Before the Lobo Band and Viewettes march through London, London came to them.
Longview High School’s student performers received a formal invitation Friday at Mickey Melton Auditorium to take part in the London Parade on January 1, 2028, turning a trip announced in the spring into a face-to-face welcome from the people who will host them.
Bob Bone, the parade’s co-founder and chair, joined Duncan Sandys, a parade ambassador, former lord mayor of Westminster and great-grandson of Winston Churchill, for the presentation. Sandys read the invitation welcoming the Big Green Marching Machine and Viewettes to the international event.
The Lobo Band performed in full uniform, giving the visitors a firsthand look at the musicians they had come to invite. Middle school students who will join the high school band also attended, sharing the occasion with the program’s current performers.
“This is the kind of opportunity that students remember for the rest of their lives,” said Rhonda Daniel, Longview ISD director of bands, when the selection was announced in the spring.
Sandys helped students picture the experience ahead, describing a parade route through central London that passes Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall before reaching Parliament Square. He also described a week of cultural and historical visits in and around London, with the goal of helping students feel like Londoners for a week, not simply visitors passing through.
The ceremony brought a bit of parade tradition to Longview, too. One student was entrusted with a London Parade umbrella and given a lighthearted assignment: keep it close until the parade ends. Bone explained the joke behind the tradition: Carry an umbrella, and perhaps the rain will stay away. Fellow students were enlisted to keep an eye on its safekeeping.
Longview families answered the London welcome with one of their own. Supportive parents prepared and presented gifts for the five visitors, including Lobo and Big Green Marching Machine T-shirts, sweet tea, Dr. Pepper, cookies and Buc-ee’s keepsakes. The parents described themselves as part of the larger network working to help the band and Viewettes make the trip.
That work continues beyond the ceremony. The Lobo Band Booster Club and Viewette Booster Club launched a $1.5 million fundraising campaign in the spring to help cover student travel, meals and essential expenses. At the campaign’s launch, the goal was to reduce the estimated cost per student from more than $4,500 to approximately $1,000, helping keep the opportunity within reach for families.
“This trip has to be about access,” Daniel said in the spring announcement. “Every student who earns this opportunity should have the chance to experience it. We are asking our community, our alumni, our businesses, and everyone who believes in Longview students to help us open this door for them.”
The invitation recognizes a program with a tradition of military-style marching, precision and discipline. The district’s spring announcement documented 76 consecutive UIL First Division marching ratings through 2025. London offers students a new setting in which to share that tradition while learning about another country’s history and culture.
Organizers say the 2028 parade will be streamed and televised worldwide, including on PBS in the United States. The visiting representatives also planned a shorter on-field invitation at Longview’s homecoming football game Friday evening, immediately before the band’s halftime performance.
Bone closed his remarks by thanking the students for accepting the invitation and telling them he expected them to be the “absolute stars of the show.”
Community members, alumni and businesses can help students take their place in that show through the official Longview Lobos to London 2028 fundraising page. Contributions support the effort to bring Longview’s student performers, and the traditions they carry, to London.