From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Aug. 31, 1972:

About a dozen female Kansas University students this year were the first to play in the marching band that had been traditionally all male except for a brief period during World War II. The decision to permit women band members had come earlier this summer after Shirley Gilham, director of the office of affirmative action for women, had written Thomas Gorton, dean of the School of Fine Arts, reminding him that bands were to be “open to all students through audition” per the KU handbook. Liz Eyles, a senior from Florida, told a reporter that she planned to be a band director someday. “If I’m going to have a band that marches at half-time, I must know how to teach them to march,” she said emphatically. “And the only way to learn how to march is to be in the band.” She added that she had attended every rehearsal last year, on the sidelines and in the mud, “but that’s no way to learn.”