NEW YORK CITY -- It's merriment, mingling and marching. It's a real Fifth Avenue parade -- even though it only lasts six blocks.

As it has every other year for the past 30 years following the Cornell-Columbia football game, the Cornell Big Red Marching Band will lead "The Sy Katz '31 Parade," down Fifth Avenue from St. Patrick's Cathedral to the Cornell Club on 44th Street, on Saturday, Nov. 13, starting at 4:45 p.m. Alumni will follow, dancing and singing. Then the marching band will present a concert in front of the club.

This is the way it has been since the early 1970s, when the late Seymour M. Katz, a New York physician, decided that "every respectable marching band needed a parade," according to his daughter, Alice Katz Berglas a 1966 Cornell graduate, and his son, Robert J. Katz, a 1969 graduate.

Seymour Katz, who graduated from Cornell's Ithaca campus in 1931, liked nothing more than to drag his trombone to the annual Cornell-Columbia football game and play along with the Cornell Big Red Marching Band after the game.

For the first Cornell parade in Manhattan, he obtained a police permit, and the band marched just one block, from 50th Street and Lexington Avenue to 50th Street and Third Avenue. "But at least it's a real parade -- no other Ivy can say that," his daughter recalls him once saying.

In a letter to the Big Red Marching Band, Alice Katz Berglas wrote, "I once asked my dad why he never marched or played with the band during the parade. He answered, 'Playing in a parking lot is one thing...the parade is the band's time to shine. This is for them.'"