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In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Marty Grady, of Natick, was an electronics technician aboard the USS Nereus, a submarine tender. At the time, U.S. Navy submarines were following Russian subs and getting ready for World War III. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev resolved the crisis and the specter of nuclear catastrophe disappeared.

Flash forward nearly 30 years and you would find cold warrior Grady, a member of the Natick American Legion Post 17, marching down Gorky Street in Moscow ahead of the Waltham American Legion Post band as part of the Soviet Union’s Victory Day parade, commemorating the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Saturday, May 9 marks the 30th anniversary of when the Joseph F. Hill American Legion Post 156 band made history on an international scale.

Under brilliant sunshine on a cool spring day, 72 men in the band sang “God Bless America” as cheering crowds with flowers in their hands filled the sidewalks. Children waved small flags. Some stood on embankments craning their necks to see as the band from across the world paraded by.

Dorothy “Dot” Slamin Hill, then 74, decided to take her band to march in Soviet Union’s Victory Day Parade. It was an unprecedented feat for the band as the first non-Communist group to march in the parade. For Hill, however, it was more than sharing music. A military veteran herself, she was on a self-proclaimed peace mission.

Many of the people living under the knuckle of communism in the Soviet Union and their client states thirsted for freedom.

Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union from 1985-1991, introduced a policy of glasnost, which loosened speech and press rights. It also opened the door to once unthinkable cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

The Honor Guard from Dedham’s American Legion Post 18, wearing their dark dress military uniforms with white belts, led the way for the Waltham band.

The American flags they carried waved alongside those of the hammer and sickle, a symbol of the Soviet Union. At the time, relations were starting to thaw between the Cold War archenemies – and their people.

“They made us feel as though we were their own war heroes. It had everybody choked up,” Dedham Honor Guard member Robert Ashman, now deceased, recalled in an interview at the time.

The Legion band trip was arranged through the now defunct Soviet Peace Committee, with help from then-retired Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, among others.

The band wasted little time to share their music. Upon arriving in Moscow, the Americans launched into an impromptu rehearsal on the steps of the Rossiya Hotel. A decorated Soviet military veteran danced as the band played “Yankee Doodle Boy” and a crowd of Russians gathered around, clapping in time to the American beat.

The headline in the May 23, 1990 Waltham News-Tribune read “Legion Band Parades Peace in USSR.”

“That the parade, once famous for its bristling lines of Soviet missiles and tanks, now includes American tubas and piccolos is a good indication of just how far Soviet openness has progressed,” wrote then Middlesex News Opinion Editor Rick Holmes.

In the 30 years since, Hill passed away in 2004 at the age of 89, and only two of the musicians who traveled to Russia are still in the band. But the memories of the experience live on.

“We went over there on a peace mission with music,” said Mario Taricano, 90, of Brighton, who plays the bass drum. He has provided the band’s rhythm for the past 65 years.

Taricano’s prized bass drum is permanently decorated with small circle-shaped stickers joining Soviet and American flags, notes and signatures from Russians he met on the trip.

“I was proud,” Taricano said. “They loved us. During the parade people kept putting flowers on the top of my drum.”

After the parade, band members visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin Wall for a wreath-laying ceremony.

“I put those flowers on their tomb of the unknown soldier,” Taricano said.

John Baboian, 62, of Belmont, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, is a professional jazz guitarist who performs all over the world. But on Monday nights when his schedule permits, he still practices and plays trombone in the band he grew up with.

Baboian joined the American Legion band in 1971 when he was 15. His father and fellow band member, Jake, played the euphonium. They both made the trip to Russia.

“I think what was important was us bringing music, our music, the American marching music to the Soviet Union,” said John Baboian, whose father died in 2017. “We were there towards the end of the Cold War scenario, and Dot was one that you just didn’t say no to, and she decided we were going, and there was nothing that was going to stop her from going out and playing music in Russia.”

What he remembers most about the May Day Parade is the spectators.

“As we were marching down the street I noticed that the crowd started following us, which doesn’t happen in parades,” he said. “People stand and you walk by them. In this parade, we walked by them and they continued with us. I think they were really interested in us.”

Baboian brought his guitar with him, and taught two clinics at music schools in Moscow and Leningrad.

He had already traveled to Russia in 1987 as part of an arts exchange program and remembers an exchange with a butcher he met at a Moscow farmer’s market.

“Through our interpreter he’s saying to me, ‘why do you people want to bomb us,’” Baboian said. “I looked at him and I smiled, I said, ‘we say the same thing about you.’ And we looked at each other…. and we hugged.

“That was a moment when we learned that people don’t care about politics, he said. “The people were just more interested in living their everyday lives.“

Natick’s Marty Grady, former mate on the submarine tender, did more than march. He shared a few beers with a couple of former military foes.

One night he bought a six-pack of beer in the Russian hotel’s duty-free shop. The shop only accepted U.S. currency, no rubles. So the Soviet veterans staying at the hotel were unable to buy beer.

While carrying the beer back to his room, Grady encountered a Soviet veteran sitting on a window sill.

“He didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Russian,” he said during a recent interview. “But he pointed to the beer.”

Grady was only too happy to oblige.

“I sat for about an hour drinking beer with him on the window sill. When I got back to our room, my wife Bonnie asked me where I had been,” he said. “I told her, ‘I just had a few beers with a couple of Russians.’ I found the Russian people to be great. Just like us.”

Grady was disappointed that the band was not allowed to march through Red Square, as was scheduled.

“They had us go around the square, but all the people followed us,” he said. “People came out of the crowd. A couple of young women gave me a kiss. People gave us flowers.”

Grady’s wife, then a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, visited the Children’s Hospital of Krupskay, in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.

“People were begging us to help,” she said. “There was an 8-year-old who needed open heart surgery. I tried to arrange for her to come to Children’s Hospital in Boston, but we couldn’t do it. There were too many complications on the Russian end.”

Since then, the Gradys have gone out of their way to visit Russian ships in Boston, once bringing a 100-pound bag of onions to sailors on tall ships.

The Rev. Nicholas Ciccone Jr., 72, a Catholic priest from Waltham known as “Father Nick,” is now a hospice chaplain for Ascend Hospice of Massachusetts.

In 1969, he was a music teacher at the Kennedy Middle School where he would later become vice principal. The Legion band practiced at the school then, and Hill asked Ciccone to play the cymbals and glockenspiel.

“I was the glock player for 25 years,” he said.

After 10 years at Kennedy Middle school, Ciccone went into the seminary and became a priest. But he continued to play in the band for almost 30 years.

The trip to Moscow, he said, was a significant event in his life. During a recent funeral for a man from Ukraine, he talked about childhood experiences that shaped his view of the Soviets.

“My generation was brought up with air raid drills, duck and cover, bomb shelters, (and told) that the Russians were the evil empire, bad people.”

Because of this many band members had pre-trip jitters.

“I remember as we were flying into Moscow, just the anxiety that a number of us had just about being there, what was going to happen, and all those things from childhood,” Ciccone said. “And over the course of the time there, the people we visited, the Russian soldiers we hung around with, it broke down a lot of fears and barriers that a lot of us had experienced as a young person. It just reminded me that people are good everywhere in the world.”

Ciccone celebrated two public Masses, one in Moscow, one in Leningrad. That was very unusual since religious practices were quite restricted at that time.

There was also a Mass in memory of Mayor Arthur J. Clark that coincided with his funeral a continent away at Waltham’s Our Lady Comforter of the Afflicted Parish. Clark had been invited on the Moscow trip.

“The biggest challenge today is that we’ve let the technology make decisions for us and we put a disproportionate trust in the internet and media.” Ciccone said. “When we went over to visit, my expectations were very much different from my lived experience there. And I think today we substitute the internet for lived experiences.”

John P. “Jake” Comer, 87, of Quincy, the American Legion National Commander in 1987, often shares his experiences from the day of the parade when he gives speeches.

“There were huge crowds, yelling at us as we were marching down the street, ‘America, America, Freedom’” he said. “They loved us.”

At one point a little girl, about 7 years old, ran from the crowd, and kissed the American flag held by the color guard.

“The father came running up to us with two little boys, and he said, could you please explain to my children about your wonderful country. That to me was very inspiring.”

At the end of the parade route, Legion band members intermingled with bands from Russia and Poland and they all started playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“It showed real unison,” he said.

“The people, it’s like any other country, the people don’t make the war — the governments do. The people were people. They don’t want war, they want freedom like everyone else.” Comer said.

Hill was a fixture in Waltham as a civic leader, band leader, and baton twirler.

She was born in the city on Sept. 2, 1915.

In 1933, Dot, then 17, won the World Drum Major Championships at Soldier Field in Chicago. The same year she graduated from Waltham High School. She joined the U.S. Coast Guard in WWII, and organized the Temporary Coast Guard Band.

She founded the Waltham American Legion Post 156 in 1946 with her husband, Joseph Hill. She was the band’s director for 50 years.

Former Waltham News-Tribune Managing Editor editor and Legion Commander Thomas J. Neville wrote an article about the trip that was entered in the Congressional Record on July 16,1990.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, wrote: “Mr. President, the past year has seen historic changes sweeping the Soviet Union. Recently, the Waltham American Legion Band, led by 74-year-old Dot Hill, became part of that history when it became the first American band to march in Moscow’s Victory Day Parade on May 9 commemorating the Allied victory in WWII.

“The band captivated the Russian people. … I urge Members of the Senate and House to consider this an example of the extraordinary friendship that the Soviet people have for the American people.”

Former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn was also on the trip.

“What a great historic event,” he writes in a recent text to the MetroWest Daily News. “The members of the band represented the USA as well as anybody could. I marched with them for one block, so I could be part of history. Almost as exciting as marching with the band when we led the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Southie. Priceless memories.”

Framingham resident John O’Toole has been the Waltham Legion band director for the past 10 years. He never met Dot.

“The band is still in a sense recovering from Dot Hill,” he said. “Not in a bad way. She ran everything. She did everything. I’ve been at any number of parades where people come up to me and say, ‘oh, I thought some woman directed the band.’ I say, ‘you’d be right for about 50 years.’”

Today the band has 35-40 members. There is a trolley band with 14 members that performs in some parades. And the band performs concerts for veterans groups and holidays.

“It is a community band,” O’Toole said, composed of nurses, doctors, lawyers, music teachers and professors. The youngest member is 23, the oldest 89.

O’Toole conducts the practices, and plays the sousaphone with the band when they march.

“Sending more bands and fewer Marines to some countries,” he said, would make the world a better place.

Amelia “Millie” Cericola was one of Dot’s assistants and accompanied the band on their trips to Hawaii, Italy, France and Russia.

O’Toole calls Cericola the band’s biggest fan.

She still attends practices on Monday nights.

“I just sit and clap and holler,” she said. “They say they play better when I’m there. I love the band. We are like family.”

Cericola, 91, is a lifelong Waltham resident and has 29 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

She remembers dancing with a Russian general outside the hotel during the 1990 trip.

“Dot wanted Russia to know we are the kind of country where we held no grudges and send our best wishes and are proud to be able to march in their parade because they never let any other country do that,” she said.

For Waltham’s Father Ciccone, the experience on the trip of overcoming cultural differences and stereotypes reminded him of the common bond between people regardless of where they live.

“There are so many more things that unite us as people and often we focus on the things that divide us,” he said. “We forget sometimes that we share a planet, that we have the same concerns and values, we just have to make that effort.”