Robert Garner, Storyteller

ROBERT GARNER, Donor

I first arrived at College Park August, 2002 to rehearse with the marching band. There’s no real way to describe the joy and sense of belonging you get immediately upon finding a group of 250 people who all feel the same passion that you do. It essentially is a very large family, and at an institution like Maryland it’s really important to find a family to be a part of. And I found one.

The reaction the community had to all of us being down there is something I’m going to take with me the rest of my life.

In 2007 the marching band went down to New Orleans as part of Habitat for Humanity’s relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina. By day our instruments were hammers and drills and miter boxes. And in the evening our instruments were what we were most familiar with, horns and clarinets and things like that. The reaction the community had to all of us being down there is something I’m going to take with me the rest of my life, and it wouldn’t have been possible without my marching band family.