Ruth Sparks remembers the conversation like it was yesterday.
“We were sitting in the school cafeteria, and I asked Rich what he wanted to do with his life,” she said of her high school sweetheart. “He said, ?I want to be a band director, and I want to make a difference in people?s lives.? ”
For the past 22 years, Richmond Sparks has been the director of the 250-member University of Maryland marching band. And he certainly has made a difference in a lot of people?s lives.
He has directed the Maryland band at the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan, at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and at too many bowl games and postseason basketball games to count.
This week he led The Mighty Sound of Maryland to New Orleans to help rebuild the birthplace of jazz.
Talk about making a difference in people?s lives.
“Thirty-four years later, and I still shake my head at the things he does,” said Ruth Sparks, a nurse at Children?s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Leaving Jan. 4 on a 21-hour bus ride from College Park, the band spent five days with Habitat for Humanity in the new Musicians? Village in the Upper Ninth Ward. New Orleans natives Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis ? both heavyweights in the jazz music world ? created the project last January to help bring local musicians back to the Crescent City.
Check out Chris Ammann’s photo blog of the entire trip.
The band slept on bunks in the nearly abandoned World Trade Center in New Orleans. They dined on breakfast grits, box lunches and cafeteria-style dinners on plastic plates. Of course, they found time for the French Quarter and sightseeing, but their mission was literally to work and play: Work with the Habitat for Humanity, and play their music as inspiration for a rebuilding city.
They performed at the Mayor?s Mardi Gras Kick-off, at the Krewe of Alla?s 75th anniversary Carnival parade, at the Musicians? Village and for the students at the Holy Cross School in St. Bernard?s Parish.
Connick Jr. and Marsalis even paid them a visit.
The devastation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 16 months ago was apparent in the neighborhoods where they worked. The residential area surrounding Holy Cross High School was particularly bleak.
“I was surprised by the number of houses abandoned, and it seems like nothing is being done for most of them,” said Michael Timtishin, a junior alto sax player from Arundel High School.
Timtishin and Sarah Hubbard, a sophomore clarinetist from Quince Orchard High in Gaithersburg, were particularly busy, helping to frame two roofs in the past fours days. “We were working hard the whole time, but it didn?t seem like it because we were having so much fun,” Timtishin said.
At noon Thursday, several band members and their Habitat crew leaders joined the larger New Orleans community in a peace march at City Hall to protest the recent spate of violence. There have been nine murders in this city of now approximately 200,000 over the first nine days of 2007.
The trip?s inspiration came at the beginning of band practice this year when Sparks returned from New Orleans with photos from a reconstruction trip this summer with his two sons ? Kendal, a senior at the University of Michigan, and Joel, a junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt.
Andrea Sparks, a former Terp drum major, joined her parents for this trip, as did Suzanne Sturgis, a teacher at Brockbridge Elementary in Anne Arundel County. She and her husband, Bill ? both former Terp band members ? brought their two children, John, 12, and Andrea, 9.
“Our kids have it relatively easy,” said Bill Sturgis, band director at Crofton Middle School. “We wanted to make sure they understand that.”
“I think the best part was working alongside the musicians who were moving into houses,” said senior drum major Charlotte Tubman, a sociology major from Baltimore. “Talking to them and learning about their lives made us feel like a little part of their family, too.”
