By LACIE PIERSON
The Herald-Dispatch
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — There’s no place like Rome for the holidays for 81 members of Marshall University’s Marching Thunder.
(Photo by Lori Wolfe)
While the rest of the Tri-State will ring in 2017 stateside with friends and family, band members along with 15 friends, family and supporters will be gearing up to represent the Thundering Herd in the 2017 Rome New Year’s Day Parade, where they will be among about 8,500 individual performers set to appear in the parade.
Band members spent the week before finals packing up their uniforms, instruments and other equipment, all of which was shipped to Rome on Dec. 14, said Adam Dalton, director of athletic bands at Marshall.
Among those items already shipped to Italy were four tubas, seven boxes containing drums, nine boxes containing the band’s uniforms and five boxes solely dedicated to containing their hats for shipment.
Band members will first travel about six and a half hours by bus from Huntington to Washington, D.C., on Friday, Jan. 30. From D.C., they travel to London, and they’ll go from London to Rome on Saturday, Jan. 31.
“We arrive on the 31st, and we have a little time that evening before the parade on the 1st,” Dalton said. “From then on, we get to be tourists.”
The band will begin its trip back to Huntington on Friday, Jan. 6, and by that time they plan to have seen the sights of Rome and Vatican City, as well as nearby Naples and Pompeii.
For Marching Thunder Drum Major Mary Bunten of Huntington, the occasion is an especially exciting one, as she’s never left the United States.
“I’ve really learned what it’s like to travel outside of the U.S. ,” said Bunten, a 20-year-old biotechnology major. “It’s a lot different than traveling in the U.S., I’ve learned. I’ve never really traveled where I needed luggage, so I bought luggage on Black Friday. I have been looking in to different things, like their cultural customs, and I’ve talked to a lot of friends about places we want to see and food we want to eat.”
Bunten, like all students on the trip, was responsible for raising the $3,200 per person cost. Amid budget cuts from the state, the university was able to provide some financial support for the trip, Dalton said, but students spent their summers hosting bake sales, performances and holding down summer jobs to pay for the trip.
Nearly 600,000 spectators attend the parade each year, Robert C. Bone, executive director of the parade, said in March when he announced the band would perform in the parade. Bone also said there typically are between 10 and 12 countries represented in the parade.
The parade route will have the band marching on Via della Conciliazione from Largo Giovanni XXIII to St. Peter’s Square, where they’ll enter Vatican City. On Friday, Dalton was finalizing the list of band members who would be marching in the parade in order to send it to Vatican officials for band members to have clearance to enter.
Bunten said he was excited for the band to represent Marshall, Huntington, West Virginia and the United States on an international stage.
“I hope they see the spirit that’s here in Huntington and the Marshall community,” Bunten said. “We have such a unique spirit that revolves around this school and this town. We want to take that over there, so they can get a little taste of what we call home, what we really like and the thing that makes us excited when it comes to cheering on The Herd.”
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