At 58, she’s the oldest but proudest horn player in the NC State marching band
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- Lois Roegge, 58, joined NC State's marching band as a grad student in accounting.
- Roegge revived her love of the mellophone after years away from performance life.
- She blends with student musicians, showing that age doesn't limit participation.
With a gray ponytail poking out of her marching band hat, Lois Roegge raises her horn in the air and blasts out the Wolfpack fight song, making more noise as a 58-year-old mother than the teenage fans bouncing around the stands in their red-and-white overalls.
In a band of 400, she easily qualifies as the most senior musician, old enough to be a freshman’s grandma, but she blows her mellophone with the fury of the first-chair band nerd.
The revelry inside Carter Finley Stadium can be deafening as fireworks erupt, cannons bang and fans roar uninterrupted over four quarters. But Roegge only adds to the youthful noise.
“There were a few kids who didn’t know what to think,” she said. “But we went to a bowl game, and I rode the band bus and stayed in the hotel. At one point I was napping on the bus and they snapped a picture and put it on Instagram. I thought, ‘OK, I’m in.’ “
Roegge joined NC State University’s storied marching band — “The Power Sound of the South” — last season when she started graduate school in accounting, having spent her career in finance. With her children both in college, she craved an empty-nest diversion, excited by the possibilities of new freedom.
“Honestly, I don’t think I’d know what to do with myself,” she said. “There’s nobody in the house but me and my dog.”
Roegge grew up in Chicago and chose the French horn as a fourth-grader, taking to its tiny mouthpiece and elaborate tubing like a young wizard choosing a wand.
“I was this tiny, scrawny person,” she said. “For whatever reason, I thought these instruments looked cool.”
Like many teens of her era, Roegge experienced a far less-intense version of marching band. In the ‘80s, it was common for high school bands to attract 40 or 50 half-hearted players to wear hand-me-down uniforms and march sullenly in place while butchering whatever Michael Jackson song was popular that week.
But as her own children veered into high school band life, Roegge discovered a new vigor that seeped into the elective. Suddenly there were competitions and weekend travel and choreography, and she fished out her own mellophone — a marching French horn.
“It did spend many years in the attic,” she said. “This is a nice instrument, so I hung it on the wall as a decoration.”
Then, as a brand-new Wolfpacker, she decided to toss a band hat back into the ring. She practiced her scales, first for five minutes a day with her out-of-shape chops, then for several hours.
When she sent her audition video, she made sure to perform in a tank top so she’d look in-shape. Then she checked her email every half-hour for a week, waiting for word that finally came. And with that, she started pre-season practices that lasted all day.
“It’s very, very physical,” she said of the routines. I’m a runner. If I weren’t a runner, there’d be no way.”
As a first-year player, Roegge surprised a few unsuspecting people, notably when she went to collect her uniform.
“They were like, ‘No, we need your student to do this,’“ she recalled, laughing.
But she fit easily into the band’s ranks, having a pair of college-age musicians as children.
“Interestingly enough,” Roegge said, “a few of the kids in my section were friends with my son.”
Now in her second year, she fits in seamlessly, marching sideways through the halftime show, which on Saturday night involved both the “Superman” and “E.T.’ themes. Far more fans stayed to watch than one might think, with beer and hot dogs in close proximity.
For Roegge, the thrill comes not so much from playing in front of 50,000 people, so many that she can sometimes hardly hear her own playing. It comes from playing alongside 400 people, one horn in a big red roar.
In her uniform, nobody knows she’s the only player out there to make a mortgage payment, or hire a plumber, or sit on the parent side of a parent-teacher conference.
“They know,” said Roegge, “that I’m just a big kid.”
This story was originally published September 29, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "At 58, she’s the oldest but proudest horn player in the NC State marching band."