"I got called out of the clear blue, and when I first got the call I was real surprised someone would track me down after all these years," Robinson said.
While at CHS, Robinson was voted Mr. CHS, Mayor for the Day, received the Golden Helmet Award for Sportsmanship for football -- playing the positions offensive guard and linebacker -- and was the first Georgia state wrestling champion in the school history in 1980.
Robinson said he was looking forward to reliving some of the memories he had while at CHS, but that one of his favorite, and admittingly embarrassing, memories cannot be relieved.
"After football practice we used to love to go get an ice cream cone at the Dairy Queen," Robinson said, laughing. "... I had a great time at Cartersville, great people, great times, I couldn't have asked for anything better," Robinson said.
He said he was not expecting during his wrestling career to accomplish the feat of becoming the school's first state champion.
"[Becoming state wrestling champion] was one of those things where you go in as an underdog, it's like you don't have any fear and you just go with what you know ... he made a mistake and I capitalized on his mistake," Robinson said.
Last year the wrestling program named a sportsmanship award -- the Col. Harvey Robinson Award -- in his honor.
"Last year we gave that award for the first time in honor of [Robinson] ... and last year the recipient was a young man named Ty Downer," said head wrestling coach Garvin Edwards. "I started communicating with [Robinson] to get permission to [create the award] and I mentioned to him if he were ever home we would love for him to come by and meet our team and our program, so it just so turned out he was coming home for homecoming this year and so I told him then we would like to receive him, and so this [gave] us an opportunity to honor him."
Serving in the military for 25 years, Robinson has been working in investigations at the Pentagon in Washington for more than a year, originally serving in operations at the Pentagon on 9/11.
"The military, especially officers, are held to such a high standard and so I'm part of the investigative team that makes sure these individuals are living up to their standards," Robinson said.
He described his experience on 9/11.
"Where I worked in the Pentagon [on 9/11] in the operations center, it was a secure operation where we were, and just like everyone else we were watching what was unfolding with the twin towers in New York," Robinson said. "At the time we were already starting to stand up at the operations center as far as getting more people involved and then when the attacks happened on the Pentagon, the word was a bomb had exploded in the building.
"At the time they had cameras around the Pentagon but the plane was moving so fast the camera only picked up a blur so no one at the time really knew what had hit the building ... but once it was realized it was actually a plane that hit the building, we knew that we were under attack and the nation was under attack, and so from that point on people started evacuating the building.
"However, where we were in the operations center our mission was to stand fast and continue to monitor what was going on and that's exactly what we did. We stayed there throughout the night ... the one good thing that we did do was call our families to let them know we were OK, and it's good that we did that because all of the phones shut down. So it was an eerie quiet and probably about 3 o'clock in the morning when you walk outside and you look and you see the Pentagon and it's this massive structure that has this gaping hole in it that's on fire."
He also has seen active duty in Iraq.
"I graduated from Jacksonville State University and I chose the military as a profession, and it's been one of those things where it hasn't been easy, but it's definitely been rewarding," Robinson said. "There have been a lot of challenges and I have overcome those challenges.
"I served my time in the combat zones of Iraq, one thing I will say is coming up I always believed in community service because people always gave it to me and [the military] was my way of giving back ... that's why when I was in Iraq I volunteered for missions where they went out to give clothes and school books and things of that nature to the Iraqi kids," Robinson said.
He said he will never forget the influence CHS athletics had on his personal life and career.
"The good thing about football was we had a lot of good role models on the team. It was a great atmosphere with a great coach," Robinson said. "Coach [Gerald] Barge, he always stressed discipline so we had a very disciplined team."
Robinson said although there have been many changes to his alma mater, some things never change.
"The one thing I don't think is going to go away from that school is the spirit of the Canes ... that's one thing I was always so proud of when I was there was that winning spirit and Canes spirit," Robinson said.