April 18, 2007I grew up in a sleepy little town few people ever heard of before Monday. If you worked in the world of engineering or you were a college sports fan, you might have heard of Blacksburg, Virginia. More likely you’d have heard of the university that abuts the town, Virginia Tech.
Blacksburg is a small Appalachian town nestled in the New River Valley among the Blue Ridge Mountains that has changed much since I left there for the Air Force in 1975. The Corner Drug store where we used to stop for sodas and comic books is long gone; the Lyric Theater, the local cinema, closed in 1989 but has since returned, restored to its former glory by a group of volunteers. The small town feel is still there, but at the same time, it’s gone. Where pastures of cattle or orchards once stood, malls and apartment complexes now stand. The scenic eight mile drive through rolling hills to the county seat of Christiansburg has given way to Wal-mart and Kmart and a hundred other small stores and shops catering to the huge student population at VA Tech.
As I said, if you weren’t an engineer or a college sports fan, you’d probably never heard of VA Tech before Monday’s tragedy. Founded in 1872 as a land grant military institute, VA Tech has evolved over the years, admitting women, dropping the requirement to enroll in the Corps of Cadets. Today, the campus sprawls over 2600 acres and is dotted with massive stone dormitories and academic buildings. More than 25,000 students attend VA Tech. The VA Tech sports teams have made the nation take notice in recent years. Football coach Frank Beamer ranks third behind Florida State’s Bobby Bowden and Pennsylvania State’s Joe Paterno in the number of wins in their division.
Students, faculty and alumni proudly call themselves “Hokies” and the school mascot is the “Hokie Bird,” a mythical creature that resembles a maroon cardinal with an orange beak and the snood and tail feathers of a turkey. The VA Tech teams were originally known as the “Fightin’ Gobblers;” the mascot, once a turkey, has evolved just as the school and town have.
“Hokie,” according to the gentleman who coined the term in an 1896 spirit yell, was a nonsensical word meant to get attention. Today, the Hokies have more attention than they want. On Monday, a disturbed young man, a VA Tech senior killed 32 people on the campus before taking his own life.
In a ceremony attended by as many as 20,000 and watched all around the world, renowned poet and VA Tech professor Nikki Giovanni said “We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it …No one deserves a tragedy.
“The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.
“We are the Hokies.”
There’s nothing nonsensical about that.
I am a Hokie. It’s not something I ever really dared call myself before. I attended school there in the 1970-71 school year with a dream of being an aerospace engineer. I wasn’t quite ready for a four year school and transferred to the local community college. I left Blacksburg and went on to the Air Force and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Because I didn’t graduate from VA Tech, I never really considered myself to be a Hokie. Today, I do.
And for a little while at least, we are all Hokies.