Are you a Hokie?

Going to college in the 70's-80's was obviously different than going now.  However, having students make fun of other students never goes out of style.  

This was found in the school paper when we attended.  Wonder how much has changed since the "olden days". 

(Apologies for the size of the picture.  Either fit it on the page and not read it, or read it and really goof up the formatting.) 

Back to School

Long ago, I left home for college.  It was 700+ miles away, and I had a car, so my Mom and I got in the car and started driving.  We drove for awhile and stopped the night at a motel somewhere along the way.  I do remember that instead of going with me all the way to Blacksburg, she flew back to Milwaukee from Charleston, WV, about 100 miles short. 

I made the remaining portion of the trip without incident, and at some point during my freshman year, my family visited to see how I was doing.  And as part of that visit, my mother bought me the laundry bag that you see on the left.   If you look very closely, you can see the remnants of Virginia Tech on the bag.  Apparently mothers can look at their son's dorm rooms and quickly identify something they need. 

The drawstring doesn't work very well anymore, but the bag is still sturdy and still holding dirty laundry upon occasion, mostly when we are traveling. 

Whitewater Rafting

Payette River - 2004

The middle squares of my t-shirt quilt are from whitewater rafting companies.  I first went rafting the week before final exams my senior year in college on the Lower Gauley River in West Virginia.  The remnants of a hurricane came through the week before and the water was running high.  I figured if I was going to die, I might as well do it before I had to take my finals.   It was a blast, and after that, I was hooked.

On our honeymoon, we had been going for a week straight when we got to Moab, Utah and we were beat.  We decided to spend a day and floated down the Colorado (which is actually pretty tame there).

When my daughters got older, I introduced the oldest two to rafting in the middle fork of the Flathead River in Montana.  A couple of years later, the whole family rafted down the Arkansas river in Colorado.  Gail spent the entire trip hanging onto the 8-year old Deanne, who would have fallen out multiple times otherwise.  We rafted the Payette River in Idaho, the Nooksack in Washington, but the most adventurous was a midnight raft trip down the Manatuska River in Alaska in July.  We had dry suits for that one, since the river begins from a glacier.

For our 30th Anniversary, we had a float trip down the Merced River in Yosemite, and a few years later, we channeled our inner Burt Reynolds by rafting the Chattooga River in Georgia, the filming site of Deliverance.

The white t-shirt on the quilt says it all. 

 It was once believed that the Earth was flat.  

And if you went too far you'd fall off the edge. 

  Cool! 

Bob's T-Shirt Quilt

During the last round of t-shirt quilt making, Gail took a bunch of my old t-shirts and made me a quilt.  The quilt tells a bit of my story, from my favorite football teams to churches I've attended, to places I've lived and worked and other interests.

Each of these squares has a story or a memory that makes it special.  You can see National Parks on here, maps, ice cream, minor league baseball, old tuba shirts from college, NPR programs and mementos of trips I've taken.

The oldest shirt dated from 1975 (grey shirt on the left edge).  That's the year my sister went off to college at St. Olaf and bought me a handful of t-shirts for Christmas.  There's a map of Milwaukee from the 70's, an Immanuel Lutheran Chapel shirt from the 80's, Richmond Rooster's shirt from the 90's, Bethany Lutheran shirt from 2000, and a Yellowstone shirt from the 10's.

40 years of my life, keeping me warm.

VT T-Shirt Quilt

Before the baby boomers came along, t-shirts were white and you wore them underneath other shirts.  By the time we were kids in the 70's, t-shirts became much more:  art, personal expression, souvenir.  It seemed a shame to turn them into rags as they wore out or got too small. 

Not certain who's idea it was, but quite some time ago, Gail started making t-shirts into quilts.  Nothing fancy, just cut out the interesting bits of the shirt, sew them together, and use them as a casual throw.   So we started saving shirts instead of turning them into rags. 

Last summer, Gail started going into the 5 boxes of t-shirts, pruning them out, and making them into memories.  There were enough of them, she started making them into different themes.  This quilt documents some of our experiences at Tech, from band trips to Memphis in 1979, the Peach Bowl in 1981, Marching Virginians' Anniversaries, and other fond memories from when we were young. 

Graduation

"You know nothing, Jon Snow."

I graduated from Virginia Tech with Bachelors of Science in Computer Science in 1982.  My journey there from Wisconsin was unexpected to me.

When I graduated from High School, my father was the Vice Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  He made it clear to me that the selection of where to go to college was up to me, but his position did have an influence on where I looked.  He had an unspoken perception of UWM compared to other universities in the state.  Not wanting to offend him in any way, I decided to go to college out of state. 

My father and I made a visit to Virginia Tech, and a few things stood out to me.  First, the setting was wonderful.  Blacksburg is located in the mountains, the campus was very open and architectually consistent, and they had all the programs that I was thinking about majoring in.  But what really sold me was the band director.

One of our visits was with the director of the marching band.  Dr. Heath had come to Tech from Purdue, so he could give us a perspective about how the school and region differed from the midwest.  During our discussion, the door opened, and a red warthog stuck its head into the room.  The student who was wearing the razorback helmet on his head didn't realize we were in there and turned as red as the helmet as soon as he saw Dr. Heath had guests.  We all shared a laugh, and it occurred to me that this is the kind of place that I would enjoy. 

I have no regrets. 

Marching Virginians

Many of my fond memories of college revolve around the marching band; the Marching Virginians.  Nowadays, they like being called the Spirit of Tech because Virginians sounds too much like ....

The band started in 1974 and it took a few years for it to become successful.  I had some influence into that success.  In  1979, the band director, James Sochinski, arranged "We Will Rock You" by Queen and the Tuba section started playing around with a dance.  He saw that and the following year, he arranged the Hokie Pokie and presented the Subculture (i.e., tuba players) with a challenge.  Could we dance the Hokie Pokie?

Well, we got together as a section and did a bit of choreography.  When we broke into the chorus line for the first time during a halftime show, we got the crowd's attention.  The routine has changed little over the past few years, and it has become the signature song for the band, and to a certain extent, the university.

Every so often, they have an alumni weekend where old MV's are asked to return.  The photograph above is from practice at the 30th anniversary in 2004.  I'm the one after the gap in the line.  I learned that dancing with a tuba 20+ years after graduation is not as easy as it was. 

Just to give you an idea, the 2009 version of the alumni band is shown in the attached video.  It's a bit jittery.  The Hokie Pokie starts at about 3 minutes in.  The chorus line is about a minute later.

Their official web site goes into more detail about the history of the band.