Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9505020013
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-18 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Had it been offered, a professor would have announced this truism: You can't relive the past.
Soliders, like Temple, have been known to react to the word "can't" by damning the torpedoes and charging ahead.
That's been his posture over the past 29 years, while Temple has conducted a monumental and sentimental mission to write the definitive history of the Tech corps.
Actually, describing "The Bugle's Echo" as definitive is a vast understatement. No coffee table will be sizable enough to hold the book, which may run to six volumes, thousands of pages and 1.5 million words when published.
"It's more than a history. It's a worm's-eye view of how the cadets saw life," Temple explains, pointing his index finger upward. "A day-to-day chronology."
On that hand resides Temple's 1934 class ring. The ring is his talisman, the symbol of his life's formative influences: self-discipline, order, loyalty, duty.
"The Corps was VPI," he says. "Now it's pretty much washed out."
Lanky, vigorous and courtly, Temple, 83, gazes around Tech's Drill Field today and sees a world of changes on the graven-in-Hokie-stone military school he revered. Most alarming has been the corps' diminution in size and campus presence.
In the mid-1930s, when Temple was a cadet, Virginia Tech was VPI, Hokies were Gobblers, the school's only band was the Highty-Tighties and all but a few students wore the corps uniform. Since then, during a period of explosive growth for the university, the corps has subsided to less than 2 percent of Tech's undergraduate enrollment.
"In another 50 years, no one will know," Temple says, echoing the feelings of displacement shared by other alumni. "I figured something should be done. I decided I'll take a fling at it myself."
Some fling. Nearly three decades and countless hours of eye-straining research later, Temple has completed about 60 years of the corps' history, up to his own era.
"I thought in four or five years I'll be ready to go to press. It didn't work out that way," Temple chuckles. "Had I known, I would probably have never started."
"The Bugle's Echo" will exhaustively document the school's founding in 1872 until 1947, when civilian Tech students first outnumbered the corps. That development, in Temple's view, represents the end - or at least the beginning of it.
Petersburg native Temple followed his two older brothers to college in Blacksburg. He graduated from Tech with an engineering degree and followed the flag as an Army officer around the globe. "It was a vagabond life, being moved every three years. I liked it."
He describes his career as "nothing unusual," although Temple fought during World War II and ended his career in 1966 as a colonel and the head of the Army's institute of heraldry, the outfit charged with designing and regulating official symbols in the United States. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest medal awarded to civilians, was designed by Temple in the mid-1960s.
After his wife died in 1988, Temple moved from Richmond to Blacksburg. Now he resides in Warm Hearth Village in a cozy apartment, lined with bookshelves and framed certificates of his military days.
Temple's move brought him closer to his archival material - fragments of newspapers, records and letters that relate corps life - and he focused on the research with the single-mindedness of a monk. "I work as the spirit moves me. But it's always on my mind." For area librarians, arriving at work to find Temple waiting at the door became a morning ritual .
At home, awakening in the wee hours, he will rise and bend to his task, a desk lamp illuminating the darkness in his work room. "Suddenly I'll look at my watch. It's 10 a.m. and I'm still in my bathrobe."
The manuscript of "The Bugle's Echo" sits on the floor beside the desk inside a large file box. Handwritten in Temple's meticulous script on legal pads, the text is divided by calendar years. Volume one will cover the 19th century corps years; thereafter, the history's other five volumes will go decade-by-decade.
"There's been a lot of drudgery, like any research. At this point it's kind of a nebulous theory that I'll ever have a book," he admits. "I thought in four or five years I'd be ready to go to press. It hasn't worked out that way."
Nonetheless, he's negotiating with publishers. And the money's in hand to move ahead, at least with the first book. Temple estimates he's spent $20,000 of his own money on "The Bugle's Echo."
His corps classmates have donated another $25,000, he said, which was used to commission drawings of the cadet uniforms over the years. These illustrations have been published separately in a book called "Donning the Blue and Gray," whose sales will be used to underwrite Temple's book.
He says it would be gratifying to live long enough to see all six volumes published. Temple cares not a whit that the "The Bugle's Echo" will overwhelm the average reader's curiosity. "I'm writing for research people, not for the general public. I think the average public would find my book boring because it's so full of details. But that's the way I want it to be."
Asked why he's undertaken such a project, to recreate the barracks he inhabited as a young man, Temple pauses reflectively, chin in hand. "It's not possible to explain," he replies. "You have to live it, the feeling of oneness."
Yet he is assertive about why the story should be preserved. He believes modern-day Tech sometimes forgets its roots. And the corps' military structure and values aren't respected as much as they once were, he says. "Now a kid has to have guts to be in the corps."
"A hundred years from now, we'll know about it," he says of the old corps, with a tone of defiant satisfaction in his voice. "I still remember the things I learned. I want to preserve that. I think it's worth it."
by CNB