ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 4, 1997 TAG: 9704040019
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS THE ROANOKE TIMES
Virginia Tech plans yearlong 125th birthday party replete with Nobel Prize winner and orange and maroon M&Ms.
On Oct. 1, 1872, a lad named William Addison Caldwell walked from his Craig County home to Blacksburg, enrolled as the newly opened Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College's first student and received a scholarship just for showing up.
He and the other 132 men of VAMC's first academic class took courses in English, penmanship, algebra, hygiene, habits and manners.
Much has changed since then. Students are no longer tested on hygiene, habits and manners as part of the contemporary instructional diet at VAMC's institutional descendant, now known as Virginia Tech.
The modern-day university has about 24,500 students, 1,400 faculty members and an operating budget for 1996-97 of $508 million.
Virginia Tech's contemporary influence is widespread, with 140,000 alumni from all of the United States and more than 100 countries.
Locally, the New River Valley has become an extended company town for the university, where about 5,500 people work. Tech is by far the region's largest employer and its primary economic force.
All of this calls for a celebration to commemorate Virginia Tech's 125th year. The university has plans for a yearlong, on-campus house party, which begins today with the annual Founder's Day Ceremony.
Tech officials have conjured up a theme ("Shaping the Future for 125 Years") and a number of events to call attention to the ramifications of Caldwell's pilgrimage - including a student re-enactment of that journey across Sinking Creek and Brush mountains on its autumnal anniversary.
There will be speeches by learned scholars, period costumes for tour guides, cheerleaders, sports teams and members of Tech's Corps of Cadets, a special halftime show at Tech's October 4th homecoming football game and the planting of an "anniversary grove" of trees, among other festivities of pomp and circumstance.
Actually, the fun's already begun. Thursday evening the once-militaristic Drillfield was turned into a latter-day outdoor rock music venue, where bands named "Minor 9," "Modern Yesterday" and "Java Soup" performed for the offspring of the Woodstock generation. Fireworks were to follow.
On April 17 another sort of spectacle is scheduled at the Drillfield. That day the university plans to arrange a crowd of about 2,000 students into a giant "125" and snap their class photo en masse from the air.
Robert C. Richardson's speech will be a matter of greater gravity. On April 15, the Virginia Tech alumnus and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics will return to discuss "Significant Kinks: The Discovery of a Superfluid," the research that led to the award.
Richardson will kick off a series of campus lectures by distinguished Tech graduates and faculty members, who will talk intellectual turkey.
Already, an anniversary photo album, titled "Images & Reflections - Virginia Tech, 1872-1997" has been published, with a history of the evolving institution and a foreword by Tech professor and notable Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr.
Finally, this world-class research university is looking into baking a giant 125th birthday cake for Tech students, complete with orange and maroon M&Ms.
No date has been set, but preliminary data show the cake would be better served in cooler weather so the icing won't melt.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Color illustration by George Wills.by CNB