Joe, Blow

The College of William and Mary's alumni magazine just published a long piece on WandM alumnus/coach/PhysEd prof extraordinaire Joe Agee... and didn't use the descriptor "Screamin'" once.

For the uninitiated, Screamin' Joe Agee was a hollerin, intolerrin' oldster when we were in school. Older than the hills. Of the oldest school. 

As it turns out, he was 57 then. Five years older than several of us here. Wow.

Well, he matriculated in the 1940's and 50's, so he came up in a very different era than the one in which we enrolled. And he seemed very much of that era.

Joe Agee coached golf, and he instructed a few different PE classes back then. I myself was in his Basketball I class in the fall of my freshman year. I made 2 key mistakes.

1. 8:00 AM class. "Hey, I used to get up earlier than that in high school, and the gym is right next to my dorm." Dumb.
2. I enrolled in a Joe Agee class. He suffered no fools like me and took no absences lightly. I had no idea, but... dumber.

I remember two things about that class, one held in a facility called Blow Gymnasium. 

1. Most every Tuesday and Thursday, I'd walk down the hall in my high-tops in the early morn, and someone would ask where I was headed. "I'm going to Blow Gym," I'd say with a smile. Always worth a grin or a glare. 
2. I missed three classes in the first 7 or 8, and I got a talking-to from Coach Agee that reminded me of his nickname. Unpleasant.

"Lester... seems like you've run through all your sorry excuses and what-not, and we aren't even to fall break yet. Un-be-lievable, son. You miss one more class and I'll have to fail you. You hear me, Lester?"

I did. Made all the rest. Got P instead of an F. One of my very, very few early transcript success stories. 

Anyway, what the College did right was profiling the man now rather than posthumously. Check it out if you took his class or got coached by Screamin' Joe way back when.

Now that Blow Gym is Blow Memorial Hall, an administrative building ("now" meaning since like 1990), the dumb joke is gone, and so are the memories of a decrepit old athletic facility. I wonder what it looked like...

...but wait! It was immortalized in Bruce Hornsby's 1988 video for "The Valley Road"!  Check this sucker out, and lots of old WandM/Williamsburg footage. And Blow Gym.

Welp, there you go. Nostalgic. Old.

I could tell you more about how the song's lyrical content was about abortion 'twixt social classes in the South, but we'll save that for another episode from the great minds here at Gheorghe: The Blog.