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.

It's Tick Season so Listen Up

The most difficult class I took in college was, without hesitation, General Entomology with Dr. Fashing.  Yes, one should expect a 400 level biology class to be hard, but I figured it's a class about bugs, how hard could it be?  I majored in biology so I was used to getting my lazy ass kicked, and friend of numerous GTBers Bekkah took Insects and Society with Dr. Fashing and raved about him and how low-stress the class was.  Insects and Society is a 100 level course designed for Art History majors to fulfill their Area I requirements so in hindsight this wasn't the best recommendation to follow.  

Dr. Fashing is a very nice guy and he's passionate about the subject matter, but the class was insane.  The lab component was 1/4 of the grade and it was entirely taxonomy.  He would start every lab with a quiz which involved him throwing 10-15 dead bugs on a table and he would ask you "What Order is this one?  What Family is this one?" and I would write down "bug" or "cricket" or "butterfly" which was never the right answer.  The lab required a project:  go out and collect (i.e., catch and kill) forty different Families of insect.  Not a mom and dad and sibling group of bugs, but a taxonomic Family.  That's really fucking hard.  Why you ask?  Well, they all look the same so you can spend three hours out in the field collecting fifty insects but when you get back to the lab and key them out you'll find you only have four different Families.  It was awful.

And it was bad socially.  I rare knew anyone in any of my biology classes, usually it was everyone's favorite ER doctor but he wouldn't take bugs with me.  Luckily Langdon from Sig was in there too so we would forage for bugs together.  Everyone was assigned a butterfly net and a killjar (a mason jar with some substance mothball-like glued to the bottom that smothers the bugs) so I would wait for Langdon on the back porch, then we would meet up and go to the woods or a field or whatever.  On one such occasion, erstwhile GTB contributor Dennis's girlfriend came flouncing by in a nightie with four or five of her similarly-attired fellow sorority pledges--they were off to perform some task which apparently called for "sleazy and demure."

Ever the gentleman, I said "Hello" and she replied, as sarcastically and sing-song as possible "Hey butterfly boy!" and all her trampy little friends giggled and tittered.  It's my experience at W&M in a nutshell.

We had to save all the dead bugs we collected and mount them on pins in a box and turn them in at the end of the year.  I didn't get to forty, all I ever had was a bunch of flies that mimicked other bugs to avoid being eaten--apparently this is their jam.  The rugby girl with the leg brace took pity on me at the end and gave me a weevil and some evil looking creature I don't remember the name of and that got me to maybe thirty-eight, which is more than half-way to sixty-nine but not enough to get full credit for the lab. 

It was also bad for rootsy because my box of dead bugs attracted live bugs--ants swarmed my collection which I kept on top of my wardrobe which was next to his face on the top of our cave.  So he awoke to a facefull of ants.  I, of course, was panicked--not for rooty's health but for the integrity of my box of bugs.  No one had bug spray so I stole spray starch from one of the ROTC guys and surprisingly that did the trick.  Between what the ants ate and the starch destroyed, I lost a few precious bugs for my project.

As you can see in the link to his bio above, Dr. Fashing's research centers primarily on mites which are arachnids, not insects.  We were only allowed one arachnid for the collection so everyone had one spider.  But we would've gotten credit for a tick, which is also an arachnid.  And also gross.  Here is without hesitation the most entertaining video I've ever seen about ticks.  You should watch it because it's tick season and you need to know what you're in for if you go out in the woods.  My friend got Lyme disease and now she's out from work on disability so it's serious business.  You should watch even if you have no plans to go outside this summer.  If not for yourself, watch it for Dr. Fashing, all his miserable bug-collecting students, and their ant-swarmed roommates.

And if you don't like that deer tick video, check out this Deer Tick video.

Homecoming Filler

Springtime 25 years ago, I, at long last, graduated from the College of Knowledge. 25 years ago this weekend, Rob and I journeyed back to campus where we pretended that we were still in school, hung out at the fraternity house, and likely passed out somewhere unpleasant. Good times.

Things were different back then. None of us were married.  A few of us had jobs (not me), but none of us had meaningful ones. We drank Milwaukee's Best. Pi Lam had a fraternity house.  Most of us went back for Homecoming every year.  And Rob and I were about to co-rent a place in Arlington, Virginia with our friend the Spoid, and that would change our lives' pathways forever.

Oh, and back then we called Rob "Squirrel."

Here's to the old days.  Enjoy your weekends. I'll be headed to Williamsburg.

This is a Call

Turning away from the rotting newspage for a moment...

T-shirts being made up now:

Rob &
Dave &
Whitney &
Squeaky.

TR &
Zman &
Marls &
Rootsy.

TJ &
Jerry &
Dennis &
Mayhugh.

Greg. 

...and a number of other FOGTB and commenters in this space...

What do they have in common?

We are all members of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity's Virginia Psi chapter.  Pi Lams.  Frat guys.  Yippee.

A little backstory...

"Founded at Yale University in 1895, Pi Lambda Phi was the first non-sectarian fraternity in the United States, accepting men of good character without regard to race or religion. There are presently 37 chapters in the United State and one in Canada. The Psi Chapter (also called Virginia Psi) at The College of William and Mary was installed in June 1929..."

Skip a bit, brother...

In 1989, Rob, Dave, and I (and this guy... and this guy... and this guy... and a guy named this...)
decided to enlist in the service of fraternal life. A semester of hijinks ensued. Three-plus more years of antics congealed. A life of friendship endured.  A blog of dipshittery materialized.  All this and more, on a very special episode of Gheorghe: The Blog.

We learned along the way that all men are created free and equal.  We learned the expression "not four years, but a lifetime." That the Pi Lam flower is the woodbine.  That the Pi Lam bird is not the nuthatch but is instead something else.

We learned that you can meet random idiots in a dormitory when you are 18 and create friendships that will last you a lifetime.  But that not everyone has a palate for Random Idiots.  We learned that being sarcastic and intoxicated and slovenly is not a successful formula for courting ladies, and that "getting lucky" is not a misnomer.

We learned the expression "four years, maybe five, but nary a credit hour more." We learned that the era of unbridled fraternity, rugby (or lacrosse), and alcohol at universities of tradition and prestige in the American South has come to a close.  And that filling a frat house with our kind of complex creature became increasingly, then impossibly hard.  We finally learned that if you smash a board over someone's face, even a friend's, and videotape it, the Man will come for you.

And that he did.  And the little social club thrown together in the year of the great stock market crash was suddenly no more in 2004.  And there was great depression.

* * * * *

Yesterday morning at our office in Hampton, VA, we had a networking event that drew a few dozen folks for coffee. Among the group was our fratre Chris Old's older brother Hunter, a Phi Kappa Tau at W&M while we were there. I talked to him at length.

Randomly, another guest was a much younger Tribe alum who had graduated within the past 10 years, and he was also a ΦΚΤ.  He told the tale of them being booted off campus (again), and that when it happened, they snagged a bunch of the old composites.

Here is the one he grabbed at right.

See anybody you've heard of?

As fraternities come and go and finally wither away from our alma mater, there's probably no sense in hoping against hope for a resurrection of our gang's chapter.

Instead, my ask is simple: did anyone grab the old composites when the house was eradicated from W&M?
Doesn't it seem like the Martha Wood Cottage might be a fine place to honor the misspent youth of our heydays?
Or did the powers that be in William & Mary's administration order those nostalgic snapshots of maturity gone by be unceremoniously burned to ashes?
If the Phi Tau's can do this, why not the Pi Lams?  Why not us??

Inquiring minds like mine want to know, and deep thoughts like this keep me from mulling over the state of the nation.

That is all.