Category: Virginia

RIP, Nora McGillivray

If I don’t want to get morbid and maudlin, I suppose I should stop reading the “In Memoriam” section of the UVA Alumni Magazine. But then I would never know when I was impoverished by the death of a friend or acquaintance.

Today I learned that Nora McGillivray was killed, or killed herself, last September; Nora being Nora, her death was as full of mystery as her life. The painful details are in the link, as are the beginnings of the mystery.

Nora was in my last poetry class, a language poetry class with Tan Lin. She was a careful, quiet writer whom I remember for her grace and her economy of language. I would never have guessed that she was ten years older than I, and I don’t know how many people in the class did either.

It hurts when someone whose words are so much stronger than yours disappears, hurts to think that someone might have lost a battle with depression (though the details are murky and unclear).

I close with an excerpt from her obituary, which is already behind the paywall at the Daily Progress (shame!):

Nora departed on a warm Indian summer night. The details are sketchy and appropriately cryptic, and, while she would have loved being the star of her own cinema verité masterpiece, rest assured, Buckingham County, that Nora is Watching the Detectives…

She was impossible to forget. You had only to meet Nora once to have her indelibly inked upon your subconscious. You might not always have considered this a good thing. She was the kind of dame a tortured young musician would write an opus about, and more than one of them did….

Hillary: Eleventh hour UVA session doesn’t help

diy Barack poster

Interesting choice of campaign destination for Hillary Clinton on Monday: she spent an hour with Larry Sabato’s PLAP 101 class at the University of Virginia (via the Tin Man). It appears, from last night’s election returns, that it didn’t help, since Obama swept Virginia (and Maryland, and DC) by a healthy margin.

What surprises me a little is the tone of the uncredited article in UVA Today, always the glossiest and least relevant of the on-Grounds publications. It reads like a campaign press release, gushing over how “poised and candid” she sounded.

I have to say I’m not surprised at all by the fact that the University Singers, rather than the Glee Club, got the nod to do the musical accompaniment, though. I can’t imagine a scenario in which this particular candidate would be OK with a men’s chorus accompanying her.

Oh, and the Barack Obama “Sweep” poster is courtesy the Do It Yourself Barack Obama Poster Site, which is based on this fantastic series of posters by Shepard “Andre the Giant has a Posse” Fairey.

The Good Old Song of … the Virginia Glee Club

Funny what you find when you dig through University archives. I was going through some old Virginia Glee Club photos tonight when I decided it would be a good idea to actually read the lists of names at the bottom. Some familiar names popped out (Ernest Mead, Harry Rogers Pratt), and then one (in an 1893 photo) that sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. E.A. Craighill…

Then it hit me. Here’s the guy credited with writing the lyrics to “The Good Old Song” between 1893 and 1895—in an 1893 Glee Club photo! The guy who wrote the freakin’ “Good Old Song” was in Club!!!!

Well, I was having trouble filling out the Notable Alumni section of the Glee Club article after Woodrow Wilson… now I’ve found Notable Alum #2.

Revised Glee Club record date: 1951

While doing some Wikipedia related research last night, I stumbled across something interesting. The record album Songs of the University of Virginia, which I’ve long thought was recorded in 1947 based on photographic evidence from the University archives, was apparently not released until 1951. How do I know this? From a 1951 Washington Post article, of all places.

If it seems funny that a Paper of Record would cover goings-on at the University, consider that the WaPo didn’t get that reputation until the time of Woodward and Bernstein. Prior to that, it was viewed as a sleepy society paper, and apparently not above covering the doings down Route 29.

Also interesting in the article was the following: confirmation of the 1871 founding date (the record was said to honor the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Glee Club); identification of the Beta Chi chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi (the “national honorary band fraternity”) as the sponsor—an organization that, as far as I can tell, isn’t on Grounds any more; and identification of Thomas Jefferson Smith III of McRae, Georgia, as the co-chairman of the project (with Jack Hardy) and president of the Glee Club at that time. Plus, apparently, the Music Department was resident in Minor Hall then, rather than Old Cabell.

But the main point of the article for me was its claim regarding the aim of the project, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

Many songs which should be a part of University heritage have been lost, some because they were set to popular tunes of the times and died out when the tunes were forgotten, some because a college generation is a brief time in the life of the school. Words to these songs can be found in university publications, but no one sings them because the tunes have been lost.

The famous “wah-who-wah” [sic] of the University’s alma mater is an example of these lost songs. Once it was sung; then all the band music for it was lost. Now no one knows the music, and it has become a yell, used chiefly at football games.

So “Songs of the University of Virginia” will preserve songs which otherwise might be lost in future years. The album will help alumni of present and future to recreate the days of “purple shadows” on the lawn.

The irony, of course, is that the album itself faded almost completely into obscurity too. Note the part about wa-hoo-wa—they are referring to the song about which the “Good Old Song” was written (no, the “Good Old Song” is not self-referential!), which is lost.

Documenting a vanishing landscape

Appomattox court house tavern building

Only natural, I suppose, that my thoughts are drawn to the past this week. A new online image collection at the University of Virginia Library, the Frances Benjamin Johnston Photograph Collection is helping to foster that nostalgia with a series of photos of vernacular Virginia buildings taken between 1929 and 1935. The buildings, ranging from the Tuckahoe mansion to a debtor’s prison, have much of the quiet, slightly shabby grace that still lingered in parts of the Tidewater when I grew up (though increasingly you had to go out to Gloucester or south to Chesapeake to find it—it vanished from the Peninsula a long time ago).

I looked through the list but was only able to find a few buildings that I am directly familiar with. But the names are an evocative litany of the Tidewater and the Piedmont: Abingdon. Apperson Farm. Bowman’s Folly. Bruton Parish. Cabell House. The Glebe. The Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop. Kempsville. Kenmore. Kittiewan. Landsdowne. Mangohick. Pohick. Mantua. Midlothian Pike. Monticola. Powhatan. Poplar Grove. Rich Neck. Sweet Hall. Warwick. Yancey’s Mill. Yeocomico Church.

Virginiana, Wikipediana

I’ve been expanding my Wikipedia footprint over the past few months. Starting on the Virginia Glee Club page, my contributions now span articles on a few University presidents, the Raven Society, the Virginia Gentlemen, and even the Seven Society. Yes, editing articles on Wikipedia is a gateway drug.

So I made it formal the other day and joined the WikiProject University of Virginia. I don’t know exactly what that means but I suspect I’ll find out soon enough.

I’d welcome help from other University alumni or interested parties regarding any of these topics. For instance, there is damned little about the VGs online to use as reference material for discussion of this 50+ year old a cappella group, and I know they’re more notable than the Hullabahoos, who have a kick-ass article.

Aw crap.

At the half, I said to my wife, “Well, we’re up, but we could always blow it in the second half like we always do.” I should have kept my mouth shut.

It was still a fun game to watch, at least until Jameel Sewell went out with an injury in the fourth quarter. Then it got sloppy fast. But still, I have to remind myself from the perspective of one glass of wine, at least we were in a bowl game, and not one of the low rent ones either. It was a nice end to a season that had its ups and downs.

Glee Club nostalgia trip

Courtesy fellow VMHLB the Tin Man, the other version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, the audience participation version performed by the Virginia Glee Club. Some of the traditions seem to have gone away: there is no “Hens Suck Eggs” chant from the Four Calling Birds, for instance, and the traditional bum-rush of the conductor followed by champagne toast has been replaced by a skit that’s not really visible in the video. But you get some of the spirit of the occasion. And I was excited to see that it happened in Old Cabell Hall; there were some dire predictions about what was going to happen with hall availability this year that appear not to have come fully to fruition.

Enjoy:

Calling out the Shadows

An editorial in the Cavalier Daily, UVA’s student newspaper, yesterday called one of the University’s secret societies on the carpet over past actions. The outcries are getting louder over this society, ranging from allegations of racism to statements that the Shadows were formed to “stop the integration of women into the University, to uphold a dress code, and to maintain the honor system’s single sanction.” It’s hard to prove the first two, though I’m anxiously awaiting more Cavalier Daily back issues coming into the UVA Library’s CD archive so I can check out some of the formative stuff that happened from 1963 when they were founded through 1967 when the current archive starts.

But based on reports of interactions between the society and students (and administrators) over the years, the society’s intentions don’t seem particularly benign. The two episodes of failed attempts to call the group to justice through UJC cited in a recent editorial are particularly egregious, especially since one cites breaking and entering on the part of the society (back in 1982). So is the tying shut of the door of the University’s first female Assistant Dean of Students back in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

I think the Purple Shadows aren’t doing themselves any favors by dressing up in Klan robes, either.

I think, like the writer of yesterday’s editorial, that calling on the Shadows to explain themselves and step out of the … erm, shadows is called for at this point.

Lou Bloomfield, TV star

A quickie for tonight: just saw in my alumni newsletter that Lou Bloomfield, UVA Physics professor famous for his “How Things Work” class and textbook (as well as for developing algorithms to bust plagiarized term papers) is going to be co-hosting the TV show “Some Assembly Required” on the Discovery Channel. Some star professors are born famous, some achieve fame, and some have fame thrust upon them, I suppose. Or thrust themselves upon fame.

Shades of Soering: UVA undergrads arrested for kidnapping

As if the loss to Va Tech wasn’t bad enough, now this: University students charged with abduction (see also WaPo article). This is the definitive proof that curriculum standards at UVA are relaxing; back in my day toolies wouldn’t have had time to go to Northern Virginia, much less to kidnap someone and hold them for ransom!

I note also, with some amusement, that the students managed to find the one sketchy motel in Falls Church in which to keep their victim. The Stratford was just across Rt 7 and a little down the street from the apartments my wife lived in before we got married, so I know the area pretty well. It’s totally the sort of place you’d expect to show up in an episode of Law & Order.

Hat tip to Greg Greene for the initial email alerting me to this development, which also provided the Jens Soering connection (Google him, but make sure to look at some of the results that aren’t actually written by him).

Fun while it lasted

Well fought, Virginia, but in the end we were outmatched. Someday I want to play against Virginia Tech and have enough TDs to post the rest of the tracks from that 1947 album, but not this year.

Now what I want is for Virginia Tech to steamroller Boston College. Why? Because it’ll make a whole lot of people here a lot less smug, and because it would be nice to have an ACC champion in Virginia—even if it’s not in Charlottesville.