Category: Virginia

Famous forbearers

I continue my work on researching the early history of the Virginia Glee Club. Google Books has proved invaluable, both in sourcing the birth year of the group and in providing a reference to a famous alumnus about whose membership I was ignorant: Woodrow Wilson, who sang tenor in the Glee Club during his one year of law school at UVA.

My awe at having found myself among the ranks of presidents is diminished only slightly by my learned contempt of Wilson for his re-institutionalization of segregation in DC when he was president.

This update has been published to Wikipedia, where I am editing the history of the Club.

A teaser: Glee Club past history

bill clinton shaking hands with the Virginia Glee Club on the 250th birthday of Thomas Jefferson

I’ve been digging into my archives this weekend, prompted by a contact from an old Glee Club friend. I have quite a few things to scan and post, but that will wait for another time, when I’m not getting ready to fly across country early the next morning.

In the meantime, I’ll post a teaser—a scaled-down section of a scanned photo that is exactly what it looks like: 55 guys from UVA shaking hands with Bill Clinton in 1993. More memorabilia from that day, including a higher res (halftone) of the photo, when I get back.

Back to the Hook

I have an appointment with destiny tonight in Charlottesville, where I am heading to see Tyler Magill get married. And to congratulate Jim Heaney on his engagement. And to hang out with my sister and take some photos. And maybe have a late night Newkie Brown at the Court Square Tavern.

No, I’m not building this up too much. Why do you ask?

Castles and plantations and all sorts of dominions

A note that a Massachusetts “castle” in the Berkshires is for sale caught my eye today. The Searles Castle is a bonafide antique, at least by Berkshires standards, having been built in 1915. It’s pretty, but there’s no real history there, and I can’t help but hope that some fabulously wealthy magnate picks it up. Great Barrington needs more eccentrics-in-residence.

I have sort of the opposite feeling about Carter’s Grove. When I was in high school, the plantation was still being run as a historical center by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; it was actually an extra credit trip for us in US History in high school, and I have a few halcyon memories of visits with classmates (hi Andrew, Unchu, Jim, Paul) and family. Of course it also houses one of the oldest graveyards of victims of conflict between Native Americans and English colonists, the remnants of the Martin’s Hundred settlement.

Which makes its being up for sale all the sadder. As of the end of last year, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation decided that defraying its deficit required selling the property. Yesterday I saw an ad in the UVA Alumni Magazine for the site. The sale includes a pretty restrictive covenant that protects the “site’s historic, architectural, visual, archeological and environmental resources.” And yet. It’s fairly horrifying thinking of this early gravesite passing into private hands and disappearing from public access.

My Founding Father is better than yours

File under amusing: the debate team of Hamilton College challenged UVA’s Washingotn and Jefferson Societies to a debate over whose Founding Father was coolest.

Heh.

Knowing a few graduated members of the Jeff and the Wash, all I can say is, I hope the Hamilton team is prepared to eat crow. And of course, to drink like fish, since they will undoubtedly be treated to a spectacular display of Virginia hospitality.

But one does wonder where the Hamilton College team expect to find their points of superiority, given that their founding father was allergic to democracy. And who are they calling “plump” anyway? I am especially tempted to speculate about the rent paid by the “tenants of rhetoric” [sic], but we’ll let it slide.

Career mobility: someone asks Ed Ayers the question

It is a logical question, but it surprises me that the Cavalier Daily was the first place to print the question about longtime UVA professor and Dean Ed Ayers’s impending move to the presidency of University of Richmond: is it a destination for Ayers, or a stepping stone?

To his credit, Ayers said to the unnamed student that asked the question that he is “focused on his new job, not looking further down the road.” Still, it’s an interesting thought. Casteen has been at UVA since I was there as an undergrad, in the fall of 1990; seventeen years is a long time in any position.

Wikipedia, Google News Archives, and the Good Old Song

I’ve tagged this as being about Virginia because the subject matter is probably most interesting to those interested in UVA, my alma mater, but some of it is probably of more general interest. So, first things first: the Virginia Glee Club has a stub of a Wikipedia page that needs some help. So I went about to help it. I added a brief paragraph about the origins of the Club as a student group called the Cabell House Men, then went in search of documentation. As it turns out, the Cabell House Men are scarce fellows indeed.

But in digging through Google’s various features, I found the news archives, a front end to the paywalled deep content of a bunch of newspapers that featured some really interesting paydirt on the Club that I called home and that formed me in some significant ways. Among the findings, as gleaned from article summaries since I didn’t feel like spending $30 or $40 in reprints tonight, I learned that the Glee Club

So much, and so little, has changed.

Interestingly, I also found reference in Google Books that the Club seemingly disappeared for a few years prior to 1910-1911, which I hadn’t heard before.

And of course, there was that Washington appearance in which Bill Clinton himself gave us a shoutout, on Thomas Jefferson’s 250th anniversary: “I want to begin by offering my compliments to the United States Marine Band and the Virginia Glee Club, who have entertained us so well today…” Read that speech; it’s almost unimaginable coming from the current sitting president, but back then it was so routine as to be almost unnoticed.

Oh yeah, and the Good Old Song? Turns out it’s a meta-alma mater, a song in memory of the real Song of Wa-Hoo-Wah, long vanished, and at least according to this author a racist imitation of a Native American chant that originated at Dartmouth of all places.

Lessons? There’s more online than lives in Google’s main index…

Just don’t call him Katie

One day a New York Giant, the next day a Today show correspondent: Virginia star Tiki Barber made a big jump this week into the wacky world of broadcasting. His new position on the Today show as a news correspondent makes him the second high-profile Virginia alum there in recent memory and the first since Katie Couric left to become CBS’s anchor. Which, of course, means that Matt Lauer needs to watch his ass.

Common sense in Virginia?

The Tin Man: Virginia Amendment. Tin Man points to an interesting poll that shows that Virginia voters are much less likely to approve the specific anti-gay-marriage amendment language that will be on the state ballot this fall than they were a year ago when asked about a general defense of marriage amendment.

How to read this? Either Virginians are anti-gay but recognize the threats posed to heterosexual unmarried couples imposed by the proposed amendment, or they find it easy to be bigoted in general terms but reluctant to impose specific anti-gay language. Or maybe people’s minds have changed over the last year. Anyway, a small ray of hope from my home state.

The Academical Potemkin Village?

Tin Man wrote a few weeks back about the planned extensions to Mr. Jefferson’s University. The impetus for Tin Man’s post was a generally good New York Times Magazine article that generally avoided the easy story angles, though there were flavors of architects, both sophisticated and moronic, vs. Virginians both reactionary and preservationist. I was particularly delighted to see the author’s reaction to both Hereford College, though I have to say that Darden is not nearly as grim as he painted it—certainly better than Sloan’s modernist gray architecture. Perhaps the author should have visited Darden during a barbecue. But the description of Hereford College is dead on:

What’s the alternative? Many of the university’s modernists point admiringly to Hereford College, a complex of undergraduate dorms designed in the 90’s by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. “There’s an engagement with the landscape and a compositional playfulness,” says Daniel Bluestone, a professor of architectural history at the university. But I found Hereford, which is home to some 500 students, as depressing as Darden: an off-kilter arrangement of towering brick slabs, their slitlike windows resembling gun ports in World War II pillboxes. Unlike the Lawn, which on that same morning was full of students sunbathing and tossing Frisbees, the quad at Hereford was devoid of any life.

The one point missing from the article, though, was the violence that has been done to the Grounds by other well meaning architects, for example Gilmer Hall and the so-called New Dorms. With that context in mind, it’s kind of understandable that we would be a little cautious.

But I continue to be nervous about the overall layout and how the neighborhood to the south will be affected. I think the Glee Club House is immediately to the south of the circular amphitheatre at the end of the terrace. But the lack of a map overlay of the existing neighborhood, even through the extended images on the Arts and Sciences web site, makes it hard to tell.

Newport News is everywhere

I keep seeing all these connections to my birthplace. Yesterday morning I was sitting in a terminal in Baltimore, where I had spent Tuesday running around like crazy from one client to another, wrapping up with a panel at the University of Maryland (someday, Craig, I will be in town longer than one day, and then I’ll call), waiting for a 6:45 am flight, and I looked to my right, and there it was: AirTran flying to Newport News.

Then I picked up the in-flight magazine on the plane, sitting in business class (which for a $35 fee has to be the cheapest business class ticket in the industry), and flipped through. And what did I find in the middle? Newport News. Complete with mentions of the Monitor at the Mariner’s Museum; Lee Hall; the Shipyard (of course); and even the Virginia Living Museum (née the Peninsula Nature and Science Center).

And that’s not even to mention the prominent coverage that the Mariner’s Museum gets in recent issues of National Geographic, with the upcoming restoration of the Monitor.

It appears that someone in the city’s Chamber of Commerce is riding the Monitor train into a smart wave of publicity for the city. Good plan. Maybe someone in the City Council will take the cue and turn the city into someplace that I’ll want to visit again, rather than the treeless collection of strip malls it was rapidly becoming when I left 16 years ago.

Weird connections to the news pt. 2: Tony Snow

Who knew that my childhood home in Tidewater Virginia was such a nexus of fate? Last year it was my onetime boss’s spacewalk; today it was Tony Snow, one-time writer for the Virginian Pilot and editor of the editorial page of the Daily Press (my hometown newspaper in Newport News, Virginia), most recently Fox News commentator turned Bush administration press secretary.

And the Daily Press was, if I recall, a bastion of journalistic excellence in the early 1980s when Snow was the editorial page editor. But at least that was when it was an independent newspaper, before the Chicago Tribune buy-out.