100 Tech Moments

Tennessee Polytechnic Institute was founded in 1915. Campus consisted of one building and 25 acres of land.

Raymond Randall Hamilton, of Cookeville, registered for classes Sept. 11, 1916. He was the first student to register at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute. He graduated from the high school program in 1920 and from the two-year college program in 1922.

In 1916, approximately 50 students enrolled in the industrial arts program and spent most of their first year constructing the program’s academic building. With the use of student labor, construction costs were $1,500, or $34,000 in today’s dollars. The wood building, which burned down in 1935, was the center for most of the industrial and engineering activities until two sections of the steel shop were erected in 1920.
In TPI’s early days, every student was expected to complete five hours of practical work a week, which helped keep student living expenses low and maintain campus.

Beulah Betty McDonald was the first student to earn a college degree at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in 1918. She received a two-year degree in English. Nine others received two-year degrees that year as well. McDonald died at the age of 93 after teaching in Smith County schools for 40 years.

The speech and debate club was organized in 1930 to train students in debating and public speaking. Originally only open to men, women were admitted within the decade. Students began competing in 1934 and entered as many as 10 tournaments a year. Founded by history professor Herman Pinkerton, the club was known as Herman Pinkerton’s Tennessee Talking Horses. Now called the speech and debate club, it has won nearly 100 trophies in its 85-year history.

Joan Derryberry wrote the Tech Hymn after a 1943 football game against Vanderbilt because both schools’ alma maters used the same melody. Charles Faulkner Bryan approved it and the song was first used at commencement that year. It is still sung at the end of every commencement ceremony.

World War II ended in 1945. The Roll of Honor in Jere Whitson Memorial Building contains a list of names of the 935 students, faculty and staff who served and the 43 who were killed. Memorial Gym was named in honor of those killed in action.

Tech joined the Ohio Valley Conference in 1949. Since then, the Golden Eagles have won 79 conference championships: seven baseball, seven men’s basketball, 19 women’s basketball, 10 football, four each of men’s and women’s golf, seven rifle, two soccer, 10 men’s tennis, one women’s tennis, three men’s outdoor track and five volleyball.

W.J. Julian taught music and directed the bands at TPI from 1949 until 1961. Students remember him as a perfectionist and said he was especially hard on music majors, who were required to be in the marching band. One former student said that if someone made a mistake, Julian would walk up and say that the band could do without that person.
Today, Julian is credited for putting Tech’s marching band on the map and for reinventing band programs in higher education.

Throughout most of Tech’s early history, female students were subject to strict rules. In 1949, the university developed a list of approved dating places and drew up policies about students who got married during the school year. Lights in all dorms had to be off and students had a 10:30 p.m. curfew, except for a few basement study rooms.

There was lively debate in 1949 between Cookeville residents and Tech students about allowing Sunday evening movies. Movies were one of the only forms of entertainment in Cookeville at the time.
Those who opposed the measure claimed that it would interfere with church services and students, as temporary residents, shouldn’t have a say. Those in favor argued that movies were a form of clean, quiet relaxation; were no more disruptive to church services than sports or other events; and that though individual students were transitory, the student body was not. A petition was circulated and received enough signatures to have a citywide vote.

Helen F. (Henderson) Keeney, ’50 business management, remembers that graduation was held in the rain in front of the engineering building, now Henderson Hall. Memorial Gym, where graduations were usually held, was being remodeled. The graduates and others in attendance were soaked. It was the last time graduation was held outside.

Wallace Frierson, ’51 biology, remembers using Tech’s first electron microscope. TPI is rumored to have been the first undergraduate institution in the country to get one. It cost $8,000, or nearly $75,000 today.

Enrollment hit 1,000 students. The student body was 5:1 male to female.

In 1957, Dean Anne Marshall tried to ban kissing on campus. The Oracle called the ban “contrary to the laws of human nature.” Perhaps as a result of the ban, students began talking about going to the “submarine races,” a code for couples who did not want to be disturbed. It is unclear how long the term was used on campus.

Eight students on their way to the 1957 campus picnic in Crossville decided to have some fun with the town’s residents. Equipped and dressed as road surveyors, they spoke loudly in the street about moving the courthouse to make way for a four-lane highway, a dam to flood the rest of the town and plans to build a military base nearby. They “accidentally” dropped a few sheets of paper with the heading “Corpses de Engineers.”

Student lab instructors were paid 58 cents an hour in 1958, or $4.77 today. Rent for a one-room apartment was $24 a month, or $197 in today’s dollars. The average one-bedroom apartment in town now costs $500 a month.

Frazier Solomon, ’59 accounting, remembered grounds-keeping staff aerating, seeding, putting down straw and watering several large bald spots on the quad. Later, several rows of corn appeared in the spots, probably planted by a group of Tech students. The corn was removed before it matured.

The first mainframe computer came to campus in 1961. It was four feet long, four feet tall, two feet wide and weighed more than 3,000 pounds.

Tech student James Davis was one of the first Americans killed in Vietnam. He died in a Viet Cong ambush as he was returning from a mission near Saigon Dec. 22, 1961. He received the Army Commendation Medal in December 1961 for his service in the third radio research unit from May to December.

Sam Pace, ’63 mechanical engineering, remembered, “Dr. (Leighton) Sissom would come in the fluid lab and change the flow rate or some other constant in our experiments. I went to his office early and borrowed his key saying the lab door was locked. When the rest of the class members were all there, I locked the doors and wouldn’t let Dr. Sissom ‘complicate our experiment.’ He banged on the door from time to time but we didn’t let him in until our experiment was completed. He was a creative teacher and, fortunately for us, could take a joke.”

Tech’s first international club started in 1964.
Today, the campus hosts lecturers from around the world and hundreds of students study abroad. More than 1,000 students come to TTU from around the world.

Tennessee Polytechnic Institute became Tennessee Technological University in 1965.

History professor “jumping” J.B. Clark would enter the classroom through the ground-floor window when he was teaching in the late 60s. He was known for including questions on his tests about other subjects than those covered in his lectures. At least once, he jumped on his desk with a flashlight in his mouth to demonstrate a lighthouse.

A Tech professor and several students conducted a “cosmouse” experiment in 1970. A mouse was installed in a rocket, which was shot 3,000 feet into the air to see what would happen to the mouse’s heart and respiratory rates. Both increased.

Marie Ventrice, ’74 mechanical engineering, was the first to earn a doctorate at TTU. It took her eight years to finish her bachelor’s at TTU because she had two children and gave birth to a third during her studies. She served as interim director of the university’s Center for Electric Power in the late 80s.

TTU joined Baja SAE, then called Mini Baja, in 1977. Since then, the team has finished in the top 10 in more than 80 percent of competitions, making it the most decorated Baja team in the U.S.

“Star Wars: Episode IV” came out in 1977. TTU mechanical engineering professor Cemil Bagci worked as George Lucas’ consultant on the mechanics of R2D2. His work was commemorated by a reference to a robot language named after him in the film.

Food fights broke out on campus at least once during Homecoming 1979.
Gary Matthews, ’81 accounting, remembered, “My future wife (Lisa Miller, ’80 elementary education) and I had just been on campus for a short time in the late 1970s. One Friday, we were eating lunch in the cafeteria when someone yelled ‘Food fight!’ The cafeteria erupted into a war zone with food flying all over the place. We took cover underneath our table. What a welcome to Tennessee Tech!”
The next year, there were the “Food Fight Trials.” The Associated Student Body supreme court held four trials and found six students guilty of disorderly conduct.

TTU opened the Appalachian Center for Crafts on Smithville’s Center Hill Lake in 1980, though the university acquired the property several years before.
Due to budget cuts, it almost closed in 1997. It remained open and has studios where students learn to make art with clay, glass, metals, wood and fibers. It also has exhibition spaces and a sales gallery.

The brick entrance signs were installed on Willow and Dixie Avenues in 1982. It took 10 years to plan the signs and raise the money to build them. Each sign cost $5,000, excluding labor costs, more than $12,000 today. Lettering alone cost $3,000.
The project began when President Derryberry was still at Tech but no designs came through during his tenure that he felt merited approval.

TTU partnered with WCTE in 1983 to offer telecourses. Academic classes were aired once a week on the station and students received academic credit for completing the work. The courses were relatively popular and additional courses were added to meet student demand. The practice continued into the 1990s.

Oozeball, a tradition that continued into the ’90s, was a volleyball match played in eight inches of mud that began in the late 1980s. Students competed against teams of other students and faculty members.

Tech’s first Blizzard was in 1985. Conference athletic officials threatened to penalize the Tech team when game attendees threw squares of toilet paper onto the court after the first basket. The NCAA banned the practice in 1986 but fans persisted, though they continued to get in trouble with the NCAA.
“I was at Tech the year Tech squares were first thrown onto the court whenever we made our first basket,” said ret. Maj. Carl Pittman, ’86 health and physical education. “It was awesome! When we played the Tennessee Vols there was a packed crowd. I remember ESPN reporting on the event. I still have a picture that was handed out later that year. Great memories.”
Terry Lancaster, ’87 journalism, remembered: “I was running a camera for WCTE that night and footage from my camera made ESPN. I was one puffed-up 20 year old!”
University officials asked students to come up with other ways to celebrate and the practice ended in 2000. Students restarted the tradition in 2013.

Tech’s first and only champion cockroach, Watergate, won the Great American Bug Race held at Palm Beach Atlantic College in Florida in 1986. Watergate was immediately eaten by a lizard lurking near the finish line. Oracle reporters paid for the bug’s trip.
About 1,000 people attended the roach’s memorial services on campus. President Prescott spoke for 30 minutes.
“It has been the tradition and history of this institution for students to go all out and to win, so it was no surprise when Watergate won first prize in the race,” Prescott said, according to the Oracle. He called the race and bug’s sacrifice “a noble endeavor that lived up to the best tradition of Tech.”
The incident got national media attention.

Tennessee Tech switched from academic quarters to semesters in 1989. The change took several years of planning and was made as a cost-saving measure. A 1985 Oracle survey of 158 students found that 127 of them opposed the change. It meant for longer class periods, shorter breaks and confusion as students and faculty adjusted. Tech was one of the last universities to make the switch.

The Black Cultural Center was established in 1990.
In 1995, it was named after Tech’s first black graduate, Leona Lusk Officer. Officer began her degree in 1945. While working as an elementary school teacher in Sparta, she took a course or two every summer at the Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School in Nashville, now Tennessee State University. She transferred to Tech when it desegregated in 1964 and earned her degree in 1965.

After DDT wiped out Tennessee’s bald eagle population, Mike Williams and C.J. Jaynes, both ’92 wildlife management, spent the summer of 1992 raising a pair of the birds to reintroduce them to the wild. The birds were taken from their nests and raised by hand to help ensure their survival; often eagles have 2-3 chicks and some get pushed out of the nest because of their size.
The birds came from Alaska and Wisconsin and were released at Dale Hollow Lake in a partnership between Tech, the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Today, Dale Hollow has a few nesting pairs of bald eagles.

The Olympic torch passed through Cookeville on its way to Atlanta for the 1996 summer games. Eight Cookeville residents, including one Tech student, carried it on its way. Sophomore business student Andy Holbrook carried the torch from campus to the intersection of Seventh Street and Peachtree Avenue.

Human ecology majors created period costumes to celebrate Tennessee’s bicentennial in 1997. The clothing, which documented 200 years of Tennessee history, traveled the state for years as a trunk show.
During a photo shoot on campus, a Tech photographer was so struck by how lovely a girl in an antebellum dress looked that he tripped and fell backward on South Patio.

Nathan Tudor, ’02 political science and history, was named to serve on the Tennessee Higher Education Commission in 2000. He was
the first from Tech selected for the commission and served form 2000-2002.Since then two other TTU students have served: Jessica Brumet, ’11 nursing, who served from 2008-2010, and Alex Martin, ’18 basic business, who will serve 2014 to 2016.

Students got Eagle cards in 2003, which served to track meals and replaced the old ticket system. The cards were unpopular at first because they meant that entrepreneurial students were no longer able to sell their meal tickets to others.

The U.S. Army Cadet Command threatened to shut down Tech’s ROTC program as well as a dozen others across the nation in 2013. In part due to an outpouring of support from Tech alumni, community members and Tennessee elected officials, the 13 programs were instead placed on a two-year probation.
The Golden Eagle Battalion successfully met each of the probation criteria last year. The second-year review will be held this spring.

Awesome Eagle won his division for the first time at the Universal Cheerleaders Association’s national mascot competition in 2014. Awesome won it again in 2015, which was also the first year.Grandpappy Eagle was invited to the competition. Tech is the only school in the history of the competition to have two mascots compete.

Tech will host and celebrate Charter Day, the 100th anniversary of the university’s founding, on March 27, 2015. Special guests, including students, faculty, community members, government and higher education leaders, are invited to a ceremony in Derryberry Hall.