University’s alumni in Las Vegas gather for support

UNLV professor Susan Meacham's Monday morning began with the news that her hometown and alma mater had been devastated by a massacre.

"It's a tragedy that's unbelievable. It's overwhelming," she said Monday night while gathering with other Virginia Tech alumni at a restaurant in the southwest part of the valley.

Meacham's connections to the school run deeper than most. She earned her bachelor's and doctoral degrees at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, better known as Virginia Tech, after growing up in Blacksburg, the town where the college is located. Her family continues to live in Blacksburg, and her brother works in the office of development for the school's college of agriculture. He was on the campus at the time of the shooting.

She learned from e-mails and phone calls Monday morning that her brother was safe. She also was relieved to hear that her mother was fine though she had been swimming at the school at 7 a.m., around the same time that the police received the first call that a shooting had occurred on campus.

Meacham and about 10 Virginia Tech graduates went to Buffalo Wild Wings on Hualapai Way near Flamingo Road on Monday night because that's where they go to watch Virginia Tech's televised basketball and football games. But on this night, their school was the subject of grim news broadcasts.

The alumni greeted each other with consoling hugs or firm handshakes as they came together in a side room at the restaurant. Many of them wore maroon shirts bearing "VT" insignias.

Jeff Motley, who graduated from Virginia Tech in 1990, said hundreds of Virginia Tech Alumni Association members are in Southern Nevada, where they call themselves the Las Vegas High Rollin' Hokies.

Julie Chadburn, a 1992 grad and president of the local alumni group, said two students from Las Vegas are freshmen at Virginia Tech.

Some of association members said one of the longtime draws of the school has been the idyllic feel of the town where it is located, and they wondered whether that has been ruined.

"I went to elementary school in New York City, and I went to Virginia Tech because I wanted to go to school in a small-town atmosphere where things like this didn't happen," said 45-year-old Florence Jordan, who graduated from Virginia Tech in 1984.

Jordan talked about strong connections among Virginia Tech alumni. She joked that her daughter, when they are together in public, dreads seeing other Hokies because Jordan often strikes up conversations with the strangers.

Blacksburg always had been known as a quiet and close-knit community where "we all knew each other," Meacham said. Her brother had returned to Blacksburg from a larger city because he wanted a quieter life where he could raise his children, she said.

She recalled that a family had been slain in the town when she was a freshman at Virginia Tech in 1975, but that paled in comparison with the Monday's slaughter on the campus.

"The school is the community. It is the lifeblood of the community," she said. "This is a major scar."

Motley predicted that the nation soon would see the resiliency and determination of the people of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech.

"This university has been around since the 1800s. This was a military school that survived world wars," he said. "It will come back again."

Review-Journal writer Lawrence Mower contributed to this report.