From Gobblers to Hokies

The word “Hokie” came first, in O.M. Stull’s 1896 cheer. But for a long time it was not the name people actually used. Tech’s 2006 traditions booklet says “Gobblers” came along after the cheer and was used more than “Hokies” until the 1980s.

Where “Gobblers” came from is a good argument, and it has several sides.

The official version: in 1909 football coach Branch Bocock started an informal “Gobbler Club” to build team spirit, and the name showed up in print that same year. A 2002 Virginia Tech Magazine history says the nickname “reportedly was first used” a year earlier, and agrees it first appeared in print in 1909.

Wikipedia adds that “Gobblers” became the official nickname in 1912.

That same 2002 history lists the other theories, and they are better than the official one.

One says cadets yelled “Coni-a-ah” and players answered with a gobble. Another says that after a 1907 Thanksgiving Day win over North Carolina, cadets bragged that Tech “took the turkey.”

The most common story is the least flattering. It says the athletes “gobbled” their food. Hold on to that one. It matters later.

Long before anyone wore a bird suit, Tech had a mascot performer. His name was Floyd “Hard Times” Meade, 1882 to 1941.

Special Collections says Meade was 14 when he became linked with the team in 1896. He worked part-time in the mess hall and performed at games dressed as a clown in orange and maroon.

Virginia Tech Magazine says cadets started taking Meade to games in 1896, and that by 1907 the teams had adopted him as their official mascot. Think about that: a teenager who worked in the dining hall was the face of Tech spirit for years before there was a costume or a bird at all.

Then came the turkey. In 1913 Meade, a VPI employee chosen by the student body, had a trained turkey pull him in a cart at a football game. President Joseph D. Eggleston Jr. stopped the cart after one game. He thought it was cruel to the bird.

Meade adjusted. According to the traditions booklet, he paraded a turkey trained to gobble on command along the sidelines instead.

The best turkey story comes from 1914. Virginia Tech Magazine says that when the VMI bulldog attacked the turkey at a game, the whole corps reportedly poured out of the stands to defend it.

The bird duty later passed to William Byrd “Joe Chesty” Price. He raised birds and took them to games until he retired in 1953.

And the turkey kept showing up in other forms. A costumed Gobbler joined the live turkey for at least one game in 1936. That costume line eventually leads to the HokieBird, which has its own story.

Even the costume carried the old name for decades. In fall 1962 a student-funded Gobbler suit, with real turkey tail feathers dyed in school colors, debuted at the Thanksgiving game against VMI. In 1971 a 7 1/2-foot long-necked version arrived, and the name became the “Fighting Gobbler.” So when people talk about Tech’s Gobbler era, they mean the teams, the fans and the mascot all at once.

In 1978 Tech hired Bill Dooley as football coach and athletic director. He did not like that eating-habits story about athletes gobbling their food.

So he removed the gobble sound from the scoreboard and revived the “Hokies” nickname. Stull’s made-up word, sitting in the cheer since 1896, finally got the top billing.

It stuck. When Frank Beamer became head coach in 1987, he put the gobble back on the scoreboard. Beamer had played on Gobbler teams himself in the 1960s. But by then “Hokies” was the name, and it stayed the name.

Look around campus and the old name is still there. Gobblerfest started in 2008 as a fall welcome festival on the Drillfield, with more than 700 booths, rides, games and performances. The student club site is called GobblerConnect.

It also fits that Tech’s mascot is a turkey. For more than half of Tech’s history, Special Collections notes, Thanksgiving week meant the VMI game in Roanoke, with dances, dinners and parades, usually followed by a Sunday Thanksgiving feast in the College Mess Hall. A bird tied to Thanksgiving was a natural match for a school whose biggest game was on Thanksgiving.

And the mascot is still a turkey. The team name changed, the bird did not. That is the whole story in one line: Tech kept the turkey and swapped the word, and the word it picked was the one that never meant anything in the first place.