VT Stories Oral History with Nick Moga, November 20, 2015 (Ms2016-015)

David Cline: Good afternoon. This is David Cline for the VT Stories Oral History Project. Today is Friday, November 20, 2015, and I'm here at the Alumni Center. If you could just introduce yourself, and if you would just so we can use this later start in a full sentence, my name is… Tell us your name, your year of birth and your year of graduation.

Nick Moga: My name is Nick Moga. I was born in 1954. I graduated Tech in winter of 1976.

Cline: Nick, just start if you would a general description about where you were born and raised and a little bit about your family.

Moga: I was born in Hubbard, Ohio, actually near Youngstown, Ohio. My mother and father are both of Romanian [00:00:54…tion]. They were first generation. Grandparents came over around the 1900s, 1899. Grew up in Ohio, lived there 1:00until I came to Tech.

Cline: What were your interests growing up, family life like?

Moga: My dad was an engineer kind of and my mom was a nurse. I enjoyed sports. I enjoyed reading. I was a raucous reader. My mother had the Reader's Digest, and I think they were not true, they were abridged books, but you had every one of them, and I started reading probably when I was 5 or 6 and finished them by the time I was 10, which was like 50 volumes. I loved to read.

Cline: Worked your way from one end to the other.

Moga: Yeah, and I still love to read. I read differently now with an e-book, but I had that love from early on.

Cline: Did others in your family go to college? Did you have a sense that you would?

Moga: Yes. My father went to college and my mother went to nursing school, but not many others in the family did that. They were kind of the first ones on both sides.

Cline: As you were getting through your high school years and thinking what you would do next how did college and then Tech sort of enter your…?

Moga: College was always you were going to go. It wasn't kind of an option, and I did well in school, so it was what I wanted to do. I knew early on I wanted to try to do aerospace engineer. I had the bright lights. I wanted to be an astronaut. You know kids want to be a fireman, want to be a policeman, I wanted to be an astronaut, and so I wanted to do something in that. My dad told me about aerospace engineering, that was indeed in engineering, and so that was an interest even in the later part of high school.

Cline: Can I ask you about, so in your growing up what sort of the role of space 3:00was, the space program at that time and what that did for you?

Moga: Yes. I lived it. I grew up with it. You know John Glenn circled the earth when I was about I guess 8 or 9. They landed on the moon in '69 when I was in high school, so the program, you know we stayed up. I watched. I was enthralled. I wanted to go. [Laughs]

Cline: So that was very much of your time.

Moga: It was living and breathing and hearing wonderful voices on the air about wonderful things we can do. I think you know John Kennedy challenged us to go there and challenged the generation to really move technology forward, so it was not just going into space, but everything in technology. It probably was the foundation for everything, a lot of the stuff we have from our cell phones to this recording device.

Cline: So you had a goal in mind it sounds like at some point in high school and starting looking for colleges that would offering you an engineering, aerospace 4:00engineering program?

Moga: That's exactly correct and that's kind of how I was led here. I had a wonderful guidance person at high school and she took me under her wing and she said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I want to be an aerospace engineer." And she said, "Well you've got good grade, let's find some of the better ones." So we did and at the time I guess Tech was in the top 10, but I applied here, MIT, Case Western Reserve, Ohio State, those type of places.

Cline: Had you ever been to Virginia?

Moga: I had never been to Virginia, well maybe Washington, DC, but I had never been to Virginia and certainly had never been to Virginia Tech. My parents were good at this and wanted me to vet it quite… And so the summer before my senior year we visited at least several of them. We went to MIT. We went up to Cleveland to see Case. We did not come to Virginia Tech. However, that fall I had sent some correspondence to the University here…my guidance counselor 5:00about the program and talking about the different things you could do. In the Aerospace Department Professor James Marchman wrote me a letter back in the letter days and invited me to come to Virginia Tech. They said you provided transportation we would take care of you for the weekend. He was an assistant professor here, kind of ran the wind tunnel, so I thought that was great. And so I got an extra day off school and worked up some money so we could fly down from Cleveland to Roanoke. Dr. Marchman picked me up from the airport. How about that? And brought me in and showed me around, handed me off to an aerospace engineering student who lived in Pritchard, for a weekend. It was a basketball game weekend or something like that, and spent all the time and did that stuff. At 18 years you know and you're in a college dorm I had a great time. It was 6:00wonderful. [Laughs]

And that was a better than I've had. MIT was very very clinical and I had some questions like what can undergraduates do? Undergraduates don't do anything at MIT. You know when you're in grad school we let you do some stuff, you're supposed to be here to learn. Well when I came to Tech undergrads were doing all kinds of research and all kinds of wonderful things, and Dr. Marchman just showed me all these things that were going on in aerospace and that was great.

My other choice Case had a lot of stuff going on, but it was in downtown Cleveland, and even today downtown Cleveland is revitalizing, but it's just really kind of scary. It was in Little Italy, which was not the best of the times back then. That was kind of another thing. Whereas you come down to Blacksburg, gosh, you're in God's country. I grew up in an urban area, so this was just kind of really great for me.

Cline: Can you remember what that was like being driven in by a future professor and seeing this place for the first time?

Moga: Oh, the first time I saw Tech I said man, it's way out here. And you see the barns coming in here and I'm saying well, what's going on? But when he drove me around the drillfield before he took me to Randolph Hall, which didn't look as nice as all the rest of them, but you see around the drillfield, all the old Hokie stone and everything which is gorgeous. I kind of had the stars in my eyes already before we even got to the red brick building.

Cline: That weekend of coming here was that was sold you?

Moga: Yeah yeah. But my parents wanted me to go through the whole process, so we went through the whole thing. MIT had a vetting process where you went and met one of the graduates who was local and had the interview process with him, and that didn't go real well. He forgot about it and left me sitting out there for about a half an hour. We finally got through all that. Case had me up for a new student thing or had something open house that we went to. And so I did not decide that I was coming to Tech just because it was so far away until the day 8:00you had to put it in the mail and it had to be there. I took my acceptance letter to the post office to get it stamped, but it was that day.

And my parents talked to me about all these things, and at the time Virginia Tech out of state was going to be less expensive for me than Ohio State, in-state, and certainly much less than Case Western Reserve, even with some scholarships and MIT was, I think my dad said, "You need to know Nick that MIT costs more than I make in a year." [Laughs] So it was scary back then. He said, "We'll work it out," but the price back then was just marvelous to come to Tech. And so I did. I said I was coming and I've been the first one from my high school to come to Virginia Tech. I wasn't the last. In the class right behind me a fellow who was in Key Club with me, John Heinemann came to Virginia Tech. He 9:00joined the fraternity I was in. He was my little brother, so we've had several from high school since then.

Cline: Great. Started the Ohio connection.

Moga: Yeah.

Cline: So what year was it that you arrived on campus?

Moga: '72.

Cline: Tell me how things were for you when you first got here and moving in that first year.

Moga: Lee Hall out there by the tennis courts, which I thought was great. My college roommate they assigned me, another guy with the name of M. Tom Moffatt I believe was his name. He smoked, I did not. He was a Virginia boy in theater, a lovely guy. He was a good friend of mine all through college, but he smoked and I didn't and that was just kind of…eh. We were up on the 7th floor of Lee Hall. I met another guy, David Morris, who was on the other end of the hall whose roommate left I think, and he said, "Hey, I've got room." He said, "If you want to get away from the smoking come on over." So we moved over and had a nice view of the tennis courts on Washington Street, so that went well.

Class was quite the shock. I had always done things you know without much studying really. I did not have good study habits, and I got thrown into a couple of large classes and a couple of classes that everyone else seemed like they had already had it before, so I struggled. It was an interesting fall quarter. I got saved by another professor, a wonderful guy by the name of Dr. Luther Brice. You might have heard of take it twice Brice in some other peoples' recollections. He was just the most wonderful guy.

So I was taking honors chemistry from him. I qualified for honors chemistry and it was a four-hour class when we were doing quarter systems. And about I would say a third of the way through the first quarter he called me in after class, and I had not really talked to any of the professors. It was freshman year; I 11:00hadn't gotten into aerospace. I was just taking all the calculus and English and everything else everybody else was. The professor actually called me into his office and I was doing maybe Cs in the class, which was not what I was used to, and he sat me down and he said, "Mr. Moga I've looked at your file and you're not doing as well as you should be doing in my class. What's going on?" Which was a good question. "I'm having a good time here but it's studying." He said, "Well I'm going to help you with that." He says, "This weekend we're going to my house on Claytor Lake and we're going to do a little studying. We're going to do a little sailing. Do you know how to sail?" "No, I don't know how to sail," he had a sailboat, "And we're going to do that and I will pick you up at 5 o'clock on Friday." Boom. Well I went out to the place. I met his family, talked with him. He worked on some things, on habits on how to do things and put it in a chemistry type setting.

He had me come to his office once or twice a week. I remember going a lot more 12:00than I should have to try to get help and to try to understand what he was talking about. It changed my career from then on. That quarter I did eh because I really hadn't studied, but from then on I did a lot better. He was the one that really kind of got me focused and it was just wonderful. He was a friend of mine until I graduated. I think he picked one or two students every quarter and they were his projects.

Cline: I was going to ask that because it's such a remarkable story of someone choosing you out of a big classroom, but offering a kind of mentorship.

Moga: I don't think you could get it anyplace else. I think back about Dr. Brice's doing that and I said how did that change my life. I could have been like a lot of people, I was in engineering, aerospace of course, and engineering at Tech is very tough. I've taken grad school at a lot of other places and I 13:00learned stuff here undergraduate that a lot of other people don't get until grad school, so I know it's tough, and I know it's a very good program. I might have been with some other people where we used to call engineering pre-business, where you just ended up someplace else, you couldn't hack it. But he got my nose to the grindstone so I could figure out how to get through and did well, so I will always thank him for that.

The other professor, Mr. Marchman who brought me here, I would hike over to the Aerospace Department where he was and ask him if I could be doing stuff and he found stuff for me to do. I did work study with him all four years. As he promised we could do research. I worked in the wind tunnel. It's still here, the big wind tunnel over there on campus. Back in the day when I first got here the wind tunnel had been given to them by NASA Langley and it collected data. It had 14:00of these instruments and tubes and everything else, and it would come back to this big long, I think it was about 4 feet or 5 feet long and it was just numbers on a roll, just like those stamps that you would get to put the date down. Do you remember those? And they just would just roll. So what happened is the numbers would come in. The instruments would do whatever things and it would put numbers here, and the numbers would come down onto a carbon paper, and then on regular paper and go boom, every so many seconds. And then the undergrads we would take our rulers and we would mark off numbers and that would be the measurement and there was a key code that would measure it for each one of these things. Now you can imagine doing that on any kind of trial that they had there which is incredibly labor intensive. And so my junior year project Dr. Marchman gave me was to computerize that. Let's stop doing all this marking, let's put it 15:00in this…

And there weren't any laptops or desktop computers, it was a mini version of the IBM 360 that we had there, but we got it so that we would come out and say now what we're printing out it would give you the pressures and the drag co-efficients and everything else. That was my claim to glory at the Aerospace Department.

Cline: It is remarkable to think back and think how things were.

Moga: Oh yeah. It's quite the change, and they got me really interested in doing hands-on type stuff, which I've done all my life.

Cline: Can you tell us more about that? We can come back to Tech too, but what did you go on to do? Did you get to do your aerospace here?

Moga: I did. I did my aerospace, graduated in March of '76 and took a job with the Navy in the Naval Service Weapons Center, well, actually with Indianhead Maryland. First I was an aerospace engineer GS7 something, or whatever the 16:00starter was, and did some nice projects. I had met my wife here. She was an undergrad and we met our junior year. We weren't married at the time, but she got her first job teaching in Stafford County Virginia, and so I kind of looked around and there was this other Navy base not that far away and I got transferred there after eight or nine months, and so we were in close proximity and then we got married.

But I was in the aerospace group there and we were in charge of missiles and rockets, anything that we put on a ship. I did computational fluid dynamics there with them, took some classes from Tech grad school there and ultimately went to NC State as a graduate in computational fluid dynamics. I wrote a program to optimize missiles and rockets and shells so you could put in some kind of criteria, how big things you wanted it, if you wanted to make boom this 17:00thing would tell you what is the most optimized shape for that thing. It was one of those that were written, and what written in IBM cards. At the time at NC State which was the same was here, we had the hanging [00:17:18 chads] you hard one card with one thing hanging and the whole thing, I had a nightmare, I my thesis was the program that we do this was like four boxes. To run it you had to take it to a computational center in the triangle between Duke and Carolina and NC State, and they would only let me run it at 2 in the morning because it was so intensive. You parked on one side of the street and then walked to the other side of the street, so I had nightmares and I still have nightmares to this day of walking those cards and a car coming by and they go flying. It never happened, but, and I had the same nightmares here at Tech when we would have to go to the basement at Burruss where the big computer was, the old IBM 360 we had there.

So I had an interest in computers, okay. I went to grad school, finished up with a master's and actually mechanical and aerospace, and went back to the Navy. After that I got a job offer related to my graduate work with a company called Ethyl, and they wanted me more on the fluid dynamics mechanical engineer. They had their project engineering group in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So we were living up near [00:18:30 Dolvin] in Fredericksburg and moved from there to Baton Rouge where they stopped doing aerospace really because they were a chemical company and made plastics and things.

And became a project engineer which kind of was a management thing and kind of got me into management for a while. I worked for them for four years and decided Baton Rouge while it was a lovely town and had great people there it was too far away for both of our families. Mine were in Ohio and my wife was a Virginian in Virginia, so we came back to Covington, Virginia with another plastics company called Hercules, where I was a project engineering manager and then production manager there.

Along the way I started a computer business back in '85 right when personal computers were starting. All I did was supply software to the big papermills up there. Some of my friends who worked there in town, neighbors said, "Well we have to call these people up to get software, can you do it?" And so I found out how to do that and set up a company so I just supplied software with them. Well it grew and grew and grew because you know how computers are and it's the old disk computer company now up there and we work mainly with small businesses. That's how that all got started, but it was just by knowing computers and loving computers. I bought my first computer, it was an Apple 2, so I was right there on the thing and a neighbor had a Trash 80, we called it TRS 80 from Radio Shack. You had to write all the programs, there weren't any programs. I used to subscribe to magazines that would be nothing but written programs and you would type these babies in and see what they would do. And they were anything; a lot of them were games, but a lot of them were like doing a lot of the stuff like I 20:00had done with the Navy that would optimize things. I remember when we were living in Baton Rouge and I had my Apple 2. My neighbor came over and was doing an auction okay, and I wrote a database for him for the auction so we could take all this stuff in and we could put it in and we could put a price tag on it. When it sold, we could tell who it was and we could print out labels for all that. He thought I was a genius. It was basic programming about 100 lines of code and that was it.

Cline: Well you could have started eBay right there.

Moga: I could have. I missed that, oh. [Laughs]

Cline: Did you have a sense though, because I do remember those times too of what this would all become?

Moga: I thought I did, because when I got back from like doing my thesis which was four boxes, the first thing that happened to me when I went back to work was I ended up with a desktop computer. Now it's not what you guys call a desktop computer today.

It was a Tektronix things and it had 64k of memory and it cost over $50,000. But 21:00one ended up on my desk because the government [00:21:06 has more] stuff. And I translated my four boxes into that 64k and figured out how to make it work so that you could go to the screen and everything would be there. Remembering the horrible days here at Tech when we were getting the number and having to do it to make the data easily readily available to you without having to do all the hard work. So, I knew that that was a go. It was like seeing the Graduate movie where they said plastic…, it wasn't plastics in the future, the future was computers.

Cline: You saw that and you saw how rapidly it changed.

Moga: Oh yeah. And the nice thing about being in it from the beginning is because I got to meet a lot… I met Bill Gates when he was a young guy. I met several other of the computer people, just going to conferences and they come. They were just desperate at this time to get anybody to listen to what they had 22:00to say. They were all very preachy. They all had a vision and you had to do it. Steven Jobs was the worst of them. His vision was very you know, it was either this way or no way and other people had other ways, but obviously they all did very very well.

Cline: So let's go back to Virginia Tech. We talked about school, but I want to ask about socials.

Moga: Okay.

Cline: Obviously, you met your wife here and you mentioned a fraternity?

Moga: Yeah, I belonged to Sigma Phi Epsilon, which was up on Clay Street. I was playing tennis right outside my dorm room and a couple of guys came up and played doubles with myself and another fellow from the dorm. And they said, "Hey, why don't you come out to happy hour? We do that on Friday, 15-cent beers." At the time drinking was legal. You had to be 18 years of age. I think in Virginia all they had was [00:22:53 3-2] beer. I came home from Ohio where you could have get everything [for 18], but when you're in college all you had 23:00money for was beer. You didn't have money for anything else. That 15-cent beer sounded good to me.

And so I went out there and I haven't come to Tech, I think I made friends pretty easily, but I didn't have a large amount of friends and a lot of the people at the fraternity had gone to schools in Richmond or in Northern Virginia where they knew a lot of people. But they were very opening and the guy I ended up playing tennis with became my big brother and he said, "You need to join," and we pledged class together. They were on the first nationals on campus. They also were the first ones that had a no-hazing which I thought was kind of important. I didn't really want to degrade myself in front of other people for whatever they did. And their pledge period was more or less about knowledge, learning about the fraternity, learning about the way to do things.

It made a big impact on my life during those years. Quite a few people from the fraternity made a big impact on this University. One of my fraternity brothers, Johnny Lawson, has served as rector and many other things here, and a lot of 24:00people have gone on and done well from a group of us that were here back in the 70s.

I pledged in the spring of '73 and finished up that summer, went home and worked in a steel mill. I drove the forklift truck and learned how to weld, good stuff there. Made a lot of money. Steel mills back then paid a lot of money, and came back and did not have a place the live. The way they did housing was a lot different. There was a lottery and I'd lost, so there was an opening in the fraternity house, so I went in the fraternity house. They immediately made me social chairman. [Laughs] An engineering social chairman is an oxymoron; I can tell you that. [Laughs] Had a wonderful time. Tougher on grades, but 8 o'clock classes weren't my favorite during that year. I had a great time socially there. I did a lot of things with them athletically. Intramurals were very important at the time. I played tennis which I played in high school and played racquetball. 25:00I learned how to play platform tennis. We had a platform tennis court out Castle Coliseum. T. Marshall Hahn was the president, loved the game and put in a T-court. Lord knows how much this thing cost. How you ever seen a platform tennis court?

Cline: I don't even know what it is, no.

Moga: It's an elevated court and it looks like a mini tennis court except that there are wire walls that go up 10 or 15 feet, and you play with a paddle that has holes in it. Have you ever seen one of those paddles?

Cline: I have seen those, yeah.

Moga: The ball is like a spongy rubber ball and you play tennis court rules. Tennis rules you on get one serve. Other than that, they are scored the same, but you can play it off the walls being that they are wire, so if you hit one hard and it comes off you can play it off there and play into it, so that was wonderful to learn how to play that. Won an intramural championship and got the t-shirt. It was fun. [Laughs]

But being part of a fraternity, you had to do some kind of intramurals, whether it was [00:26:08 C team] softball on the drillfield or something else. You had to do something and that kind of get me into it. And they were also big on leadership. A lot of the people do leadership things on campus was encouraged. I was president of the AIAA, American Institute of Aerospace Engineers while I was here, and did a lot of projects with them. My junior and senior year did projects where we would take them to a national conference, and even back then the Aerospace Department was always being first, second, or third in all that stuff, so it was very rigorous and good stuff that we were doing back then.

I met my wife through the fraternity. Going sophomore to junior year there was a downturn in the economy. There was no more steel mill jobs for guys coming back 27:00for the summer time, so I said well I'll go to summer school.

So I went to summer school and was living out [00:27:04] fraternity brothers and one of them had a party and my wife was in Slusher also and coming to summer school, and a couple of the girls on the hall dragged her over. I met her then and was interested and said hello. She said, "Well you need to know one thing about me, I'm going off to New Zealand on a study program come this fall." And so she did and I wrote her and kind of kept her up… She may have the letters, I don't have mine, but she wrote back and we corresponded over that year, and when she came back from New Zealand after I think two quarters we started dating.

Cline: What was going on on campus in those days in terms of that particular period?

Moga: Oh lots of wonderful things. It was the Vietnam War and protests were weekly it seemed like on the drillfield. Anti-war, anti-everything, it was a 28:00time of drugs, a lot of experimentation with drugs in the world. A lot of people not wanting whatever their parents had done, so it was a turbulent time. Russell would have it seemed like to me every month or so an explosion on over at Radford. They would blow something up there and it would shake the campus over here, which was interesting. That's the company I eventually went to work for, Hercules that ran the plant over there, so that was interesting.

When I was young and impressionable we had a group and in the house fraternity we had a group of fraternity brothers from Seton Hall New Jersey come down. And of course, we had a nice long evening with some beer and some other food and stuff and around midnight they said, "Okay we're going to go streak the Hardees," and I didn't know what streaking was. I had no idea. I'm the social 29:00chair. I'm the one that's supposed to shut the bar down. And so they drag me in and we streaked Hardees. It was the first streak on campus in 1973, fall. [Laughs] Mark it down.

Cline: Historical moments, yes.

Moga: And it made the paper. There's an article that Hardees got streaked at about 1:30 in the morning. Hardees stayed open until like 2 or 3 in the morning on Main Street and Clay. Then people starting streaking everything. I mean during one of the protests I was trying to go to a class and there was a protest on the drillfield and signs were being held outside Dr. Hahn's office and someone streaked by and there was a policeman chasing him. It was interesting times.

Cline: Did the protests around there divide the campus or was it just something always going on?

Moga: Well because we had a real small contingent of Corps at the time, I would say they say they were probably at their smallest, maybe 3 or 400, someone can give the details.

They were one thing and one of our fraternity brothers was in the Corps, and a lot of my aerospace engineering classmates were in the Corps. Of course their opinion of what's going on versus a lot of the War, the protests… I didn't see the purpose of us being in Vietnam. My father served in World War II, all his family did and a lot of the people on both sides of our family served in the War, but War just seemed to have a purpose. Fighting communism, fighting the political… I didn't see that danger as much as maybe some of the other people did. But I went and worked for the Navy and certainly was proud of the work we did protecting the United States during that time. But yeah, I would say it was divisive definitely, but for most students there was a very I would say minority 31:00of students who were real excited politically. Most people were here getting good grades and going to class. I would say engineers had very little time for politics. We were taking 18 hours a quarter trying to keep our head above water and get a beer on Friday.

Cline: What do you think Dr. Hahn's influence was?

Moga: Oh, he was an interesting man. I didn't know him like a friend of anything, because of the aerospace engineering thing, and we had done some things with him, he had a vision for the University. He had definitely grown the University. From the time I entered until the time I left it went from like 12,000 to 15 or 16,000 students, and so he had a vision of making this a true land grant institution, which I think he felt it wasn't before. It was a small military school and that he was going to do those other things.

He encouraged the research, which I thought was good, as Dr. Steger didn't in 32:00his years to a large extent. So I can see him doing that, but he was probably better off where he went, Georgia Pacific as a great leader of industry. He tended to I think treat the University type thing as an industry. He was definitely here and we definitely knew he was the president. He left while I was here and Dr. Lavery actually I think came my senior year and that's who signed my… I did not know Dr. Lavery at all.

Cline: So obviously you saw a great deal of change as you said at that time and we've seen a great deal of changes since then, so what is your opinion? Can you believe it walking around here now and what do you think about the change and where we might go?

Moga: Yeah, I am ambivalent, I think a lot of students and alumni would think about the same thing, I am very proud of the instruction, the family, the home 33:00thing we do.

Certainly we didn't have on the academic side the number and choices that we do nowadays. I think there were more departments doing very well. Having come from which I consider and I think the data shows is one of the best in engineering, there are now lots of really good ones. Our business program was probably eh, average when I was here, but it's much much better now. So the rising tide of better academics, and also the student base is much better. When I came here if you were breathing and a Virginia student you got into Tech. That's no longer the case as we well know. I've done a lot of stuff with the alumni associations and scholarships and the kids are very very sharp coming in here with the average grades of 4.0 and stuff. So that in itself will raise a lot of the stuff [that is done here].

The overall, I'm very proud of the overall expansion that we've done in buildings and how we've kept to the Hokie stone type of architecture. I saw them 34:00construct this building. My wife was on the design team. She was on the Alumni Association Board for this building, and so that was a wonderful thing to have the alumni…really have their own building where they did not have that before. The Torgersen Arch right there by the drillfield just sets off that part of the campus. I love that we haven't become a bunch of Slusher Towers. I think that was probably a mistake. That got finished while I was here, but having the five or six story buildings I think was a great architectural move, so I really like that. And we haven't lost the beauty. I mean you can walk around the drillfield and see the duck pond and it was just as glorious as when I was here.

Cline: We've covered a lot already, changes you've seen and what you would like 35:00to see.

Moga: I'm hesitant on us growing too fast. I know Dr. Sands has a vision of huge, you know, high estatish almost, and I'm hesitant that we go there and not lose. When I was here a large class was like 120, and I know the classes can be 4 or 500 on certain Sociology 101 or something like that. I know you can take a class to do well in it, but I didn't really get much out of those classes. I enjoyed being in aerospace where I our classes were 30 or 40 people with an instructor, and that seemed to work out pretty good, so I worry a little bit about that. I am thrilled that we have a medical school, that we're going there 36:00and look forward to us doing all the professional schools eventually.

I'm in favor of all that. I think to be a comprehensive university you need to have all that and you need to have those resources among your alumni. I'm pretty proud of the Alumni Association here. Both my wife and I have served on the National Alumni Board. I'm an alumnus of NC State, my wife is an alumnus at the University of Virginia, and there's a difference. Like the NC State alumni are constantly asking for 50-bucks to join the Alumni Association. I just love that Virginia Tech you're an alumni after you've got your one semester in and you're an alumni for life and it doesn't cost you a penny, and they are not fundraisers, but they are Hokie nation raisers. I belong to our local Alumni Association in Fredericksburg in Baton Rouge and here in Covington and we do good stuff. We raise funds for scholarships and we do ut prosim. We generally 37:00live by that. I knew what ut prosim was when I came here as an undergraduate. Even back in the 70s you were here to serve and that's what we're going to do, and that's one of the things you learn. And I just love that over the years we've kept that. The Relay for Life thing that goes on here which wasn't here when I was here, I'm just so proud of the undergraduates that do that.

The Tech people that I meet and that have moved to our community or I meet outside of here all have that thing. They all want to help out. If they get involved with the Alumni Association they all ask what's our service projects. What are you doing to help in the community? It's so important that whether it be a Tech graduate or any graduate that you have that feeling of not of entitlement but of giving back. Because you know, people that come through college are going to be at the upper end of income and other things that go on in life and they need to balance that out for those that aren't.

Cline: Is that sort of kept you connected?

Moga: I think so. I think so. The Hokie nation kind of developed while I was here and stuff. I think people who are grads from the military days and then who were grads when I came were not required to be in the military had a different interpretation of what the Hokie nation was. You know they were talking about their companies and doing stuff which is great and wonderful, but we more less talk about what we can do and where we're going and more focused on the University I think, just the way it's changed to what the Hokie nation is.

Certainly I was on the alumni board April 16th and that was very of course tough for everybody, but it was very unifying and gratifying to see how we all came together during that time.

00:39:01 Very sorry that that's what we're coming to that something like that 39:00happens now quarterly it seems like.

Cline: Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like about coming together in that way?

Moga: Um, you know April 16th happened and we had a board meeting a couple of weeks later, so we were here, the television trucks hadn't all left. You know of course it was very sad, and you just can't imagine anything like that happening, but it certainly scars you to the fact that it can happen, and that it's not the event that defines you, it's how you respond to the event. And I'm just so proud of how the Hokie nation did respond, whether it be Nikki Giovanni's wonderful speech, Frank Beamer's wonderful thing, but the Yankees coming to town that's what it's all about. Horrible things are going to happen. A college this big as 40:00you well know there are students who start…don't make it. I lost a fraternity brother while I was here. It's a large number of people and the odds are against everybody coming out and how you respond to that and how you do that, you know, that is going to be more defining.

Cline: You mentioned Frank Beamer. I was going to talk about sports. I would be remiss if I didn't do that on this particular weekend, which for the record is Frank Beamer is going to be coaching his last home game tomorrow. Can I ask you about what you see is the role of sports here, it's part of the Hokie nation and all of that.

Moga: Yeah, I'm not a big… I enjoy sports, I have season tickets to both basketball and football. I come here and enjoy that as a social event. I think it has a place and it certainly can raise the profile of the University. I decry 41:00when it becomes the thing at the University. Now I think we're wonderfully blessed to have Frank here, though after his third year you wouldn't have had my support to keep him here, and I've told Frank this several times. [Laughs] After the 2 8 and 1 season I didn't know. [Laughs] But he was a wonderful human being. I've met him a couple of times and have met him many times since then. All the flatitude that you hear about him are just so true. Sometimes on famous people and famous people I've met who they are in the press and who they are in real life are generally two general things. It's not with Frank. He's a Hokie. He went here, he knows. He came in just after we opened up and you didn't have to be in the Corps, '67, '66 timeframe, so he knew, he was there at the beginning of the Hokie nation and feels all that.

I think sports are positive in giving people opportunities to come here. I think 42:00that's a good thing and maybe Tech has emphasized is that we're going to try to graduate you and we're going to try to… You know you're here first to get that degree and then do all the other fun stuff, because so few make it to professional sports. And especially in the minor sports, the Olympic sports I think it's a wonderful opportunity for people to really kind of see it differently. I'm thrilled that we have the academic back-up to help people because I know it's a tough tough tough life to work 40 hours a week at sports and another 40 hours at your academics, because it takes…[00:42:40] engineer architects [00:42:43] sports. There isn't enough time.

Cline: Well anything that you were expecting me to ask that I didn't ask you or that I should have asked you?

Moga: No. I think that the transition from the '70s to 2015 has been a real 43:00gradual and there's been no big jump shift. It seems to be a smooth line. I think when I talk to kids from our area that come to Tech after they've been here a semester or two we have so much in common, as opposed to having 40 or 50 years not in common. When I see somebody and ask them what they are majoring in and what they like they know I really care. I really want to know what they are doing and I really want to hear what they like and what's going and what's not going good. So I think that's very important that we keep that going and that we have a good relationship between the alumnis and those becoming alumni.

Cline: Anything else I forgot to add?

Moga: All talked out. [Laughs]

Cline: All right.

Moga: I've got to save some scream for tomorrow.

Cline: Well thank you so much Nick. I appreciate it. That was a lot of fun.

Moga: Okay.

Cline: Thank you.