Floodsters in a Classroom at WV Tech
#585 / Flood Time Capsule: 2004
After a 90-minute drive from Huntington to Montgomery, Doug Chaffin and Charlie Bowen met Joe Dobbs at West Virginia Institute of Technology to musically teach a class one afternoon in Spring 2004.
“We’ve played there several times before,” Charlie told his mom in an email the next day, “but it’s always been in the cafeteria in the lunch hour, a noisy room where students haven’t really come to hear music, but to eat and socialize between classes.
“This time, though, we were invited to play and talk to a class — actually two classes combined — sharing thoughts on Appalachian music and culture, and we had a ball.”
Fifty to 60 Appalachian culture students listened to about an hour of tunes from the Flood Lite ensemble.
Joe brought a variety of instruments — a gourd banjo, a mountain dulcimer, a mandolin and several fiddles — and “we played a variety of stuff,” Charlie wrote, “from jigs and fiddle tunes to ballad to even one jug band tune. The class really seemed to like it. Very attentive, lots of questions and visiting afterward.”
Later the guys got a kind note from Dr. Janis Rezek, the professor who invited the guys to come to the classroom. “You were very helpful with your knowledge of Appalachian music and, of course, delightful to listen to. Even the dean was tapping his foot.”
A WV Tradition
A decade of annual Flood Lite gigs at Tech started in October 2001 when Charlie joined Joe for the job. At that time, an old friend of Joe — music professor Fred Meyer — invited them and set them up on a little stage in the cafeteria.
“We just winged it, playing a mix of blues and jug band pieces, folk songs, swing numbers and fiddle tunes,” Charlie later told his mom about the cafeteria gig. “The kids seemed to like it, though, of course, they were mainly involved in eating in a hurry before their next classes.”
Starting the next fall, Doug joined Joe and Charlie for the afternoon in Montgomery whenever Fred called.
Then, starting 23 years ago this week, the setup changed. The show moved from fall to spring and the venue moved from the cafeteria to a classroom.
Fred Meyer was the band’s contact for the shows until his retirement, when Bob Simile took over over as the main organizer for the band’s annual afternoon shows, starting with their performance in March 2007.
The band’s annual appearances at Tech ended after Bob’s death from cancer in 2012.
Montgomery Campus’s Demise
Four years later, the town of Montgomery lost its college when WV Tech’s original campus closed.
Founded in 1895 as the sub-collegiate Montgomery Preparatory School for West Virginia University, it separated from WVU in 1917 and became a junior college in 1921, a four-year institution in 1931, began granting engineering degrees in 1952 and added master’s degrees in 1978. The institution became a regional campus of WVU in 1996, forming West Virginia University Institute of Technology (WVU Tech).
Tech was long beset with declining enrollment, owing partly to its remote location and antiquated facilities. In 2015, the axe fell on the Montgomery campus when WVU’s board of governors unanimously voted to relocate the school to the shuttered Mountain State University’s campus in Beckley. The move was completed by the close of 2017.