Letters

From the editor

A brand new look

Welcome to the newly redesigned Virginia Tech Magazine.

As you read the spring edition, you’ll notice a few changes, beginning with our cover. For the first time ever, Virginia Tech Magazine is perfect bound, featuring a spine like a book. Your future collection of magazines will line up neatly on a bookshelf, as a ready-reference and an eye-catching display.

This edition also incorporates updated visual elements—from a new logo to more modern fonts and graphic elements—all of which are connected to the new Virginia Tech brand platform.

As you turn the pages, you will find familiar sections, including “Around the Drillfield” favorites like How Tech Ticks (page 16) and Ology (page 22). On page 42, you’ll find “Around the Hokie Nation,” our newly renamed location for Class Notes, stories, and information especially for and about our alumni.

The on-line edition is also transitioning in the near future to a new template in our Content Management System. We are hoping to make that move for the next edition.

For 40 years, Virginia Tech Magazine has been your resource for stories about campus and alumni. Our look has changed a little over the years, but our commitment to sharing compelling stories has remained the same.

We hope you continue to enjoy our coverage.

Erica Stacy, Editor

To the editor

An Honorable Name

I met Jim Doss when I was a freshman at Virginia Tech back in 1966. Some of my classmates had told me that there was another Jim Doss on campus that fall. The surname Doss isn't that common, so I thought I’d contact Jim Doss to see if we might be related. After meeting him, exchanging handshakes, and enjoying some discussion, it appeared that, as far as we could determine at the time, we weren't related, at least through a couple of generations back.

I lost contact with Jim Doss after that, and I knew nothing of his leaving school, getting drafted, and subsequent untimely death, until I read an article in the local Bristol newspaper highlighting the November 2017 ceremony at Virginia Tech that honored him.

It’s reassuring to know that the “other Jim Doss” was a true war hero, and he certainly deserved to be memorialized on the Pylons of the War Memorial.

James E. “Jim” Doss ’70

Blountville, Tennessee

Editor’s Note: Learn more about Jim Doss, whose name was added to the Honor pylon in November 2017.