The urge to write about recent events at Virginia Tech is almost overwhelming, especially for an alumnus. The issues are enormous: rage, mental illness, murder. Too enormous for me, as it turns out. The pain is too deep, the parallels between land-grant universities like Tech and OSU too obvious. I'll leave that discussion to others and tell a different story entirely, a story featuring the same issues but in a different context.

I was taking a class in behavioral psychology at Virginia Tech in 1968. We were each issued our own white rat and we were training the rats to get food by pressing on a lever. We could reward the rats for proper behavior or punish them with a mild electric shock for doing something wrong. This we did a minimum of five times a week.

I had a nice rat. Herman was smart, playful and affectionate. He learned quickly how to get his reward. I was proud and bragged about him to the instructor, which, as it turned out, was a mistake.

A brief aside: the instructor was a young, good looking man, a real hit with the co-eds. All the guys hated him.

He saw how well Herman was trained and congratulated me in his smarmy way, then told me to change his behavior. Start rewarding him for something he'd been previously punished for, and punish him for actions that had once earned him food. I didn't want to but the instructor said we'd both learn something. He was right. Herman learned to be psychotic and I learned that psychos always make you pay.

Two weeks into the new training regimen I picked Herman up out of his cage. He twisted around and bit down hard on the middle knuckle of my left hand. Herman was a big rat and his teeth encircled the entire knuckle. Then they began to grind down toward each other. I was standing in the middle of the lab, with people all around me, so I gritted my own teeth, kept silent and tried to remove Herman from my knuckle.

"Nice Herman," I whispered. "Easy boy," I moaned. "Knock it off, you little %&*#," I growled.

At this point the pain was excruciating, Herman had hit bone on both sides of the knuckle and was continuing to drill. I was attempting to pinch his cute little head right off his shoulders but because he was a psycho rat he wouldn't give up.

Another brief aside: about 15 feet away from me the cute little professor was talking to a beautiful co-ed who, by the way, was an interest of mine. They were standing very close to one another. About a rat and a half's width, as I recall.

By this time, Herman had brought me to the brink of my own brand of psychosis. The pain blotted out every other thought in my mind and turned me into a raging maniac. I gripped him with my right hand, tore him free of my left (the scars are still visible) and flung him with all my strength at the wall.

The direction of Herman's flinging was purely accidental. The fact Herman passed directly between the faces of the instructor and my co-ed friend on his way to rat heaven was just one of those serendipitous events.

Herman hit the wall with a satisfying splat, and slid to the floor, where he stayed without twitch or complaint. My love interest definitely twitched; she never spoke to me again. And the instructor complained, as reflected in my final grade.

But hey, I still graduated in the top 99.9 percent of my class. And yes, I've always grieved for Herman.

Go Hokies!

Pat Wray is a free-lance writer and longtime local resident. His general interest columns can be found in this section on alternating Fridays. He can be reached at patwray@comcast.net.