Peninsula In Passage

The campus is a gorgeous piece of property but it was an old munitions depot and was always perceived to be TCC’s industrial and technical campus teaching truck driving, nursing, photography, CAD (computer aided drafting. I’d stand in front of the old munitions storage warehouse that was converted into an academic building as long as an aircraft carrier and think you can’t tell a book by its cover. We had a talented faculty but what we didn’t have were facilities for the tech courses. Chemistry was taught in an old lab, and Aubrey Hartman ( associate professor of physics ) hand built an observatory from nothing. I was exceptionally proud to be provost of that campus. We had a gym and played faculty softball games. We had great friendships and camaraderie. I was so young back then - in my 30s – I didn’t really grasp the significance of the munitions that were discovered on campus between 1984 and 1989. Later, when I was president it was named a Superfund site. Even when DiCroce left TCC in 1989 to be provost at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, she kept in touch with the TCC staff and faculty. “When we celebrated George Pass’s 15th anniversary with TCC we toasted him with champagne before switching to his Bud Lite,” she remembers, explaining that the leftover bottle became the traveling congratulatory champagne that mysteriously showed up at major events in the lives of the faculty and staff. Kitty Perkinson, professor of English at TCC, remembers opening her desk drawer one day “And there was that doggoned bottle.” “Whoever got the bottle felt obligated to care for It.,” DiCroce says. “When I came back to TCC as president in 1998 the bottle came back to me, mounted in concrete with a note ‘Ha Ha TW was wrong.’” I had come home again”. In 2010 the new Portsmouth campus of TCC opened as the Frederick W. Beazley campus and hosted a reunion event for Frederick College. DiCroce says We didn’t want Frederick College alumni to lose their sense of place. They claimed us and we claimed them. TCC opened with 619 students. Now TCC has 46,000 - if that’s not a legacy for Beazley I don’t know what is.” The new Portsmouth campus is gorgeous – but its foundational building blocks came from the early founding years in Suffolk. We brought dirt from the old campus to mingle with dirt on the new campus – symbolic of the campus’s strength that we built on. The regional work force center remains on the Suffolk campus according to DiCroce. “We were doing that before it was cool,” she says. “We had a standing relationship with the Naval shipyard. A thousand apprentices from the shipyard were in academic programs at TCC and we had a relationship with GE too.” The TCC Real Estate Foundation owns the old campus land now except for 55 acres that were sold to city of Suffolk, she explained. “It’s a beautiful piece of Hampton Roads and we need to insure that we do right by the community with that land,” she says. “Don’t look to pave paradise.” DiCroce left TCC in 2012 to become the new president and chief executive officer of the Hampton Roads Community Foundation - and the champagne bottle went with her.

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