JIM BALLENGEE

                                                 March 28, 1996

                                                         —

                                                Mame Warren,
                                                   Interviewer

Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the 28th of March, 1996. I'm in Lexington,
Virginia, with Jim Ballengee.

         I'm intrigued by you. I haven't done a whole lot of homework about you,
because everybody says you're going to tell me lots without my even asking. The thing
I'm most intrigued by is that you did not have the undergraduate experience here. You
went to the law school only. Is that right?
Ballengee: That's correct.
Warren: And yet, your devotion seems to be quite singular and quite extensive. So tell
me why you are so devoted to Washington and Lee.
Ballengee: I have the view that it changed my life more than anything else. It enlarged
my horizons. Sydney Lewis says the same thing, coming to Washington and Lee,
because she was here as an undergraduate, as well as law school.

         My mother said, "Your experience at Washington and Lee did more for you. It
enlarged your vision, your ambitions, whatever, put you in such a much better
position." Because I'd gone to a little country Methodist—even the Methodist disowned
you at the time—a little college in my hometown in West Virginia that went broke and
had to move to Charleston. The Methodist Conference decided they could not support
two, and they had West Virginia Wesleyan, and so they gave up on this little school,
then called Morris Harvey.
Warren: Boris Harvey?

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Ballengee: Morris Harvey, named for a gentleman, M-O-R-R-I-S, and now called the
University of Charleston, which causes confusion with Charleston U., which I think is in
Charleston, South Carolina. But it was there in the town library and was supported by
some people who were active in the Methodist church. You can't say that you were
self-taught. There were some superb faculty people, nothing compared, though, to the
competition.

         What happened to me at Washington and Lee, I guess, is really part of it, and
maybe the law school, being such a step above just an undergraduate degree from a
college that almost folded up in recent years, like just happened at one that helped put
me through law school. My wife had taught at then Southern Seminary. Well, actually
she had a contract to teach in Rockbridge County School System, so I guess we'd have
had support because she had a good job at Southern Seminary.
Warren: Did she come here with you?
Ballengee: Yeah. We got married halfway through. She graduated from college in '47,
and I was going on to what was then three years in two-year program year-round at
law school after the war. Everybody was trying to play catch-up, and we went
constantly. I took a few days off, we got married in June of '47, which she had
graduated from this same little college in West Virginia, and we moved here out in
what was then Hillside Terrace, which is now, it's across from where the Elrods used to
live, that hillside there. I can't think of what you call it, group of Quonset huts. A great
many people, some of whom you may have interviewed and know, started their
married life there.
Warren: Is it Davidson Park?
Ballengee: No. Davidson Park was on the other side of the town, across the bridge,
over where the fraternity houses are and the hospital and all now. This was just right
out the street here, not very far from here. You go out past that lumberyard and it's up

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the hill, not Preston Street, but maybe the next street, White or Preston, one of those
going up the hill.
Warren: There were Quonset huts there?
Ballengee: Oh, yeah. There's something else there now. A park, maybe. Is there a city
park? Frank could tell you. They were like Quonset huts. They were prefab sort of, three
units in a building. You had an icebox. You had to put the sign up for the ice man to come and
deliver. This was '46, '47, '48, and beyond that for some time, in fact. You only paid $50 a
month. It was for GIs and part of the GI Bill. It was a great way to start married life. You had
no money, but nobody else did, either, and lots of work to do, and yet in a wonderful atmosphere,
compared to what we'd just been through everybody had in the war, particularly. Not that it
wouldn't be nice anytime, but it was especially so then, I think. All of that combined, I guess,
to—you know.
Warren: So when you were here, the law school was in Tucker Hall.
Ballengee: Yes, it was.
Warren: That would be very different from being over there in Lewis Hall.
Ballengee: I'm afraid you're exactly right. It was really fully a part of the university. I
joined a fraternity. I served on the Executive Committee. The seniors sat out in front on
cane chairs in front of Tucker Hall. We were like a fully integrated institution law
school, one and all together. It's somewhat different now. I had a son who went to
undergraduate school here and a son-in-law that went to law school here, so I've seen in
different times both those. Of course, those two things helped sharpen my interest and
love for Washington and Lee, to come to see your son graduate and then to see a son-in-
law in law school. My son-in-law is a Dartmouth graduate, but as soon as he married
into our family he needed the Washington and Lee experience.
Warren: You straightened him out. [Laughter] Well, tell me more about Tucker Hall.
You're the first person I've talked to who was in law school at Tucker Hall, and I just
would like to know more about—

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Ballengee: God, it makes me feel much more ancient than I think I am.
Warren: Well, it wasn't that long ago. It was only '77 that the law school moved over
there, so you could have done this not all that long ago.
Ballengee: Well, Walter Dudley, the father of Bo Dudley—I don't know whether
you've seen his—
Warren: I've heard the name.
Ballengee: Walter was a longtime board member here, very close. He was in the firm
that Bob Huntley went to, named partner in that firm. Walter and I both were sick over
the fact of what they turned Tucker Hall into. No more magnificent room than the library at
Tucker Hall was ever on this campus, in my view. It was just lovely. It was like the reading
room in the New York Public Library or the Atheneum in Philadelphia, beautiful tables with
these little lamps on them. And they put rats in there, now computers. They've changed,
they've done everything. It was awful. They desecrated. It's like going to Moscow and St.
Petersburg and seeing what the communists did to great churches, turned them into some kind
of pedestrian thing.

         Nobody liked that, but everybody loved Lewis Hall and what that did for the
law and the law alumni. But Tucker Hall, it was still a very small law faculty of the old
guard that are pictured on the wall over there, except Dean Moreland had died, but
Dean Williams was the dean and Charley McDowell and Johnson and Light and
Laughlin were, in fact, almost the entire faculty.

         Actually, in those days we took what I would call a liberal arts course in law.
There was none of the things that they study today, such as environmental law. There
was no moot court. There was none of the extracurricular activities of going over to
Alderson to help prisoners or to help the homeless or to, you know, get involved in
everything. We studied, as had always been the tradition, using the case law system,
which started at Harvard, and everybody, when you went back to your hometown or
wherever, you probably didn't know how to get to the courthouse door, or where it

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was, even. The practical aspects you learned, in fact, in an apprenticeship or an
internship or residency in a law firm later. That has changed considerably, as you can
tell from what you see that goes on over there now.
Warren: So there was no moot court at the time?
Ballengee: Oh, no.
Warren: Because I found references to it back in the 19th century. I wonder if that was
because of the war.
Ballengee: During the years right after the war, there was none. There was no
consumer law, no environmental law, none of this super specialties. Some people came
in part time and lectured on tax law, but basically you were taught contracts and torts
and criminal law and few other agency standard subjects in law school—trust, wills,
and estate, future interests, all of that, all of the pretty much standard things.

         I was later in two law firms that were very small, but the senior partner in each
of those was a Washington and Lee undergraduate and law school graduate, in my
hometown in West Virginia, a typical five-man, in those days, law firm. You called it a
five-person firm. It would have a West Virginia University graduate, a University of
Virginia graduate, a Washington and Lee graduate, you know, some sort of balance, in
the same way that you had a couple of Democrats and a couple of Republicans in a
small town, too, to balance it out.

         So I've always just had close ties. And then I did some work as a class agent for a
long time, and then my son came here. Then I was elected to the board, and then my
son-in-law, and all those things. Everything, starting married life here—not everything
in my life has centered on this place, but everything that happened here related to this
place has been very good in my life, and I've felt a great obligation. So that's why I have
that kind of interest.

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Warren: I don't want to skip away from your time here, but you've just said something
I'm very intrigued by, the idea that your law firm, your first law firm, had two other
W&L men.
Ballengee: Well, that's not what had got me there at all, although I had a nice letter of
recommendation from Dean Williams, who was the dean, and they were looking for
somebody. The second law firm I was in—when I got called back in the Korean War,
the first firm I was in brought in two sons of partners, and in a small firm, I decided and
they decided that I better look around, but they told me I could stay as long as I
wanted, which is when I came home in '52. But I changed, and I got an offer, by
coincidence. Almost every law firm in Charleston probably had a Washington and Lee
graduate someplace in those days.
Warren: Well, it's quite a network out there, the Washington and Lee network.
Ballengee: Oh, yeah. I live in an area where Princeton, Penn, Harvard, and Yale, and
particularly Pennsylvania and Princeton around Philadelphia, there are old-boy school-
tie networks that are absolute superbly stronger than ours, although incredibly in
Philadelphia we've got Gerry Lenfest and myself and I. M. Scott , who was on the board
for many, many years, and a couple other people that had been very strong and very
active here. With Gerry's help particularly, our share in the last capital campaign
Philadelphia looked very good, compared to the size of Richmond and Atlanta and
other alumni chapters.
Warren: It seems to me that that network has served the Washington and Lee
community so well on so many levels, especially for new graduates going out and
trying to get settled into the world. It seems like there are open arms waiting for them
almost anywhere they want to go.
Ballengee: I'm sure that's true. I don't think that's especially unique to Washington
and Lee. I know we have statistics that could show we've got more CEOs of companies
than any [unclear]. Yale probably has more than anybody, but you look at it on a

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number of per-student basis, we came out number one in a couple of studies, I guess the
Commerce School and some other things. Many of those are family companies, people
that I know well and served with on their board. I don't know, there's more of that.

         I don't want to downplay the networking thing. There's no question about it's
important. I just called on a firm called Rittenhouse Financial in Philadelphia. A man
named George Kadell [phonetic], whom I happen to know, owns it all and started it,
but his CEO is a Washington and Lee man, two or three other people there are
Washington and Lee men. I'm sure once that got started—you know, that's the way it
goes, and they all seem to be doing very well. I didn't know any of them were
Washington and Lee people there when I first went out there.
Warren: They're everywhere.
Ballengee: Yeah.
Warren: Let's jump back to your days here on campus. How did you choose
Washington and Lee?
Ballengee: Where I grew up in West Virginia, everybody sort of admired Washington
and Lee, and I can't specifically tell you why. Morgantown, where my sister went to
school, the state university, it just didn't have the cache, I guess. It was too much still a
hillbilly school, in my sense.

         I thought, when Dean Gilliam admitted me into law school here from this little
college in Charleston, that I'd made a quantum leap, not necessarily socially, but in
reputation. Everyone in West Virginia knew about John W. Davis, who was the most
famous West Virginian, and any educated person that read knew that he had gone to
W&L and that he was the Democratic candidate for president, even though he got
swamped in 1924 terribly. And there were other people. Governor Holt, who was on
the board, and Mr. Fitzpatrick in Huntington, who was a rector when I was a student
here, was the senior partner in a major and leading law firm in Huntington for railroad
interests.

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         It was a choice like UVA, which I didn't know much about at all. I did write and
get the catalog for Harvard and considered that. But when I drove over here and Dean
Gilliam said he would take me—and, of course, he was dean of the college, the
undergraduate school. I never saw anybody in the law school. That's the way the
system worked. Frank and others could tell you more.
Warren: Really? I didn't realize that.
Ballengee: Some people call their class Dean Gilliam's mistake, but Dean Gilliam was a
wonderful man, and that's why he is honored here in so many ways, as he should be, I
think, because there's so many stories like mine. This little place I'd gone in West
Virginia, I didn't think I had enough credentials, but it was obvious, maybe because of
war service or because W&L needed to recoup after being almost shut down. During
the war, they took a lot of people, there's no question about that. After I got here and
saw who everybody else was, I didn't think Dean Gilliam had done anything really
exceptional accepting me, because he'd accepted a lot of people. But I nevertheless
appreciated it, because I at the time would have understood if he had said no.

         I can't give you a specific reason. It was difficult to travel in those days before
interstates out of West Virginia, and just until recently you could come east and west
across Route 60 or ride the Chesapeake and Ohio and go to near Lexington—Clifton
Forge, Covington, Charlottesville, Washington, or Cincinnati, where the mountains are
such trying to go north and south to Morgantown and other places made it very, very
difficult. That didn't influence me in any way.

         Washington and Lee played West Virginia in Charleston every year a big football
game back in the thirties, maybe even well before then, and there were just a lot of
people from Charleston that had gone to Washington and Lee that I knew, and I'd
always admired the school and most of them. All of that, I guess, was the reason that I
came here.

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Warren: Can you remember when you first arrived here to go to school? Can you
describe what it was like for you?
Ballengee: I could tell you exactly what it was like for me. I roomed with a man
named Bob Smith, who was also from Charleston. He's maybe retired now, but he's
been a judge in Kanawha County in West Virginia, in a little house out here. And then
immediately I moved and got a room in what was until recently Dick Sessom's house. I
think Dean Sullivan lives in it now, where you make the turn onto Jackson Street.

         The approach to learning the law was a whole new discipline for me, a whole new way of
thinking, and I started so slowly, I wasn't sure I was going to make it. It was a struggle. I had
done well, but not against much competition in this little college that I went to, and had a very
good grade point average. But the first year in law school, it was tough, the first semester almost
a mystery. Even real property, one Dean Williams course with an agency, they were over my
head.

         But gradually, every term I did better and better and better, and particularly in Charley
McDowell's course in contract and later Dean Light's, who was not the dean then, in torts and
constitutional law. I grabbed on to all those instantly and did very, very well and ended up
either first or tied for first in the class with Stanley Sacks and Dan Wells. I guess I was always
a late bloomer, as you would call it, child of yours now, that didn't do well at first. It took me a
while to catch on, but once I did, it was as though I had two speeds, full ahead and dead stop. I
couldn't get through that barrier in the beginning. It was a whole new way of learning, the case
system of teaching law, very different than the way you had done things before chronologically in
history or whatever.
Warren: How about the social life at Washington and Lee and in Lexington? Where
did you say you lived?
Ballengee: I lived just up from the post office a block, about a block from the post
office, in a rented room.
Warren: It was a room.

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Ballengee: Yeah. Of course, this was the—you know, you go back and read Robert E.
Lee's statements. He expected this town and gown sort of thing to help support the
town.

         That's been a strange thing that John Wilson and I debated, and I can remember
talking with Bob Huntley, why we couldn't get more students to come to basketball
games at night and to be on the campus at things. We really had no student union. We
really had no dorms. The tradition was that you came and lived in Graham-Lees the
first year, you lived in the fraternity house the second year, and you went out in the
county and rented an apartment or someplace with a bunch of other kids the second
and third year.

         That goes all the way back I guess to Robert E. Lee, and even my son said to me,
when I was on the board and we were considering we had to do something to bring
them back in, he said, "Dad, don't change it. You've got a constitutional right to move
out and have an apartment someplace." And Bob told me that.

         We finally did—and coeducation, in part, caused this—did Gaines residence
center to get more. But even still there are—fraternity life was important then, but
living out in a room someplace was not unusual. Then I lived in these apartments, sort
of Quonset huts or prefab kind of—looked like they were made out of wallboard or
plywood, not round like a Quonset hut we were used to in the war.

         But the social life was the fraternity life and football games and dances, the usual
opening sets, Spring Set, Fancy Dress, all the kinds of things that you always had, and
still to this day. I watched Haley Barbour the other night at Mock Convention getting
up calling it the greatest party. I thought, "Oh, my God, the faculty will be worried
about this and that kind of publicity that all we're known for is a party school."
Warren: Was there a lot of partying when you were here?

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Ballengee: I've tried to think back. I have a couple of pictures of my wife and myself
going to dances and parties at the Sigma Chi house. Of course, by that time I was an
old married man, compared to many of them.
Warren: Well, that's what I'm wondering. Since so many of the students were veterans
and a little older than students are today, was the social life changed by that?
Ballengee: No, I don't think so. I don't think it was much different. Everybody was
very serious that we had lost three years out of our lives and we had to play catch-up,
and so we got married and we started having children and we got a professional degree
and got in the world to make money and play catch-up for all we had missed. We were
thankful we'd survived when so many had not.

         But I don't think it meant that we partied any harder. I think maybe we studied
and worked harder than they had the years right before the war, that this was very
important, that if you didn't get it up here, take it away from here with you, you're not
going to survive in a highly competitive business world at all whatever you're doing.

         I had only had one problem. Because my wife taught at Southern Seminary, my
fraternity brothers said, "You're the perfect chaperon." I can recall we were going to
Lynchburg to play VPI, and we took a couple cars, maybe three. Jo got in one with all
the girls from Southern Seminary, and I went with the guys. We drive up to the top of
the first mountain on the way to Lynchburg, and they swapped cars, and I'm suddenly
alone with my wife and nobody else. We're chaperoning and I didn't see them, so I had
little lecture to these guys. I said, "Hey, my staying in law school is dependent on my
wife keeping her job, and this is the last time we're chaperoning you without some
Honor System pledge from you guys. We're not doing that anymore, because I can't
lose track of that."

         So you're right, we were a little older, obviously, if they looked upon you as a
chaperon, but I didn't think I was that much older. When I graduated from law school,
I was twenty-five. I got out of high school at seventeen, and a couple summers I

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couldn't find a job so I went to summer school at this little college that I went to. The
Air Corps actually sent me to Clemson for a little bit, and I claimed credit for that.
When I came back, I really went through college in three years and law school in two
years. And I was going to work so I didn't think we were that much older.
Warren: You accelerated the whole thing.
Ballengee: Yeah, we did.
Warren: You've mentioned your fraternity several times. Did you take your meals at
the fraternity?
Ballengee: No.
Warren: Why did you join a fraternity? What did that offer you?
Ballengee: Well, a place to go and play bridge in the afternoon and do other things. I
don't think we went through a regular rush. They sort of came and asked me. I knew
some people in my hometown who were Sigma Chis. I liked George Coyle.

         I'll tell you, the first summer—I know why now. The first summer I was here,
George Coyle, his father owned a big department store in Charleston. He had gone to
Washington and Lee, his father had gone to Washington and Lee, his brothers. All of
them were Sigma Chi.

         George was dating Julia Holt, Governor Holt's daughter, who's been his wife
now for forty-six, seven years, whatever, and my wife, current wife, was in Charleston,
and one other, Bill Craddock [phonetic], who was also Sigma Chi. George had a yellow
Packard convertible, and every weekend, despite those terrible roads over Hawks Nest
and mountain, we would chip in and buy him gas and we'd all go home. We'd get
there late Friday night and come back Sunday at noon, take some books to study. Well,
you've got to be young, of course.
Warren: That's quite a drive. It's a drive today to go that far.

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Ballengee: Even today, on 64 you could do it quickly, but in those days. We didn't do
it actually every weekend, because a couple times the girls came over here, particularly
in the fall, when George was going to summer school and a lot of people were.

         They were Sigma Chis, and they said, "You ought to join." This was all this
summer. So I went down, and they took me right away as a pledge, and I went
through—they had limited initiation from the four-year kind of thing, I guess, although
I went through what everybody else did at the time, and I enjoyed it. I did take a lot of
meals there, till I got married, which happened in June of '47. I didn't join until the fall
of '46. It wasn't very many months from that. But we had parties, and Jo and I could go
and other things, big dance at Roanoke and things like that, the Hotel Roanoke. It was
an active life, I guess.
Warren: Can you remember the theme of Fancy Dress the first year you were here?
Ballengee: No, I don't, I really don't. I've looked at so many of them through the years
since.
Warren: Do you come back and attend?
Ballengee: No. We may next year because the Washington Society is going to be. I'm
not a great dancer.
Warren: Oh, well, you don't have to be. It's a social event.
Ballengee: Oh, no, of course, for that, you're right.
Warren: There's a lot of promenading going on.
Ballengee: Yeah.
Warren: So what do you come back for? What are the events that draw you back now?
Ballengee: Of course, for twelve years, every board meeting, every Executive
Committee meeting, every special committee meeting. Nine years of those years I was
the rector, and we had any kind of meeting, particularly during the review and
decisions over coeducation, which was major.

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         Well, before that even, right after I became the rector, Bob Huntley called me and
told me he wanted to talk to me, and I had a hunch. I said, "Bob, I just took this job. I
don't want to chair a search committee for a new president."

         He said, "I'm going to come and talk to you."
         He and Evelyn came and spent the weekend with us, and he and I sat up and
talked most of the night. I think Bob felt he'd done all he could do for Washington and
Lee, and he had done so much. So then that put me in the position of chairing the
search committee, which ended up bringing John Wilson here.
         But we had numerous meetings all one summer over in the law school, when
nobody was around much and it was out of the way, and we brought candidates in. I
was the CEO of an oil service company, a New York Stock Exchange company. We had
a jet plane. We kept it in Houston. I used it all the time. They would come up and get
me and bring me up here Weyers Cave or whatever or to Roanoke.
         I can remember once with Tom Anderson, who was a wonderful graduate from
Houston, older, even older than I, and I was going to Houston on business and he was
going home to Houston. The candidate we had I think was from Southern Methodist,
so we were going to drop him off in Love Field in Dallas. As we in the committee had
interviewed him, he seemed fine to me. By the time we got to Love Field in Dallas, I'd
crossed him off my list. I didn't ask Tom whether he had or not.
         Tom was a wonderful guy. He was dead set against coeducation. He was by then a
trustee emeritus. A very interesting story. The Monday after we took the vote here, I called all
the trustees emeriti to try to explain to them why we had done this. His line was busy. I left
word. So he called me back and he said, "I'm sure you're wondering why my line was busy, and
I've got to admit this to you. I was talking to the admissions office at Washington and Lee about
my favorite grandniece."
         I loved it. Here was one of the leading—in fact, he'd been chairman of the nominating
committee when I was put in the rector. She's since, I think, just graduated from law school.

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She graduated from undergraduate school and went off and did something and came back and
went to law school, I think.
Warren: That's a wonderful story.
Ballengee: He and Walter Dudley and a couple other trustees had written me a special letter
getting close to coming up for a vote that we should put it off for two years, three years,
whatever, make a concerted effort to try to build up the quantity and the quality of the applicant
pool for the undergraduate school, all male still, and try to really put an accelerated effort into
improving all of the things that the faculty was concerned, and we all were concerned about.
Warren: What kinds of things?
Ballengee: Well, the fact that we were losing so many people who wouldn't come here
because it wasn't coed. We were getting 1,500 applications. Bill Hartog, who was here
and went through all this, could give you this chapter and verse. To fill a class of 400
freshmen, out of 1,500 applications he was taking 1,000, accepting 1,000. Now, that's
two out of every three that come in. No selectivity. Today he's getting 3,600, 3,700.
He's taking 800 or 900 to fill the same class. Now, it's not quite Stanford or Harvard,
maybe. You get to turn down more valedictorians than you take, but it gives you great
selectivity.

         There were a great many very bright fine young men that wouldn't come here
because the place wasn't coed, so we were losing all them. Obviously, we were losing
half the world in all the bright young women that couldn't come here. My two
daughters. My son came here. One of my daughters went to Swarthmore, one went to
Berkeley. They got a wonderful foundation for life, good education. And I don't know
that they would have come here, considering, but we were missing. I'm certain that
everybody—it was tremendously controversial.

         I only made one big mistake in this, which I blamed on Frank and Farris. This
survey—has Frank told you about this?
Warren: You tell me.

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Ballengee: All right. They were persuaded we had to survey all the alumni. The
University of Virginia had done this when it had gone coed. They sent out however
many living alumni they have. Let's assume they have 100,000 living graduates. They
only got back 3,000, 4,000. We had 16,000 living alumni. We got back far more than
that. We got back 8,000 or 10,000 out of 16 saying, no, you don't want to do that. That's
a mistake to go coeducational. Then, of course, many people resented the fact that, "We
told you you didn't want to do it, and you did it anyhow."

         Now, we had kind of a saving catch clause in there. If the board, in its discretion
or wisdom or whatever, earnestly believed that the future of the school depended on
doing this, would you trust the board to do it, and a majority said yes on that, so we
had to fall back on that. The power was in the board. It wasn't required that we have a
referendum, which everybody thought we should. I went along with that and regretted
it, and, of course, then it was easy to pick out Frank and Farris and say, "Hey, you're the
two guys that recommended this." [Laughter]
Warren: Take me into that room that day, the day of the decision.
Ballengee: The vote?
Warren: Yes.
Ballengee: I made a little list, in fact. I'm sure Frank's got this written down someplace.
There were two trustees that I knew were against coeducation who could not be
present. I allowed them to vote by phone anyhow. Our bylaws, unlike modern
corporations, did not allow a meeting by phone. If you're not here, it's the same as the
honorary degree. You've got to be here. I knew they were—one even from Ireland,
who wanted to be on the record as voting against it.

         The problem was, there are twenty-five members of the board, but Tom Wolfe,
who'd just agreed to come on the board, had not attended a single meeting where we
had gone through all the pros and cons, because he wasn't a member of the board then.
He was very new, and he didn't come to this special meeting on July 14th of '84, I guess.

                                                                                                                        16
Warren: He did not come to that?
Ballengee: No, he did not, but he had not participated in any of the discussions, the
studies, or anything else. So we had twenty-four people to vote.

         I was persuaded that, of the twenty-four, if it came out 13-11 or something like
that, so close, that even though the bylaws said a majority carried the day and that this
was a decision the board itself could make, which it had done on going coed in the law
school without a whimper, which it had done this far in the South by admitting blacks
without a whimper, which it had done with some protest of cutting out any athletic
scholarships.

         I even wrote a letter, remember, protesting that because of some well-known
people that had done so much for Washington and Lee that never would have gotten
here if they hadn't come on a football scholarship. "Famous Amos" Bowen is a great
example of one, from West Virginia. So the board had done many, many important
things here without getting anybody's opinion, and, for all I knew, by a close vote. But
I did not feel anything this momentous should carry by a very, very narrow vote.

         So I arranged with S L Kopald, who was an advocate for coeducation who was a
development chairman, that if the vote came that close, very narrow—we didn't define
narrow, but certainly one or two or something like that—in favor of coeducation, one of
us—I asked him, since I was presiding, to make a motion to reconsider. In Robert's
Rules of Order, only a person who voted for a motion could ask for it to be
reconsidered. If you voted for against and lost, you couldn't say, "Hey, let's bring this
up again." But if you voted for it, you could ask that it be reconsidered. And then I
would rule on that, and we would all vote the other way and then turn it down because
it was so narrow.

         At the beginning of the morning, just as we were gathering, Chris Compton,
who's on the Supreme Court of Virginia still to this day, wonderful, wonderful trustee,
was very much opposed to coeducation. He was very articulate and kind of a big, tall

                                                                                                                        17
great hero, had been a great basketball player when we were in school here. He was an
undergraduate and I was in law school. He said to me, "Jim, this should not go by the
rules of a strict majority of one or two."

         I said, "I agree." I don't know, I suppose I might even have agreed on three-
fourths.

         He said, "It ought to be a two-thirds vote if it changes, if it carries."
         I said, "Agreed. Fine."
         So I announced that he and I had discussed this and that we would put it to a
vote, but in order to change from our current status of being an all-male institution, it
had to be at least two-thirds voting in favor, so that if anybody abstained or voted nay,
then that would count and go against out of the twenty-four.
         Then I let everybody go around the room in a counterclockwise place to say their
piece, how they felt after they had heard everything and believed everything, which
made John Wilson next to last and me the last speaker. And then when we voted, I
went the other way around. Instead of a show of hands or secret ballot or anything,
everybody had to speak up, and without "fear or favors," it says.
         It went pretty way the way I thought. I guess there were a couple people maybe
in question. Cal Thomas, who is from Hartford, announced at the time that he had been
awake all night trying to decide, pacing back and forth out in the Keydet General, that
he couldn't make up his mind.
         But it came out 17 to 7, and there were very few surprises to me in that. Maybe
Jimmy Gallivan, who was fairly new on the board, but had been elected by the alumni
association, which happens every other year. He felt that he was duty bound to
represent the alumni, and their referendum was against it, so he voted against it. I don't
know, it may well have been his conviction, also, that it was the wrong thing to do.
         All of us agreed that, whichever way it went, we would together to make it a
success no matter what, and afterward John Wilson and Chris Compton—no, I don't

                                                                                                                        18
think Chris Compton. I'm trying to think now who it might have been. Oh, Edgar
Shannon. Edgar Shannon was a tower of strength. He had been president of the
University of Virginia at the time it went coeducational. He knew everybody in the
academic world. He was chairman of our committee on academic affairs. He was
invaluable when we had the search committee picking John Wilson, because he knew
everybody in academia and he could call any provost and say, "Tell me about this
person." He could get confidential information through his contacts the rest of us could
not. Edgar Shannon and John Wilson and I, and maybe Chris Compton also, did a kind
of press conference making the announcement.

         I think, compared to what I've seen other places, I predicted the same thing would happen
here that happened there. My friends who are Princetonians around Philadelphia, they were
dead set against it. The minute Princeton went coed, they started sending their daughters.

         I really believe that we gained as much or more in alumni support than we lost.
For example, Steve Miles, my successor as the rector, had really not shown any interest
in Washington and Lee at all. I'd never seen him. I never knew him, never heard of
him. The minute we went coed, his daughter came here in the first class, and he began
coming and showing interest, and we learned about him and got him on the board, and
now he's been the rector for six years, since I stepped down. So if we lost a few people,
maybe, who got unhappy over the fact that it's not exactly like it was when they went to
school here, the net gain was tremendous in alumni support.

         That's not counting everything else. The faculty was very strongly in favor of
doing this, and the reputation we've gotten through the admissions process now. The
concern was that there were people that really thought that we would get a group of
strong-willed feminists a ala the Seven Sister colleges and expressed it like, "It's going to
ruin Washington and Lee, its reputation. You're not going to get any of the pompom
girls or cheerleader types."

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         It turned out we got exactly the same kind of young women we'd always been
getting in men, the same background, the same kind of families, the same interests, very
bright, competitive on the SATs and grade point average, very strong, and it's worked
out wonderfully, I think.
Warren: We need to turn the tape over.