Farrar interview [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is Mame Warren. It's June 19, 1996. This is tape two with Jim Farrar. All right, lacrosse. Tell me about lacrosse at Washington and Lee, which I know is a high point. Farrar: Well, W&L has had a much longer lacrosse tradition than a lot of people might suspect, and here again, Mame, I'm not going to get the exact year, but I do know that at some point in the late thirties, probably-excuse me, in the forties, in the forties, mid-forties, early forties, probably-W&L students, with the help of a couple of faculty members, created a lacrosse club that began to play UVA. These were predominantly kids who were coming down from Baltimore with that high school lacrosse experience. They created a club, and basically for a while coached themselves, and had some early success. I can't recite chapter and verse all the records and who beat whom when, but I do know that they would compete fairly favorably with some of the other larger schools, like UVA, where a lot of their classmates from high school were going out of Gilman or St. Paul's or wherever. So they're competing in that very small lacrosse fraternity, that very small circle of people who played the game even then. So we got started in the forties. In the fifties and the sixties, I'm trying to think now when people came. We had a guy named Wilson Fewster for a year or two who was a coach. Gene Corrigan coached at W&L for a year or two, and Gene is now the commissioner of the ACC and is president of the NCAA this year. Gene was athletic director here for a year, just under a year, before he got the UVA job. So Gene was very knowledgeable 34 about soccer and lacrosse. Then Bob McHenry, Bill's brother, was lacrosse coach for a number of years. Then Dick Szlasa, S-Z-L-A-S-A is how you spell his last name, Dick Szlasa came on the scene. Now, through those forties and fifties and sixties, W&L had lacrosse teams, not ultracompetitive, but we had all-Americans. Bill Clements was 1950. He was an all-American, was most valuable goalkeeper in the country, the top goalkeeper in the country, and we had other fine players during the course of those years. You can take the rise of the modern "lacrosse program in the early seventies through the early part of the eighties, through the decade of the seventies and the early part of the eighties, and you can attribute, the first person that you can point to that really created a successful lacrosse environment was Dick Szlasa. Dick was lacrosse coach from the late sixties through '72, through the spring of '72, and it was Dick Szlasa who was responsible for recruiting and bringing to W&L Sam Englehart and Skip Lichtfuss, Skeet Chadwick in particular, and some other guys who became very strong supporting players. But those were very important people, when you look at the decade of the seventies, because Sam Englehart was-all of these guys were very fine high school lacrosse players. As it happens, all three of those guys came from Towson High School, and Dick was able to interest them in W&L and they came to W&L. Sam came and joined a mediocre team, and then in the early seventies-and I came in the fall of '70, all of this started in the fall of '70, because in my freshman class, as it turns out, were to be three first-team all-American players, and all of those players are now in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. So it was Englehart, then with some of these guys who came in in 1970, that the nucleus of the great-and I say that just in quotes-the "great" teams, if you want to look at it in the context of Division I competition. There wasn't Division I as we know it today. It was called university 35 versus college level. We were in the university division, or what is known today as the Division I level, for my last two years. The first two years, it was college level, and then we made a jump up in divisions. So those guys came, and then subsequently there were other people who came-Tommy Keigler, Robbie Lindsey, David Warfield, Charlie Brown, Bobby Clements, Bill's son. Every one of those people became all-American lacrosse players here. We had seven my senior year. There were seven all-Americans in the 1974 season alone that ranged all the way from honorable mention to first team. In the spring of '72-actually, it was in early June. I'll never forget, I was home. School was out, and I was at home. This is Saturday morning. Dick Szlasa came to my house, and he sat down with my father for a couple hours outside. They had become close friends. Dick had told him that he was leaving Washington and Lee to become head coach at Navy. (You spending so much time in Annapolis, you know what that meant for a lacrosse coach.) If you were tapped to be the head coach at Navy, you weren't going to look around. If you were at W&L and you had a chance to be head coach at Navy, you'd probably be nuts to pass it up. So Dick left and became the head coach at Navy, and his story ultimately had kind of an unhappy ending there. He didn't fit in, and it didn't work. His marriage broke up, and it ended up not being a good thing for Dick. But anyway, Dick Szlasa left, and then W&L had to go out and hire a new lacrosse coach. We had enjoyed a lot of success in those couple of years. We'd gotten in the NCAA tournament, which was a huge step. Here W&L wasn't supposed to be able to compete with anybody, and now we're playing at the top level. So Jack Emmer is named lacrosse coach. Warren: What's his name? Farrar: E-M-M-E-R, Jack Emmer. Jack had gone to Rutgers. He was a wide receiver for Rutgers on their football team and played lacrosse, and I think ended up being a 36 third-team all-American defenseman at Rutgers. When he came to W&L, he was coaching at Cortland State in upstate New York. He was coaching the lacrosse team there, and in that spring of '72, they had just pulled off a huge upset in the tournament and beaten UVA, and that was a big deal, a real big deal. So Jack came, having earned his-he had good credentials at that point. Jack Emmer wasn't a hell of a lot older than we were. Jack would have been in his mid- to late twenties when he came. And here's another very interesting parallel. It parallels our current coach, Jim Stagnitta, at least to my way of thinking, because they're so much alike. Maybe I'll have time to talk about that later. Jack came in '72, and Jack's from Long Island and he talked just like a kid from Long Island. It was really kind of neat. You had all these guys, these public and private school kids out of Baltimore and you had a few kids from Manhasset and some kids from Long Island and other places and a couple of kids from Pennsylvania, who could hardly translate what this guy was saying. We didn't know what to make of this thing. But he showed people pretty quickly what was going to happen. Practice started in January at that point, and it would just be running for about a month. Jesus, he worked us harder than anybody could ever imagine. Dick Szlasa had worked his teams pretty hard, but Emmer took it to another level. Jack, he didn't come here to mess around. He came here to win, and to win at a big level. So he just absolutely beat us to death, which is great. It was the best thing that could have happened to us. Jack was smart enough to not over coach the team, because he had some really phenomenal talent on that team. He just basically let the guys go out and play. Those two years, we did not lose a regular season game for two years and were ranked very high nationally. In my senior year, we were ranked as high as number two, and we finished ranked third in the nation. Lost in the semifinals to Hopkins by one goal, 10 to 11. That and a dime won't get you a cup of coffee today. But if you 37 wanted to look at a point, that was the ultimate high point. No W&L team has ever done better than that. You know, it's really interesting. We were all in the right place at the right time. W&L's national lacrosse fame-we've always had a tradition of lacrosse at W&L since the forties, and there are a lot of well-respected people who played lacrosse here, and W&L is a known name in the lacrosse world. But when you look at it in the broad context, that period, the early seventies, is really just a very narrow window, when all the right people were together at the right time. Now, you can say, "Well, that's the way it's usually supposed to happen." You can't really have those sorts of dynasties forever, unless you're a Hopkins or those kinds of programs that have been established long before ours was. But a lot of people got caught up in that and tend to forget what was-not paid attention to what was happening to the game of lacrosse in that period of time. Warren: And what was that? Farrar: It was changing dramatically. At that point when I was playing here, we used to beat Carolina like a drum and Duke, Snoresville. That was no big deal. Virginia was a different story, and other teams like-well, like a Cortland State. Washington College was always tough. But some of the schools that are now big players in the game weren't then. Take the ACC, for example. Virginia and Maryland were the teams then, and after a while, it wasn't long after I graduated, Carolina decided they wanted to be a player in the game. So they went out and they hired Willie Scroggs, who came down from Hopkins. He was an assistant there. And within a few years, they had bought themselves a national championship team. And I don't say that cynically. They decided that they would give some scholarship help, and it didn't take many. In a sport like lacrosse or some of the smaller, less visible sports, not the football and basketball, it just doesn't take that many kids. So over a three-year period of time, if 38 you gave, let's say, three or four full scholarships, or an amount of money that totaled to about four full scholarships, you could dole that out and you could attract kids. What high school guy in his right mind-you start to see the Chapel Hill campus. They're throwing a few thousand bucks your way. You're a blue-chip lacrosse player out of St. Paul's or wherever. You're going to a beautiful place like Carolina, it's coed, it's warm down there throughout the spring. Sure, you'd take that in a heartbeat and go, especially if you've got a guy like Willie Scroggs, who was a good coach and people knew. So Carolina very quickly built themselves a program. So you see what's happening. W&L had hit a point up here in the seventies, and meanwhile Duke and Carolina and other schools are deciding that they want to become a player in the game. We hit our head on the ceiling in '72, because we weren't going to be able to give any money to it and we weren't going to have that kind of situation forever. So we, probably unwittingly, hit our head on the ceiling. We weren't going to go any further, because the university wasn't going to change its philosophy to become a Division I team. We made that decision as an institution in 1954 after the football cheating scandal, when President Gaines said, "That's it. No subsidized athletics." That was it. So here we were, twenty years later, still in a non-subsidized era, but we had competed at the very top level in this sport, which was only then beginning to go to a higher level, you see. So what happened was, we had our high water mark just about the point where the game then started to increase in popularity and momentum across the country, and that was it. Jack had some other good seasons, but by the mid-eighties it was clear that the program wasn't going anywhere, and he went to Army. They hired Dennis Daley, who's a wonderful guy and he's a great high school level coach, but he wasn't a college level coach, with the expectations that people had on him 39 here. And so then Jim Stagnitta was hired, and he has brought W&L back very much into respectability in Division Ill, which is where we should be and which is where we're going to stay, I guess. Warren: So the legacy of the cheating scandal goes on. Farrar: Well, yeah, because it affected-let's just say for the heck of it that there wasn't a cheating scandal. I suspect we would have gotten out of subsidized sports pretty much shortly thereafter anyway, just because of the way all of those things were going to go. Back in the fifties, it just wasn't like it was today. I mean, that's forty years ago, and the pressures and the money, all that's changed. We couldn't have competed at that level. What might have happened, though, you see, is, if we had remained subsidized, we might have made a decision at some point that we would de- emphasize the football and basketball and those major sports and taken the subsidization maybe at another level, like a lacrosse program. And if we had done that, we could still be competing today at Division I. This is where Mike Walsh would say, no, we couldn't, or perhaps we couldn't, because now if you want to compete in Division I, you have to have certain league affiliation and certain things have to happen with the other sports. But on paper it would be possible for us to compete at Division I in lacrosse and maybe at tennis, but not at the other levels. Take, for example, Georgetown University. You don't hear a whole lot about a lot of their other sports. The basketball is the sport, and that's at the highest level of Division I. Their football teams we used to play, but because of NCAA regulations, we no longer play them because they had to get into different conference affiliation in order to maintain this kind of Division I status. So in '\, essence, it really is the tail wagging the dog. It's the basketball program at Georgetown that dictates what's going to happen to every other program. 40 Now lacrosse is Division I. Dave Urich [phonetic] came from Hobart to start Georgetown's Division I lacrosse program. He's doing a pretty good job of it. They're in the top fifteen, but he hasn't gotten Georgetown at the tournament yet. All that's by way of saying, you look at the teams that are playing Division I lacrosse today. Notre Dame, and that's being coached by Kevin Corrigan, Gene Corrigan's son. Dave Urich at Georgetown. You look at the top fifteen, Princeton is national champion two years in a row, UVA. It's still a relatively small fraternity of well-known schools, but they're some new players in there now. W&L was in there in the early seventies, and through the mid- and late seventies, too, because Jack had some pretty teams then, too. Warren: Well, I'm glad you had your moment of glory. Farrar: Yeah. Nobody who played then will deny that it wasn't just a hell of a lot of fun. I mean, it really was. And those teams themselves were legitimate. Those were legitimate Division I teams. We could play with anybody in the country for a while, and then these other programs began to come about and we weren't going anywhere else, so it just naturally hit a decline. But it was a hell of a lot of fun. Warren: Thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about? I feel like this is usually about the limit somebody's willing to go is a couple of hours. Farrar: There are probably a lot more things we could talk about, and I'd be happy to, but I better get back to the sweatshop. Warren: Definitely. Now that I know things that you know that I didn't know you knew, I'm going to be calling on you, definitely, when I'm writing captions, for sure. I guess you're going to be real helpful at that, I hope. Farrar: Happy to. Warren: Thank you, Jim. Farrar: Thank you. Warren: This has really been fun. I've learned a lot. 41 Farrar: Good. [End of Interview] 42 he gave me a ride back to the gym one day from the football field after a football game on the back of this big motorcycle, which put my mother in apoplectic that I would get on a motorcycle, much less with a college student, so that was a big deal. Then he had a car, a Corvette, a silver Corvette, that in black paint or else black tape said, "The Silver Bitch." I can remember one day we pulled up to the stop light. It's so innocent now. Nobody would think of a car named The Silver Bitch. It would be kind of like, big deal. But back in the early sixties, mid-sixties, it was a pretty big deal. We were parked. We came to a stop light right in front of Lexington Presbyterian Church, and we were behind Bill David in The Silver Bitch. My 9 mother looked at that car and said, "Jim, what are you going to do about that?" You know, this guy's a hell-raising Californian here in sleepy little Lexington with his Silver Bitch. I can remember peering over the back seat, looking at this thing and thinking, "God, that's just the coolest thing in the world," and here's my mother, who's just ticked off that a W&L student would have a car named Silver Bitch. It's pretty hilarious. Now you wouldn't even blink a! it. You'd just say, "Thank God it's only the silver bitch," compared to what else you might have on there. Warren: That's great. I can picture the whole scene. Farrar: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is stuff right out of the show "The Wonder Years." Have you ever seen that show? Warren: Yes. I had to stop watching it because I identified with it too much. Farrar: I know. Well, that's Bruce Ritz and the clubhouse and Bill David and The Silver Bitch and stuff like that. Those are episodes out of "The Wonder Years." We really did live a lot of that kind of stuff right here in Lexington during the fifties and sixties. It was pretty much fun. Warren: You made a reference to the McLaughlin years. Am I correct in assuming that you would have gone to a lot of sports events? Farrar: Oh, yeah. Oh, God, my father was a huge sports nut, and my brother and I shared that enthusiasm. Jeez, he took us to everything. I mean, we went to everything, literally. Everything that he could get us out of the house to, we would go to, all the wrestling matches and the basketball games in Doremus. Just like there is today, like my kids and Kevin O'Connell and all the W&L faculty and staff brats running around over in the Warner Center, we did the same thing. Boyd Williams' son, Chuck Williams, and Buck Leslie's son, Bucky, and Marshall Washburn, and Doug Chase wasn't faculty, but Doug was always around, Gary and Trippi Cook, and the list goes on and on. 10 But we'd go to all those things and watch the students in Doremus, sit on the balcony on the track above the basketball court there and conveniently drop shoes on the other team sitting behind them, those kinds of things. It was just a blast. We'd go down to the gym on Saturdays, and my dad would be playing handball with Murph or some other guys, and we'd be in the wresting room or something, that kind of thing. It was just a great place for a kid to grow up. Of course, Lee McLaughlin, you mentioned, was part of that. They came to Lexington in the late fifties. All this is documented elsewhere, of course. I just can't remember the date. But he was the head football coach at Episcopal High School in Alexandria and had some fabulous teams up there, and came down after the cheating scandal of '54. Boyd Williams was an insurance agent, and he volunteered for a couple of years, and then they hired Lee McLaughlin. Lee came, and then they were off and running. They had a few years gearing up, and then they had these incredible teams in the sixties, small college championship teams. That's one way that I got to know a lot of these guys and know who they were, the Bobby Paynes and those guys. Barton Dick, of course, who's here in town, and a lot of those guys. I can speak as a-I knew "Knubby," knew Lee very well, went to his summer camp and all that, grew up with young Lee. We're two months apart in age. That's a terrific chapter in W&L's history period, not just sports history, but within the culture and fabric of the institution. Those McLaughlin years meant more than just good football teams because of the type of guy Lee McLaughlin was and the kind of influence he had on people like Bobby Payne and Courtney Mauzy and Barton Dick and Terry Fohs and all those, Charlie Gummey and all these great players from the sixties. That was a pretty significant time. Then he died in '68 or '69. Warren: Can you talk about that? 11 Farrar: Oh, yeah. Well, it's frightening how much Gary Fallon's experience paralleled Lee McLaughlin's. It probably is something to astrology, if you want to look at it that way, because I don't know how else to account for it. But Lee McLaughlin's influence was profound, and then Lee died in that tragic accident. He was electrocuted out at his summer camp. And that was it, that was the end of the McLaughlin era. Then there were others who came in and who-the football program specifically floundered for a few years, until they were able to hire Gary Fallon. Gary came down-again, I can't recall. Probably in the late seventies, probably '77 or '78, somewhere in that neighborhood, or maybe even a couple years later. But at any rate, Gary, his legacy is well known across the institution for that decade of the eighties and early nineties and the impact that he had on kids. He had an influence on some of these guys from the decades of eighties and early nineties in a similar fashion to what McLaughlin had on the W&L guys in the late fifties and sixties. Of course, Gary's death was tragic, untimely, how-do-you-account-for-it kind of thing. Warren: We're talking to posterity here. Tell us what happened to Gary Fallon. Farrar: Well, Gary, I played golf with him a couple days before, and on the day he died, I remember passing him on the street, waving, and then the next thing I knew, on Sunday we were getting the news that he had died in his sleep. There wasn't an autopsy, but the assumption is, after they checked it all out, it appears that he died in his sleep of a heart attack, just that simple. Gary Fallon, we used to occasionally bump into each other like at five-thirty, six in the morning down in the weight room, and I'm here to tell you, anybody that knew Gary knew that this guy was chiseled out of that cinder-block wall. Gary Fallon was just in incredible shape, and then he dies in his sleep of a heart attack. It's one of those things you just don't-and unfortunately, I say unfortunately because it would kind of-I've wondered whether or not there might have been a 12 congenital kind of thing that nobody ever picked up before that would account for it or whether he just flat had a heart attack. How do you figure it? So I think the Fallon and McLaughlin eras are-I mean, it's scary to me how the untimely death, and they're both very young, had been very successful, had a lot of influence on the young people that they worked with. It's just a killer. But Lee McLaughlin was great, and Gary was, too. They were both great guys, a lot of fun to be with, great practical jokers, just really neat people. Warren: What do you mean, practical jokers? Farrar: They loved doing stuff, pulling jokes on guys. I'm not going to be able to come up with a lot of specifics, but Lee McL~ughlin was notorious for that kind of thing, practical jokes that he would pull on people. He loved doing that kind of stuff, absolutely reveled in it. And Gary was a lot the same way. If you look at people in that profession, working with young people and coaching, there is that sort of childlike element to them, because after all, they're working with young people in games and it's supposed to be fun. They had a way of, while they would put a lot of pressure on themselves, they'd get a lot of it off through good-natured practical jokes. Lee McLaughlin was a very strong Christian. I can remember being in his home when they would-maybe this would be late in the evening or something on a Sunday before dinner, and he would get his family together and he'd read some from the Bible and would have kind of mini devotion period. He would always do that at his summer camp. There was a morning session every morning devotions, which was about a fifteen-minute period when he'd read a passage and there'd be a little lesson to it, and then there'd be announcements and you'd go on about your daily activities. So that element was very, very prevalent with Lee McLaughlin. He never let that get in the way of a good joke or having a good time, but that's just the 13 way he was. That was important to him. I can't speak to that about Gary, but I suspect in his own way it was important. They were both sort of wise in just the way of life, just the way that they worked with young people and the influence they had on their lives. They just gave good advice, and the guys that they worked with really bought into it. Warren: One day a couple weeks ago I went through the photographs over in the sports information office, and I found a picture that I just loved of a wrestling match. Here you had these two guys in the foreground really going at it, doing their wrestling, and in the background are all these people down there and they're really cheering, and they're all wearing their coats and ties. I just loved that. It so spoke to a time. Farrar: It puts the period in the framework. It really tells you when it was, doesn't it? Warren: Was that just a given around here? Farrar: Yeah. And I suspect it was in lots of other places, too, although I don't have that personal experience. But I suspect-let's say that photo was from the late fifties or early sixties-you could go over to Charlottesville or maybe Princeton or Davidson and you'd probably see a very similar scene. So I think it reflects as much as anything just what was going on everywhere. But it certainly was the case here. It was a given that most of the time you're going to see the men in coats and ties. And, of course, along with that for the freshmen was the beanie thing. Dad used to take us down to Doc's Corner Grill, which is not Mountain Copy Graphics, and Doc was-I don't remember his last name. But Doc was this great old guy who ran the grill, and they served breakfast. I'm not going to remember her name, but she's the secretary at Maury River Middle School. I think her last name is Alexander, and I think it might be Florence Alexander. I think that's her name. She was a waitress down at Doc's, and we would go down there occasionally for 14 breakfast, because that's when we were going to Ann Smith, which is now the Chi SPE house. God, it just makes me weep every time I think of the Chi SPEs being in that school. Warren: Tell me. Farrar: I'll get to that later. Warren: I have wondered about that. Farrar: I don't want to talk about that. It just makes me ill to think about it. But at any rate, that was Ann Smith, and we used to go down to Doc's and have breakfast. It would be fairly early in the morning. You'd see a lot of guys going to class, and that's what I remember vividly, a lot of the W&L guys going to class or coming from the post office or going to class, and you'd see all the freshmen in the beanies and the coat and tie thing. I can't imagine any town or any place in the country, certainly any college town, being more typical of reflecting the period than we did. Again, I'm quite sure that the same kind of thing went on at other schools, but ours, it was quintessential period coat and tie. Of course, then they had the assimilation committee, which is really pretty hilarious when you think about it. It was nothing but a fascist, conformist committee which made sure that everybody was doing pretty much the same thing. You couldn't be too different then, and that's the downside of what was on the surface, the pretty Norman Rockwell picture postcard kind of image of what a school or a college town was supposed to be like, when, in fact, there really wasn't very much tolerance. And so the assimilation committee made sure that people wore their coats and ties and the freshmen wore their beanies and that people weren't rocking the boat too hard. You look back on it now, you say, "My God, how could-." It could exist then, but you couldn't even think of it existing in any school today. Warren: When did the boat start to get rocked? 15 Farrar: The late sixties, when the spillover from UVA and other schools, but I guess there was some agitation from some of the activists at UVA, and our own. I mean, Jeff Gingold and others here at W&L were in the middle of the war protest movement. So it was the late sixties. Frankly, it was just before I got here, because I can remember friends of mine who were here in-let's see, I started in the fall of '70, so those who started in the fall of '69 were just right there in the middle of it, and, that's when the school decided-and I can't remember if it was for more than one year. But there was a point at which-maybe it was in the spring of '70 or the spring of '69 when they allowed students to take incompletes in order to protest the war. Warren: That was 1970. Farrar: Is that what it was? Yeah, the spring of '70. Warren: May of 1970. Farrar: Right. Okay. Well, it was at that time that all of these demonstrations were going on, and they had them down in front of the chapel. We had our share, but not nearly to the extent that other schools did. Depending on how you want to look at it, we were protected, if you want to look at it that way, or insulated by geography, the fact that we were harder to get to than a lot of other places, and we were smaller. We probably, given the nature of Washington and Lee, had fewer people who were interested in agitating against the war, although it was an element within the student body. And I wasn't here then in that year, so I've just pretty much heard when people talk about it. Warren: Where were you? Farrar: I was in high school. See, I was the class of '74, so I entered in the fall of '70, so I missed that year. Warren: Did you go to high school here in Lexington? Farrar: I went to Episcopal High School in Alexandria. 16 Warren: So you were gone through this transitional period. Farrar: I was gone in the late sixties. I was watching it from within my high school, where there was that same concern, and everybody was going through that. And in Washington, we were actually closer to it than a lot of people, because we were right in Alexandria watching the city burn. We watched, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, we could literally-Episcopal's on a slightly elevated property, and at the top of some of the buildings, you could actually see Washington burning. But the story that I've heard-and you'll have to get somebody else to recount it. Probably Bob Huntley would be the best, because the story is about Bob and Betty Brubaker. There was a sit-down demonstration in his office. Some of the students came in, and it might have been-I can't remember if it would have been the black students or just students protesting the war, but there was an element of that that ended up in his office, trying to stage a sit-down strike. The story that I've always heard is a great one. The students came in, and Betty just said, "How may I help you?" "We want to see President Huntley." "He'll be in shortly. You all have a seat." Or they had taken a seat on the floor. Bob came in, stepping over all these guys, and saying, "How can I help you all?" They're protesting this and that, and they want to call off classes and all this, and he just said something like, "Betty, can you get these gentlemen something to drink," just very nonchalant, like they're just W&L guys, treated them in that way as opposed to saying, "Hell, no, get out of here." You need to get that story from somebody, because it was pretty typical of the way W&L would approach something like that. Warren: I actually got it from Gene Perry himself. 17 Farrar: Is it Gene? It was the black students, then, wasn't it? Warren: Yeah. Gene told me the story. Farrar: Yeah. Tell me the story. Remind me what it was. Warren: He just said that it went on for a while, just like you were describing, and finally they said, "Well, nobody's paying any attention to us. Why were we here?" They eventually just got up and left. Farrar: Just disappeared, yeah. Warren: They just totally took the passion out of whatever it was they were there for. Farrar: But those were tough times everywhere. I guess we got off a little bit easier than a lot of places. Warren: I need to turn the tape over. [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: Well now, you've brought up one of the major subjects I wanted to talk to you about, the black students. From what I understand, your father was very important in that whole development. I understand that you weren't here, but what do you know about that? Farrar: Well, it's just a function of the times and what was right and what had to be done. W&L, again, we've always been a decade behind the curve when it comes to change, for better or for worse. We're just slower to pick up on it here, not altogether bad, I don't think, in lots of cases, but nevertheless we didn't integrate until the late sixties, early seventies. The focal point is always going to be on the admissions office in a case like that, and certainly today, you know what Bill faces in trying to bring in the right mix of males, females, and all that kind of thing, and he's certainly got a lot of his pressures. But at that time, it was black students, it was integration. Everybody in the school knew that it was right and had to be done, and it just came on my father's 18 watch. He was the type of person who wanted that to happen, and I think he accelerated it. I'm sure that if there had been somebody else in that position less interested in causing the integration to happen, it would have been slower in coming, probably. My father was never interested-that's not the right word. He never spent a lot of time with the "face men," the guys who looked good and were-I can't find the right way to describe it, kind of looks but no real substance. The people that he really admired and felt close to were these guys, some of the names of which I've mentioned, the Bobby Paynes and Jamie Andrews and people like that, who were willing to give their time and do the important things. One of the things he really enjoyed was being able to get blue-collar kids to W&L, kids out of the public high schools in central Pennsylvania, guys like that to come down and really give some diversity beyond just black/white kind of thing. Those are the kind of kids that he really, really enjoyed watching grow here. But there's really not much. The black thing, the integration of black students at W&L was just something that had to happen, and he was absolutely convinced that it was right to happen, and it did, again probably more slowly here than lots of other places. I don't remember it being particularly painful, at least in terms of our family, but I'm sure that there was a tremendous amount of pressure on him, and that was the struggle, finding the black students who'd be willing to come here and integrate and be the first. We can only imagine how hard that was, with Gene Perry and a lot of those guys, the Smothers family, and I'm trying to think of the name of the Smothers boy who graduated from W&L in the early seventies. I can't recall it, but he's now-I saw him recently at his niece's or his cousin's wedding, but he's with AT&T or IBM or somebody like that. I can't remember where he is now. At any rate, the point is, for the early blacks it must have been really hard. They didn't really have anywhere to go. They relied very heavily on my father as a 19 support person, because he was the one who had recruited them here, and quite obviously we didn't have an office for minority affairs. We didn't have any of that stuff we do today. He was it. The admissions office was it, and sympathetic faculty. But that was it. That certainly is why he had a close following from those students. Warren: Would he entertain the students at home? Farrar: Oh, God, yeah. We had people in and out of the house all the time. Yes, surely, a lot of people. Warren: So you were a student, really, during this transitional period. Farrar: But I was oblivious to it, I really was, like most of the kids. Warren: You didn't see any tension, any racial tension? Farrar: Yeah, yeah, we'd see some of it, but we just really didn't-at least the group that 1-1 was much more interested in sports. I never really saw, or if I did, I never really paid much attention to the fact that there were black students here. It didn't matter to me. It wasn't a big deal for me. That's just the way it was. I was playing football in the fall and lacrosse in the spring. I had my circle of friends, and that's just the way it was. Warren: So you didn't realize you were witnessing history in the making? Farrar: Well, yes, in a way we did. But it was never an issue, really, for the students. It's always much more of an issue for the alumni than it is for the students, I think. Most of the time, the student body, most of the people are going to handle it pretty well. It's a small group that tends to be the vocal group in changes like that. That's the way I remember it. Warren: Well, for example, Gene talks about a few white friends he had and that they were ostracized for being his friend. Farrar: Yeah, I'm sure that happened. There were some black students who played football. Bob Ford is the one I'm thinking of. For us, it just wasn't a big deal. For me, it just wasn't a big deal. 20 But yeah, I'm sure that the white guys who befriended the black students, I'd be willing to bet you money that they weren't in fraternities, they were independents, and they came from communities or high schools where there was probably a fairly significant black representation, and so it was much more natural for them than it was for other guys, the guys from the South who probably went to segregated schools and that kind of thing. I'm making gross generalizations here, but that's probably the kind of people who were interested in making friends with the black students. And clearly they were going to be in the minority and just weren't going to be in the mainstream. There was a guy. He is now the public information director at a school in, I think it's in New Jersey, Dean Golembeski. He was a classmate of mine, class of '74. See, I'm much closer to the black students, the black alumni in that era now than I ever was then. Gene Perry came on the alumni board after I had come back. Bill Hill several years ago began helping out. He began helping recruit black students and now is on the law council. He's got his daughter here. Thomas Penn from Roanoke, he and his wife sent Courtney here. Their son is an alumnus. He's down I think getting a master's degree or something like that in teaching or education down at the University of Georgia. So I'm much closer to the black community now than I ever was then. As I said a minute ago, my friends in the circle that I was in, it was never a big deal. But I would be quick to say that that's because, I'm sure, I was a SAE, and my affiliation with that fraternity would have caused all of the black students to want to have nothing to do with us. Warren: Why? Farrar: Because that fraternity, and there would be others, like the Phi Delta house and the Phi Kappa house, were predominantly Southern. They were occupied by Southern whites who either consciously or subconsciously, purposely or not, 21 represented all the bad things about the black/white kind of relationship, and there were plenty of guys in my fraternity who would be very intolerant of blacks. That's just the way it was. For a black, other than being on a team or having a friendly relationship just out on the colonnade, no black would want to be associated with the SAE or the Phi Delta house, that kind of thing, simply because of what it stood for. That's just the way it was. The blacks, at that point, if they joined a fraternity, it was the ZBT house, because the ZBTs then, it evolved-of course, as you know, back in the fifties and sixties there was a much larger Jewish population at W&L. The PEP house and the ZBT house were Jewish fraternity houses. By the mid-seventies, the PEP house no longer existed, and the ZBT house had kind of become the fraternity for the misfits, for that part of the community that just didn't fit, whether they be Jews or blacks. They kind of drew some comfort in being together in that association. So that was where those blacks who joined fraternities-with some exceptions. There were a couple, I think, who might have been Phi Garn or maybe another fraternity. But that's where you would see the blacks and the Jews headed is to the ZBT house. Warren: Why do you suppose there are so few Jewish students now? What happened there? Farrar: I don't know. When I say there was a significant population of Jewish students at W&L in the fifties and sixties, I can't tell you what the percentage actually was. Warren: I think you're right about that. Farrar: There was, but I don't want to suggest it was forty-eight percent or anything like that. But probably maybe fifteen percent or some figure like that, that would give a fairly significant Jewish population on campus. I don't know how to account for that, I really don't. I really don't know why that happened in the first place, and 22 I really don't know why, other than perhaps societal changes. I don't know how many of those Jews at W&L then were from-I know a number of them were from the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, but some of them also were from Southern Jewish families, as well. I don't know generationally how that evolved, whether it came to-it may be that some of our Jewish alumni possibly began to feel that we were a less welcoming place for Jews as we moved through the sixties and into the seventies, but I don't know. I don't know how to account for that. I do know that it has been an issue on the minds of the alumni office, rather the admissions office, to develop some strategies to try to attract more Jewish students to W&L. Warren: Yeah, why aren't their kids coming here? Why isn't that tradition being handed down there. It's an interesting question, isn't it? Farrar: It is, and I can't begin to address it. I mean, society flows, the currents shift, and I suspect part of it might have been the fact that-and this would cut across black, white, religious grounds-but single sex might have had a big role in that, and just the attrition that happened. The lack of interest displayed in W&L through the seventies and early eighties because it was single sex may have had an impact within that Jewish community, as well. So there are things like that. I think clearly it's multi-layered answer. I think you'd find a lot of societal influences and those kinds of things, single sex, mixed in with whatever thoughts maybe our Jewish alumni might have had about W&L. And then you also just have the fact that kids want to go to different places, too. That's just a natural siphoning process, as well. Warren: You mentioned single sex. Were you here when that vote was taken? Farrar: No. Warren: Sometime in the seventies there was a vote taken that the students voted for. 23 Farrar: Well, there may have been. I don't remember. Again, I wasn't really tuned in to that. If I voted for it, I voted for all male, only because that's what everybody then-if they were interested in coeducation, not many people came out for it. We were pretty much following in each other's lead. I can remember saying to my father on any number of occasions-he said this long ago. I mean, he saw it way down the pike. He said, "W&L will be coed. It's not a matter of if; it's just a matter of when." My typical sophomoric response was, "Over my dead body," kind of thing. That was just the typical student reaction of the day. But he knew. He knew long ago that it would be coed. Warren: Were you here the day the decision was made? Were you on campus? Farrar: No, I was at Episcopal. I was working there then. But I did a little survey prior to that, probably in that same year. I guess the decision was made in '83, right, a special meeting of the board in June of '83. Warren: Yes. Farrar: I guess it was '82, '83, or in the winter of '83 when this debate was going on. See, for years I was at Episcopal, and Episcopal had always been a very popular feeder for kids coming to W&L. Episcopal at that point was all male, and schools like W&L, Carolina, Virginia, Princeton, the standard kind of traditional schools, Davidson, places like that, always attracted a lot of kids from Episcopal. I can remember talking with kids over the years. We'd sit at the dinner table or something, eat, talk to the guys at your table and say, "What schools are you interested in?" It was always a standard litany of Vanderbilt, Virginia, Carolina, Davidson, Duke, blah, blah, blah, all down the list. You'd say, "What about a place like W&L?" "Yeah, W&L's a good school, but it's not coed." What am I going to say? 24 I can remember early on I tried to defend it and say, "Well, you know, there are some good things about it," and you'd try to put that spin on it. Finally, one day I just said, "Why am I trying to beat this horse? I can't sway these guys. They either want to go to a single-sex school or they want to go to a coed school, and nothing I can say is going to make them change their mind." So I did a little survey. This was in that coed year, the debate year. I think it was eight questions long. It probably couldn't have been more unscientific if I had tried, but it was questions like-I tried to make it scientific. I tried to make it a logical kind of flow of questions, like, "What kind of school are you interested in?" "If you are interested in-." There were a couple of questions I got real specific. I said, "If Washington and Lee were coed, would you be-circle one-very interested, moderately interested, not interested at all." I put this survey every senior's box, in every mailbox, every senior mailbox, and I must have gotten about twenty or so. At that point, the senior class was maybe seventy-five or eighty. So I got twenty back, which was pretty good, at least those people who might have had an interest in Washington and Lee. Whatever the questions, the end result was that out of those that came back, the ultimate question was, "If W&L were coed, to what extent would you be interested in applying there?" The end result was that out of the roughly twenty or twenty-one that we got back, I think six said, "I would be very interested in applying," and another eight said, "Moderately interested," and then the rest said, "Not at all." So, rightly or wrongly, the conclusion I drew was that there were fourteen students at that moment at Episcopal alone who were interested, at least moderately interested, in applying to W&L if it were coed. So I copied that and sent it off to the W&L board of trustees, and that was my little contribution. It was clear at that point that we were just losing our shirts out there in the marketplace, and all these great guys-and that didn't even speak to the 25 female population, but all these terrific guys were interested in all the schools by virtue of the fact that we were single sex. So that was kind of a no-brainer if you look at it that way. Warren: When the decision came down, and there were a lot of people who hadn't of done definitive research you had, did you make any attempt, were you at all involved in trying to get them to see that it was a good idea? Farrar: To the extent that you're able to individually. I can remember pointing out to friends that this really is the right thing to do. You can share the concern, and I had the same concern, too. It was right to go coed, but then you began to worry about how it was going to affect all the other things that W&L people hold so dear, whatever those things are, however important they are to you. The civility and the honor code and athletics and all these things, how was that going to be affected by coeducation. So we all shared the same concerns. The difference was that for me, as opposed to some others, I was in favor of coeducation, but just uncertain how it was all going to take effect, and others were opposed to the coeducation and were very concerned with how it was going to affect everything. So there was a little bit of that sort of handholding that we all went through, what's going to happen, wringing of hands and worrying that all the institutions were going to hell in a handbasket, and, of course, just didn't. It immediately became stronger. I think it's been proven now it really isn't an issue anywhere out there. People are curious. They want to know how things are going and how productive is the school. They're interested in all of those things. But clearly the coed debate is ancient, ancient history. Warren: I want to go back to a couple of things we talked about before. Conventional dress. When you were here, it was really the transitional period. Were people wearing ties? Were people wearing bell bottoms? What were people wearing? 26 Farrar: History majors would wear coats and ties on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when most history courses were taught, and then on other days you didn't. Warren: Why? Farrar: Just because you were dressing to the professor. You were really dressing to the discipline, if you will. Warren: Was there some particular reason why history? Farrar: Just because they're more conservative. Dave Futch "required it." There were people in his classes who didn't wear coats and ties, and I'm sure he thought they were from Mars. There was a lot of that going on, but most people-you could tell who was in what area. C school types would have done some of that stuff, too. And just like today. It still goes on today. You tend to play to the whoever's leading the orchestra. You do what you need to do to fit in. You want to make the right impression and do the right things. There's probably less of that today than there was then, but I suspect that a lot of students still fall into that kind of mind-set. You just do what is accepted in the C school, whatever that is. Spending time up in the computer lab, for example. There were guys that I knew who used to go down to Charlie Turner's office. Oh, this one guy was just notorious for playing up to Charlie Turner. It was really awful when you think about it, but it was pretty hilarious then. Kind of funny now, too. Charlie Turner loved for students to come to his office and his classroom and study. So this guy would get up early in the morning, and he would not shave and he'd put on an old shirt and he'd go down to Charlie Turner's office before Charlie got there, before Dr. Turner would get in, and would make it look as if he had been there all night studying. I'm sure that this fellow wasn't alone. There are other guys doing it in their own ways. You had a lot of that kind of thing going on. 27 But conventional dress, it was on the wane, but a lot of people still wore coats and ties or ties to class, in certain classes. I guess probably history, which would tend to draw more or less a conservative crowd; C school pretty much the same way. You wouldn't see them in the English department. You'd see more long hair and free spirits in the English department. So at that point when I was here, you could pretty much identify where people were coming from given the way they were dressing, and then it just evolved out and conventional dress became whatever party T-shirt you were sporting that week and the blue jeans and that kind of thing. Warren: It feels to me like we have our own version of conventional dress. Farrar: We have conventional dress, absolutely. There is a uniform, and it's very, very evident, maybe much less evident to the kids, to the students. When you look at the way our kids dress at football games, it blows my mind. Our kids aren't there interested in a football game. The girls, honest to God, dress as if they have just walked out of Vogue or Cosmopolitan, but in the college chic. I've seen girls show up in dresses that I would be embarrassed for anybody to be seen in. It ain't leaving much to the imagination. And the guys-it really does crack me up. I don't know if you noticed this, but there is a studied and calculated casual dress that the guys in particular effect to suggest that they have not taken time to get dressed, but in fact have thought out and planned everything about what they've put on. They put on the hiking boots and socks with shorts, with a Oxford shirt and a tie. So they've got the shirt and tie, shorts, and the outdoor gear, and that doesn't happen by accident. You don't do that accidentally. There is that studied casual. You can see I've given this some thought and observation, but there is a conventional dress here, and you really do see the party T-shirts and the T-shirts everywhere, and hats, of course, are huge, and people become identified by their 28 party shirts and by the hats they wear, and whether it's blue jeans or shorts is really irrelevant. Warren: I wondered about that attire your talking about, the shorts, the Oxford shirt, and the tie. Are those kids coming out of Futcher's class? Farrar: Some are, yeah. Warren: Because I came across a picture of that situation that looked like it was maybe ten years old, and I said to myself, "Oh, he just came out of Futch's class." Is that a reasonable assumption to make? Farrar: Well, you can't go too far. I think, because of where those guys come from, and they're probably some of the Phi Delt, KA, SAE, that kind of group, the more traditional Southern guys for whom that dress is in, and they're likely to be some of the same guys who are going to be gravitating to a Futch kind of thing. So there's probably a loose relationship there, but a lot of it is fraternity. Now, you wouldn't see the Phi Gamms necessarily dressed like that, because they tend to be more Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, New Jersey. I see some kid from New Jersey in a white Oxford shirt and a striped tie. So a lot of it is just their background and where they're coming from. But it is hilarious. I just want to see some guys in blue jeans and just plain old regular T-shirts in the stands cheering the football team as opposed to this parade. I guess out in nature it's the mating dance of one species or another of bird as they fluff their feathers and do all the preening and stuff. It's hilarious, it really is. It's a stitch. It's so predictable, so predictable. Then again, I guess most of us are. But the kids like to think that they're not, but you can go to the bank on it. It's hilarious. By the way, I think our kids are well dressed by most college and teenage standards. All the T-shirts and stuff aside, I think they look pretty darn good. I mean, it is a comfortable, casual sort of dress that they have, and it's not altogether 29 unattractive. I think the styles today are much looser and are aimed that way for the young people. I think they're in step, they're in sync. Lord, I don't have any problem with it. I think they look just fine, by and large. Warren: But you don't see the jeans with the big holes in them here. Farrar: Not really. You do, some of the kids. Warren: Not much. Farrar: No, not much, not as a rule. Warren: They're probably Lexington high school kids who come through. Farrar: Probably my blue jeans. I've got the holes in the blue jeans that I like to wear. Warren: You also mentioned the people in the football stands. When did Lee McLaughlin die? He had died by the time you were on the team, right? Farrar: I can remember it vividly because Lee and I went to Episcopal together. It was the summer before my senior year at Episcopal, so it would have been the summer of '69, I think, because I graduated from high school in 1970. Yeah. I had plans of coming to W&L and playing for Lee McLaughlin. That's what I wanted to do. Warren: So what happened there? What was it like to come and not play for Lee McLaughlin? Farrar: It was awful. It was awful. There was a real void. And I don't mean this. I'm going to say some things I probably shouldn't be on tape as saying, but it was really awful. It was not anybody's fault. Lee McLaughlin died in the summer before. I mean, this is a month before football is to start. So what happened was, they got Buck Leslie to come in as interim coach. Warren: Let me ask you. Would you rather me turn it off or are you willing to talk on record here? Because I think this is a real important period, and you're the only person I've talked to who lived through this. 30 Farrar: Well, I want you to hit the stop for just a second. [Tape recorder turned off.] What happened was, they got-again, I'm may not be getting it quite chronologically correct, but I think I am. Buck Leslie was asked to come in as interim coach. Warren: And he had been assistant coach? Farrar: Right, an assistant coach, and a W&L alumnus and a Rockbridge County native. Buck had spent most of his life in this area and at W&L, and Buck is a wonderful guy. But what happened was that, because of the timing, it was just awful timing, we struggled, absolutely struggled through some pretty dismal seasons when I was here because of the lack of real leadership to pull the program out of the doldrums after Lee died. It's just a leadership void in all of that, and we just didn't have the right people. As great people as they were, we weren't able to get the right person to be the leader, to be the head football coach. I think Buck Leslie was interim coach for like two years, and then Bill McHenry took it over for maybe two or three years. It didn't work out with Buck, and it didn't work out with Bill. Bill, for all of his great personal qualities and points, Bill wasn't the guy to lead it, either. There was a lot of cheerleading, but no substance within the program, and I can say that was the case with Buck and with Bill. It wasn't their fault. They just weren't the right people at the right time to pull this thing together. Nobody expects a Knubby or a Gary Fallon to drop dead all of a sudden, so there really weren't any contingency plans. Mike Walsh, if you want to look at it this way, Gary died at the end of April. Mike had three or four additional months to work with than W&L did when Lee McLaughlin died, and Mike had to make the same decision that Bill McHenry had to make when Lee died. 31 These situations paralleled each other in a frighteningly close manner. Mike, as it turns out, had the good fortune and the good sense and had the benefit of having the guy who has, at least for right now, turned out to be the best guy for the job. Frank, of course, was named, Frank Miriello was named interim, and then in the middle of the season, Fulton. That's the advantage that Mike Walsh had that Bill McHenry didn't, that he had a guy right there on staff who was able to do it. I mean, there are plenty of people who weren't sure that Frank was going to be the guy, but as it turns out, happily for everyone, they had a fine season, that they dedicated to Gary, and it looks bright for the future. So Mike dodged a bullet there. Everybody came off looking good. The problem after Lee died was that we floundered in those next four or five years, however long it was, before Gary came. We just didn't have a real football head coach. We had nice people, good assistant coaches, but they weren't head coach material, and the result was that the football experience for me-I can only speak to myself, although I know others who shared the same feeling-was a real, real disappointment. There was no real morale, no sense that you're really moving the program forward. It was just bad timing. But I personally had the outlet of lacrosse at the same time. While football was taking a nose-dive, football was headed toward its nadir, and we were headed towards the zenith of the lacrosse program. So that was good for me personally. It wasn't like I just had football that was going down the tubes. But the McLaughlin thing and the years after his death were, in my mind, a real unfortunate low point. Nobody's fault. It was nobody's fault. It was just the way it happened. We just didn't have the right people at the right time, like it appears that Mike has had. Warren: Do I understand correctly? I came too late in the season, but do kids not go to football games anymore? 32 Farrar: There are more kids going to football games now than there were some years earlier. Warren: Because looking at. the pictures, it looks like there's nobody in the stands, hardly anybody. Farrar: We've got a fair weather, to some extent a fair weather fan base out there. You see it in basketball. I mean, it was hard this year. It was hard for a lot of people to go to the basketball games this year. It's always hard when you're not doing well. It's easy to go when you're having a great season. It's funny. People don't come to W&L because of the athletics, by and large. There are some kids who come who really want to play sports in college. But the rest of the people don't come because of sports. If they wanted to go to college for big-time college sports, they'd be going to the University of Georgia or Notre Dame or wherever. So they're not coming here because of the big-time major sports. They're coming here for other reasons. So on Saturday afternoon, it's not unusual to see that half-time or third quarter exodus, where people are headed back to their farmhouses or the fraternity houses and they can hunker down and watch Georgia-Florida. I don't care how many buddies or good friends are out there. When those kinds of games come on TV, the kids from Georgia and Florida and the big-time college fans are going to go watch that game. That doesn't make a lot of sense. You'd think they'd stay and watch their friends and people play. And I'm sure a lot of the kids do, but you do see that exodus. Our students will come at some point early in the first quarter and stay through typically a half or three quarters, and then they're out of there. It's weird that way. But again, some of it is cultural. A lot of these kids grew up in places where there's so much focus on the big-time sports that it just becomes second nature to them. 33 Warren: We're at the end of the tape. Can we put one more in, because I'd like to talk about lacrosse. Farrar: Sure. [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is Mame Warren. It's June 19, 1996. This is tape two with Jim Farrar. All right, lacrosse. Tell me about lacrosse at Washington and Lee, which I know is a high point. Farrar: Well, W&L has had a much longer lacrosse tradition than a lot of people might suspect, and here again, Mame, I'm not going to get the exact year, but I do know that at some point in the late thirties, probably-excuse me, in the forties, in the forties, mid-forties, early forties, probably-W&L students, with the help of a couple of faculty members, created a lacrosse club that began to play UVA. These were predominantly kids who were coming down from Baltimore with that high school lacrosse experience. They created a club, and basically for a while coached themselves, and had some early success. I can't recite chapter and verse all the records and who beat whom when, but I do know that they would compete fairly favorably with some of the other larger schools, like UVA, where a lot of their classmates from high school were going out of Gilman or St. Paul's or wherever. So they're competing in that very small lacrosse fraternity, that very small circle of people who played the game even then. So we got started in the forties. In the fifties and the sixties, I'm trying to think now when people came. We had a guy named Wilson Fewster for a year or two who was a coach. Gene Corrigan coached at W&L for a year or two, and Gene is now the commissioner of the ACC and is president of the NCAA this year. Gene was athletic director here for a year, just under a year, before he got the UVA job. So Gene was very knowledgeable 34 about soccer and lacrosse. Then Bob McHenry, Bill's brother, was lacrosse coach for a number of years. Then Dick Szlasa, S-Z-L-A-S-A is how you spell his last name, Dick Szlasa came on the scene. Now, through those forties and fifties and sixties, W&L had lacrosse teams, not ultracompetitive, but we had all-Americans. Bill Clements was 1950. He was an all-American, was most valuable goalkeeper in the country, the top goalkeeper in the country, and we had other fine players during the course of those years. You can take the rise of the modern "lacrosse program in the early seventies through the early part of the eighties, through the decade of the seventies and the early part of the eighties, and you can attribute, the first person that you can point to that really created a successful lacrosse environment was Dick Szlasa. Dick was lacrosse coach from the late sixties through '72, through the spring of '72, and it was Dick Szlasa who was responsible for recruiting and bringing to W&L Sam Englehart and Skip Lichtfuss, Skeet Chadwick in particular, and some other guys who became very strong supporting players. But those were very important people, when you look at the decade of the seventies, because Sam Englehart was-all of these guys were very fine high school lacrosse players. As it happens, all three of those guys came from Towson High School, and Dick was able to interest them in W&L and they came to W&L. Sam came and joined a mediocre team, and then in the early seventies-and I came in the fall of '70, all of this started in the fall of '70, because in my freshman class, as it turns out, were to be three first-team all-American players, and all of those players are now in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. So it was Englehart, then with some of these guys who came in in 1970, that the nucleus of the great-and I say that just in quotes-the "great" teams, if you want to look at it in the context of Division I competition. There wasn't Division I as we know it today. It was called university 35 versus college level. We were in the university division, or what is known today as the Division I level, for my last two years. The first two years, it was college level, and then we made a jump up in divisions. So those guys came, and then subsequently there were other people who came-Tommy Keigler, Robbie Lindsey, David Warfield, Charlie Brown, Bobby Clements, Bill's son. Every one of those people became all-American lacrosse players here. We had seven my senior year. There were seven all-Americans in the 1974 season alone that ranged all the way from honorable mention to first team. In the spring of '72-actually, it was in early June. I'll never forget, I was home. School was out, and I was at home. This is Saturday morning. Dick Szlasa came to my house, and he sat down with my father for a couple hours outside. They had become close friends. Dick had told him that he was leaving Washington and Lee to become head coach at Navy. (You spending so much time in Annapolis, you know what that meant for a lacrosse coach.) If you were tapped to be the head coach at Navy, you weren't going to look around. If you were at W&L and you had a chance to be head coach at Navy, you'd probably be nuts to pass it up. So Dick left and became the head coach at Navy, and his story ultimately had kind of an unhappy ending there. He didn't fit in, and it didn't work. His marriage broke up, and it ended up not being a good thing for Dick. But anyway, Dick Szlasa left, and then W&L had to go out and hire a new lacrosse coach. We had enjoyed a lot of success in those couple of years. We'd gotten in the NCAA tournament, which was a huge step. Here W&L wasn't supposed to be able to compete with anybody, and now we're playing at the top level. So Jack Emmer is named lacrosse coach. Warren: What's his name? Farrar: E-M-M-E-R, Jack Emmer. Jack had gone to Rutgers. He was a wide receiver for Rutgers on their football team and played lacrosse, and I think ended up being a 36 third-team all-American defenseman at Rutgers. When he came to W&L, he was coaching at Cortland State in upstate New York. He was coaching the lacrosse team there, and in that spring of '72, they had just pulled off a huge upset in the tournament and beaten UVA, and that was a big deal, a real big deal. So Jack came, having earned his-he had good credentials at that point. Jack Emmer wasn't a hell of a lot older than we were. Jack would have been in his mid- to late twenties when he came. And here's another very interesting parallel. It parallels our current coach, Jim Stagnitta, at least to my way of thinking, because they're so much alike. Maybe I'll have time to talk about that later. Jack came in '72, and Jack's from Long Island and he talked just like a kid from Long Island. It was really kind of neat. You had all these guys, these public and private school kids out of Baltimore and you had a few kids from Manhasset and some kids from Long Island and other places and a couple of kids from Pennsylvania, who could hardly translate what this guy was saying. We didn't know what to make of this thing. But he showed people pretty quickly what was going to happen. Practice started in January at that point, and it would just be running for about a month. Jesus, he worked us harder than anybody could ever imagine. Dick Szlasa had worked his teams pretty hard, but Emmer took it to another level. Jack, he didn't come here to mess around. He came here to win, and to win at a big level. So he just absolutely beat us to death, which is great. It was the best thing that could have happened to us. Jack was smart enough to not over coach the team, because he had some really phenomenal talent on that team. He just basically let the guys go out and play. Those two years, we did not lose a regular season game for two years and were ranked very high nationally. In my senior year, we were ranked as high as number two, and we finished ranked third in the nation. Lost in the semifinals to Hopkins by one goal, 10 to 11. That and a dime won't get you a cup of coffee today. But if you 37 wanted to look at a point, that was the ultimate high point. No W&L team has ever done better than that. You know, it's really interesting. We were all in the right place at the right time. W&L's national lacrosse fame-we've always had a tradition of lacrosse at W&L since the forties, and there are a lot of well-respected people who played lacrosse here, and W&L is a known name in the lacrosse world. But when you look at it in the broad context, that period, the early seventies, is really just a very narrow window, when all the right people were together at the right time. Now, you can say, "Well, that's the way it's usually supposed to happen." You can't really have those sorts of dynasties forever, unless you're a Hopkins or those kinds of programs that have been established long before ours was. But a lot of people got caught up in that and tend to forget what was-not paid attention to what was happening to the game of lacrosse in that period of time. Warren: And what was that? Farrar: It was changing dramatically. At that point when I was playing here, we used to beat Carolina like a drum and Duke, Snoresville. That was no big deal. Virginia was a different story, and other teams like-well, like a Cortland State. Washington College was always tough. But some of the schools that are now big players in the game weren't then. Take the ACC, for example. Virginia and Maryland were the teams then, and after a while, it wasn't long after I graduated, Carolina decided they wanted to be a player in the game. So they went out and they hired Willie Scroggs, who came down from Hopkins. He was an assistant there. And within a few years, they had bought themselves a national championship team. And I don't say that cynically. They decided that they would give some scholarship help, and it didn't take many. In a sport like lacrosse or some of the smaller, less visible sports, not the football and basketball, it just doesn't take that many kids. So over a three-year period of time, if 38 you gave, let's say, three or four full scholarships, or an amount of money that totaled to about four full scholarships, you could dole that out and you could attract kids. What high school guy in his right mind-you start to see the Chapel Hill campus. They're throwing a few thousand bucks your way. You're a blue-chip lacrosse player out of St. Paul's or wherever. You're going to a beautiful place like Carolina, it's coed, it's warm down there throughout the spring. Sure, you'd take that in a heartbeat and go, especially if you've got a guy like Willie Scroggs, who was a good coach and people knew. So Carolina very quickly built themselves a program. So you see what's happening. W&L had hit a point up here in the seventies, and meanwhile Duke and Carolina and other schools are deciding that they want to become a player in the game. We hit our head on the ceiling in '72, because we weren't going to be able to give any money to it and we weren't going to have that kind of situation forever. So we, probably unwittingly, hit our head on the ceiling. We weren't going to go any further, because the university wasn't going to change its philosophy to become a Division I team. We made that decision as an institution in 1954 after the football cheating scandal, when President Gaines said, "That's it. No subsidized athletics." That was it. So here we were, twenty years later, still in a non-subsidized era, but we had competed at the very top level in this sport, which was only then beginning to go to a higher level, you see. So what happened was, we had our high water mark just about the point where the game then started to increase in popularity and momentum across the country, and that was it. Jack had some other good seasons, but by the mid-eighties it was clear that the program wasn't going anywhere, and he went to Army. They hired Dennis Daley, who's a wonderful guy and he's a great high school level coach, but he wasn't a college level coach, with the expectations that people had on him 39 here. And so then Jim Stagnitta was hired, and he has brought W&L back very much into respectability in Division Ill, which is where we should be and which is where we're going to stay, I guess. Warren: So the legacy of the cheating scandal goes on. Farrar: Well, yeah, because it affected-let's just say for the heck of it that there wasn't a cheating scandal. I suspect we would have gotten out of subsidized sports pretty much shortly thereafter anyway, just because of the way all of those things were going to go. Back in the fifties, it just wasn't like it was today. I mean, that's forty years ago, and the pressures and the money, all that's changed. We couldn't have competed at that level. What might have happened, though, you see, is, if we had remained subsidized, we might have made a decision at some point that we would de- emphasize the football and basketball and those major sports and taken the subsidization maybe at another level, like a lacrosse program. And if we had done that, we could still be competing today at Division I. This is where Mike Walsh would say, no, we couldn't, or perhaps we couldn't, because now if you want to compete in Division I, you have to have certain league affiliation and certain things have to happen with the other sports. But on paper it would be possible for us to compete at Division I in lacrosse and maybe at tennis, but not at the other levels. Take, for example, Georgetown University. You don't hear a whole lot about a lot of their other sports. The basketball is the sport, and that's at the highest level of Division I. Their football teams we used to play, but because of NCAA regulations, we no longer play them because they had to get into different conference affiliation in order to maintain this kind of Division I status. So in '\, essence, it really is the tail wagging the dog. It's the basketball program at Georgetown that dictates what's going to happen to every other program. 40 Now lacrosse is Division I. Dave Urich [phonetic] came from Hobart to start Georgetown's Division I lacrosse program. He's doing a pretty good job of it. They're in the top fifteen, but he hasn't gotten Georgetown at the tournament yet. All that's by way of saying, you look at the teams that are playing Division I lacrosse today. Notre Dame, and that's being coached by Kevin Corrigan, Gene Corrigan's son. Dave Urich at Georgetown. You look at the top fifteen, Princeton is national champion two years in a row, UVA. It's still a relatively small fraternity of well-known schools, but they're some new players in there now. W&L was in there in the early seventies, and through the mid- and late seventies, too, because Jack had some pretty teams then, too. Warren: Well, I'm glad you had your moment of glory. Farrar: Yeah. Nobody who played then will deny that it wasn't just a hell of a lot of fun. I mean, it really was. And those teams themselves were legitimate. Those were legitimate Division I teams. We could play with anybody in the country for a while, and then these other programs began to come about and we weren't going anywhere else, so it just naturally hit a decline. But it was a hell of a lot of fun. Warren: Thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about? I feel like this is usually about the limit somebody's willing to go is a couple of hours. Farrar: There are probably a lot more things we could talk about, and I'd be happy to, but I better get back to the sweatshop. Warren: Definitely. Now that I know things that you know that I didn't know you knew, I'm going to be calling on you, definitely, when I'm writing captions, for sure. I guess you're going to be real helpful at that, I hope. Farrar: Happy to. Warren: Thank you, Jim. Farrar: Thank you. Warren: This has really been fun. I've learned a lot. 41 Farrar: Good. [End of Interview] 42