BOB FISHBURN July 4, 1996 — Mame Warren, Interviewer Warren: I'm Mame Warren, and you are Bob Fishburn. It's the 4th of July. We're working hard on this holiday, and we're in Lexington, Virginia. And you are class of 1955. Now, I did a little bit of homework on you. I don't like to learn too much about people before, because I want to learn it from you. But I did look at the Calyx, and I got real excited when I looked at the Calyx because you look like you were really involved socially. Fishburn: Socially? Warren: Socially. I was real excited, because it listed that you were in the Mongolian Minks and the 13 Club. Fishburn: Both of which, as far as I can tell, were clubs where you met and partied once a year and had your picture taken once a year, so that's two times a year. Warren: Will you please explain that to me? I found references. Tell me what it meant to be a Mongolian Mink. How did you become a Mongolian Mink? Fishburn: I was asked. I don't know whether or not it was a mutual back-scratching society or not. I really can't tell you much about either group, except it was something of a minor thrill to be a member. But I'm very serious when I say my memory tells me that we had one party—in both cases—one party a year, and then we had our picture taken together. And I think with the Mongolian Minks, the sillier you could be in the 1 picture, the better, and I think you saw that in the Calyx, too. I have no idea what the purpose was, except to get together and drink. Warren: But it was by invitation. Fishburn: It was by invitation, oh, yes. Warren: Was there a special place you met? Fishburn: There were lots of crazy clubs. I don't know if you—the Gully Bridge Hunt Club back in the early fifties. Warren: Were you in that? Fishburn: No, I was not. Warren: What did that mean? Fishburn: That was restricted to West Virginia guys, Gully Bridge Hunt Club. I have no idea what it was. There was a Civil War battle fought at Gully Bridge. But anyway, these guys got together and formed the Gully Bridge Hunt Club, and I guess they knew what they were about, but no one else did. There were a lot of secret societies, too, not like Virginia, where you didn't until you died and your fellow club members came and put whatever it was on your grave. It wasn't that secret, but there were some secret societies where you had membership and you weren't supposed to tell you were in them. I was in one of those. Warren: But you probably wouldn't tell me. Fishburn: No, I would tell you. I'm near enough to—I have intimations of mortality, so I'd probably tell you. Warren: Well, the 13 Club, what was that about? Fishburn: The same thing. I have no idea. I really don't remember ever getting together much. I remember it was purely a social club of supposedly like-minded individuals, but we met so infrequently that it was hard to tell whether we were like- minded or not. Warren: Were there specific places that these groups met? 2 Fishburn: No. I mean, we had no secret handshake or club rules or club roots, as far as I know. I really can't tell you. The seine that is my mind has sifted out those minor details. I really don't know. Warren: I have a photograph of a bunch of guys standing around in pajamas, some kind of a pep rally or something, and then there are some people standing off to the side who have 13s on their back and they're all carrying paddles. Do you know what that's about, what's going on there? Fishburn: There was a paddle with a 13 on it. I think it was just the emblem of the 13 Club. As far as I know, the paddle was not for any kind of hazing or any club ritual. Back then, a lot of organizations had whatever it was the organization was on a paddle, because it acted as a plaque on a wall or something like that. I think that was totally innocent. I don't think it meant anything. Warren: So it wasn't functional? The paddle wasn't functional? Fishburn: No, those paddles were not functional. I remember seeing a lot of paddles with a lot of inscriptions and organizations and emblems and things like that on them. It was just because the paddle was something of a symbol of—it wasn't even a symbol of the process. It was just a convenient way of putting an emblem on something. Lacrosse paddles, like lacrosse sticks, I've seen those on walls when people didn't even know what lacrosse was, so I guess it was a safe thing. Warren: Well, there seems to be a lot of that kind of thing in the background of photographs, and, of course, it intrigues me. I'm wondering what am I seeing here. Fishburn: No, there was some paddling in the fraternities. I will not deny that. I can remember only one case where there was paddling in the Phi Delta Theta house, and that was because we were not sufficiently solemn and we lined up—I think there were thirteen of us, thirteen pledges. It was during the pledge period, and we added a Sigma Nu to the end of the class and chanted into the sanctum sanctorum in the basement of the Phi Delta house with this one extra guy in the back, and they thought that was such 3 a terrible thing that we did get paddled at that point, one each from your upperclassmen, your big brother. I thought, I remember at the time, that my big brother was a little bit too, shall I say, attentive to his duties. But as far as I know, there was no paddling for initiation, at least in my experience. There was paddling for really bad transgressions of the secrecy of the fraternity, all of which sounds very silly now, but it was taken quite seriously back then. We had handshakes and secret chants and omnia thorestia [phonetic] dinoria [phonetic]. I have no idea what that was, but I remember it to this day, and I'm probably telling something on the national Phi Delta Theta Society may come down and rip my membership out from under me like a rug. I don't have any idea what it was, but we had to learn it. It was mock mock ceremonial, I guess. I think all that has been dropped, and nowadays if you want to get in a fraternity, you don't have to go through anything, except maybe a beer bust. Warren: I don't know. I think they take it all very seriously. There's a lot of ritual around here. Fishburn: They still take it seriously? Well, I'm all for ritual, provided it has some meaning behind it. I mean, I wouldn't go to church if I weren't for ritual. But some of it is done out of whole cloth. Warren: So you were Rushchairman. What does that mean? Fishburn: I was Rushchairman my sophomore year, and I think it was only because at that point in my life I could remember names. Thank God I don't have to now. And that was also the year we got something like five pledges, four or five pledges. I think we called them "The Fearless Five." And then they went and recruited some pledges from other classes, which didn't sit very well with Red Square. You know which Red Square is. Warren: Tell me. 4 Fishburn: Well, Red Square was the one, two, three, four fraternities right in front of the campus, in front of the wall, and politically it was Red Square versus the rest of the fraternities. I don't know when it started. I don't know historically when it started. But Red Square was a political entity and the rest of the campus were "the other fraternities," Red Square, I assume, thinking it was comprised of fraternities better than any others on campus. It was one, two, three, four, five fraternities, just the ones centered on Henry Street. Warren: Do you have any idea why it's called Red Square? Fishburn: You know, that's a very good question. I don't know. It could have been the predominantly red brick, I don't know. I don't think it has any political overtones, as such, but I've just always known it to be called Red Square. Warren: It's an intriguing name, and nobody seems to know when and where it started. Fishburn: It has nothing to do with the Communists, I can assure you that. If there was a socialistic thought back in the early fifties in Red Square, I would have been very surprised. Warren: Well, it goes all the way back to when the houses were first built. When they were built, they talk about it being in Red Square. Fishburn: It's very much more a red square now than it was then with all that extra brick work. But then all the houses were red. That's the only thing I can tell you. Weren't they all red brick or is Beta and Pi—what's the one on the street— Warren: Today they're all red brick. Fishburn: Today they're all red brick. Warren: And I think, at least in my time, they always have been. Fishburn: And some of the outlying fraternities were white clapboard or white brick, etc. That's the only thing I can think of. Warren: Perhaps that truly is the distinction. 5 Fishburn: Sometimes, you know, they say don't look for any hidden—don't dig too deep in history, because a lot of times it's exactly what it seems to be. So it could be that they were just red brick buildings, I don't know. Warren: Let's go back to being Rushchairman. I went to a school where there were no fraternities, no sororities. I'm getting my whole education about fraternities here, honestly. You're the first Rushchairman I've talked to. Educate me, please. Fishburn: Well, you'd have to almost do a history of fraternities in colleges and universities throughout the country to understand the fraternity system. Back in the early fifties, remember, there were no facilities for non-fraternity members, so I imagine the sign-up percentage among undergraduates was well over 70 or 80 percent. I don't know what it was, but I knew very few people—and that was my fault— but I knew very few people who were not fraternity pledgees in my class. The only thing they had they could call their commons was the old student union building, which is just the corner of what we call the student complex now. You know, the main dining room, the meeting rooms, all of that was not there. It was just that one student union building on the corner, that still exists, but it had a commons meeting room in the bottom and then it had activities like Calyx and Ring-tum Phi and other student-run activities around it. But other than that, there was no place for a non-fraternity guy to go. There was not as much housing in town as there is now. Now, I've heard that some of the non-fraternity people did very well, but from the point of view of those of us in fraternities, we could not imagine how you could get along socially if you weren't in a fraternity. That was the village within the university, the small place within the university where you made your friends and where you tested yourself and were tested, and it made a certain amount of sense at the time. I like what Bud Robertson said in the session. He said, "It's very unfair and probably very deceptive to judge history through our lenses." So we really have to go back and talk 6 about the context of what the social life on campus was in the early fifties through the mid-fifties, which is the only time I know it. I would also have to say that—and I'm neither bragging nor complaining. If anything, I'm complaining. I came to W&L when I was barely seventeen, and I graduated when I was twenty. So in the average, I was about two years, one to two years younger than the average, I think. I think most people came when they were seventeen or eighteen and graduated when they were twenty-one or twenty-two. I was a year and a half to two years younger, so I needed all the protective coloration or barricades from life or whatever you want to call it. I'd come from a single-sex prep school. I'd had very little contact, social contact, with either people in general or women. So this was my cocoon, and the fraternity was my cocoon within the cocoon. Now, that sounds terrible in today's rather broad coed perspective, but there was a lot of that back then, and as far as I'm concerned, I needed that cocoon. If I were to do it now, I'd probably do it entirely differently. But that was back when you were sent off to prep school. You didn't choose it. After I was sent off to prep school, the rest kind of followed naturally, the single-sex element. I couldn't imagine at sixteen going to a large university where there were, gulp, girls. I really wasn't ready for it. So I needed some place where I could go through the maturation process without stubbing my toes too badly, and I think the fraternity afforded that. Rushchairman, the Rushchairman was responsible for sending out letters before Rush Week, listening to all the rumors and rumors of rumors about people coming in the freshman class, getting pictures where possible, getting as much of a line on the incoming freshman class as possible so as to be able to beg, borrow, and steal them and get a good pledge class. As I said, we got five, so obviously I didn't do a very good job, or we didn't have a good, as they say, we didn't have a good rush. For whatever reason, I don't remember. 7 As I remember, back then the Phi Delts were pretty laid back. Their attitude was very laid back and, "Come to us. We know we're good. You come to us. We're not going to come to you," and maybe that's why we had such a bad rush. But I think we did end up with about four or five pledges from other fraternities, so we ended up with a class of nine or ten. It wasn't quite as bad as it sounded. I remember then that I could really look at somebody, and I don't know how in the world I ever did it, because, as I say, I've lost that touch whatsoever. The only good thing about being Rushchairman was learning that if you really concentrated and got outside your little shell of particularity, you could learn people's names. You could walk in a room and learn fifty names. Well, I had to for that, and, as I say, it must have just left me my junior year, because I've never been able to do it again as long I live. But there's nothing particularly arcane about Rushchairman. It's mostly organization. Warren: That seems to have been a really important—and still is—a really important aspect of this place is greeting one another and greeting one another by name. Fishburn: Mm-hmm. Warren: I've heard just amazing stories of the administrators and how they went about learning everyone's names. Fishburn: Oh, it was important. I remember in all of my classes, virtually all of my classes, which were small, except for freshman geology, which I think was the only thing you could call a large class and I think maybe it had 100 in it or 80. Warren: Really! Fishburn: Which was a big class back then. Geology, yeah, I think freshman geology, because there were so many people trying to avoid physics and the other sciences that they went for geology. It was a large class. But I remember even in that class, we sat in the same place every day, and within a week or two he knew our names. And that's unusual, unusual in that it was not a small class. 8 But in virtually every class I took at this place, the teacher knew my name, so there was no anonymity. There was no way of sneaking up late and saying, "Do you know who I am?" and slipping your blue book in among the others and running. You couldn't do that here. They knew who you were, and they knew a great many of your idiosyncrasies, too, which made it nice. It's not that much larger now, and I think it's probably still very much the same way. But that was one of the appealing things about it then, and now, the interaction between teacher and student. Warren: Were there any particular teachers who were important to you? Fishburn: Oh, yeah. You'll probably hear from the people in the fifties the standard ones. Because we're doing the Civil War this week, I remember Bean, Bill Bean, fighting the battles from trench to tree and back to muddy trench, and Jenks, Bill Jenks, on virtually anything. I mean, he was just such a masterful lecturer. Let's see. Warren: What made him a masterful lecturer? Fishburn: One of the things, Mame, was his—there were rumors about Bill Jenks, and I'm sure you'll run into this, too. There was a rumor that he was in the Secret Service during the Second World War and that he was a dashing person who ended up behind enemy lines. I don't think any of this is true, but of course it added to the intrigue surrounding him, the mystery surrounding Bill Jenks. But mostly, he was just a crackerjack lecturer. He could begin at the bell, and like so many good lecturers, deal with material that in someone else's mouth or hands would be dull as dishwater, and it would be fascinating. The high point of his lecture would come right before the bell, and when the bell rang, he put the period on it. Organization, perhaps too much organization for a lot of tastes, yes. But for me, I was a crimped note taker, and some of my very long words took no more than about three- quarters of an inch on a page. I mean, six-syllable words would be like that. So I was crimped and probably somewhat anal, and I loved to take notes and I loved the organization of it, and, boy, he was nothing if not organized. I mean, as you listened to 9 Bill Jenks, you would be going Roman numeral one, big A, little A, big B, A, B, Roman numeral two. He didn't have to say it. He didn't have to give you an outline. It was just the way he presented the material in such clear steps, and I admired him for that. But he in many other ways was a good teacher. He just knew his stuff. I liked Marshall Fishwick. There was kind of a secret pleasure in taking Marshall because he was a great iconoclast, and there weren't too many iconoclasts back in the early to mid-fifties. But he was kind of the apple cart upsetter, and those of us who took him liked his panache, I guess you'd call it, and the fact that he was irreverent toward General Washington and Mr. Lee's college, and there was very little irreverence back then, too. I feel that the period in the early fifties—and I'm speaking for W&L, because I can't speak for any other institution. I think the fifties everywhere have gotten a bad rap for being the Ike years, for one thing, and being somewhat conformist. I remember the big thing back then was apathy, you're all apathetic, you're probably not even going to vote when you get out of here, part of what was true. But I think in light of what happened in the sixties and seventies, again through their lenses, they have looked at the fifties as being kind of Ozzie and Harriet go to Camp Lexington. It was nothing like that. They make it sound like a bland, sleep-producing era, and it really wasn't. I mean, we had people telling us we were bland and nonconformists, and they told us every day, and we had our gadflies and we had arguments, and it was an alive place. But I must say, the difference to me—and I was writing editorials in the sixties and seventies—the difference to me, as I saw it from my little ivory tower perch in Roanoke, was that some of the civility that existed in the fifties was gone by the sixties, just the simple act of saying, "You and I can disagree, but we're not going to become ad hominem, we're not going to become strident." We're not going to try to attack each other, in other words. 10 There was a stridency that came in, and I think it came in to this place, too, in the sixties, because it permeated higher education, an intellectual smugness, a lack of civility, a stridency, that I don't remember ever seeing in the fifties. There was passion about opinions we held, but it was not I'm right and you're wrong. It's going to sound corny as hell now, in the light of everything that's happened in the last twenty years, but I think there was a belief in that we were all involved in a search for truth with a little T and that it was possible to find something close to the truth. Again, I think sixties and seventies kind of shot that idea in the saddle, and everybody's opinion was the same. In the fifties, you could still say, "Well, I'm right and you're wrong, but I'm not going to hold it against you," you know, in a civil way. Through argument and evidence, it became apparent that one position was stronger than another position, not all positions were equally valid, and I think that was probably the last time that one place, this place, could say we're in a—you know, Francis Pendleton Gaines could come out with some of the worst, I mean they sound like ringing clichés these days, but they were believed back then. Have you ever heard any of his speeches? Warren: Yes. Fishburn: They sound like 19th century Lincoln-Douglas debates, except they don't sound quite as good as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But all of those ringing phrases, by and large, were believed in. They sound—and I'm going to say it—a lot of them sound fatuous today, but they didn't back then. Again through our lens, they take on a different coloration, but I remember being absolutely—he was a stem-winder was Dr. Gaines, and I remember just being absolutely taken by his oratory. Of course, the older I got, the more I found out, you know, that this was his shtick, and the oratory didn't sound as good. But it meant a lot to an entering freshman in 1951 to have the president say the things he said, using almost Roman oratory as his 11 example. Nobody could get away with that today. I mean, he or she would be hooted off the stage. But it really meant something in 1951. Now, I've gotten pretty far afield. Where were we? Warren: I'm on the same field you are. Fishburn: Get me back on track, please. Warren: You know, I'm sorry that that's the case. I loved the group of speeches that I was able to listen to. That voice is passionate. Fishburn: Oh, it was—he came from a small town in South Carolina, and where in the world he learned to speak like that, I don't know. But he could alternately stir and charm in his speeches. The only person I've heard who could do that was the chancellor of Vanderbilt, when I went to one of my daughter's orientation sessions, and I thought, "This is Francis Pendleton Gaines' ghost, and he's right there." I've forgotten, Dr. Wyatt, maybe, from Vanderbilt. Whoever it was, he was wonderful. I could see the expression on the faces of these young Vanderbilt freshmen, and they were just rolling their eyes as if to say, "Where is this man coming from? This is 1978, for God's sake." And I was lapping it up. The nostalgic part of me was lapping it up, thinking, "How in the world is getting away with this in '78?" You can gather I'm something of a traditionalist, just a little bit of one. There's just so much about the period of '51 to '55 that I think it's precious. I don't mean precious in any other sense of the word than it was wonderful because it was so fragile. In retrospect, a lot of that fifties naiveté. The country was naive and the undergraduates were naive and I was naive, and maybe Eisenhower was naive, I don't know. But the country was stable. We had a sense of purpose. We agreed on most things. That situation was so fragile and so destined to be swept up in the turmoil of the sixties, and that's maybe why I look at it as I would look at a doll that's been smashed and trying to remember what it was like before it was smashed. I probably make it 12 seem much more beautiful than the doll really was. But there was something very precious about those times, because there was sort of a consensus. There were wild people around and they did wild things, but there was a consensus, and it kept wild people from really going absolutely totally bonkers. I mean, we had our problems. We had a freshman suicide in '51 in the freshman dorm. It wasn't that we were totally protected from the winds of life, but to a certain degree—that's why I call it a cocoon. To a certain degree, we were in a cocoon. We were in a beautiful place at a stable time, and as I said, it was a very fragile time, because I can read now about the things that in the fifties were precursors of the sixties and seventies. So it was on the edge of vast changes, some of which have been wonderful. I think the sixties and seventies made have been so much more an open, tolerant society, but I think we have traded some of these other things I've been talking about for the pact we made during the sixties and seventies. Want to get me back on track? Warren: You're on the track I want you to be on. I mean, I've got other questions. Fishburn: This has very little to do with W&L. Warren: Oh, no, it does. Fishburn: It really does. I remember—and you're going to laugh at me, but I remember it was just so—this I can remember as though it were yesterday—the Southern Collegians, a small, white, gentrified jazz band, sort of the kind that came down from Eddie Condon in New York. It was New Orleans jazz as filtered through Eddie Condon in New York. It was New Orleans by way of Chicago, New York, and back to the campus at W&L. It was Dixieland jazz. The Southern Collegians had a group that played jazz. They always played Dixie and they always played the Washington and Lee swing and they always played "When the Saints Go Marching In." I remember the first time I ever went to a keg party, and I got my beer and I had a date and I had my arm around my date and I had my beer in this hand and it was a 13 beautiful day. It was somewhere, I think, in back of, it may have been on the lawn on in back of a fraternity house. I was sitting there with the September sun shining down and my beer and this wonderful music coming that I absolutely loved, and I thought, "God, this is the only place in the whole world to be." Now, it was naive, but I remember it to this day, and I've never felt more in a place and of a place since then. I know it sounds silly, but it was powerful working on the psyche of a seventeen-year-old who didn't have a particularly good prep school experience. I mean, it was powerful. I thought, "I may never leave," which was to say I was really saying, "I may never grow up." Well, that's okay. We all have to go through that, too. Warren: Yeah, there are a lot of Peter Pans around. Fishburn: Oh, yeah. Warren: Did you ever consider going to school anywhere else, going to college anywhere else? Fishburn: Are we being honest here? Warren: Yes. Fishburn: You're forcing me to be honest. I didn't do too well at prep school. I'm a almost classic late bloomer, and I didn't catch on. I had a good enough background at Episcopal High School so that I could—I knew how to study. So my first year, I made As, Bs, and C-pluses. I think I was the only one in my class that was doing well. The Phi Delts were not known for their intellectual attributes. I had sophomore slump, classic sophomore slump, and then I caught on a little bit junior and senior. But the upshot of it was, I came into W&L with less than good grades, but my father knew Dean Gilliam. And you will find, I think, in your interviews that a lot of people who were late bloomers and having trouble getting in places attribute their being at W&L to Dean Gilliam, because he got a lot of legacies in and he got a lot of sons of people he knew in. Now, again that sounds preposterous in this day and age of egalitarianism, but it wasn't bad then because most of the people I know who got in 14 with help from Dean Gilliam did extremely well along the way. I mean, they were late bloomers, but they did well by the time they graduated, and they have been some of W&L's staunchest supporters. So Dean Gilliam, though he might not be considered a classic Democrat, he might even be accused of elitism, but I think he did a lot of good. There are a lot of people who are devoted to him, and I'm devoted to him because he got me in. A long way of saying I did not apply to any other place, because I probably couldn't have gotten in. I know I couldn't have gotten into the University of Virginia. My father was third in his class at Princeton, and I had no earthly hope of getting into Princeton. I mean, that was just out of the question. So my father drove me to Lexington one day, and we looked at the colonnade and he said, "Butch (as he called me), do you like the looks of this place?" I said, "Yes, Dad, I do. I think it's a beautiful campus." He said, "Good, because this is where you're going." It didn't mean that—I mean, if I'd had all Fs at EHS, I couldn't have gotten in. He knew I could do the work, but he also knew that I skipped the eighth grade and probably was not socially where I should have been and that probably held me back in my grades. By the time I got to W&L, I was still very much susceptible to peer group pressure, more so than your average entering freshman. Warren: So a while ago you implied that the idea of girls was a pretty strange thing for you by the time you got here. Fishburn: At sixteen, I am sixteen going on seventeen. Isn't there a song? She was sixteen going on seventeen or something. Anyway, I was seventeen going on sixteen, very, very immature. Warren: But within a year you're standing there with a beer in one hand and your arm around a girl. What did W&L have that enabled you to do that? 15 Fishburn: It enabled me to do that. It might not have enabled me to do anything after the beer ran out and the sun went down. I was okay as long as I had my fraternity brothers around me. Warren: Where did the girls come from? Fishburn: Oh, the girls came from, as you said today, the road schools. I dated one girl all the way through Washington and Lee, and I dated her my senior year at EHS. I met her my senior year at EHS and dated her all the way through W&L. So I had the same date from Mary Washington the whole time I was here, and wouldn't have had it any other way, because we were very close and that gave me a feeling a stability, too. If I'd have had to meet or court or go after or play games with any other girl, I probably would have tripped badly, but she and I had been through it. I did have a date at Sweet Briar my freshman year. It was one of those mixers that they used to have where the fraternities would bundle up their freshmen and take them over to one of the road schools and push them off into the middle of the room with some of the Sweet Briar freshmen or the Hollins freshmen or the Randolph-Macon freshmen. I met this gal who was a friend of my sister's. My sister was in her senior class at Sweet Briar, and I met this girl and just absolutely fell madly in love while I was dating my high school sweetheart. My big brother at the fraternity, who was supposed to be there to protect my interests, took her over and I never saw her again. Well, I saw her again, but she was always with him. So the fraternity big brother system failed me miserably, but it was supposed to help some other people. Let's see, he took my girl and he hit me unusually hard when he paddled me. If I hadn't known my big brother, in retrospect I'd say he was something of a crudball. But he wasn't. He was a wonderful person. Warren: Well, you're the first person to call someone a crudball. You have that honor. [Laughter] I need to turn the tape over.