Fleishman interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: I want to get back to the ZBT House. I want to hear more about what—
Fleishman: Well, the ZBT House, in my day—now, my son was here. He graduated in
1970. The ZBT House had changed some, but it was still a good fraternity house. My
stepson came here, graduated in ‘84. His mother was not Jewish, although she
converted to Judaism. Now, we were married for quite a while. In fact, she’s up here.
You going to be at any of these activities tonight?
Warren: Yes.
Fleishman: All right. She’s with me, she’ll be here. She and I were divorced in 19—
well, how long? We got married in 1969, and we were divorced in 1981, because she
had too many children, and I had too many children. There was always something
going on.

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         But when Henry was here, it was a pretty good house. In my day, it was a great
house. We did a lot of good things. We had a lot of good people. We weren’t much on
sports. We didn’t have too many athletes. There’s Jay Silverstein, whose name I saw just
a few minutes ago in the Calyx, was my roommate my senior year. He was a runner. He
was on the track team. Jean Friedberg, who was my roommate, was the manager of the
basketball team for two years.

         We had people who were—I won’t say intellectual, I don’t know. We had a
couple that were intellectual. We had another brother named Ed Cory, who was class
of, let’s see, ’43, I guess. He became ambassador to Ethiopia, and he was a UPI—United
Press International—main correspondent for Europe and then for North Africa during
World War II. We had a lot of people that wound up in interesting things, and they
were interesting people. They were smart and they were fun.
Warren: Was it just clear-cut, the Jewish guys went into Jewish fraternities? Were there
any Jewish students who went into any other fraternities?
Fleishman: Nobody that declared themselves as actively Jewish were even rushed by
the other fraternities, and, of course, I can see how that was a—now, in 1970, when my
son graduated, I think it was still like that. But when Les was here, it was not.

         I went to the national convention. I went to two ZBT national conventions, one in
1938-39, in San Francisco. Charlie Thalimer and his family took me with him, and paid
all the expenses for me. I couldn’t have gone otherwise. The idea was, his brother was
getting married out there, and I was to go to the fraternity convention and look after all
the—I was the house manager of the fraternity house for three years. I didn’t tell you
that. In addition to being—well, the good thing about that is, I got free room and board,
see, so again, being a poor boy, I didn’t have to pay all those things.

         But we went out to the convention, and then there was no question. There was
nothing going on. But in 1946 or ’47, my wife and I went to the convention in New
York, and there were like 1,200 delegates there, and there were only six of us—one of

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them was me—that said we didn’t feel that ZBT should declare itself non-sectarian. We
felt that it should maintain itself as a Jewish fraternity, and if they wanted to take other
people, they should, because this way they’re not fish or fowl.

         There are still ZBT fraternity houses around. Some places they’re all Jewish;
other places they’re not. I don’t know that that’s important, and I don’t know that it’s so
different, but in the days of the thirties, when I was here, it was very important to me
because I didn’t know—or I did because of our business and because of the little town I
lived in, I didn’t know much about what other types of people did, because my home
life was different. And we maintained that pretty well. We had a good housemother,
Mrs. Neely, when I was here. We maintained a great deal of decorum. We weren’t wild
with our parties and things like that. We used to have a big party at semester break,
where we invited the whole campus, and we used to get six or seven hundred people
come in. We had what they call "PJ" now—we used to make purple passion—grain
alcohol, grape juice, and some fruit, and it was delicious stuff. It tasted like good fruit
juice, until you had about three, and then you’d wind up stiff as this tabletop. I used to
kid people. We’d have the whole campus in, and this stuff was so good, they’d drink,
and then the next morning, we’d find them stretched out on the lawn. We could pick
them up by their ankles. They were still stiff.

         And when Henry was here, ZBT was still a force, and they were still good
academically. My son was Phi Beta Kappa, too, and I’m very proud of him. He’s a big-
time surgeon in North Carolina. He went to Washington and Lee, and he had a summer
job with one of the teachers in the chemistry department, who wrote a book. Henry
helped him with the book, his sophomore-junior year. He got a lot out of Washington
and Lee, but, unfortunately, three years ago, his daughter, my granddaughter, was
rejected when she applied to Washington and Lee, and it made him very unhappy and
me, too.

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         Of course, again, I started to tell you about the ZBT convention. I didn’t finish
that. I got up on the floor, one of six or eight people, and protested the fact that they
wanted to go non-sectarian. I told you, I’ve always been, you know, Sancho Pancho.
I’ve always been spinning at windmills about things that looked unimportant. I’m
working on a couple of them right now. Trying to get a—we don’t have a placement
bureau at Tri-County Tech, and this is a community college, and that’s what they’re
there for, is to train people for jobs.
Warren: I’m intrigued by these parties. You were the house manager?
Fleishman: Yeah. For three years.
Warren: So were you in charge of making sure that things went smoothly at these
parties?
Fleishman: Well, no, that was the social manager. My job was the financial and the
food. I’d pay the bills, and make sure the mortgage payment went out, pay the
housemother, pay the help. That kind of stuff, buy the food, or supervise the buying of
the food. Making sure that we had enough food when we had people in. We used to
have to have assessments. We had the dances to pay for the extra food for the dates.
Things like that. So my job was budgets and accounting. And we did pretty well. We
managed to pay the mortgage payment every month while I was here.

         ZBT was a pretty cohesive group in my day. When I was there, we had twenty-
four brothers and four cars. When my son was there, they had thirty-two cars and
twenty-four brothers. And that’s the truth. Everybody had an automobile. There were
only four people with automobiles. One of my fraternity brothers, a man named Don
Stein, whom I still see, he’s retired, lives down in Florida, and has had a pretty tough
life, I guess, personally. I see him every time I go to Florida. Played golf with him once.
My golf is no good anymore since I’ve got arthritis. But anyway, Don always had the
latest, greatest thing in new cars. His folks had something called Dutchmill Candies in
Chicago, which is like Fannie Farmer on this part of the world.

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         I’ll tell you one of my other great adventures. While I was in the band, I had a
date with a young lady. Her name was Louise Hannock [phonetic], and she went to
Sweet Briar. She was from, I don’t know, one of the fancy Oranges in New Jersey—
South Orange, East Orange—I lost which one. She came as my date to one of the—or
maybe it was Homecoming weekend. Of course, I was in the band, so I couldn’t sit with
her anywhere. We always had a cocktail party at the fraternity house before the game,
and she got absolutely smashed. I couldn’t sit with her, except for the half, after we got
through marching. I’d go up and spend a few minutes with her, and I went back to the
band. So when I got back to the fraternity house after the game was over, she was just
looped. And I figured the only thing to do was to get her back to Sweet Briar, and I
didn’t have a car. So Don had a brand-new Buick convertible, red, wire wheels, red
leather. It was ivory-colored, gorgeous. And the only thing I could do was to beg Don,
see if he would let me—this was when we had the four cars—if he’d let me take her
back to Sweet Briar in his car.

         So I took her back, but on the way back, she got sick and threw up all over the
car. He never knew about that, and I spent about an hour cleaning that car up when I
got back. And he never knew about it. I told him last year when I was down in Florida
about it. He said, "I never knew that the car got messed up." So, you know, there were a
lot of little things like that, that you don’t even think about. But that was real nice of
him.

         The love of my life I met at Fancy Dress, I guess it was ’41.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Fleishman: All right. Well, she was just here with me last weekend. I went to Fancy
Dress. I was something on the Fancy Dress Committee. I think I did the publicity or
something. We had these very elaborate costumes. It was a Mardi Gras, some king
somebody’s court. If you looked in the Calyx, you saw them in there. Benny Goodman
played. It was really a big-time thing.

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         I didn’t have a date, so one of my fraternity brothers, who knew some people up
in the Washington area, was nice enough to get me a date from National Park College.
She was a young lady from Greensboro, North Carolina. Her name was Betty Changey
[phonetic], and I sort of knew her. She’d been there before on a couple of occasions.

         That Fancy Dress used to cost us a lot of money. It used to cost $50 assessment—
what with $25 assessment, you had to—the costumes cost us twelve dollars. You had to
pay six dollars apiece to rent the costumes. This is 1939. Now, it would be like $500
today. Maybe more, maybe $1,000. Had to send them a corsage, which was three
dollars. And then we had a couple of other things—you had an assessment in the house
for extra food, and then the tickets. So it was a big deal.

         So anyway, she came with me. She looked lovely at the Fancy Dress Ball. The
girls used to stay out in town at these boarding house-type places. Ladies would take
them in, and they had to be chaperoned. I took her, and she changed clothes. At the
Fancy Dress Ball, there was an intermission, then we’d go back to the dance for another
two or three hours. It ended like three o’clock in the morning.

         So we went back to the house, and I left her down in the living room while I
went upstairs to change out of my Fancy Dress into my tuxedo. When I came back
down, she was talking very earnestly with this guy over in the corner, and I said, "Betty,
who’s this?"

         She said, "This is my fiance, Stewart something," or whatever his name was, from
the University of Virginia.

         I said, "What the hell are you doing here with me?"
         She said, "Well, I knew that you had something important to do with Fancy
Dress, and I felt you needed an attractive date, and I thought I could do that for you."
         I said, "That was real nice of you." And I went back to the dance, and somebody
broke on me, and that was the last time I’ve ever seen her.

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         So I went back to the fraternity house feeling pretty low, and while I was moping
around there in our little activities and bar and whatever we had down in the basement,
one of my fraternity brothers, Louis Greentree, came up to me and said, "Fleish, I need a
favor."

         I said, "What is it, Spay?"
         He said, "I’m sick as a dog. I got the flu or something, and I’ve invited my cousin,
who goes to Madison College, to come to Fancy Dress with me, and she’s a real nice
young lady. Will you see that she gets home all right?"
         Well, that was a young lady named Eleanor Pinkus [phonetic], and I fell madly
in love with her. I went to see her every weekend. That was my senior year, and I had
unlimited cuts. We had Saturday classes, and I never went to Saturday classes. I was
always up there on Saturday. She lived in Norfolk, and when I graduated, I went to
work at Thalhimer’s in Richmond, and I used to go down to Norfolk every weekend,
and I asked her several times to marry me. She and I were together in Harrisonburg
that Sunday that Pearl Harbor happened. Of course, I just took her back to school
immediately, and told her I had to go.
         I had applied for the Navy the summer before, but they told me I couldn’t see
well enough to be an enlisted man, much less an officer. He said, "I’ll file your stuff, but
forget about it." So I knew they would need me, so I went back to Richmond that same
afternoon.
         Eventually, when they called me and I finally went on active duty in the Navy, I
was stationed in Norfolk for the first couple of months before they sent me up to
Harvard for supply school, and I asked her to marry me. I wasn’t rich enough for her
mother, I think, mainly. Her mother didn’t like me. I knew that. And so she left me
dangling.
         Anyway, in Norfolk, we went to those beach clubs at Virginia Beach. I don’t
know whether you’ve ever heard of them or remember them. I think they’re all gone

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now, but there used to be these beach clubs where you went for dancing and dining. It
was real nice. That’s all they did. You had a big dance floor.

         We were there one night, she and I, and some other people that I knew from
Norfolk, from the Navy, and there was a table about as big as this, and then there was a
table like over there, and there was this lieutenant jg sitting by himself. I went up to him
and I said, "What you doing here by yourself?"

         He said, "Oh, everybody’s dancing. I don’t have a date."
         I said, "Come on over and sit with us." And I introduced her to him, okay?
         So anyway, I finished my tour of Norfolk, and I left there like in May, went to
supply school, and left in September for the South Pacific. When I got to my ship, it took
two months for me to get to that destroyer I was assigned to, because nobody knew
where it was, and I was assigned to other ships until I got there. I had three big gray—
those old-timey gray mail sacks, in the corner of the ward room, waiting for me, and
everybody thought I was real important, because there was an ensign on board with all
his mail. My mother used to write me every day and sent me the Anderson newspaper,
and Pinky used to write me every day, and then I got all of them and put them in order.
         Well, Pinky—she was there every day for about two weeks, then every other
day, then every third day, then once a week. I had them all by the postmark. Then I got
the "Dear John" letter. And she married the guy that I introduced her to. So, you know,
that was the end of the world for me. I was seasick and scared to death, and that. It
almost ended the world, sure enough. Anyway, I sort of recovered. I’d really forgotten
about it, and I’d gotten married to somebody I met on a blind date, who was a WAVE.
         Anyway, my father and I were on our way to New York one time, and
something happened to the train in Washington. They used to change the trains from—
Southern Railroad used to change engines. They had to go on a Pennsylvania engine, or
something. We’re on the platform there, and here comes Pinky. I hadn’t seen her in

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twenty years, and we had a nice conversation. That was probably the early sixties, and I
hadn’t seen her since.

         Last year, when I was here for this end of World War II celebration, a person that
I knew, I didn’t remember, came up to me, she said, "Al Fleishman. I’m Jane Pinkus,
Eleanor’s cousin."

         I said, "Oh, I sort of remember you, Jane."
         She said, "Did you know that Sol died about three years ago? Here’s Pinky’s
phone number." So I called her up, and I’ve seen her a couple of times since. I think
that’s a W&L story, isn’t it? I guess.
Warren: It sure is.
Fleishman: They’d make a movie out of it. What else you want me to tell you?
Warren: That’s a great story. I love it.
Fleishman: It’s true. And I had her back here. She came back with me last weekend.
Warren: That’s why you forgot to come see me.
Fleishman: That’s what happened.
Warren: I wasn’t at all surprised.
Fleishman: Well, that’s life. I didn’t mean to be mean to you.
Warren: Oh, I know you didn’t. I knew you had other things on your mind.
         I’ll tell you something really important we haven’t talked about.
Fleishman: Tell me.
Warren: The Honor System.
Fleishman: Okay. It was a wonderful thing when I was here. You could leave anything
that you owned anywhere, and it would be returned to you. Of course, I’ve been like
that all my life. I’ve had many occasions when things happened where it would be of
value to me that I could tell somebody that they left it, or that they lost it, or look for
them. I still do that, and I think Washington and Lee had a lot to do with it. There was
no question. We didn’t have any problem about that.

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         We had two or three people dismissed on the Honor System. Of course, it was
hush-hush. Nobody ever said anything about it. I wasn’t on the Executive Committee.
Of course, I knew all the people on there, all the time. But I think it’s a wonderful thing.

         In my lifetime, I’ve thought a lot about the things that—especially when we were
here last week, about Washington’s canal stock. I think that’s a wonderful thing. It still
goes to value at W&L. And it’s hard to relate those precepts, or those principles, or
those activities, like what, you know, Robert E. Lee meant—like I told you, I saw real-
life Confederate veterans marching. I was born in the South, and I’ve lived in South
Carolina. It was a very poor state. Not any more, but it was. I know that the textile
people and the people that came there, that gave jobs to people after the war between
the states, were very important to the South, but they’ve really ripped a lot of folks off
along the way. Maybe not deliberately, but they did.

         But people can’t relate to something like Robert E. Lee. There’s just no way you
can relate to this guy that had the world by the tail and decided to follow his principles,
and to go with the South, whom I’m sure he felt couldn’t win, but because he thought
that was the right thing to do. I think that was inculcated in us a lot more than it is now.
However, W&L has a certain kind of person, even today, and you can see them. They’re
close, and they may fight one another and disagree while they’re here, but when they
get out, they’re very much the same kind of people. And I think the Honor System had
a lot to do with shaping that.
Warren: Last question for me. Anything more you want to say, you just go right ahead.
Fleishman: No, I said too much already. It’s ten after eleven. I think I told Helen Marie
I’d pick her up at 11:30.
Warren: Tell me, during the coeducation discussion, how did you feel on the issue?
Fleishman: What should I say? Lukewarm. It’s not like this thing just happened at
VMI or the Citadel. I think it’s wrong. Having been on a small ship for a long time, it
would have been very difficult had we had ladies on board. I didn’t say females; I said

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ladies. It would have been extremely difficult. I think that certain things in the military
are in a life-threatening situation, and I think women are good at a lot of things, you
know. We might as well—what should I say?—readjust the male physical being so that
they can have babies. That’d be interesting. I think there are certain things, for whatever
reason it is, and it’s not chauvinism, by any means, that women can’t do as well as men.
There are a lot of things I know that I can’t do as well as a woman.

         I think that they’ve added a lot to W&L. I talked to Bill Buchanan, who’s head of
your Department of Politics, and who’s a close friend of mine even today—hopefully
I’ll see him today—about this when it happened, and he told me about his classes, how
much they spruced up the fellows, that they made them dress nicely, and made them
more interested in academics, that the girls are so smart, that they make the fellows feel
funny, and they have to hit the books. I’m very proud of the females that I’ve met that
went to Washington and Lee. I think they represent a type of person that Washington
and Lee should represent. That’s all. What else you want me to tell you?
Warren: That’s just fine. That’ll do it.
Fleishman: Okay.
Warren: Well, I thank you, sir.
Fleishman: And I thank you, ma’am.
Warren: I’m really glad we got to get together. You’ve got wonderful stories. I’m just
tickled to have them.
Fleishman: I only got started on them. I could probably tell you another hour’s worth,
but I better not.
Warren: Well, thanks a lot.
Fleishman: Thank you, Mame.
[End of interview]

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