Frampton interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: A while ago, you said you had some kind of a moral crisis about the amount
of money that was being spent. Talk to me about that.
Framptom: Well, I did, and I kind of still do. I guess I have to digress a little and say
that I know now that there's people around—I've heard that there's a motion on some
faculty committee or something to move FD to spring break or something like that, and
some people in the campus community view FD as this kind of dead span of three or
four days in the academic year when you can't do anything in class because everybody's
at FD, and they're all drinking in preparation of FD. I think FD is, like I say, one of the
greatest traditions the school has going for it, especially in the social aspect, and I hope
they don't go changing anything that will kill off FD. So I hope FD continues, you
know, in the tradition it has been in the past few years of this big extravagant event, but
at the same time, the big extravagant event costs an awful lot of money for a four-
hour—you know, a three- or four-hour ball.

         So there's kind of that dichotomy there that you want this big event that
everybody loves, but I always felt guilty about having this kind of money—and it stems
from the fact, I think, the realization anyway, it stems from the fact that Leo and I, also
the other guy—I shouldn't just say Leo and I, because that would make it sound like it
was Leo and I and nobody else, but just Leo and I used to do all this together,
everything from building FD to everything else. We also built for Habitat for Humanity
on Saturdays. We used to go over to BV and build for Habitat on Saturdays, and our
senior year I wasn't very involved in it, but Leo was very involved in getting a Habitat

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house built in Lexington here. He and another girl put this together, and they pretty
much built the house with a crew of people, and now that's apparently a pretty strong
tradition.

         But when you go work on a Habitat house and you see these guys are building
houses for homeless or needy people for twenty-thousand bucks, and you turn right
around on Saturday afternoon after you've finished, you know, hanging vinyl side for
these people, and you turn around and you go work on the big gym, and you're
blowing seventy-thousand bucks for a four-hour party where you know seventy-five
percent of the people have had too much wine before they've gotten there anyway, it
just seems like this—I just always felt a little guilty about it. All this lumber we used to
get, you know, we'd go out and get lumber by the pickup-truck full and just paper and
all this stuff. All this stuff, this decoration stuff, twenty-five thousand, thirty-thousand
dollars worth of wood and construction, decoration materials alone, and we used to go
out and get this stuff, and we'd use it and essentially dispose of it.

         So I always kind of felt a little bad about that, but I think it's well worth it. The
students continue to buy the tickets, and so as long as people continue to come, I don't
think there's anything really too wrong with it, and we always gave this stuff to the
high schools and the theater departments anyway.

         I've heard that the Rockbridge County High School prom happens to be the same
theme as FD. In spring they just use our decorations. I think, you know, that's
probably—there's a lot of stuff—matter of fact, I was talking to some of the guys this
weekend, some of the lighting guys, some of the security guards and that, and the year
that we did the Paris theme, we built a bunch of benches, like we built six benches,
pretty—they're not Southern Living-type benches, but they're not bad. And those things
are still floating around on the guys' porches.

         And then another guy was telling us that some stairs we built a few years ago for
like the garden platform or whatever, he was using them in his house now. And these

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other guys take our lumber, and some of these guys build extensions onto their houses
with it. One of the guys over there was telling me he's got a stack of this stuff, and he's
getting ready to use it to build onto his house. So, you know, in that sense it's not like
it's just going into a landfill somewhere, but it is a lot of money for—it's certainly the
most expensive four-hour event I've ever been to.
Warren: I have a friend who's an art teacher out at the high school, and I can tell you
that you make a huge contribution out there. Have you all ever gone out to the prom to
see what they do?
Framptom: I never went out, and I guess now I wish I had.
Warren: It's a pretty big contribution to the community.
Framptom: Well, that makes me feel good that we do that, and we try to buy—we try
to get all our stuff locally. We have our teeshirts printed locally. We buy the lumber
from lumber yards locally, and I don't think that's really that big a deal. It's not like
we're infusing this bunch of cash, because five-thousand bucks at a lumber yard is small
change for them when they're in the business of building houses. But all the same, these
guys at the theater and the high school, it makes me feel good to know that they're
getting stuff. When I was the chairman, we sent letters out to these different high
schools, their art departments, and said, you know, "We're having this ball. This is our
theme." And what I said was, "Send a postmarked letter back to my mailbox if you
want any parts of this." And in the order I got these letters, I made appointments with
them, and I said, "Okay. You can come in. What do you want?"

         They'd say, "We want this and this," and they wrote that down, put their names
on it so they could come in here Saturday morning at 6 a.m. with their students and
their crowbars, and they take it with them. Everybody kind of gets what they want,
and they can use this and that. I'm glad that that happens. And we also reuse some
stuff from year to year, but not a lot, but we try to do some of that. It all cuts down on
that little waste aspect.

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Warren: You've mentioned the auditor a number of times. What's the role of the
auditor?
Framptom: The auditor is the one that controls all of the bucks, and the whole ball—it's
really funny how this works. The whole ball is funded off of ticket sales and
memorabilia sales, but of course, we start spending money in October, and we don't
realize one penny of income. Well, outside of ads from the playbill, I should say. We
always try to make the playbill self-sufficient. We sell enough ads to get the playbill
done. Other than that, everything comes from these ticket sales, and we start spending
money in October or November, and we don't see any money come back in until a week
before the ball. And so the school is always—essentially what they do is just give us an
interest-free loan. They just cover all our costs for us, and then we just pay them back
when we get it in. That is actually a critical element. I mean, the financing of this ball
is—you know, the university is very generous and helpful, and without that help we'd
never be able to do this, because we would have to have some way of buying the stuff.
I guess we could buy it on credit. But we do it from the school.

         One of the big problems with the ball is, well, you set this kind of budget. You
know, we say the budget's going to be seventy-five thousand dollars and tickets are
going to take forty-five bucks a pop, and teeshirts are going to cost this. And we have
to think, well, how many tickets are we going to be able to sell. So we say we've got this
budget of seventy-five thousand dollars or whatever, but in actuality, we don't have
that cash. That's just what we hope to raise. So it's always this kind of gamble.

         The university helps us out in the bad years, and I guess they get the extra cash
in the good years, but, you know, there's a lot of events. If people don't like the theme
or if the weather's bad or something like that, then ticket sales can be off. That
happened the year we did Paris. We actually wound up being something under
budget, a couple thousand dollars under our budget, but our revenues were well
underneath what we were projecting. So we wound up being about three-thousand

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bucks in the hole, and EC has bailed us out. They essentially just said, "Okay, here's
three thousand bucks. Go pay your bills."
Warren: Why do you think, when you had such a wonderful theme, why do you think
you—
Framptom: Well, a lot of people talk about the weather was bad that year. That doesn't
seem to make a lot of sense to me, because there's not—I mean, there's some people that
come in from outside the area, but there aren't very many. I don't think whether there's
a little bit of snow on the ground or not is going to influence somebody's decision
whether or not they want to walk four blocks to the ball. I don't think that's a big—a lot
of it involves the hype for the ball, and that's kind of the thing about the ball I've never
really been able to understand, is what drives people to the ball and why do some come
and why do some not. Most everybody seems to come, but not everybody does.

         But the auditor, anyway, controls all of this funding, and it's a big, big, big job,
because we've got all these chairmen running around, these guys ordering lumber, the
ladies ordering paper and ordering teeshirts, and we've got all these accounts at lumber
yards and Walmarts and mail-order stores and sportswear stores for the teeshirts, and
hardware stores, and the auditor has to just manage all this financial information, and
it's a big job, and it's one that has to be done pretty well.

         This is another rumor that I've heard, but they had some big problems with the
funding, I think, the year before I got here, which would have been the ball in 1991, and
what happened is there was just a lot of waste and they went a hundred-thousand
dollars over budget or something, or some massive total, and they took everybody out
to the Willson-Walker House for dinner, and they ran up these big tabs, and the
chairman quit three weeks before the ball in some kind of scandal. I don't know how
much—there's some truth to that, but I don't know how much. After that, I think—
well, I don't know what changed after that, because I wasn't around to see what it was
like beforehand, but that just emphasizes how important the auditor's position is,

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because without somebody to really manage this, you can just go bonkers. Because,
you know, even the auditor doesn't really know how much is being spent until the bills
come in, because, you know, you've got eight people charging stuff. Some of them
forget to bring in receipts. Some of them don't, and then if three people go buy
something all at the same time, then you know, each one of those doesn't bust over the
budget, but when you put them all three together, you know, the auditor really has to
just do the best he or she can to control it. But it's a pretty big job, and it's certainly one
I would not want and one that I don't think I could do a good job of.
Warren: So what was the theme that went so far over budget?
Framptom: I think that must have been the King Arthur's Court theme. I think that
was the theme in 1991. Like I say, that was the year I was still in high school. I didn't
get to that one, but it was King Arthur's Court, and apparently the decorations were
really good, and I don't think they went over budget, I think they went over budget
because of the Willson-Walker House type of thing as opposed to decorations, but I
don't really know.
Warren: Well, one I've heard about that I'd love to know more about is the Orient
Express. Do you know about—
Framptom: That was in, I think, 1988. Richard Weaver is the man that knows the
history better than anybody else, because he's the one that—
Warren: I know. I've heard they brought in a railroad car?
Framptom: I don't know about that.
Warren: Apparently they brought in a railroad car, and I've always been dying to
know how they did that.
Framptom: Wow. Yeah. They might have put it on the front porch. The year we did
the Magic Carpet Ride, we got a camel from the Natural Bridge Zoo, and we had a
camel out there on the entrance, but, you know, there are always some tacit rules.
There's always some rules that the gym lays down, like no water in the gym, and I think

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another one is no live animals in the gym. I don't know how they did the railroad—I
never heard of the railroad car. I wouldn't be surprised if they did it.
Warren: I heard that people were going in and getting their pictures taken inside the
railroad car or something.
Framptom: That's fascinating.
Warren: I just have a few more questions. You know that the origins of the Fancy
Dress Ball was really fancy dress, that people wore costumes.
Framptom: Right.
Warren: Was there ever, in all your time, ever any talk about going back to costumes?
Framptom: There was. There was big talk about that in the 1994 ball, the Magic Carpet
theme. There was talk about that, and we talked about it on the committee for a while,
you know—do you want to do this? But I think it didn't pan out because people would
think, well, some will come in costumes and some won't, and that won't be that cool,
and people maybe don't want to spend all the money to put together the costume.
There's only so many pre-made costumes out there that you can get, and there's so
many people that want to go to the ball, that you're going to have a lot of duplication.
That's a problem, because it's not like every guy just wears a—I mean, every guy wears
a black tie to the thing. You know, you could do photocopies of everybody pretty
much. But still, there was talk of that costume one year, and I don't know why it didn't
pan out. Probably Monica Robinson knows. She was the chairman that year. She
probably has a good idea why that didn't, why that didn't work.
Warren: Well, I'm lobbying hard for doing it in 1999 for the 250th anniversary.
Framptom: Yeah, it would definitely be neat. It would definitely be neat to have.
Warren: The pictures of those years when everybody was in costume are just
marvelous.

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Framptom: I bet that would be neat. If it turns out they do it, I'd like to come and see.
But even if everybody just kind of wore a mask or something over a tux, that would
really be neat.
Warren: Well, that's a good idea. That would certainly seem to be manageable.

         Well, you have done a marvelous job of explaining Fancy Dress. Is there
anything we haven't talked about that you think we should?
Framptom: Well, the only thing I really wanted to make sure I said was inserting that
business about how I think it's such a great tradition and the deal about how it unifies
everybody. I think I got that stuck in somewhere. Coming in here, that was really what
I wanted to say. I think for people like me who have done a lot of this and seen the
specs on it, I think a lot of times we miss the forest for the trees. We get so tied up in
what's in this corner and what was in the big gym and what was in the small gym, that
we sometimes lose sight of the grander scheme or the grander deal about FD, which is
the elegant ball that brings everybody together on this high social plateau, and it's this
great tradition at the school, certainly not as great a tradition as the Honor Code, but it
is, nevertheless, the greatest social tradition the school has and one that I think it would
be a tragedy to see it die out or replaced or diminished in strength. It's really a
marvelous event, an excellent opportunity for everybody to come together.

         When I look back on the time I spent at W&L, the stuff I did, the opportunities I
had at FD, and the chance I had to work with different people on this and that, and the
creativity that, you know, it's just this wide open space for creativity. You know, there's
nothing like it in terms of the committee. You just build this thing. "You build it and
they will come" kind of thing. It's just fabulous. And when I look back on my years at
W&L, FD is it. That's what I think about. I guess I lived and breathed it kind of for a
while and I love it. I love thinking about it and I love remembering about it. I go home
every now and again, you know, back to the folks' place and I dig through the stuff, and
I could spend time just looking through there reading old newspaper clippings about it

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and reading old playbills and stuff like that. It's just an amazing event, and I'm really
lucky I had an opportunity to get involved. I'm really pleased that I could make a
contribution, and it was great for me to come back this year, and I'm really pleased that
they were able to let me get in there and play around a little bit. It was a great
experience for me, then and now, something that I really have no regrets about,
something that I love.
Warren: My last question is, do all of you who work so hard on it, are you so exhausted
by the time the ball happens that you can't enjoy yourself? I worry about that.
Framptom: [laughter] That big push—because we get the gym on Tuesday, like
Tuesday at noon or Tuesday morning or something, we get the gym, and everything's
kind of been put together elsewhere, but still you have to bring it all together and
assemble it, and it's this massive push. We used to work like sixteen hours a day
Tuesday and Wednesday to try to get it put together so we could not work so hard on
Thursdays and Fridays, but still, Leo and I and the other people, we joke about how we
were running out of there with our toolboxes under our arms and people were coming
in with tuxes. And that's a slight exaggeration, but not too bad, because some days
before that ball I didn't get out of that gym until five or six o'clock on Friday night, and
my date's already dressed and waiting for me, and I'm sweaty and got sawdust all over
me, and I'm beat. But no, there's just—we were beat at the end of that week. I think
everybody was beat. But that adrenaline rush of going to the ball that, you know, you
don't dare miss it, you know. Yeah, that is a problem. Somewhere inside all of us, we
always seem to find that reserve for those eight hours of going to dinner and hanging
out and going to the ball, or six hours or whatever it takes. Then we just go home and
sleep until about Thursday of the next week.
Warren: What happens to classes through all this? A minor question, of course.
Framptom: Yeah. Right. Well, most people it doesn't have much effect. For me, I
missed some classes that week, but I remember being in some classes that week and

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just—matter of fact, now I have a TA, and so I have these students at the University of
New Hampshire where I'm in graduate school that I teach these labs to for Introduction
to Geology, and I remember, I was looking through some of my old notes a couple of
weeks ago, and I came to the week of FD and these notes, and they're just pitiful.
They're just terrible. I mean, I was in class, but I was just dozing off. You know, you
can see the words just kind of start off on the left side and they just kind of drop off the
line by the right side, and physically because I was just not capable. So, I mean, I
missed a few classes, but my professors were pretty—one of my professors let me
reschedule a test once because he said—there was like a deadline for the test, and I said,
"Can I take it just outside the deadline?"

         "I know what you've got to do. You can just take it next week."
         Another one of my professors my senior year, I missed his class on Friday, and
he told his class, he said, "Well, Mr. Framptom's not here with us today, but we'll excuse
him because he's in the ball preparing for FD," and so they let you cut a few corners for
it.
         Don't get me wrong, you know. Class is what we're here for, but it doesn't kill
anybody to miss one or two here and there. So academics might have suffered a little
bit, but in the long run, that GPA is just a little number, but FD is this flood of
memories that I have that I wouldn't trade for any kind of grade changes, and, even
then it didn't really make that big a difference anyway.
Warren: That's a great quote to end on, Joe. I can't imagine anything better. Thank you
so much.
Framptom: Well, my pleasure. I hope I could help you out.
Warren: This has been great. You've set a high standard for Melissa.
Framptom: Well, I'm sure she'll match. I'm sure she'll match just as well. But the only
thing is, I've had two years to sit back and kind of let all this stuff mold together and see

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the forest instead of looking at all the trees. So she'll probably give you more nuts and
bolts aspect of it.
Warren: I usually don't interview many students because I want them to have a little
perspective, but it's just too irresistible to talk to her right coming off of it, and she may
be just totally out there, but I'd like to try.
Framptom: I understand.
Warren: But you're a wonderful example of getting a little perspective.
Framptom: Well, I thank you. I'm glad to have the opportunity, and I hope to read
about some of the good stuff in the book.
Warren: I think you will.
Framptom: Well, it was good.
Warren: Thank you, Joe.
Framptom: Yes, ma'am, thank you.
[End of interview]

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