Futch interview
                                                                                                                  19
[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Futch: They were like men who came not only from different planets but different
galaxies. Leyburn was so serious, so intense. Ollie Crenshaw suspected that Leyburn
was a Yale atheist, but in this town there was no place for overt atheism, and the
only way to plug into the town, to acquire respectability-and I've got to tell you a
funny story about this also-was to be either "Presby" or "Episcy," one or the other.
And so Leyburn hooked up with the Presbyterian Church upon arriving here, and
Dr. Crenshaw was absolutely convinced that a man who had taught sociology at Yale
for twenty years was an atheist, and that the sincerity of Leyburn's Presbyterian
attachment was completely phony, that there wasn't a single sincere fiber in
Leyburn's body, first of all, and in his religious affiliation as well. Not that Ollie
Crenshaw was religious. I suspect that he wasn't because of various sarcastic little
remarks he made just fleetingly, but I think the Crenshaws may have gone to
church once a year, to the Episcy Church, just to put the tiniest pinch of incense on
the altar, the tiniest possible pinch of incense.

         But Leyburn was more assiduous in going to the Presby temple, and Leyburn's
only friend, and it must have been a somewhat aloof and rather stuffy friendship, if
the word "friendship" fits, was a retired Presbyterian minister who lived in the
town and who was pretty icy himself, I gather. These two icebergs would
occasionally visit and perhaps have tea or coffee-no, no, not coffee; that's too low
class-tea together. It was always a picture that sort of amused me, Leyburn and the
Reverend So-and-so, lived here in the town, these two cold, cold, cold fish.
Thinking that they were friends was sort of strange, because Leyburn, it's hard to
imagine Leyburn-Leyburn, actually, I think, was probably a space alien, and the
idea of his being friends with any earthling, any mortal on this planet, is an
impossibility.

                                                                                                                        20
         I'll admit my view of Leyburn is greatly colored by one lunch conversation
after another, day after day and year after year, with Dr. Crenshaw, for whom hatred
of Leyburn was oxygen. And I will say I've never heard or seen anything in Leyburn
that contradicts what Dr. Crenshaw said. Everything he said was consistent with
what I could observe and pick up from other people. I don't know that Leyburn was
an evil man. I think he was just devoid of emotions and the psychological structure
of an earthling, I mean, earth-born inhabitant. So a lot of Ollie Crenshaw's
conversation was about this arch, archenemy of his. Obviously you can't put this in
the book, because that would not be consistent with a pleasant portrait of the school.
Warren: No, but it's very interesting to know that dynamic.
Futch: Yeah. I think it is interesting for you, the writer, I assume the chief or the
only writer of the book, for you to know this, that these two men who were born
very close together, one in '02-Leyburn was born in '02 and Ollie Crenshaw in '04,
so they were closely-what's the word-contemporary and coeval. I guess an old
person and a newborn baby can be coeval. They're living briefly in the same time.
But at any rate, these two guys hated each other.
Warren: That's interesting that you're bringing up this theme of people being in the
same place at the same time, because one of the things-I'm going to jump here.
Futch: Yeah. Go ahead.
Warren: Two of the interviews that I've done recently were with people who
attended Washington and Lee in the years 1969 to '74, so they were both here at the
same time. One of them led the traditional Washington and Lee life, and the other
one got involved in the alternative life style that was here at that time.
Futch: Doug Harwood would be such a one, for example.
Warren: Well, that's not who I'm talking about, but, yes, he would be.
Futch: He was very alternative.
Warren: He would. He still is.

                                                                                                                       21
Warren: He was highly alternative.
Warren: He still is.
Futch: And still is. Yes.
Warren: It was fascinating to me, because it was like these two people were talking
about entirely different places, and yet they were talking about the same place at the
same time. I'm fascinated by that time period here, because I think it's an
extraordinary time here, and I mean that in the sense of it being extra-ordinary. It
was not a normal time, and yet-
Futch: Oh, that's right.
Warren: -it was a very dramatic and historical time. And you were here.
Futch: Oh, yes.
Warren: What was your experience, especially of what went on here in May of
1970?
Futch: Oh, yeah. Well, I can say something about that. My feeling was that a surface
minority of the students, a small number, wanted to reenact what they saw on TV at
other campuses. I think very few, if any, were genuine radicals. The faculty, on the
other hand, included a few such as Mario Pellicciaro. Excuse me. Mario is still here.
This is a man who left after about three years. And you may have heard-what was
his name? Henry Sloss, S-L-0-S-S. Have you heard about him?
Warren: Just people who were here then have mentioned his name.
Futch: Okay. He was in the English Department, and you can easily check this out in
the catalog, circa 1968, 1972 perhaps, a rather short time. But he, I think, took the
whole radical peacenik thing very seriously, hated traditionalism in every form, as
Professor Boatwright did, although the Boatwright story is one I knew a great deal
better, if only because he was here a long time, and Sloss was here very briefly. But
those two men, I think, wanted to see every tradition in capitalism, sexual
relationships, every single tradition of society ripped up and reshaped in a Utopian

                                                                                                       22
way. I am told that Henry's-I, of course, have no personal knowledge of this-that
Henry Sloss' leaving the faculty was a matter of departmental trauma in the early
'70s and that the reverberations of his departure affected his department for many,
many years, personal relations within the department. But the extraordinary
radicalism of Henry Sloss was probably the most significant influence on the
campus in May of 1970. He had been here a very short time then, and he was
destined to remain a very short time after that period.

         But there was no student radicalism to speak of, quantitatively, and it was
significant that one of the rumors of Kent-Cambodia week, which I guess-ten days,
the first ten days of May of 1970-I've always thought it was significant that the most
interesting rumor was that radicals from UVA, which would have sounded like a
contradiction in terms a couple years earlier, but it's a bigger school, so there were
probably more, maybe not in percentages, but there were probably more radicals in
absolute terms at UVA than here, that they were going to come down to W&L and
vandalize the property, Lee Chapel and other places here, to let Richard Nixon and
whoever-Melvin Laird, I guess, was Secretary of Defense and John Mitchell the
Attorney General, these hate objects of the radicals of that day, let them know how
mad the students were, and to my knowledge, no UVA radical has ever set foot in
Lexington. But it was as though the rumormongers in May 1970 here were saying
there aren't enough radicals here to accomplish anything, and therefore this
network of peaceniks with, presumably, a foothold at UVA would send somebody
here to stir up the pot at W&L in the absence of indigenous radicals at W&L. And, of
course, no property was vandalized at W&L. I don't recall whether any was at UVA
or not. But the radical impulse was extremely weak overall, though there may have
been one or two virulent characters, and certainly Henry Sloss was probably a
mental case.

                                                                                                                 23
         For one thing, Henry Sloss and his wife both came from rich families, and so
they had no reason to worry about job security, for example. If he made his
colleagues or made the administration angry, it didn't matter, because they were
both rolling in money, and what happened was that when Henry Sloss lost his job a
few years later, he and his wife moved to Italy and bought a villa or some sort of
house in Tuscany and lived sort of like Victorian English people who had so-called
private incomes in 1850 living in Italy. So I guess it's easy and fun to play-act at
radicalism if one has two big financial cushions to fall back on, his family and her
family.

         At any rate, the decision-one of the decisions-I guess the only memorable
decision made was in May of 1970. There were two faculty meetings held in Reid
Hall, which was not the usual place for faculty meetings. I don't know why a
different building was used, but there were two nighttime faculty meetings held in
addition to the regular monthly one in May of '70 to deal with the supposed
explosive mood of the students, and the decision that came out of all this was that
any student who was in a moral tizzy about the invasion of Cambodia and the
shooting by the National Guardsmen at Kent State, any student who was
emotionally or morally furious about this-Italians have a word, sconvolto,
meaning overturned or turned upside down-about this could postpone the final
exams, which were coming up, of course, at the end of May, could postpone the
exams until no later than September the 30th, could take them any time at the
beginning of the next academic year, which, when you look back on it, was not a
very wise idea because people forget things, students forget material that they were
supposed to have learned in one semester, they forget the material by the end of the
summer vacation, all the beach fun and games.

         So this academically was not a very wise idea, and I don't know how many or
how few students accepted this arrangement, but some did, and during final exam

                                                                                                                            24
period left town, and a number of very conservative students, very conservative
students told me that instead of taking final exams, they were going to leave and
take the final exams in September. And I said, "Well, you're free to do that according
to the faculty decision, but it seems academically unwise." I said, "So if you're
leaving town, where are you going?"

         They said, "Oh, Virginia Beach."
         And I said, "Virginia Beach? You're not going protest the war at Virginia
beach, are you?"
         He said, "No. We're going to enjoy the swimming and drink beer and look
for girls at Virginia Beach." And so their postponing the exams had nothing so do
with war protesting or moral indignation against anything. They just wanted to hit
the beach a few days earlier than they otherwise would have, maybe a week earlier.
         So the radical impulse here was very weak overall, but Henry Sloss and a
very tiny handful of students-there was a boy named Jeffrey Gingold, G-I-N-G-0-L-
D, whose name you'll find, I'm sure, in the alumni roster and I'm told is still living
out in the Pacific Northwest. So he was sort of a radical wannabe and play-acted at
revolution, and Henry Sloss was play-acting or maybe more. Maybe he was a rebel, I
don't know. But there was this one nutty student and one nutty professor and, I
think, very few others.
Warren: One person I interviewed from that time period sent me an amazing
making body of material that was published at that time on mimeograph machines,
it looks like.
Futch: Oh, that may well be.
Warren: And there were probably 300 pieces of paper.
Futch: But a very small handful of people can do that.

                                                                                                                  25
Warren: Well, yeah, but they were all published within ten or twelve days. I don't
know that that happened at other campuses. I was just impressed. It seemed like a
lot was put out.
Futch: I would imagine. Now, the stuff may have disappeared that was at Columbia
and Kent State and Berkeley, but I'm sure that if we had kids using a mimeograph
machine, that a lot of campuses must have had it, because this campus was one of
the least fiery, or what would you say-hysterical-at the time. So I would think
that maybe five or six students in the space of ten to twelve days could grind out
news releases.
Warren: Did you attend that faculty meeting?
Futch: Oh, yes. There were, I believe, two extra faculty meetings in addition to the
normal one. The regularly scheduled faculty meeting is the first Monday of a
month, so that maybe that was May 3rd. I'm sorry, I don't have a calendar here. So
that was May 3rd. Then there was another one set on May the 7th and then another
one on May the 10th.
Warren: And what was the mood in those meetings?
Futch: I would say surprisingly calm. The conversation didn't drag. I didn't say
anything. Of course, I'd known for all these years that a conservative's opinions
would be discounted instantly. So I have never spoken at a faculty meeting in
twenty-in what-thirty-four years now. But I had the feeling that everybody-
what am I trying to say? Every minute of the faculty meeting was taken up with
contributions, but, I mean, there was never a time when the president said, "Do we
have any other comments? Does anybody else want to say anything?" Somebody's
hand was always up, but it seemed to me that the mood was not hysterical. It was
polite, and I guess some people spoke with a certain intensity. It was not like the
French Revolution. Those demented assemblies of the French Revolution were
quite volatile. It wasn't like that.

                                                                                                         26
Warren: Was your sense that the faculty was more or less or equally radical, than
the students? Was it just one or two members of the faculty?
Futch: I think very few faculty members were radical. There was a man who is now
still living, in his nineties, who was probably an outgoing department head at the
time, who had sort of a fixation on the Russian Revolution. He remembered the
Russian Revolution. If he's in his nineties now, of course, he remembers the
Russian Revolution as a teenager, and he never fell out of love with the Bolshevik
Revolution of November 1917. Students told me that he wanted the American
students to create sort of a hammer-and-sickle revolution in this country, but he's so
much older. I mean, he lived in Paris in the 1920s and used to see Gertrude Stein
and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald walking the streets of the Latin Quarter. So he
was a faculty member at the time, though on the verge of retirement, I think, and
was sort of an armchair radical screwball. And then Henry Sloss, this very young
man, probably in his-I think not over thirty at the time, probably, who was a
radical. But I think most of the professors were sort of worshippers of FDR and JFK,
and so that meant that they were armchair liberals and theoretical leftists, but they
weren't one to go out on the barricades at all. So it was a faculty whose radicalism
was limited to cocktail parties, praise of LBJ's legislation, that sort of thing.
Warren: You touched on this a little bit with Richard, but I'd like to pursue what I
think is just a really interesting dichotomy that goes on at this school, that the
faculty seems to be liberal and the student body is so conservative.
Futch: Oh, yeah. There's no doubt of that.
Warren: How does that work? Why does it work so well here?
Futch: Because people are polite. If the student body came, or if the faculty maybe
came from a different socioeconomic background, there might be rudeness and
shouts and insults, but I think that, whether by design or by happenstance, so many
of the people come from similar backgrounds that politeness is a virtue that has

                                                                                                                27
been respected here for a very long time, and I think maybe some of the people who
come here from more humble backgrounds quickly realize that politeness is a
cardinal-maybe the cardinal-virtue here, and they quickly get with the program.
Rudeness and confrontation-confrontationalism-does that word exist? Rudeness
and confrontations are not part of the picture here, and so that's how it gets along.
The political differences are extremely deep between left-wing faculty, who are the
majority, of course, and the right-wing students, who are the majority.
Warren: When you arrived in 1962, the faculty was liberal then?
Futch: Yes, oh, yes. Now, of course, you understand that in 1962 the definition of
liberal was very different, because the Kennedys were just taking hold at that time.
And so leftism in 1962 was defined as Roosevelt, Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and
JFK. We look back on JFK as being a conservative in some ways because of his tax
reduction and his confronting the Soviets, his risking war in Cuba over the missiles.
So now, thirty-some years later, JFK looks conservative, but he was regarded as a big
liberal at that time. So that was what liberalism was at the time.
Warren: And at that time he was embraced by the faculty, but not the student body?
Futch: Oh, that's right. And I'll tell you another story in a moment along this very
line, so remind me. The students hated JFK because he was perceived-the
Democrats were perceived as liberals at that time. The faculty, of course, bought into
the New York Times-Arthur Schlesinger cult of worshipping JFK even before he
was assassinated. They liked the idea of Camelot and this young couple, handsome
Jack and lovely Jackie, who incarnated the hopes of a new generation. Remember he
used the metaphor in his inaugural speech about passing the torch. The old tired,
bald-headed, white-fringed, white-haired Eisenhower generation was tottering off
into decrepitude, and the young, vigorous, World War II generation of JFK were
coming on, and the faculty just ate that up. I very quickly realized that I had better
not say a word about politics at these many faculty cocktail parties when I arrived

                                                                                                                 28
here, and, of course, kept very quiet and entered eagerly into conversations that had
to do with Lexington and W&L and kept very quiet when the Kennedys or, later,
LBJ came into the conversation. So the faculty was very politicized and liberal,
according to the definition of liberal in the early '60s.
Warren: One of the first people I interviewed was Charley McDowell.
Futch: Oh, a big liberal.
Warren: Yeah. And I got the impression from him that his parents were considered
really radical back in the '30s.
Futch: Especially his father.
Warren: So somewhere in there the faculty changed.
Futch: Well, yeah. I would imagine the faculty did change in the'40s and '50s, but,
see, I wasn't here in the '40s and '50s. The only access that I have to the change in the
faculty is what Ollinger Crenshaw told me at lunch, because we had lunch four days
out of five.
Warren: So would Ollie Crenshaw have been a liberal?
Futch: No. Not at all. Now you have just hit on an interesting point, and again, I
don't know whether you can put this in the book. Ollie was an old Harry Byrd
Democrat. You know the history of Virginia politics.
Warren: Yes.
Futch: So Harry Byrd, Sr., was an extremely important figure in the political life of
the'40s, '50s, and '60s. But, of course, by the '60s, by the time I arrived, Harry Byrd,
Sr., was elderly. He had a stroke about 1964, '65, and his son, who was equally
conservative, took over that seat. But the son did not have a forceful personality,
and the Voting Rights Act of '65 prevented the son from taking hold of the state of
Virginia in the same way that the father had done. Now, this is not irrelevant to the
Lexington-faculty scene. Harry Byrd's position, of course, depended on white
supremacy in Virginia, and that was a major part, along with not showing up any

                                                                                                               29
state debt. Those were major components of the Democratic ascendancy in Virginia
as it was understood in the '40s, '50s, and the early '60s.

         But there was another element in the Virginia Democratic party that never
took hold in those days, but W&L for some reason was very attached to this, and it
was called the Francis P. Miller-Francis the male spelling, masculine spelling, F-R-
A-N-C-I-S. Francis Pickens Miller was an alumnus of about 1910 or 1920, who was
an advocate of racial equality and, of course, was a deadly enemy of Harry Byrd, Sr.,
the senator, who was senator for many, many, many years. And Francis Miller ran
against the Byrd machine for-and we'll get back to Ollie Crenshaw. I haven't
forgotten your question. The Francis Miller faction of the party, they couldn't defeat
Harry Byrd, but they administered pinpricks for a senatorial election here, a
gubernatorial election there. The cream of Lexington society was hooked up, for
some reason, with the Francis P. Miller liberal brand of, at that time, unsuccessful
intraparty rivalry with Harry Byrd. And so if one wanted to go to Lexington cocktail
parties with the Penicks and the Paxtons, one would, of course, supposedly be on the
Francis P. Miller and the anti-Harry Byrd wavelength.

         Ollie Crenshaw, however, did want to go to cocktail parties, but he did not in
any way sympathize with that faction at all. He was absolutely a conservative, an
old-line Southern Democrat conservative of a very old vintage. But if he had said
that at the cocktail parties, the invitations would have dried up. So this is what I
meant by saying that he was a master of diplomacy and euphemism and
circumlocutions and elliptical speech. And so it must have been an amazing
performance for decades for him to be accepted as a Lexington Democrat while he
was, deep down, a conservative Harry Byrd Democrat during all of those years. And
that was done by talking about old Miss So-and-so, who said the funniest thing back
in 1918, and on and on like that. And so Ollie Crenshaw was an ardent conservative.

                                                                                                                 30
         Leyburn, for example was a great apostle of racial liberalism in the '40s and
'SOs, and Ollie very discreetly made-if he were living, I wouldn't be telling you this,
and I trust this won't be in the book at all, but he was not sympathetic to that stance.
And so just for a record that may be unsealed a hundred years from now, that was
one of the problems between Ollie and Leyburn, and I doubt if they ever discussed it,
because, as I say, Ollie Crenshaw was not into confrontations and quarrels and
arguments. But at these lunches with me he made it clear, though in a rather
oblique way, nonetheless clear that he disliked everything about Leyburn,
everything. If you had asked him to say something good about Leyburn, he would
say, "Well, he dresses nicely." That would have been it. "The white hair is
becoming," perhaps. So Ollie Crenshaw was a-it's no wonder he taught U.S.
diplomatic history in the courses, because he himself was an extremely skillful
diplomat, and, of course, he continued with the cocktail circuit 'til the week he died.
His son is still living. That's another reason I don't want anything said or printed.
Warren: I understand.
Futch: And his son is not old either. His son was born when Ollie was no kid.
Warren: I hope that this book will be inclusive but discreet.
Futch: Yes. Discretion is extremely important. I emphasize that I'm a great fan of
Ollie. He treated me like a son. It was as though I had two fathers, the one in
Baltimore and the one here. And I knew him for seven-no, for eight years, because
I first met him in April of '62 during an interview, and he lived until March of '70.
So for one month less than eight years, I knew him very well, and he opened up
increasingly to me as the years passed.
Warren: Let's stay with speaking of academic things. Richard said I should ask you
about-
Futch: A very nice boy.
Warren: -the H train.

                                                                                                                       31
Futch: The H train?
Warren: The H train. The history train? That that's apparently a term that the
students use.
Futch: Not around me.
Warren: That you can take the H train around the world by taking different courses
about different kinds of history.
Futch: They never-
Warren: All right. Well, then I won't expect you to tell me about that.
Futch: Oh, no. The students are very-something like that makes me think that
they are more discreet than I realize.
Warren: No, I don't think it's anything critical, not remotely.
Futch: Oh, I thought this was something negative.
Warren: No, no, no. Oh, no.
Futch: Oh, well, good. If it's favorable, I'm happy.
Warren: Oh, no, no. You could take the H train and see the world through-
Futch: And see the world?
Warren: -through your history courses.
Futch: Oh, well, good. Well, that's fine.
Warren: I think that's he was saying.
Futch: I'm glad to hear that, but it's a brand-new term to me.
Warren: That's one of the interesting things, speaking to someone as young as
Richard. He thinks that the way it's been for the last four years is the way it's always
been.
Futch: Oh, no. Well, yeah. You and I know different. He's a nice kid. He's extremely
smart and pleasant. He's a sphinx, though. You never know what he's thinking. He
has a deadpan way about him.
Warren: He does.

                                                                                                                              32
Futch: And I sometimes look at him and wonder what's going on behind that face,
behind the mask.
Warren: I think it's his journalism background. He keeps that blank look.
Futch: Maybe is something that they are trained or that they learn to pick up.
Warren: I think so.
Futch: But I'm very fond of him. He's always been very polite and nice, easy to talk
to for me.
Warren: I think so, too. So how about this great legacy of students that you have
taught through the years? Have you kept up with people?
Futch: Oh, with many, many of them, yes, going back into the '60s, very much so.
Warren: Tell me about that. How do you keep up with them?
Futch: Correspondence on a manual typewriter. I couldn't begin to deal with a
computer. I would probably have to be institutionalized if I were put in a room with
a computer. So I have a whole bunch of manual typewriters, which, by the way, are
still being manufactured, I'm told from missionaries who go to jungles, and they
can't plug a manual typewriter into a palm tree. So that's how I keep up with them.
I'm not a telephone buff at all, because it's very time-consuming. I've found that
very few people will talk for ten or fifteen minutes and hang up. So my telephone
contact with alumni is extremely rare, but I'm very glad to write letters and love
getting letters from alumni. And that's how it's done. It's a very 1930s' way to keep
up with people.
Warren: Well, it's nice to know. You know, I often worry that those personal
records, there just aren't going to be many of them from this time period because
we're all doing e-mail and telephone.
Futch: Well, I don't doe-Mail. And I will say that I keep the letters of all of the
wittiest students or alumni-alumni, I should say. So that is going to be quite
something, if I leave those letters behind.

                                                                                                                   33
Warren: Well, I certainly hope you will.
Futch: I don't have any plan to destroy them, but certainly I would have to be six
feet under before a lot of them are read, but, yeah, I have a great number of personal
letters, and I'm making an effort now as I go through the debris that I live in. I
always call my house the harbor bottom. I'm trying to put them all in one place, and
I have some big stacks of correspondence, and I guess I will make these letters
available to somebody, but I do not have any intention to burn them, as when
Queen Victoria died, one of her daughters, Anticordia [phonetic], spent ten years
burning papers. I guess the most interesting things are the ones that got burned. A
huge lot is left, but they burned goodness knows what for ten years. Princess Beatrice
and Lord Isher [phonetic] did the burning.
Warren: They weren't historians, obviously.
Futch: They were not. So I don't have any plan at all to do that, but I do keep up
with the-getting back to your question-with considerable numbers of students,
those who write letters. There are those who are not fond of writing letters. There
are some with whom I've fallen out of touch because they are strictly electronic
young men, and I'm absolutely terrified by anything having to do with electronics,
and I tell people that, for me, technology is whatever existed in 1940, and, thank
heaven, manual typewriters did. The technology of my elementary school days will
be quite sufficient.
Warren: So what else do you want to talk about? What haven't we talked about?
Futch: Oh, what haven't we talked about?
Warren: We talked about a lot of interesting things before we turned the tape
recorder on.
Futch: Yes, indeed. Indeed we did. I wondered if there was anybody I want to put
you in touch with. In fact, I am going to contact a few people and say, "Would you be

                                                                                                                  34
willing to talk to Mame Warren about So-and-so, either on tape or otherwise,
perhaps?"
Warren: That would be wonderful.
Futch: I will be glad to do that. Photographs. I will rack my brain to come up with
somebody who might have pictures. Now, there's a professor who may or may not
be mentally able to help you now. He graduated in 1923, taught math here, living
here in the town, incidentally. He taught here, I guess, from the '20s until he retired.
He was born, when? 1900, I guess. Winter Roysten. Do you know that name?
Warren: I've heard the name. Do you know what kind of condition he's in?
Futch: I do not know, but I'm sure you can find out from the Math Department. He
lives on the street next to my street. I think it's called Edmondson Avenue, here in
Lexington. R-0-Y-S-T-O-N-, or T-E-N, I forget. He and his wife live in a house that I
sometimes drive by, and they are in their nineties now. Of course, I don't know
whether he was born in 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, but he graduated in '23. He might
have some photos, possibly. A very, very nice man, and he and his wife were
driving their car around until even their late eighties, and I assume they're still
living in that house. I'm sure that the senior-level math teachers could tell you
whether either one of the Roystens is in a position to talk about the 1920s with you.
Warren: I sure would like to find somebody who can talk about that. I'd like to find
out about bathtub gin around here.
Futch: Oh, well, Ollie Crenshaw told a story about the bathtub gin. He said that if a
student would stand on the corner of Main and Washington Streets, where Grand
Piano now is, that, as he put it, a black young man would-and sort of, if one stood
there and sort of gazed around at the sky, a black young man would figure out what
the W&L student wanted and would appear within a few minutes and say,
"Anything I can do for you today?" And you'd say, "Well, yeah. I sure would like to
have a gallon of this or that." And he'd say, "Well, if you want to go in the

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drugstore and have a soda, I'll be back in about half an hour," and you would make
the arrangement right there on the street corner. Now, whether the delivery was
made on the street corner, who knows? I suppose very few blacks had automobiles
in the 1920s, so it must have been within walking distance.

         But he said that bathtub gin was very-well, I don't know that Ollie
Crenshaw ever used a word like "bathtub gin," but he would have said illegal
products were easily gotten in the 1920s.

         He also told me another funny story that you might want to have. Are we
still on tape here?
Warren: Yes.
Futch: He laughed and laughed over the fact that the president of the university in
the 1920s unwittingly perjured himself before a congressional committee, because a
committee of the House or the Senate held hearings on the effectiveness of
Prohibition, and that President Henry Louis Smith of W&L was an ardent
prohibitionist, believed in it very sincerely, and went up to Capitol Hill to testify
before such and such a committee that Prohibition was working fine. He said, "I am
the president of a school for young men, and I can personally assure you that
Prohibition is absolutely successful in Lexington and on our campus." Ollie
Crenshaw said that it was like a sieve, and that getting booze was the easiest thing in
the world, and the president lived, as faculty members usually do live, unaware of
how the students are living, that the president was just oblivious-or as they say
today, clueless-and assured under oath to senators or representatives that
Prohibition was completely successful here in Lexington, and it was anything but.

         So that is an Ollie Crenshaw story that he told with great peals of laughter. He
was anything but a Prohibitionist. I've always said that Ollie Crenshaw looked like
the type who ought to be sitting in a white suit on the verandah of a white-

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columned mansion with a mint julep in one hand, or maybe in both hands. He
enjoyed the product of fermentation very much.
Warren: I don't have any pictures of Crenshaw. I would love to have a photograph.
Futch: I'm sure in any Calyx you ought to be able to find one.
Warren: Right, but I'm talking about that kind of picture of him sitting back with a
mint julep.
Futch: Oh, no. No, I'm sure there are no pictures of him. I thought you meant just
any photo. No. I wish he had posed for that, but I think he took the university and
the professorship so seriously that he would never have posed humorously for such
a picture. No. I misunderstood your point.

         What else? Mr. [Earl Stansbury] Mattingly, the treasurer. There was another
enemy of Ollie Crenshaw. Do you want to hear about Mr. Mattingly?
Warren: Well, sure. We're just about at the end of the tape.
Futch: Well, you want to meet another day?
Warren: We can continue on.
Futch: You have another tape?
Warren: Do I have another tape?
Futch: Yeah. Yeah. I should have known.
Warren: Of course, I have another tape.
Futch: Yeah. Well, by all means.
Warren: All right. I'm going to put in a new tape.
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