Futch interview
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[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]
Warren: This is Mame Warren. This is tape two with Jefferson Davis Futch III, on
August 19th, 1996. Actually, I guess it's tape three, if we count Richard's.
Futch: Yeah. This is the third tape this summer, but the second tape today.

         I wanted to say something about a great campus character. In fact, I want to
say something about his cremation and the disposal of his remains. Mr. Earl

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Stansbury Mattingly, who was the registrar as an undergrad, if you can imagine an
undergrad finding time also to be registrar, and then he did get his degree very
belatedly and continued being registrar until 1940, and then he became treasurer
from'40 until the mid 1960s. If I recollect correctly, he died the week of Christmas
and New Year's of '66, but because he had no family, was unmarried, he lived a
tennis ball's throw from the campus, he lived in what I think is now called the
International House next door to what was the Sigma Chi house and is now Brian
Shaw's P.R. office, Mr. Mattingly's life revolved entirely around the school, and he
was undistracted by family, friends, or hobbies, as far as anyone knows. He was
born-as Ollie Crenshaw, one of his great detractors, used to call him and turned his
birthdate into a nickname, "Old 8/28/88," August 28th, 1888.

         Because of lack of money, Mr. Mattingly entered W&L, I believe, in 1916 at
the age of twenty-seven. He was born on a farm in D.C., if you can imagine a farm in
the District of Columbia, on the site of the subsequent Walter Reed Hospital, Army
Hospital, way out towards Georgia Avenue at 16th Street on one side, and I guess
Georgia Avenue is the other side. So E. S. Mattingly, who would wind up rather
affluent, came here as a poor boy of twenty-seven, a freshman, twenty-seven years
old, in 1915, which was not unusual in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
It did happen. He was so academically, shall we say, challenged that he couldn't
graduate-I guess low grades and so forth-until 1925. Ollie said that the
graduation-and they were classmates. Of course, Ollie, of course, graduated at age
twenty-one in 1925. He graduated on time. Maybe he entered a year late. See, Ollie
was an undergrad for only three years and got his degree 1922 to '25. But at any rate,
he and Mattingly, who was then going on thirty-seven, when he got his bachelor's
degree, graduated simultaneously, the same ceremony in Lee Chapel where the
graduations were held in the 1920s. Ollie said a sarcastic round of cheers went up

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when Mattingly was given his diploma, as though to say, "You dumbbell, we knew
you might make it, but here you've actually made it."

         So Mattingly had already been appointed registrar during his undergrad years
because he was in his thirties at that time. He turned thirty in the year 1918. And so
he got his degree after being the registrar, which, today, is inconceivable, obviously.
But during those years when he was a student, apparently the faculty had said, "You
nitwit, I'm giving you a D just to get you out of the course," and the professors
apparently had been very impolite and sarcastic in their treatment of Mattingly. But
once he got his degree and went on being administrator after that, he did not hide
his hatred for the faculty, and the faculty members, for example, who were very
poorly paid in the 1920s and '30s, would run out of money before the end of the
month and would come to Mattingly, this young man who they had been insulting
for his academic shortcomings not so many years before. The roles were reversed
now, and faculty members had to sit in his office with him, of course, behind his
desk and on the twenty-fifth of the month say, "Well, I would like an advance of
next month's paycheck because we don't get paid until the thirty-first of the month,
and could you find it in your heart to do this?"

        Mattingly would give them sort of Calvin Coolidge-style lectures. "If you
would handle your money more responsibly, you wouldn't be put in a position like
this. Certainly I should think that a man of fifty years old with a doctorate of
philosophy would be able to budget his funds for a thirty-day period in order to get
through the month, at least that." And so he took great delight in humiliating
faculty members who, in some cases, had been embarrassing him once upon a time.

         While Ollie was never in that position-Ollie did not come from a poverty-
stricken family by any means-Mattingly would sort of pinprick the faculty in other
ways, turning off lights. Apparently Mattingly would roam the buildings late at
night, having nothing else to do, and if Ollie Crenshaw were working in his office

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and were leaving at 10 p.m. in Washington Hall, where his office was, and not turn
off a hallway light, Mattingly might catch him at it and say, "Do you think this
school has a $10 million endowment? It would certainly help if members of the
faculty would turn off hall lights at this hour of the night." So Mattingly went out
of his way to be unpleasant to faculty members, according to Ollie Crenshaw.

         To me, as a young faculty member, he was certainly polite. Maybe it was
because he did not equate the youngest of the faculty with his persecutors of once
upon a time. He was always very nice to me in a rather businesslike way, but he
wasn't unpleasant, certainly, at all and once even took me to dinner, which
apparently was like Jack Benny taking someone to dinner. In the first year or two I
was there, I didn't have a car, for a number of years, and so Mattingly pulled up
alongside me when I was walking on Jefferson Street toward my rented room, the
house where I rented a room, in this great long Cadillac or whatever he had. It
looked like a White House limousine, and I think it was the mark.of success for a
boy who had arrived in humble circumstances in 1915. And now it was almost half
a century later, and he had a very fancy long black car, and it pulled up alongside
me. For a moment I didn't know who it was at first, and the window was
automatically taken down, from the driver's seat, I'm sure, and I gathered somebody
was trying to get my attention, so I looked in. It was Mr. Mattingly. He said, "Get in,"
rather brusquely, like that, and I, of course, obeyed, and he said, "Have you had
dinner yet?"

         I said, "Well, no, actually, Mr. Mattingly, I haven't had dinner yet."
         He said, "I'll take you to dinner." So he was good-hearted. Late in life,
perhaps, he was good-hearted, but there were many stories about other good-
heartedness in the '30s and '40s and '50s, that if he became aware that an undergrad
was hurting for money, the family perhaps was not rich to begin with or there was a
family illness that had cut into the wealth of the family, Mattingly would either

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anonymously or in absolute confidence give the boy tuition money. Many kids
graduated in the middle of the century and before the middle of the century because
of Mr. Mattingly's anonymous generosity. So in spite of the fact that he came across
as a very terse Calvin-Coolidge-like, austere character, he very much had his good
side, and I thought being invited to eat with this man of proverbial rigor and
severity was a compliment. I was very pleased at that. And he continued until his
death-well, he did not have a long nursing-home illness. He died after a rather
short illness, maybe a week.
Warren: And you wanted to tell me about his cremation.
Futch: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. I was told at the time that there was a city law that cremated
remains could not be disposed of on lawns or in parks or in gardens or flower beds
or anyplace like that, and yet Mr. Mattingly, I found out many years later, or some
years later, had expressed a desire to be cremated and to have his ashes scattered on
the lawn in front of Washington Hall. When I came back from Christmas holiday in
the December of '66, came back, I guess, in the first days of-January, I learned Mr.
Mattingly had died a week earlier. So I asked a question about, "Well, was he buried
in Stonewall Jackson Cemetery?" and was told, no, he was cremated. I said, "Well, I
guess his ashes are there."

         Someone said, "I don't think so."
         People began talking in sort of, again, circumlocutious ways about the ashes,
and I eventually found out, though not easily and not quickly, that the ashes were
illegally scattered on the grass in front of Washington Hall, city law or no city law,
and there are thus now the remains-the ashes, remains, of at least two faculty
members there.
         Did Richard tell you the other story about the professor whose ashes were put
there?
Warren: I've heard that.

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Futch: Fifteen years later, the young man who committed suicide.
Warren: Yes. I've heard that one.
Futch: And I think on New Year's Day of '81, if I-or am I deceived? Maybe it was
New Year's Day of '82 that he committed suicide, but we have in the soil of the front
lawn-
Warren: No wonder the grass is so green.
Futch: Yes, indeed. These two loyal-they loved the school so much that they both
requested this, and, of course, by the time the younger man was put in the lawn,
apparently the city law had either become a dead letter or had been repealed, but in
the 1960s it was still a delicate matter to deposit Mr. Mattingly's remains in the
wintertime grass.
Warren: You made a mention a while ago about turning off lights late at night. I
understand there's quite a lot of activity on this campus late at night, that faculty
members keep late office hours and-
Futch: I know of one faculty member. I don't know of many or of two, even, but I
know of one faculty member who is, like me, a bachelor and keeps hours into the
wee hours of morning, as I do at home. But I don't want to particularly run into the
night watchman at 2 a.m., but there is one of the professors who is here now and
has been here for many years who is said to be a late-night creature on campus, yes.
Warren: And you keep office hours at home?
Futch: No, no, no.
Warren: Oh, you keep late hours at home.
Futch: I grade exams into the wee hours at my house but not in the office. No. I
keep normal office hours, the same daytime office hours that other people keep.
And I don't know why, some little intuition told me that hanging around campus
in the wee hours of the night is not a standard thing for professors to do, so I don't
do it. No, I don't have students at my house. But my house looks like a landfill or,

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as I say, the wreckage of the Titanic, or now the wreckage of TWA. So I can't have
any visitors in my house ever, but I have office hours in the daytime.

          However, your question was about this person who has office hours in
literally in the middle of the night, and I think when he's not having office hours,
he's grading exams or planning a lecture, something like that. I don't say he has
students coming in every night.
Warren: So this is only one person.
Futch: Only one person, yes.
Warren: I got the impression there was a beehive of activity around in the night.
Futch: Well, there may be, but I know of only one person who does this, sort of an
eccentric, beloved but eccentric person who has these very late hours. But I have
never done that, and I don't know of any others who had office hours late at night.
Most Americans, I guess, are TV zealots, and most people want to be at home
watching the tube at night. So I would be surprised.

         I have heard, with regard to the fact that I'd be very surprised, I have heard
that amorous students are often aprowl in various buildings in the wee hours for
reasons having little to do with scholarship, for reasons having nothing to do with
scholarship, but that has nothing to do with the faculty, I trust.
Warren: I've seen signs to that effect.
Futch: Oh, yes. Student hanky-panky is reportedly quite active.
Warren: Do you have any good stories about that?
Futch: I don't know any. Students are very discreet about their personal lives with
faculty members, and it's very probable that I know kids who've misbehaved in
campus buildings in the wee hours, but, of course, they wouldn't tell faculty
members that. So I can only imagine and envy them very much. When I was a
student, I was a goody-goody and lived in the same town, always went home on the
bus to my parents, and I never misbehaved. But, of course, these kids' parents are a

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long way off, and I can well imagine that students take advantage of empty buildings
after 1 a.m.
Warren: Are there any other stories you'd like to tell? What do you want to be
remembered for here at Washington and Lee?
Futch: For longevity. [Laughter]
Warren: Well said.
Futch: Thank you. I don't know, other than for having an extremely long career, I
would like to be remembered for keeping the kids awake and alert in class.
Warren: What classes do you really enjoy teaching?
Futch: Well, I guess Venice and the papacy most, ~hich are spring semester courses,
because Venice is a city that I came to love by roaming through it, street by street and
alley by alley, in my youth, and the papacy because there is no institution more-
what shall we say-more heavily chronicled with scandal than the papacy. So when
you have a combination of scandal and art, it's a wonderful recipe. So while I know
that you can't refer in your book to the scandal-ridden nature of papal history, that's
what I enjoy about it. I suppose in a book, if this is quoted at all, you would say that
the artistic history of Rome and the role of the Popes as the greatest art patrons of
Western civilization, that I enjoy that, but, entre nous, the Popes were just wild
men in the bygone times, less in the twentieth century and in the nineteenth
century pretty bland, also. But that's a wonderful course. I don't know if the students
think it's wonderful. I enjoy teaching it. And, as I say, Venice is a city I fell in love
with from photographs when I was in high school and then was lucky enough to get
stationed there in the Army, stationed on the mainland right outside of Venice. So
every weekend for two years I went to Venice.
Warren: Oh, aren't you lucky.
Futch: Yeah. How about that? It was an incredible break. Some people get stationed
on Korean hilltops waiting for the North Koreans to come back, and I got stationed

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next door to Venice. It was a quick train ride to the city, and I learned the ins and
outs of Venice and its history and its architecture and art collections and so forth
very thoroughly. So I have never gotten bored and have never fallen out of love
with Venice. So it's a wonderful course to teach.
Warren: So do you think your teaching style has changed through the years?
Futch: Only in one respect. Off-colored anecdotes cannot be told in a coed class. I
don't think otherwise it's changed. There were many more off-color anecdotes prior
to 1985. I guess I didn't have any female freshman at that time, because I don't think
I taught freshmen in '85, because there was a period when freshman history
enrollments may have been down. I taught the freshmen and sophomores early in
my career, then there was a period when they said, "Well, we can get other people to
do it. You don't have to." And then the enrollments may have picked up, because
I've been teaching freshmen again in the last six or seven or eight years. I forget
what. You'll be glad to know-everyone will be glad to know I don't keep a diary so I
don't know exactly when. So I don't think I had any female freshmen at that time.
But in a mixed class one can't tell smutty stories. But that's the only change I have
made.
Warren: So why are you depriving the girls of your best stories?
Futch: Oh, because I don't want a young lady to go to-my bride-who-never-was,
that hyphenated lady, to say, "He told a story about Marie Antoinette and So-and-
so," or, "He told a story about Queen Victoria's daughter-in-law who did this and
that." And I can be in deep doo-doo, as George Bush would say, deep do-doo. So, of
course, that's a case where I would have to be very careful. One never knows when
somebody might take offense at something.
Warren: And male students never took offense at anything?
Futch: Oh, no. Well, who knows? Maybe they did. Maybe the Sunday school type of
male student just didn't take my courses.

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Warren: One thing I was impressed by was I interviewed-and you can stop me if
I'm going over the line of what we said we wouldn't talk about, but I interviewed
some of the first women students who went through here. Of course, this is ten
years ago. But I was really struck at how similar they seem to be to the guys who go
here, that they seem to be the same kinds of people.
Futch: Yes. Yes, that's very true. Many people have remarked on the same thing,
and, of course, a lot of the faculty members h9-ve been unhappy about that because
they wanted female students who would be male-haters and say, "Men are all brutes
and rapists and monsters and devils and patriarchal oppressors," and, of course, the
young ladies who have been here the last ten years very seldom, if ever, say that
kind of a thing. They will say, "I'm not a feminist." And you are exactly right. You
are very perceptive, as always, to say that. So this is not an imaginary similarity at
all. I fully agree with you on that. So, of course, I've had a number of them in my
class and had no problems at all. But I still can't tell an off-color story in class because
there could be just one person, one female student who's on a different wavelength,
and there would be "H" to pay if I told a story. I mean, there are many stories, not
about Queen Victoria, I hasten to add, but say the wife of George IV was a
nymphomaniac, but if I said in class that Queen Caroline was a nymphomaniac,
somebody might go to the hyphenated-my hyphenated future bride and say, "He
was holding a woman, a female in history, up to ridicule." So I can't. There's no
way I can run that kind of risk. So I simply say that George IV and his wife were both
morally dubious and that each one was a great cross that the other had to carry,
something of that sort, and just sort of pass quickly over anything else, or just
mention George IV alone. And, of course, about him, he was a sex athlete,
increasingly fat as the years went by. He was not a Brad Pitt. But, of course, I can say
anything of the male characters. The male scandalous characters of history are
seldom the problem. But one has to tailor-the French called it chronique de

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scandal. One has to tailor that a little more carefully now, but otherwise, getting back
to your original question, I think my teaching is the same, essentially the same as it
always was.

         I'm inspired in that respect by a philosophy professor I had over forty years
ago at Johns Hopkins who was a very entertaining professor, and he is my
unacknowledged model, long dead, of course, now. But he was a very delightful
lecturer, and I remember him better than anybody else in my undergrad days, and
he's the one I have attempted, with who knows what success, to emulate, Professor
George Boaz [phonetic] of the Philosophy Department. Nobody fell asleep in his
class.
Warren: Well, I don't think they do in yours either.
Futch: Thank you. My goal is not to have them fall asleep.
Warren: Well, let me ask you about-you know, I was here before and I've come
back. Certainly what I witnessed in the late '70s when I was here, I was not in the
classroom, but I was in Lexington, and I did not see a lot of gentlemanly behavior in
the late '70s around here.
Futch: You mean at night, or out on the town, or on campus or what?
Warren: I mean walking by Red Square on a Wednesday night.
Futch: Drunk? Were they drunk?
Warren: Oh, drunk and just-
Futch: Relieving themselves on the sidewalk, something like that?
Warren: Very unruly behavior out at night.
Futch: Breaking glass at automobile tires?
Warren: Yeah, all that kind of thing. Very loud music all the time. And I wasn't
necessarily an older person who would be offended by this.
Futch: You were a mere high school maiden at that time. [Laughter]

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Warren: Not quite. I wish, but not quite. But from what I understand, part of the
reason why coeducation was brought here was because the academic standards had
been lowered, that the students who were coming through here weren't quite as
good. Did you experience that?
Futch: No, I did not experience that. I think that a lot of the defenders of
coeducation wanted to make it appear that they were academic deadheads,
dunderheads. Deadhead, I guess, has another meaning now. Dunderheads. And
there may have been some dunderheads here at the time, but there also were in the
'60s, I guarantee you, and some of the brightest kids that I know here in the late '70s.
So I think that a somewhat distorted picture is deliberately painted of that period in
order to give alumni and trustees at the time a reason to go coed. It has always been
a suspicion of mine-obviously I can't prove this or footnote this, because faculty
members just don't talk to me much-that there could have been a lowering of the
quality of high school kids who were let in here. I mean, history is not a tough
subject to teach. Maybe if I taught math or physics, it would have been a little more
noticeable. But the material of history is so familiar to start with, and it's easy to
read, and it's not like physics or calculus or computers.

         I heard somebody say this once, and I have never forgotten it, that they
deliberately let in some high school boneheads in,order to be able to tell the trustees,
"We are facing a crisis of the quality of kids who are coming here, and we will
eventually have nothing but morons here."

         The trustees said, "Oh, dear. We don't want that to happen. What's the
solution?"

         The administration said, "Well, admitting female students would probably
change things very much."

         The trustees said, "Well, we don't much want to do that."

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         The admissions people said, "Well, it's that or simply apes and gorillas will be
here, just people with no IQs at all, no detectable IQs, will be the students ten years
from now."

         The trustees said, "Oh, we don't want that to happen either."
         And something of this sort may well have happened, and I'm convinced that
it did happen, but I cannot possibly prove that. The ones that I got in that period
seemed to be perfectly okay, and if anybody looks at the alumni magazine and looks
at the graduates of 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, that you'll see they're having very
successful careers. And it has been said also that there's no A, you know, the letter
grade A, in the word "success," and that it is quite easy to be academically weak and
still run a company or found a company or step into Dad's shoes and take over the
family business quite successfully.
         So if the graduates of the late '70s and early '80s had turned into BV derelicts,
then I would say, "Uh-huh, yeah, there was really something wrong with the quality
because these guys are all sort of leaning on buildings in BV," which is not the case.
And so I'm very skeptical about the academic assertions that are made and the
reasons for any academic falling-off in that period.
         Now, as for their wild behavior, I think that has something to do with the fact
that the Student Control Committee or whatever that took care of disciplinary
problems might have been very lax, and what John D. Wilson did was to set up a
fraternity system that is very, very tightly managed so that the vandalizing of
fraternity houses and destruction of furniture, the breaking of glass windows and
things like that, there is such a tight rein on the fraternities that wild behavior
comes at a cost, that if a wild fraternity party takes place and the frat house is
damaged by hurling full bottles of whiskey against the wall or the door or
something like that, there is an immediate financial penalty, because a penalty is

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assessed, and Mom and Dad will find that monthly bill for fraternity dues is doubled
or is increased in some way.
Warren: I need to turn the tape over.
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