Gaines interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: You were just starting to talk about Mr. Pratt, John Pratt. Gaines: Mr. John Pratt, that's right, and I'm not sure he'd ever seen the university till my father convinced him to come up here. My father used to visit him in 12 Fredricksburg. I think his gift was finally equivalent to 13 million or something like that. Warren: It was pretty substantial. Gaines: I visited him down at Fredricksburg. He put one person through graduate school, for his Ph.D., because of his interest in the ginkgo tree. The two trees in front of the president's house are ginkgo trees, as you might know, and I think they were given by the Chinese to General Lee or something like that. They're the trees, you know, within twenty-four hours every leaf's off both of them. But John Pratt, he had these ginkgo trees, must have been male or female, I've forgotten, but they were ten times as big as those trees in front of there. He had an interest in them, and he thought they had possibilities as far as medicinal things. Now I see that the ginkgo thing is all over the place. Warren: He was a man ahead of his time, I guess. Gaines: That's right. And Leticia Evans, she called my mother "Baby Girl." I call Miss Jessie "Aunt Jessie," but this was, "Baby Girl, what can I do for you?" She's the one, of course, that gave the Evans Dining Hall and the tennis courts before they put in the new courts. Warren: What do you remember of Leticia Pate Evans? Gaines: I remember she was fun. I didn't know her that well. We'd go over to Hot Springs, and she'd give us the key to her liquor closet, which was down at the dining room because they couldn't buy drinks in those days, and tell us to charge everything to her. You know, we'd have a wonderful-my brothers and their wives and myself and my wife, but we would usually go in and see and talk to her a little bit, but she didn't want to go down herself, and so she'd send us down. She loved my mother. I don't remember her as well, of course, as Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. duPont. An interesting thing, I think when Mrs. Roosevelt came, she, of course, did not enjoy drinking. As a matter of fact, I guess her family had been ruined by drinking. So she would have a drink with President Roosevelt to keep him company at times, and that was the only reason, but when she spoke down here right before she went down to the Lee Chapel, my mother said, "Is everything all right?" She said, "Yes, but Mrs. Gaines, you wouldn't happen to have a little sherry around here, would you?" [Laughter] So she had a glass or a glass and a half of sherry. Turned out she wasn't used to making speeches to all-male audiences, and I think, though I can't swear, I think that the Secretary of-Ma Perkins [Frances 13 Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor 1933-1945], I think she also had a little bit of sherry before she went down and talked to them. Warren: So Frances Perkins spoke here as well? Gaines: Oh, yeah. I think she's right-oh, yes. We called her "Ma Perkins," I think. Warren: And did Eleanor Roosevelt come at the same time Franklin did, or were they separate trips? Gaines: No, Franklin and Mrs. Roosevelt came down and spent the better part of a day, and they were chauffeured, and she went on over here in Goshen, I think it was, and spent the night. Then she came back again separately to address the student body. And Miss Perkins came to address the student body, not at the same time as Mrs. Roosevelt. Warren: Tell me your memories of Franklin Roosevelt's visit. Gaines: I remember there was a big excitement. I believe his visit was in '33. I'm not sure, but I think that was it. So I would have been about four and a half. But I remember there was a big rumpus coming, and I remember guards standing on that porch. I remember that President Roosevelt was in the car, and the next thing I remember he was in the library sitting there and said, "Come on, sit in my lap," you know, and I went over there and sat in his lap. He asked me if I had a dog, which I showed him, and so forth, and then they took and ushered me out, and I came back and put a cat on [unclear]. I never remember him being crippled, and I was reading my brother's account, and he said the same thing. Roosevelt was fascinated that Lee had spent so many days right in the bay window where the students came by each day to speak to him, and they put his horse out there so he could see him, Traveller. Traveller was very special to me. Warren: Tell me more about that. Gaines: Well, I think I went down to see him every day I could from our house down to the-it used to just be his skeleton, you know. And you remember the story about [unclear]. Warren: Tell me. Gaines: Well, they used to take the freshmen in at the beginning of the year, and there was the skeleton of Traveller encased in glass, and you could see there were a lot of initials on it and everything. Then here was a skeleton of a colt right next to him, and when there was a freshman came in as part of the indoctrination, they would take him down and simply say, "This is Traveller's bones when he was grown, and these are Traveller's bones when he was a colt." "Oh, yeah. I see. Oh, you're kidding." [Laughter] But that they did then. 14 And, of course, it was Traveller's stall that was my clubhouse. Warren: Tell me about that. Gaines: Well, I think, if you'll excuse me, that's where the local girls and the local boys used to play post office. I remember putting the ladder to where the hay was. They still have the hay and water attachments in there. And then it was, you know, doing some mischief or something, but it was always a good place for a clubhouse. Warren: Now, a lot of people say that the doors are never closed to Traveller's stable. You were playing post office with those doors wide open, or did they- Gaines: You mean the garage doors? Warren: Yes. Gaines: We used to always close them. Warren: You know, I've seen them closed, and there's this legend that they're never closed, but- Gaines: No. No. The front door may not be locked, but we used to close them. Toward the end maybe we didn't close them as much as we used to, but I remember when we first got there, they were closed. Warren: Earlier you were talking about some of your rather remarkable neighbors that you had. Were they members of your club. Did Edgar Shannon come to your clubhouse? Gaines: No. Fontaine Gilliam, Dean Gilliam's son. That was Fancy Dress when we were about eight or nine years old, and the theme that year was the Kentucky Derby. Warren: So you two dressed up. Even though you were just children, you dressed up for Fancy Dress? Gaines: Well, we led the figure. We came out first twidling and looking around saying, "Oh, there must be some big party going on here," you know, and then the thing came on, but we led the parade. Warren: I didn't know that. Gaines: And one of the beautiful things we had here at the Lee house was, it used to be whenever we had a band for the dances, they agreed to send one or perhaps three people over to our house to play for a while at a reception. You see, whenever they had a dance, we had a reception. Sometimes it was a parents' reception, sometimes it was a seniors' reception, and so forth. But here's Hal Kemp, Tommy Dorsey, Kay Kaiser, all these people who came there, and I got to know them all because I would-if it was a pianist, I'd sit right on the end of the bench. If not, I had my chair while they played in the Lee house, and I got to know them all. Hal Kemp became-he had a son that played in there, I believe, young Kemp, but he became a 15 real Washington and Lee advocate. Whenever he got on the airways, he'd play the "Washington and Lee Swing." But this was a unique thing, you know, to know these people. When I was in college, we would take and bring Tex Beneke here or something over to the house at intermission, when we had some punch or something like that, and so I got to know them that way, too. Kay Kaiser was the most fun of them all, and I saw he died recently. But he started with "Evening, folks. How ya'll?" And it was Kay Kaiser's College of Musical Knowledge, and then he went to a divinity school and spent the last twenty or thirty years of his life teaching there. Warren: I didn't know that. That's fascinating. You were in Washington and Lee at a very interesting time. You were a student with the veterans, is that right? Gaines: That's right. Our class, 50 percent veterans and 50 percent non-veterans, and it was good. I think it helped both of us. They got to throw off a little of their seriousness, and we got to learn something from the more mature people. There's always been this myth about married students not doing as well or something, and that dispelled that, because veterans came back, got married, they just did very well. We had some-it was a good time. I remember the election of 1948. There was a lot of activity on the school. Warren: What kind of activity? Gaines: Well, there was a mock convention. Let me say several things that may change the subject before I forget. You know, my father came there in 1930, and he had the Depression to fight. They had to reduce salaries a little then, but on the other hand, they never went to the chit system that, say, the University of Arizona and other places, where they paid them in little things that the grocery store would honor most of the time. But he got through the Depression. I remember I got a penny for each light I cut out that somebody else had left on. And then he walked right into World War II. Now, when you have a university of nothing but male students-the student body went down below ninety, I remember, but my father was able to get the School for Special Services in, and that was delightful. I mean, these people all had talent, and every church that wanted a performance of a play, or more often they liked the comedians, they were always here. I remember the folks gave a reception for each group that came through, and my father made some very good friends. The next governor of Texas was there. They had all these people there. And it seemed to please everybody. [Telephone rings. Tape recorder turned off.] 16 Warren: You were talking about the School for Special Services. Gaines: Oh, yeah. A lot of people. And just one of the surprising things that happened was that Red Skelton went through that school, and he showed up at the reception with a girl that-well, anyway, I didn't know her, and she was a-I don't know how to put it in a nice way, but if Lexington had any bad girls, she was one of them. [Laughter] And he showed up at the reception with her, and I remember my father broke out laughing, and my mother was about to cry. Warren: So how old were you at that point, when the School for Special Services was there? Gaines: Oh, I guess-I was away at prep school most of the time, but I was in from the tenth to the twelfth grade or ninth grade, something like that. Warren: You went away to prep school? Gaines: Yes. I went one year to Lexington High, and then I went away. You see that picture of Pat Robertson? We started out together here. He was one of those that jumped the seventh grade. Then we both went to Lexington High for a year, and then he went to McDonough outside of Baltimore, I believe it was, for a year. I went to McCauley [phonetic] in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His father, the Senator Robertson, got dissatisfied with Pat and sent him down to McCauley, requesting he room with me, and so we roomed together one year at McCauley, and then we went another year, and we didn't room together. Then we went through Washington and Lee together and in the summers went down to the Marine Corps, Quantico, to get our reserve commissions. Then we graduated and went to-as a matter of fact-well, anyway, it doesn't make any difference. Anyway, we graduated from McCauley, and subsequently McCauley has a picture of the two of us graduating and receiving our lieutenantships or something like that. Then Pat and I went to Korea together. So I've known him a long time. When we got out of the Korean War, I was at Virginia and he was going to Yale Law School, so each time he went home, he'd spend the night with us or something like that. But I haven't seen him since his court trial with McClosky , I guess it was. Then about ten years ago-I think it was when he was talking about running for President-that he sued Pete McClosky for defamation of character. McClosky said that Pat didn't get into any combat because of his father, which may be true. I don't know. But Pat called me to tell me that he was suing, and I haven't heard from him since. Warren: What was he like as a student here at Washington and Lee? 17 Gaines: Well, I mean, our grade point average-we were both Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduates. There couldn't have been more than a tenth-of-a-point difference or something like that, but he was a hell-raiser. Not that I didn't do my share, too. [Laughter] But he was-well, I don't know, but he didn't mind driving his father's car with the congressional license on it and telling people, policemen in Washington, where to get off, you know, because they wouldn't arrest the senator's son. I don't mean to be hard on Pat or anything, but I think everybody that knows him agrees that that's the way it was until his conversion. Warren: So were you in a fraternity? Gaines: Yes. I'm a Delta Tau Delta. Warren: You're a Delt? Gaines: Yes, Roger and I were-Roger Mudd. And there were a bunch of us-the Rowe brothers that were in journalism. We had a good group. Warren: You had some interesting people who went through Washington and Lee with you. You were there at the same time Roger Mudd was, but he was a veteran. So he was a little older than you? Gaines: I guess he was. He came in, and he was a fraternity brother of mine, and we were good friends. I went to the last class reunion. He and I had lunch together. So, yeah, we did. Warren: And John Warner was here with you? Gaines: Yes, and he was one of my-see, he was down at Quantico with us. Pat and John and I had what we called the "Thursday Night Supper Club." We would leave Quantico, go up to Washington and have dinner and maybe stay up there all night, come back just in time for work on Friday, struggle through Friday, and then be dead during the weekend or something like that. That was our Thursday Night Dinner Club, we called it. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Washington and Lee. I had one brother that didn't graduate for reasons I won't go into, but it started at Washington and Lee. He's the brother that became president of Woffford. Another brother-sort of a pyrrhic victory. Mrs. duPont wanted to send him to med school, but he never could pass chemistry. It's not because of his intelligence. There were 4,000-you remember that V-12 or V-2 during World War II, where they took the college students and made them naval officers or something in ninety days? Well, Bobby scored higher than anybody that took that test. They even sent up a general to make sure that it hadn't been-stuff he wasn't interested in, he didn't [unclear], but I remember him reading the Encyclopedia Britannica when I was about five and he was ten. He'd 18 spend hours reading it, and he had tremendous ability. He just had a weakness toward drinking, and he died when he was about fifty. Warren: There was one other classmate-well, not classmate, but person-well, actually, was he your classmate? Was Tom Wolfe your classmate? He was there at the same time you were. Gaines: A year behind, I think. Warren: Yes, I think so, too. Gaines: He was a St. Christopher boy or something. I knew him. I wasn't as close as I was, say, to Pat and John. But Tom was a very nice guy. I like his eccentricity, too. Warren: Was he eccentric when he was there? Gaines: He was. He belonged to one of the small fraternities, you know, and everybody thought, well, that's just a group of misfits or something over there, or something like that. But I believe that's true. Do you know which fraternity he joined? Warren: I don't remember. Gaines: It was one of the small ones. To tell the truth, it was the same fraternity, I think, that some Washington and Lee boy many years ago got in a fight with his wife and she didn't have enough money, so he blew himself up in an airplane over Charlotte or something. It was a commercial plane that killed everybody, but I remember that guy was in the same fraternity. Warren: Oh, my gosh. Gaines: It was nice to have the people that didn't fit the mold, because the mold was so much the same in many ways. But my father, when he came in there, it was more-he was looking for the rocks to shine and make them gems, and there it looks like all the gems are coming in before- Warren: Now, one of the gems about Washington and Lee that I ask everyone about, that I think is so special about Washington and Lee, is the Leticia. What did the Leticia mean to you? Growing up, did it have an influence on you as you were growing up? Gaines: Absolutely. The Leticia was something not to be toyed with. We had Freshman Camp, I think as you know, which was primarily designed to instill in people what the Leticia was. The Leticia sort of confirmed for me that there are absolutes, that there is honor and there's dishonor. There were a lot of freedoms we had by observing the Leticia. 19 I had at least two fraternity brothers that went out of the university because of the Leticia. I never got put in a position-it was a very tough thing to point out one of your friends and say, "You broke this, and you're out of school." I served on the Honor Committee at the University of Virginia. I was president of the graduate school and on, first, the Student Council and then on the Honor Committee, and there was a reaffirmation when I was over there. McCauley had an honor system, too. Of course, Virginia and Washington and Lee are about the only two that don't give you a second chance or something like that. But I've gone through too many of those "[unclear] give me a second chance. So-and-so got a second chance." I think that's fine in prep school, but I don't think it's a real honor system. The system I think is entirely different, both at Virginia and Washington and Lee, from the service academies, which are sort of a joke, I think. Warren: The honor systems at the service academies are a joke? Gaines: I think so. I travel around to the Naval Academy. They just had their-not the Naval, I mean the Air Force academy. They had a dean's meeting there, and they'd just gotten through with a big scandal, and the little people there were saying, you know, the captains, "This can never happen again because we've legislated this and that and the other." Got home, and within a week there week there were about fifteen or twenty new things, had done exactly what that guy said they never would do. [Laughter] Warren: Having grown up in Annapolis, I know what you mean. The whole idea of the demerit system, some of the things people got demerits for, if you were at Washington and Lee you'd be gone. Gaines: That's right. It applies throughout, whether it's women or whether it's writing or stealing or whatever. Warren: One thing we've mentioned briefly but I'd like to hear more about because you were a student there at the time is the Bicentennial in 1949. That's a whole yearlong event. Gaines: Well, ours, it was more a spring event. I mean, I remember the dedication of the stamp, which was a coup, and I think they passed a law in Congress afterwards that they never could honor a university again, as I recall, because they immediately got 400 or 500 applications for stamps. But I was in charge of selling the stamps at the Bicentennial, and so that had several areas there. We were trying to raise 10,000 dollars, which doesn't sound like much now, but the students were going to raise it themselves to honor the World War II veterans and form a scholarship, which at that time [unclear] we raised [unclear]. 20 Art Wood, who's another alum who's a good friend of mine, he was president of Fancy Dress our senior year. He made me a vice president. He was King Arthur. We were- but he went around to-I think there were forty or fifty of these comic-strip artists, and asked them if they would do one for Washington and Lee's Bicentennial. You know, not a one turned him down. He turned out this little booklet, it was just great, you know, with all the great comic-strip artists doing this, and some of them, you know [unclear]. So we were the two students that really participated in that thing. They didn't have much then. I remember-it seems, unless I'm crazy, I hadn't thought about it, but I believe out at Penn Robin they put up a huge tent. I went out there one night almost as the climax of it, and I remember they had people parking the cars and all that thing out there. They had a pavilion, I guess it was, out there. Then I remember they-I don't think I went to some of the occasions, but they gave, what, twenty or thirty honorary degrees. Incidentally, my father's received fifteen honorary degrees, but I know at one time he told me that he had been offered three times that many. One person wrote, which I thought was rather clever, "Dr. Gaines had fifteen honorary degrees, only exceeded by the number of invitations to become president at other schools." If you look through there, you can see the list of them. They tried to get him even over on the West Coast, big [unclear]. But he wanted to be keeper of the tomb, I think. Warren: Keeper of the tomb. Gaines: He wrote a book on a Southern plantation in about 1922. It was his thesis for Columbia, dissertation, and it was "The Southern Plantation in Fact and Fiction." So he did this. All but one of the reviews were good. But then they asked him-they had what they called "Every Man's Edition," and it was sort of like the Book of the Month Club. I have one right over there. And they asked my father to do the introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was rather ticklish at that time. He was teaching at Furman University. And he did that introduction, which is on this Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's one of these books that I have. I guess it's right over there. I thought you might want to look at that some time. But the gist was-his was that, yes, you could find any of these infractions, abuses, or what have you, in slavery in the South, but instead of all being in one place like this, you'd have to look at a newspaper one day at abuse over here and another paper for abuse over there, but it was very rare, if not nonexistent, that you would have all this happening on one place. And it seemed [unclear]. But this was seventy years before they first started questioning about the old conceptions of the 21 plantation, because after the war, many people in the North reproduced these homes, Southern homes, tried to become dressed-up people in garbs and this, that, and the other. I remember my father went to one party up there in New York, and everyone was dressed in togas, and they thought the moonlight was a little yellower there and everything, and they dressed them up in togas, and I remember Father saying he was standing by the host, and this man that was assisting with the drinks and everything came up and said, "Oh, my Caesar, the gin done give out." So that was a part of it, the Reconstruction of the South in the North, or at least what they thought was a Reconstruction. Warren: I have one more question about the Bicentennial. The person who chaired it is someone I expect you got to know fairly well, John W. Davis. Gaines: If you had asked me who chaired it, I would never have dreamed it was John W. Davis. Warren: What was he like as a person? Gaines: I never was that close to him, but as far as I could tell, he was a man of great principle and extremely gifted. I mean, I think he would have been a great president of Washington and Lee, too. Warren: Did he ever come to visit at Lee House that you remember? Gaines: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'm sure he's in there. I remember him coming [unclear]. Well, he was on the board of trustees, and so the board came periodically, but I didn't-I was too young at the time. Marvin, my black friend and I, would be eating in the back someplace, the one I showed you the picture of. Warren: Yes. What was Marvin's position in the household? Gaines: Well, we'd go to Mississippi two or three summers, and Marvin and I played. He came up-he was five years older, and he came up primarily to be a friend of mine and to try to make sure he received an education. Even at that time-let me go back. There was always back there several of my black friends living in the Lee house. When my mother and father came, they brought two maids from Mississippi, Bea and Blanche. Bea became my nurse. She lived with me. In the morning she would come in before I got up and put my clothes on the radiator so when I got up they would be warm, then she would come back while I dressed and listen to my lessons and so forth. We would go all over Lexington collecting tinfoil and making tinfoil balls or something. But I loved her, I'm sure, as much as I loved, if not more, my mother at the time, because I saw her all the time. 22 When the Lindbergh trial of the Lindbergh baby was stolen, all of a sudden, Bea, who lived in the back, appeare~ in my room, which was next to my father's, put her mattress down-if it weren't for the walls, it would have been ten feet from my father's head-and every night would stay there because she didn't want me to get stolen. After two or three weeks, they convinced her to go back. She was about ten years older than I. She was a young girl. I loved her to death. Some of the funny things I remember that we did [unclear]. Warren: Oh, tell me. Gaines: Oh, I remember I had a lot of trouble. There was an enema in the house that they'd used on me, and Bea asked them if we couldn't get rid of it, and so they told her yes, and so she took me and we went over the footbridge and threw this thing into [unclear]. But I mean, I never will forget that, that she was going to get rid of that thing because I didn't like it. I loved her to death. Blanche lived there about three years, and we just found out a couple of years ago that she left because she was pregnant. She was sweet, but Bea was the one I really loved. Then Bea left and Marvin moved in, and, of course, my uncle lived back there, too. I remember happy times now, great jokesters. Sitting at the table, it was hilarious. Warren: Oh, do tell me. Tell me what you mean by that. Gaines: Oh, just witticisms that would come through. I remember one time my father was telling his little niece, said, "I think you're a cold potato. That's why you don't have any dates." Then he said to me, "You're the little potato," and this, that, and the other. I said, "Yeah, and my mama's the dictator." Oh, he thought that was- [Laughter] That was a very poor example. But particularly at Penn Robin, you'd be crying at just the spontaneous jokes that [unclear]. And there was a big fight. Everyone wanted to get the floor. "Can I have the floor for a minute?" Warren: And they'd actually say that? Gaines: Oh, yeah.