GEORGE GOODWIN September 18, 1996 — Mame Warren, Interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the 18th of September 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with George Goodwin, and it looks to me like you've come prepared. You've got lots of notes. Goodwin: I have some. Warren: What made you decide to come to Washington and Lee, in the first place? Goodwin: A combination of circumstances, but the primary one was, I knew that they had a very good journalism school, and I was determined on a career as a newspaperman. I had visited the campus in the fall, I guess, of '34, attending a Southern Scholastic Press Association meeting, and that further entrapped me. There was a remarkable man in Atlanta named Colonel Willis Everett [phonetic], Willis A. Everett, I believe, who was a Washington and Lee alumnus, a friend of my mother's who was particularly a friend of his parents, and he spoke to me of the merits of Washington and Lee and I think had a hand in getting me a small $100 scholarship. It wasn't too small for that day, but it was pretty useful. He, incidentally, went on to be the military officer appointed to defend the Malmady [phonetic] Massacre, Germans, and as he said to me later, Malmady was a terrible incident in World War II in which a number of American prisoners of war were shot down. Later, the officers of the battalion involved were captured, and that led to a trial of the commander and a number of others. This young officer from Atlanta, who 1 was an attorney, was picked to be their defense counsel in the court-martial. It went on about the same time the Nuremberg trials went on. He said for the first part of the incident or the procedure, really right up through the trial, he felt he was doing what he was supposed to do, defending some defendants who, under our system, were entitled to a defense. But thereafter, he realized that he had to appeal that, and he finally appealed it, I believe, to the Supreme Court of the United States, on the violations of American judicial canons. It became quite a famous story, and he became right distinguished for it. He's long gone, but a good man, a very good man. A biography is in the process of being written about him. So anyway, it was those factors that led in. I think in 1932 my family had visited the campus when we were on a drive through the Shenandoah Valley to New York. Warren: Do you remember your impressions then? Goodwin: Oh, yeah. It was a very beautiful place. It looked about like it does now. My wife says that Lexington and Washington and Lee have been pretty much unchanged by progress. Warren: Do you think that's true? Goodwin: There's been some progress over here. I don't see much in the town. Warren: So you attended the Southern Scholastic conference. You're the first person I've talked to who attended one of those. I've certainly talked to Tom Riegel about it, but I'd love to hear a student's point of view about it. Goodwin: Well, another fellow and I who were in Boys High in Atlanta were invited to attend. I forget now just what the procedures were, whether we applied or how it was. We came up by train to Lynchburg, and by bus over here, I presume. We stayed in— well, I stayed in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house, because one of my good friends from Boys High had come up here and had pledged Delt, and they found a bed for me. 2 Then I remembered those things after I was in school, and they seemed to attract a lot of capable young people from around the region. I guess Atlanta was a little far for some to have come. Incidentally, the fellow who came with me subsequently was a federal district judge in Atlanta, stood for Congress. He was not elected, but was very close. And is now retired, and we are still good friends. He told me he regretted that he wasn't able to come to W&L. He went to Emory. Warren: So you had decided you wanted to be a journalist early on. Tell me about being a journalism major at Washington and Lee. What did that entail back then? What was it like? Goodwin: As I recall, you could take only one journalism course in your sophomore year. You had to do all of the required core curricula. In fact, what one sought was a certificate in journalism. As I recall, I had 130-something hours, and that extra twenty or so were what made the certificate part of it. Then your junior and senior years were pretty well filled with journalism courses. Well, they weren't filled, but you had a lot of them. Tom Riegel taught Critical Writing and Propaganda. A man named Dick Carter taught Reporting and Advanced Reporting. I haven't carried many grudges in my life, but he manages to hold one of them. I guess it was the spring of my junior year, I was elected to go to the National Sigma Delta Chi convention in Madison, Wisconsin. At the time, the class was covering the courts, and so I did my court story for the day and then wrote a little note that "Goodwin will be away for the next few days. For full coverage of the Rockbridge County Court, see the reports of—" and listed the other guys who were there, for which he gave me not an F, but a zero, and that zero pulled me out of Phi Beta Kappa, and I never quite forgave him for it. I guess I learned a lesson. 3 Anyway, there was another fellow, whose name I've forgotten, who was there. Harold Lauck ran the print shop, and we printed the Ring-tum Phi, which was about where this library is now, as a matter of fact, hung out over the chasm here. Working on the Ring-tum Phi was very much a part of the journalism procedures. Warren: Tell me about that. Goodwin: Well, the Ring-tum Phi was a right good college paper for its day. It came out twice a week, so we had two managing editors. Then there was always a competition to who would be editor in his senior year, and I missed out on that. Bob Nicholson, who had been the managing editor of the other section of the paper was selected. Warren: Who selected? Goodwin: Oh, it was selected by general campus votes or something. I've forgotten how we selected campus offices. But it was like everything else. It was traded out. One of our fellows wanted to be president had a Fancy Dress. The Delta house couldn't have everything, so we had to give something up, and mine was one of them. But the actual selection—oh, now I remember. The actual selection was before some student committee, maybe the Executive Committee, the head of such, something like that. It was a right thoughtful paper. I get the Ring-tum Phi now as a class agent, and we didn't have nearly the political material. It was really more campus oriented and didn't try to cover the world's news or be overfilled with commentary on political, national politics. Warren: What do you think about that change? Goodwin: I think it's probably a change for the good, certainly. Today one lives amid politics. I have a feeling there's too many Republicans running around, especially on the campus, but that will change. Warren: You think? Goodwin: Oh, yeah. 4 Warren: What was the political scene when you were here? Goodwin: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and no one else. Warren: Is that true? The student body was behind Roosevelt? Goodwin: Of course. Well, we still had Republicans around, but I would guess that the majority of the student body in those days would have been for Roosevelt. I'm sure there's some pieces in the Ring-tum Phi that did touch on that issue. I think his opposition in '36 was Alf[red] Landon, maybe. Yes, that's who it was. And he wasn't a very strong candidate, and Roosevelt was a towering candidate. It's funny, the girl I married was working as a secretary to Wendell Wilkie. Warren: Really? Goodwin: When we were married in 1940. Warren: Isn't that interesting. Now, tell me about being at Washington and Lee during the Depression and during the Roosevelt era. It must have been very different. Goodwin: That's what this is. Warren: Well, you tell me. Goodwin: Well, it's pretty well set forth here, covering four years, because I had to select what was going on, and I've been trying—these notes I made when I was coming up. I found it's really difficult to realize more than high spots. For instance, from Atlanta you came by train and by bus or by taxi from Lynchburg. No freshmen were allowed to have automobiles. In fact, I didn't have one all the time I was here, and didn't feel particularly deprived. I remember very well the first time coming up and somehow—I guess I had made a day trip of it because of coming in on a bus by way of Glasgow and Natural Bridge and sitting next to a fellow named Bob Brickhouse, who turned out to be the freshman dorm counselor in Graham Dorm, one of mine as a matter of fact. I remember it was evening, and we had freshman camp at that time, so we spent one night in rather primitive conditions there on the third floor of Graham. But I recall 5 that the dormitories were, of course, not joined. I can't remember what was between them. I guess it was just grass, though there could have been a road between them. They were separated in the middle, so that you had one entrance from the street leading up toward the campus there behind Traveller's home and another entrance from the campus, but you couldn't go all the way through the corridors. So that made particularly close friendships among the people who were together on their respective ends of the four floors. I remember one of the people on my end was Ed Shannon. He lived with three other fellows down in the room that had four guys in it. Others, I think, were single rooms, as I recall. But four of us from that group, our sophomore year lived in the castle. Warren: Tell me about the Castle. Goodwin: The Castle is the oldest building in town, over behind the jail, the headquarters of the Rockbridge—some agency there. What's the street parallel to Main Street one block? Warren: Randolph? Goodwin: Yeah. The castle is a little tabby-like building, outside stairs, entrance under the stairs, it could handle eight students. Professor Hale Houston [phonetic], who lived up on the corner of Washington, I guess, and Randolph, owned it. That's an historical monument. It's got a plaque on it, all that sort of thing. Warren: Did you have an apartment in it or did you have the whole house? Goodwin: No, we had the upper story and four other guys had the lower story. Warren: Is that when you were an upperclassman? Goodwin: That was when I was a sophomore. Then my junior and senior years, I lived in the Delt house. But back to the impact of the design of the freshman dorm, they created a little group of which you were a part. Just like you were a part of the journalism school once 6 you got into it, you were a part of your fraternity. If you had been in athletics, you would have been a part of whatever athletic pursuit you were into, which was one reason I was so glad when they gave up football, because that was a sort of a special group of people. And indeed, I'll tell you a story about that. I don't think I told you. We'd gotten back from freshman camp. I was in 317 Graham, and the fellow next to me was a fellow exactly my size from Morgan Park School in Chicago, and he'd played football there. I had played pick-up football, but not in high school. And so they put a notice up in the gymnasium, anybody wants to go out for freshman football, report to the gym or to the football field, or to the gym I guess it was, at two p.m. on Tuesday. So McClure and I looked at each other, "Do you think we should?" "Yeah, let's do." So we did. We got over there and found all the hired hands had reported at two p.m. on Monday, and they had all the uniforms, the new shoulder pads, better equipment all the way around. And of the group that reported on Tuesday, I think only one ever made the varsity, but that one was Charlie Lykes, the Lykes family of Florida. Well, they wound up owning about half the state of Florida, the Lykes Brothers Ripley Steamship Company, Lykes Foods. He died just a few years ago. Warren: How do you spell Lykes? Goodwin: L-Y-K-E-S. Very generous family to the university. Their roots originally were in Texas. In fact, they're all along the Gulf Coast. There were Lykes in Texas, and I think there's an interest in Louisiana, big cattle interest and farming interest in Florida. Warren: So who do you mean, the "hired hands"? Goodwin: These were the people that were on football scholarships. Warren: Tell me more about that. Goodwin: Well, in those days Washington and Lee was trying to play big-time football, like the University of Georgia or VMI or VPI or Carolina, and they didn't do very well at it. They usually had one or two outstanding players. We had one in our 7 group, Ray Craft, who was pretty good, quite good. Amos Boland [phonetic], that was the freshman football coach, but he'd been distinguished in the years immediately preceding. I would guess they had about twenty-five football scholarship athletes. The rest of us were sort of to be practiced with and at. But it was fun, and we all enjoyed it. There were some nice guys on there. Warren: Was there resentment? Goodwin: Pardon? Warren: Was there resentment from the other students? Goodwin: Not really. It was sort of expected. I guess for Mac and me, we were just surprised when we first—we resented having hand-me-down equipment. All the better shoes, the other guys had. We had, if you could find a pair to fit you, left over from last year or the year before. But, no, there was no general resentment. Warren: Was there a lot of support for the football team? Goodwin: Oh, yes, very enthusiastic, and we would all get out and cheer. And most of us that went out on Tuesday stayed out through the whole season. I think I got in one game for a few minutes. But it was fun. We enjoyed it. Then in I think it was 1949, somewhere in that era, Washington and Lee actually played in the Gator Bowl, and then the next year or the fall following that year—no, in the spring following that year—they bounced about fifteen of the players on violation of the Honor System and gave up football. That was one of the great days in the university's life, because it opened the field for anybody who wanted to go out could, and did, and I think it's been fine. I doubt there's been any serious regrets on the part of anybody except a few alumni. Warren: How did the alumni react when that news came out? Goodwin: Some of them screamed like a wounded bear, and there's at least one in our class that still thinks it was an evil day and stopped contributing. But they've gotten over it, like they got over coeducation, most of them. 8 Warren: Was fraternity life really important to you? Goodwin: Yes. I have a feeling in those days fraternity life was pretty important, relatively. Our son was here in '69, and he elected not to pledge a fraternity, and he had a fine time here and thoroughly enjoyed himself. But fraternity life was right pervasive, I would say, and pleasant. It was another group of friends. One of the fellows who pledged the fraternity the same week I did, I swore I couldn't possibly stand to live around that man for four years, loud mouth, horrible. He turned out to be best man in my wedding, and we were with them in Illinois a few weeks ago. Warren: You must have worked something out. Goodwin: It's funny. Some of the people that I have disliked, at least temporarily, turned out to be wonderfully close friends. That was Charlie Bowles. Charlie went on to be All Southern Conference wrestler, still looks like a kite. We lost a lot of people out of that fraternity. I think eight or nine who were there when I was were lost in World War II. Warren: Did you have a sense, as you went through your four years, of what the world events were and what was coming? Goodwin: Well, those four years, here are 1,200, 1,500 young men sort of physically removed from the big cities of America, the big newspapers. We had radio. Of course, this is before TV. There was a lot of following of world events on radio. That tape, one of them is from my sophomore year. One is Franklin Roosevelt, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." No, no, "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny." The second one is the Duke of Windsor and his statement to the British people when he stepped down from being king. And there's the Joe Louis- Max Schmeling fight, the crash of the Hindenburg, the War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' thing. Warren: One thing. I'm sure your slide show is wonderful, but what I'm putting together here is for posterity, and we want to hear what George Goodwin has to say. 9 Those were really big world events. What happened here at Washington and Lee as those things were taking place? Goodwin: Well, I don't remember political gatherings like I read about in the Ring-tum Phi now, where you would have visiting speakers, high level. Of course, we had the Mock Convention, but I don't think we had funds in the student budget for bringing speakers. If you could get them for free, you might get some occasionally. There were discussions in classroom. Political science was a very significant course here, always was. History. And so it got mixed in by osmosis if no other way. But anyway, we were sitting back here all by ourselves, and this world's going on outside the Shenandoah Valley. One of the things in there that occurred while we were here was Neville Chamberlain's meeting with Hitler and his talk, “and Hitler assures me that the Sudetenland will be his last territorial objective,” and less than three years later we're all involved in it. So I think there was a definite awareness, particularly after '38, when Hitler goes into Poland, that it was just kind of a question of time. None of us envisioned Pearl Harbor, but there was the expectation that they couldn't have that big a war without the United States being involved in some way. We were, of course, aware of Lend-Lease and the destroyer deal. Well, that comes later, after we were out of school. But we knew Roosevelt, which side he was on. Warren: Were military science classes being offered, and did you take any? Goodwin: I did not take any. There was a Marine group here. I remember one of my classmates, a boy named Bob Goodin, G-O-O-D-I-N, from Tennessee, was in a group that they wound up on Guadalcanal. There's a picture of his Marine training group in there. Now, where they trained, I don't know. It must have been somewhere around here. I don't think it was as far away as Lynchburg, but it could have been. But I didn't know of any Navy or Army ROTC. And I think some of that continued after the war. 10 Other than that Marine unit, I didn't know of anything. There may have been some fellows who were in the National Guard in their home states, possibility. Warren: So was there talk among the students that "we are going to get involved,” "we," personally? Goodwin: Oh, yes. Warren: Tell me about that. Goodwin: It just was. You knew you were, because you were the right age. You didn't know when, but there was talk, there was expectation. We had a nice thing at the Delta house. Our housemother was a woman named Mrs. Kennedy. Her husband had been an Episcopal minister, and she lived a long time in China. Her husband was the brother of Hugh Stoddert Kennedy, who was highly quoted among Episcopalians. She served tea each afternoon, and there was a room set aside just for that. And she had a radio, and we would make our way in there. We might listen to a national commentator, and then she'd talk about it or we'd talk about it. There was some joking around he campus about the tea-drinking Delts, but on the other hand, our friends appreciated being invited. Some of those conversations were right serious. Then a sort of replay of it might happen in the evening sometimes. She'd be in there, and various fellows would drop around. She was a world figure herself, so she added breadth to any conversation that went on. Incidentally, she, in China, had in her charge two young women who were with some other missionary family, Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine. In the summer after I graduated, I went out to California with a group from Atlanta, and she made arrangements for me to meet Olivia De Havilland in Santa Monica, I guess. And we were going on up to San Francisco, so she said, "You must see my parents and my sister up there." So I did, because they all had great regards for Mrs. Kennedy. 11 We had a funny thing happen at one of those tea sessions. Sonny Harbaugh [phonetic], from somewhere in Virginia, he was a year behind me, I believe, brought a dog to school when he came back for his sophomore year, when he could live in the house. See, freshmen couldn't live in the fraternity. He brought this damn dog. It was a remarkable dog, I think a collie, a big dog. But he could hear the telephone before anyone else could hear it, and if he were downstairs, he would go from wherever he was pell-mell to the little downstairs telephone booth, or if he was upstairs, he'd head for the upstairs one. One day that happened just as Reed, the butler, was either coming in or going out with a tray of tea things, and he hit Reed and Reed went down, and tea things went all over everywhere. Warren: Was that unusual to have a dog? Goodwin: He was, I think, the only one we had around the house when I was there. Warren: There are dogs everywhere here now. Goodwin: Well, there were always plenty of dogs on the campus, but at that time I didn't know many that lived in fraternity houses. But Harbaugh was different, anyway. I forget what town he's from. But those four years were good years. They were years of friendships. I was jotting down some thoughts here of the times that happened. The gym was popular. That was the old gym, the Doremus Gymnasium. The basketball team used it for practice, but the handball courts were available, and a lot of us learned to play handball. Then while we were here, they built the tennis courts, and they were good tennis courts, down under the bridge. Fred Perry came here as a tennis coach. Warren: Tell me about that. Did you play with him? Goodwin: I didn't play with him. I remember first he came and played an exhibition, and then it may have been after I was gone that he came here as the coach, but I know that he was. 12 Of course, Rush Week was always an interesting time. The thing that I marvel about so much was how the SAEs and the Delts and the various types of guys wound up at houses where they belonged. Warren: How do you think that happened? I think it's very mysterious. Goodwin: I just don't know, but it happened. There would be exceptions, of course. But generally, guys of a type wound up together. One of the funny things is, the SPE alumni have been generally the most generous in their contributions to the university. The little house down there where the Highway 11 bears off and heads into town as you're coming from out at Best Western, the little yellow building to the right, I think it's a health center now or something, but Hugh Avery of the SPE house started a boys club in there. He was just a student, but he thought these kids didn't have anything to do. I guess they were black even then. And he started a boys club for them. I was here with Hugh some years ago, and he went back there and something like that boys club was still going on. He died recently, two years ago. Dick Handley lived out in the state of Washington, very generous, very kind person. Didn't have much money. Bob Hilton, Cincinnati, a lawyer. There's something about that crowd. They were that way. You really couldn't describe what made them the—KAs were sort of professional Southerners. I expect we all drank too much, although whatever level we operated in that department was multiplied by ten over subsequent years. One of our alumni, one of the fellows in my class, wrote me a clipping from some rating service of colleges and universities just recently, in the last month, and Washington and Lee had been noted as a place with plenty of alcohol. He said, "Is this what's being said about our university?" I wrote him back, "And what were you doing when you were there?" But there was too much of that. 13 Warren: Do you think there was more here than elsewhere? Goodwin: Probably. Warren: Why? Goodwin: I think the University of Virginia exceeded it. Well, we had a lot of wealthy boys. We were sort of identifying ourselves as sophisticated young gentlemen, coats and ties. That was part of it. Another, we had a lot of parties. Now, we didn't have these constant fraternity parties like came in recent years, but, remember, there were no women here, except for the Desha girls, Dr. Desha's daughters. There just weren't many in town that were a part of the university. So it was Hollins or Sweet Briar or Randolph- Macon or Mary Baldwin, and those visits went on just about each weekend. So when we did have a party, I guess it was a pretty raucous one in some ways. I remember we had quite a long debate in the Delta house on whether to allow a bar and playroom to be built downstairs. They finally did do it in my junior year, I think. But most of us were probably getting introduced to whiskey for the first time, and beer. In spring, bock beer was a popular idea. Various places around town served it, a dark beer. Conviviality was sort of a hallmark of the place, either by twos or fours or tens or however many were in the group. I don't think there was any drinking in the dorms to amount to anything. The dorm monitors are supposed to be a little aware of that. But we used to take protection in the fact that the University of Virginia was probably even more so. Warren: I need to turn the tape over.