Goodwin interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: You just mentioned the idea of going to the various women's colleges. You didn't have a car. How did you get there? Goodwin: By being awfully nice to guys who did. Warren: Tell me about that. 14 Goodwin: Well, usually there would be a group around the fraternity that was kind of aimed at various schools, maybe three or four that had girls at Randolph-Macon and maybe an equal number at Sweet Briar or Hollins. Hollins, being a little closer, was maybe a little more popular, because that mountain was a mess to go whichever way you went to Lynchburg. And Mary Baldwin was close up the way. Usually on weekends, on both days of the weekend, there would be somebody going, and those who had cars were very generous to share them with others. A fellow who died this year in Atlanta, who lived in Memphis, he used to go to Randolph- Macon. I rode with him many a time. Warren: Would it be a whole gang of you would get in the car and go over? Goodwin: Oh, maybe six, five. More than one, usually. There was a professor here named Fitzgerald Flournoy in English and high regarded. I think he may have been a Rhodes scholar. His mother was very active in Colonial Dames and the Daughters of the Revolution in Lynchburg, and doing my sophomore year I fell into a pattern of driving her over there of an afternoon, and that would give me time to drop by Randolph-Macon, and when she was ready to come back, we'd come back. I remember one night driving back in the rain, coming into Buena Vista, a black asphalt pavement, black night, I suddenly realized I was in a herd of black cows. I was dodging cows, not wanted to wreck her automobile. We made it. One of the things that happened while I was here and that we all took joy in, we had an English professor named Lawrence Edward Watkins. Are you familiar with this story? Warren: Please tell it. Goodwin: Well, Larry Watkins lived in the house just back of the Episcopal church, he and his wife, and they used to give pretty raucous parties, not for students, but for faculty. It's said that the university was just about to remove him from the campus 15 when his book came out, and his book was On Borrowed Time, a wonderful play, Death in the Apple Tree, and they made him a full professor. I had him for I guess in freshman English. I also had Dean Gilliam freshman English. Larry was just a delight. Years later, 1951, I was in London, barrelling through a revolving door of Selfridge Department Store. I knocked a man down, and I caught him just before he crashed in the thing. I'm looking, and it's Larry Watkins. "What the hell are you doing in my arms in London?" It turned out that after the war he at some point had gone with Disney as part of a writer/producer team, and he was in London filming Robin Hood somewhere. They were living in London, because they invited me to their apartment, and then we went out for dinner in an Indian restaurant. I remember they asked me did I want my curry warm, medium, or mild, and I said, "Very mild," and it was the hottest stuff I ever tasted. Then I got a call from him some years later, saying that he was coming to Georgia to produce for Disney The Great Locomotive Chase and would I help him recruit some actors. Well, I was president of Theater Atlanta at the time, and so we lined up the extras for him to do The Great Locomotive Chase. Then still later, we visited him in California when he was doing Darby O'Gill and the Little People, which I have never seen, by the way. I have the book, but I never saw the film. But he showed me the big chair that they used for making people little. But he was a distinguished product of this university, not as a student, but as a faculty member. Warren: Do you know why he left after he became a full professor? Goodwin: I remember the night that the play On Borrowed Time opened on Broadway. He was scared to go. And I think a playwright named Osborne might have been involved in the play version. I walked around the campus with him that night. I think it was maybe my sophomore year, sophomore or junior. He was just nervous and hoping. I forget how the evening ended, but I'm sure the next day it was known that it would be 16 one of the great hits of the American theater. To this day, little theater groups put it on all over the country, I guess all over the world. I got to thinking about something the other day that I believe I should share with you, a personal observation. Oh, I knew I brought you something, and I knew that for some reason I wanted to bring my briefcase, and I left the briefcase in the room. I thought, "There's nothing in there I want." But what I do have in there are tapes of Dr. Gaines' speeches. Warren: You gave me that. Goodwin: Oh, did I? Warren: And I thoroughly enjoyed it. Goodwin: Oh, all right, then you have them. Warren: Yes. Goodwin: Did I give you just the excerpts or the full tapes? Warren: You gave me both, and I listened to both. Goodwin: All right. Well, I brought three sets with me this time. Warren: I'm taking care of it. I have it on file. Goodwin: All right. Well, that's great. But anyway, as I think back over these four college years, it seems to me that most of my student friends and myself would be particularly close to one or two faculty members, like Tom Riegel or Al Moger. Usually they were people in the field where we were perhaps concentrating, and you might wind up getting invited to their homes sometime. And I expect that was true of the people in science with Dr. Howe, and I know it was true in geology, the fellow who was head of geology at the time. But for thirty years, Francis P. Gaines spans this place, and you listen to those speeches, and I submit that if there's anything special about Washington and Lee alumni, it comes out of those speeches and speeches like that. Now, none of those 17 speeches that you have were made when we were here, but they are typical and they are basic and they are the same points that I remember his making. I guess thirty years is a pretty long time for a college president to be around anyway, and I think he had a real impact on us, because he had a manner of speaking that would sort of lift things above the routine. When he speaks of positive character, for example, and when he talks about honor your patron saints. Listening to those full speeches, I realize he had a manner, he'd go into a parenthesis within a sentence. If he's talking about Lucius Cincinnatus Lamar, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus Lamar, and he told them, "He was a friend of my wife's grandfather," and go right on. Warren: What did he mean about personal saints? Goodwin: Positive character? Warren: Positive character. Goodwin: What he meant was this. He said anybody can say that he never robbed a bank or never cheated on his wife or never got fallen-down drunk. The nearest lamppost can say that. But what about positive character? And he submitted an idea that he had heard in his student days, that positive character was the carrying out of a resolution after the excitement in which that resolution was made had passed away. He said, "If you found a better definition, let me know." Warren: Did he have a real rapport with the students? Goodwin: Yeah. He taught a class on the Bible as literature. It met at eight o'clock in the morning. Incidentally, we had eight o'clock classes in those days, Monday- Wednesday-Friday, Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, and labs in the afternoon. I took the course in I guess my junior year. It might have even been my sophomore. And when I got through—I think it was a fall course, but I remember a couple of times we met in his library there. Mrs. Gaines would fix ham biscuits or something, or we'd never listen. When I went to study for the final exam and I opened my notebook, and I didn't have any notes in it. I'd have a page and a date and maybe two or three words or 18 perhaps even a sentence, but never a paragraph. And the reason I know it was either my sophomore or junior year, because McClure had to leave. He had to get through in three years, but didn't find out until after the first one. He was here, because he was in the course, and I called him. I said, "Let me borrow your notes on Literature of the Bible." He said, "Okay." He called me back in a little bit. He said, "You know, it's a funny thing. I haven't got any notes." He had the same experience I had. So we started checking around with the other guys in the class, and no one had any notes. That man was such an orator, such a speaker, such a teacher, that you got absolutely mesmerized by what he was saying. It happened to all of us. I think he had had the experience before, because the final exam was something terribly easy. Everybody made A on it. But the two impacts on this university that I think tend to get overlooked, one is George Washington, and the other is Frank Gaines. That's not to put down any of the others, although Gaines set a standard among college presidents. He had been nationwide [unclear]. Warren: Well, his style of oratory is something that just hasn't happened in my lifetime. There are very few speeches. It's only speeches of old that I've heard recordings of. But I've never had the privilege that you did of living with that kind of oratory. That must have been spectacular. Goodwin: It was dramatic, and we had that and Franklin Roosevelt at the same time. There was another great orator. But anyway, that's one of my theories. The faculty, you didn't have the real envision mixing up with the faculty that I expect you have at Oxford and Cambridge. You had good teachers, you had respect for them, and in the classroom there was banter and serious discussion. Dr. Bean in history, 19 Constitutional History, was very effective at that. I remember one day he said, "If someone would awaken Mr. Goodwin, the class is dismissed." One of the hilarious ones was Fletcher James Barnes [phonetic], political science. He later wound up as the recruiting officer for naval officers in Virginia, and I saw him after the war, too, in Atlanta. Some of his stories were pretty salacious, but, again, his points over. I think he built, among those who had his class, a respect for the political process. One of the things that frightens me, I feel it's in great danger today. Anyway, let me glance at some of these things. Oh, yes. One of the things, you asked me about fraternity life. Our fraternity—now, I think it was true at others—had a tendency to linger after dinner for maybe a singing, a songfest of ten or fifteen minutes, singing college songs and state songs and Delt songs. That would go on for as long as twenty, thirty minutes, when you think about it. We took all meals in the fraternity house, including breakfast. You bat out of here for an eight o'clock class, that meant you got up before seven to go to the Delta house and then back for that eight o'clock class. But they were pleasant occasions, and there was great regard for the cooks and for the butlers, that sort of thing. Warren: Who were the butlers? Goodwin: They were blacks. Reed—I forget what Reed's last name was. He lived a long time. He was part Cherokee Indian. Warren: And they lived here in Lexington? Goodwin: Oh, yes. Warren: What would they do? Goodwin: They served and they sort of kept the place going. They saw to it that there was something in the refrigerator to eat at night, and were generally the only servant in the house. There may be a cook, as well as the butler. Usually we had two butlers and a cook. You didn't know the cook as well. I didn't. And the housemother, of course, directed them. 20 But they were the gathering places for the dances, and as I say, they were the places where the dashing teams, as they were sometimes called, developed to go to Hollins or Sweet Briar or Randolph-Macon. Warren: They were called dashing teams? Goodwin: Dashing teams, dashing off to this place, dashing off to that. Warren: I love that. That's a great expression. You mentioned dances. Do you remember any— Goodwin: Oh, and the movies were a big part of life. What were you saying about dances? Warren: Oh, go ahead about movies. Goodwin: Well, it was just that we went to most of them that came to town, and when the theater burned during, I think, my junior year, that was a great tragedy. Of course, they built it back the same place. Warren: Which one burned? Goodwin: The one on Nelson Street. Warren: The State Theater? Goodwin: Yeah. The Lyric immediately became popular again, but it always was good for cowboy movies. Warren: Wait a minute. One theater had one kind of movies and the other had another? Goodwin: Yes. Generally, the State had the first-run movies. I don't know whether they were owned by the same people or not. It was when I was off to the Sigma Delta Chi convention. McClure met me in Staunton and brought me home early one morning, and he said, "Before I drop you off, let me show you something." He drove up Nelson Street and pointed to where the State Theater had been. It was just burned down whole. But they built it back quickly. But it was a part of it. So were the places like Steve's Diner. Warren: Tell me about Steve's Diner. 21 Goodwin: It was down there—you know where there was a little floral shop at the point where the streets divide, Main Street comes in and ceases to be one way? Warren: Yes. Goodwin: Well, Steve's was on the right there as you go north, and kind of back of the Old Blue, but on the other side. It was just a great place to gather. I think he had beer. I think he had bock beer in the spring, ham-and-egg sandwiches, that sort of thing. Also, one of the pleasant memories of living in the dorm was a fellow would come by every night with crackers and sandwiches and milk and stuff to eat. Warren: For sale or giving it away? Goodwin: A lot of guys worked their way through college doing that. Warren: Were they selling food? Goodwin: Oh, yeah. Then the laundrymen who would come in from the hills and pick up your stuff on Tuesday and bring it back on Friday. Warren: What do you mean, "come in from the hills"? Goodwin: Well, they lived out in the hills. My laundryman lived on House Mountain. Warren: Wait a minute, you're the first person to tell me about his. You have to explain a little better. Goodwin: I remember in my freshman year this guy shows up. He says, "I'm a laundryman. I'll pick up your laundry and take it home. My wife will wash it and iron it. I'll bring it back to you, and you pay me." I said, "Fine." So that's how it operated. And then at the fraternity house, the same pattern continued. We didn't have coin laundries. You had dry cleaners. Some boys shipped their laundry home. They had fiber-tight boxes about so big, and they'd just mail it home every Monday, and Mama would do it and mail it back. Warren: Oh, my God, you're kidding. Goodwin: I'm not. 22 Another very key gathering place in Lexington in those days was McCrum's. Now, that continued up until fairly recent time. When McCrum's changed character, that's when I knew Lexington had lost its downtown. But it was the bus station, and it had the parking behind it, and long rows of booths and everything you could want in a drugstore of its day. The faculty used to use it during the mornings, and students would use it at night. There's one story about Dr. Howe, who was the head of the chemistry department, that a fellow comes to class on Thursday and Dr. Howe begins to quiz him on the Tuesday lecture. This guy had been smart. He learned what Howe had said on Tuesday when he'd skipped the class. Howe was a little taken back that this fellow was so knowledgeable. He said, "How did you know all that when you weren't here?" "I was in McCrum's, and I heard every word you said." Howe had a bellowing voice. I remember somehow something got mixed up when I arrived at college, and he was my freshman adviser for about three days. I went over to see him in the chemistry building. The place smelled like a chemistry building. I had never taken a chemistry course and had no intention of ever taking one. He handed me my schedule. I had every chemistry course that Washington and Lee University offered. I said, "Wait a minute, Dr. Howe. There's something wrong. I'm supposed to be in the journalism school. You've got me taking all the chemistry." He said, "I know. A journalist only needs to know two things—chemistry and stamp collecting." Well, I escaped as soon as I could. I went over to the journalism school and found Riegel and I said, "Look, I think I'm supposed to be one of yours." He said, "Oh, yeah, there's been a mix-up. I've been looking for you." After World War II, '47, '48, there was an issue of Life magazine devoted to only two subjects—chemistry and stamp collecting. 23 Warren: Well, you see, he was on to something. He was trying to tell you something. Goodwin: I'll tell you the person who was on to something, or try to tell you something, was Riegel. Riegel insisted that all of us in the journalism school—I guess this may have been in a course in editorial writing or advanced reporting or something—learn everything you could about Charles A. Lindbergh. This is 1938, '39, after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Lindbergh's living in Normandy, working with Alexis Carrel on the artificial heart, and he said, "That man's going to be back in the news one of these days." And so we did. We learned about Lindbergh. One year later, I'm working with the Washington Times Harold, and one of my first assignments was to cover Charles A. Lindbergh in "America First." Later, during the war, we were together for a week out at the Marine Corps Air Station, Santa Barbara. He came through, teaching Marines how to stretch Corsairs, or flying them more carefully than Marines normally fly airplanes. I was the operation intelligence officer, although I was Navy and eventually wound up in PT boats. He had the office next to me for a week. Every time I'd see him, Riegel, I marvel that he should have been so perceptive. But Riegel is one of the most remarkable men that ever walked on this campus. He was in Paris as a newspaper reporter when, I believe, the international edition of the New York Daily World in the mid-twenties, when all these American expatriates were there, Scott Fitzgerald and the like, and he has written his life over there, marvelous writing. I've tried to get it published, but it's too late. There's nobody who remembers the era now. But that's quite a guy. He's a hell of a guy. Warren: He's had an impact on a huge number of people. Goodwin: Oh, yeah. Warren: During the thirties, there he is, he's an expert on propaganda, and the world was being filled up with propaganda. Did you realize what an opportunity you had there, having him as a teacher? 24 Goodwin: Yes. He was showing us examples of it and talking about it. He was talking heavily from World War I, but those of us who were Propaganda and Public Opinion or maybe Public Opinion I and II were the course names, and you recognized it pretty quickly when the same Belgian babies are getting killed in World War II, and, of course, he becomes head of U.S. Information Service in Italy. Quite a guy. Warren: In describing something else, you've made the allusion to the Old Blue. Goodwin: Yes, but I didn't know much about it except where it was. It was in back of Desha's house. Warren: You never went into it? Goodwin: No. Warren: I'm very curious about that building. Goodwin: I was never in it. Ask some of the faculty people who live down in the circle. They must know, because they back up to it. Warren: But it's been gone a long time. Goodwin: I know, but there must have been stories. I think it shows in that very early lithograph of the campus. Warren: It's in a lot of photographs. I know exactly what it looks like. Charley McDowell remembers it. He's the only person I've talked to. Goodwin: Charley McDowell grew up there. Charley will know about it. Warren: Yeah. He's the only person I've been able to find that knew it. Goodwin: That's all right. If you've got him, that's enough. Warren: That's enough, you're right. Goodwin: Probably more than enough. Warren: I started to ask you before about you mentioned the fraternity houses were the gathering places for dances. Goodwin: Yes. Warren: There were a lot more dances back then than there are today, right? 25 Goodwin: No, I think there are the same. The two big ones were Fancy Dress and Finals, and in between were Homecoming and spring dances. I think that's it, four. Now every fraternity appears to have some kind of a thing to which all the other fraternity guys are invited or all the schools are invited, and these fraternity houses are just not designed for that. Warren: Well, they have parties now, but they don't have dances like you had. Goodwin: I guess, no, they probably don't. Warren: Your dances just sound so elegant to me. Goodwin: Well, they were. They were formal. The tea dances were on there, too. Penny Gaines had collected the music of the orchestras who had played at Washington and Lee when he was here. Warren: Who is Penny Gaines? Goodwin: Penny Gaines is the son of Dr. Francis Pendleton Gaines. He's Francis Pendleton Gaines, Jr., and was in my class and was dismissed on an Honor System violation. Warren: Really? Goodwin: That's why I know the Washington and Lee Honor System works. He went on. He had a mental aberration of some kind, and he worked for a year or so on a road crew in North Carolina and then went somewhere else and got his degrees and went into teaching. He was president, I believe, of Wolford College, and when he died, I think he was at the University of Arizona, either Arizona or Arizona State, as the provost or something like that. He had a distinguished college administrative career. He caught a rare disease in Spain. I forget the name. He's buried here. But he was a delightful fellow. We had in that same class, Penny Gaines and Ed Shannon, both of whose homes were on the campus. I think Penny lived at home. Ed lived in a dorm. Warren: Yeah, I've talked to him. He's a wonderful person. 26 Goodwin: He really is. He would be very perceptive, because he saw other aspects of college. He could compare Washington and Lee with one of the great universities of the nation. Warren: You've mentioned the Honor System. One thing I'm trying to ask everyone is, what did the Honor System mean to you then and what does it mean to you now? Goodwin: I don't know that it changed much. I heard an Emory University ethics professor speak on Sunday evening last, and she was talking about lying and when was it acceptable, under what circumstances. But we heard about it first at freshman camp, and it was very much in the student handbook that we were given at that time. But it was interpreted very narrowly that you didn't lie, cheat, or steal, and because you weren't supposed to associate with those who did, you were honor bound to turn in any infractions of those three that you saw. I felt I was very fortunate. In four years here, I did not see it, but there were from time to time notices placed on the bulletin board that a student has left the university. I don't think they named the student. I have read that subsequently they got involved with trials and defense counsel and all manner of hither and thither. But it was the acme of simplicity, and to this day I think it is one of the things that shaped us all. One of our classmates was a conscientious objector and served time in prison in that category, but it was good because he couldn't come away from what he believed. It's the intangibles of this place that make it different, if anything makes it different. You can probably get just as good teaching in English and history and political science and the languages as specialties in Georgia State University in Atlanta. You can probably get it around the clock, whatever time fits your work schedule. But that again had something to do with the isolation of the locality, and I think something to do with the fact that relatively few of us had automobiles, even after our freshman year. Freshman year none did. But even afterwards, most didn't. 27 I was just thinking today. We had lunch out at Wendy's. That whole area didn't exist, and it was made possible only by the automobile and by the ownership of automobiles by just about everybody, not the students, but the lowest income people, and it changed our lives. Speaking of automobiles, I think at least every year there was one or more Washington and Lee students killed in automobile accidents, usually coming back from Lynchburg. That was a miserable road over those mountains. Warren: It was a dangerous, and still is very dangerous thing to do. Goodwin: We had the national wrestling championships at Washington and Lee. Warren: The national wrestling championships? Goodwin: Yes. Warren: While you were here? Goodwin: Collegiate. Yes. I can't remember which year, but I'm sure the Calyxes will tell you. It may have been my freshman year. My freshman year was our Mock Convention year. Warren: I want to hear about that, too. Goodwin: See, I'd come in September of '35, and so that convention was in the spring of '36. It was the Republican convention, and we nominated Senator Vandenberg, one of the few misses. But he was a very highly regarded Republican senator. Really, it's not unlike what happened four years later in the Republican convention that nominated Wendell Wilkie. The crowd got into it, "Ve vant Vandenberg, ve vant Vandenberg," just like "We want Wilkie" four years later. And delegates, I think, may have forgotten some of the instructions that they had gotten during Christmas holidays from their local political leader, because one reason that the conventions have been pretty accurate has been the homework that delegates have done. We had a freshman class president, which was a clown job. This guy really was a 28 clown, Tim Langvoit [phonetic], and he came as the Hawaiian delegate, grass skirt and all. That was about it. I don't remember who the national speaker was. Warren: Did you feel the next year like you'd blown it or anything? Did you feel the next year a frustration that you all hadn't gotten it right? Goodwin: Yeah. We thought we let the school down, because at that time it had a long, long pattern of accurate selections, even to the utterly ridiculous selection of the Washington and Lee alumnus, John W. Davis. The only reason in the world he could possibly have been considered was that he was an alumnus, and there he was, [unclear] Democratic party. It was the same thing. I think that's a very useful event. I hope we never give it up. Warren: Oh, I don't think so. Goodwin: Jimmy Carter has talked to me about it, and Andy Young. They've both been here as speakers. Warren: Let me pop in another tape. Is that okay? Goodwin: Yeah.