DALLAS HAGEWOOD May 2, 1996 — Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the second of May 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with Dallas Hagewood. I want to know what made you have this pioneer spirit to come to Washington and Lee in the second year, right? Hagewood: I was in the second class. I had never heard of Washington and Lee, so I never came into it with a pioneer spirit. I actually went to an all-girls' school for high school. Actually, I was there for seven years. So coming from that environment and also living in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time, there wasn't a big alumni group that had gone to W&L. Now there are more and more people. And also coming from an all- girls' school, of course, no one before me had ever gone, so it wasn't like it was a school that I had heard of from older friends that had gone there. So I really had no idea where I was going to go to school, so in my junior year, forty girls got on a bus with my headmaster—and he was very brave—dressed us up in dresses every day and took us to see all the schools on the eastern seaboard. We went everywhere. We saw about three colleges a day. Warren: Good grief. Hagewood: It was just an unbelievable stint. We went to North Carolina, we went to see Richmond and UVA. Went to see Duke and Dartmouth and Yale and Harvard and Brown, and we saw them all, literally at such a pace, you wouldn't believe it. 1 So two weeks later, we're still on this bus, and we are exhausted. Coming back down, and we had seen—I guess we'd seen University of Richmond, came back through, and it was our final night, and we were spending the night here in Lexington. We were all so dead tired when we got here, it was about 11:30, but I called my mom on the phone and she said, "How has your trip been?" I was like, "Well, it's been exhausting, but we've seen a lot of schools." She said, "Well, where do you think you want to go?" I was like, "You know, I just haven't seen anything that I like. Everything's so big." I went to a real small high school. I was like, "Everything's so big and impersonal. We're just kind of all walking around in a big clump of people. I haven't really gotten a great feeling." She said, "I'm sorry. We'll go to California, we'll go to Texas, we'll look around at different schools. You'll find something that you like." She said, "Don't you have another school to look at tomorrow before you drive home?" I said, "Something called Washington and Lee. It's all male, and there's no way I'm going to go to an all-male school." [Laughter] She's like, "Okay. Well, when you get home, we'll look through some more brochures and pick out where we're going to go." So lo and behold, the next day we wake up, we put on our dresses again, and we come to W&L. The reason why we were stopping by W&L was obviously to see the school, but my headmaster was good friends with Bill Hartog—I think they had gone to school together or something—so he was like, "I want to stop by, see Bill, and have him show you his school. They're just now going coed and next year will be the first year, and since you're juniors, you'll be accepted into the second class if you want to apply." He had arranged for us to eat lunch here, which was just mortifying to us, because it was all men on campus at the time, and eat lunch in the freshman dining hall. But when we went in, they had twenty tour guides show up, and instead of taking us in 2 this big clump of forty, they split us up into groups of two and took us around the campus. Everybody was, "Hey Bob. Hey Bill..." Everybody knew everybody else. It was just a great feeling. I was like, "This is so much different from what I saw at a lot of these other campuses." Of course, our tour guide was funny and really nice. Then we all got back together and went to go to lunch. All the freshmen were already there and we kind of filed in. Here come two girls in dresses, and then there were four, and then there were ten, and then there were twenty, and suddenly we got this standing ovation. So it was just a really funny day. Everybody was like, "Oh my gosh." So we had to sit there and eat, but I just remember eating lunch at this table of freshman guys and just thinking, "These people are really nice. They're laughing about the fact that we're here, but they're also saying, 'This is great.'" So we all got back on the bus—and we had an eight-hour drive home—and all we could talk about was everybody was going to apply to Washington and Lee. It was so funny. Of the forty people, everybody was like, "Well I was going to go to Brown, but now I'm thinking about applying..." And I wanted to go to Princeton, so I was like, "I'm baggin' that. I'm gonna go to Washington and Lee." It was so funny. We all went back. About twenty of us applied early. I was the only one that got in, because they weren't accepting that many women at the time. I was the hated one in high school after that because I got to go. But that was the story. From just not even knowing anything about the school to going home. And my mother, when I got home, was like, "I'm really sorry you didn't find anything." I was like, "Well, actually, I'm applying early somewhere." She was like, "Oh my gosh!" So I did, and it was the only school I applied to. Warren: Wow, what a story. Hagewood: Well, it's kind of a funny story. I know I've told it a million times, but it's just so funny how my life changed dramatically. Warren: Truly overnight! 3 Hagewood: Overnight! Because W&L certainly affected my afterlife as much as my college life, in a very positive way. I'm almost enjoying being an alum as much, if not more than, when I was here, just because of the camaraderie that just continues. I look back on it and I'm grateful. I mean, I wasn't even going to go on this college trip because I thought, "Uck, two weeks of these girls on this bus! What a nightmare!" But it really did change my life for the better. Warren: And you never would have found it on your own, it sounds like. Hagewood: I never would have found it on my own. And I hate to say that, I hate to say I'd never heard of Washington and Lee, but it's just the truth. You know, Nashville, Tennessee just wasn't a big W&L—it was all Vanderbilt. I broke so many traditions coming to W&L. I broke their tradition, but I also broke my family's tradition. My grandparents went to Vanderbilt, my mom went to Vanderbilt, my brother went to Vanderbilt, so I kind of broke two things at once. Warren: Tell me what you're saying about the "afterlife." I like that expression. Hagewood: The afterlife. Well, I guess I would just have to say the after-college life. I've become more involved with W&L after school than I felt like I was involved in it when I was here. I'm sure I was very involved when I was here, but I just moved from Atlanta, and the Atlanta chapter is a really big alumni chapter, and we do so much stuff. I dated a guy, or I'm still dating a guy, who went to UVA, and he used to just be flabbergasted at the amount of parties that we had, or building houses, or whatever it was that we were going to do on behalf of W&L. He always used to say, "What on earth! Y'all have something going on in Atlanta every other week, and it's just amazing." I don't know what it is. We all continue to get back together and really enjoy being together, whether we knew each other at school or not, which in most cases, we didn't. But you just make a whole new network of friends, and you just have that W&L bond. I know that's kind of trite and clichéd, and people always say, "Oh, the W&L 4 bond lasts," but it really is interesting to see that we get together and plan a party and everybody comes, everybody that went to W&L, whether they know who's hosting it or even know the people that are attending. So that's what I've really enjoyed most about being an alum. You always feel like you're a part. Whenever I see a kid on the street in Nashville—I live in Nashville now again— whenever I see a kid on the street with a W&L hat, I ask, "Did you go to W&L?" And usually I get, "No, this is my friend's hat." But I'm hoping that they'll say, "Yeah!" and we can talk about something. I actually ran into a guy at a bar—I guess this was about two or three years ago in Atlanta, and he had on a W&L hat. I was like, "Hey, did you go to W&L?" And he said, "Yeah." He was a junior at W&L, and I said, "Well, where do you live?" The houses around here all have names. He says, "I live at Aqua Velva." I said, "Aqua Velva. I've never heard of Aqua Velva." And he said that it was right next to—and he described another house—I forget the name now. I was like, "Oh, that used to be Sigma Aqua, because the guys that lived there were water polo players." So it has evolved now, obviously, from Sigma Aqua to Aqua Velva. [Laughter] I thought that was so funny. Warren: That's great. I'm so glad you told me that, because I did an interview with a current student who was telling me about Aqua Velva, and he said, "I have no idea where the name came from." Hagewood: That is so funny. That kind of made me feel good. That was so funny. Sigma Aqua turns into Aqua Velva. These guys had no idea where it came from and how it evolved to that. We lived in a couple of houses. I lived in a house called the Border, which a bunch of Phi Delts used to live in, and they hated us because they accused us of stealing their house, which we, I guess, did. I think they lost the house and then we got it, but it 5 sure doesn't look like it was stolen. But then we got kicked out the very next year, and it turned into the Baptist Student Union, so they were kind of laughing at us. Then we lived in a house called Amityville. Warren: Who's "we"? Hagewood: I lived with a lot of different people. My freshman year, we all lived in the dorms, and then my sophomore year I moved in with eight girls into a house, most of them made up of girls that were on my hall. And then my junior and senior year, lived with who I consider to be my college roommates, because we lived together for two years. Some of the girls came from the Border over to Amityville, and some were just other friends that moved in. But those eight girls, we've just stayed in touch and have just been best friends ever since. And I actually spent the night with one of them last night in Charlottesville, and had the best time. I was talking to her about a lot of things, just because I was going to be talking to you and talking about coeducation. I was asking her the kind of things that she remembered, especially about the coeducation. We were talking about friendships, and she was like, "You know, I'm almost afraid—but afraid is not a good word—I'm afraid I might never have as good a friends as I had with you guys, and I know that we're gonna grow apart." The really great thing about W&L is that it attracts people from all over the place. So I lived with eight girls and became very best friends with them, and I'm still very best friends with them, but we all came from different states. There wasn't a one of us that came from the same state, and now we're all also back in our respective states, which I think, you know, is just great, because I've got somebody in Texas, I've got somebody in Florida, in D.C., two girls living abroad, and they're still my very best friends. Whereas I think if you had gone to like Georgia or Vanderbilt—well, Vanderbilt's a little like this—but gone to Georgia or UVA, where maybe it's not as diverse a drawing—people always criticize W&L. They say, "Well, you know, you 6 don't pull from a very diverse population." But I really think they've done a good job since I was here, of pulling people from all over the place. I know it's probably easier with girls, because there weren't that many, so they kind of had one from every state. So maybe that's why it was so uncanny that we all came from such different places. Warren: I want to go back to that lunch. The guys gave you a standing ovation. Hagewood: It was really funny. We were so embarrassed—and mortified—to be here. We were treading on these guys' spaces. It was so strange. We all had come from being at a girls' school for seven years, and just kind of walking around in our dresses. There was not another woman on campus. Warren: So these were all freshmen? Hagewood: They were all freshmen, because all freshmen eat in the dining hall. And this class was the last class of males. Warren: And they were welcoming you. Hagewood: Well, who knows? Warren: What happened when you actually came on campus? Did you find that same spirit of welcome? Hagewood: We actually did. We found a little bit, because I think it might have been one of the first times that an entire busload of women got off to look. Because, again, the people on campus at that time were all male, because it was my junior year. The tour guides certainly were very jovial and very excited. I think the whole episode was kind of a funny event, that this many women trampled off of this bus to see W&L. Obviously, the entire year was replete with controversy and, "It's coming, it's coming." The decision obviously had already been made maybe a year or two before that, maybe even before that. I'm not sure when the actual date was. But these guys knew when they applied. I believe this class probably didn't know, when they applied, that they were not going to go to an all-male institution. So I think it was an interesting 7 class of guys that freshman year. So when we walked in, they were definitely the last class of males. We always say, "After that class left, it was a lot better." [Laughter] But it was a real neat experience. We walked in, and just to have them stand up and clap, I mean, it was just so funny. And you know, part of us were like, "Oh, well, they're just making fun of us." But then I thought, "They're not, they're really not." They're saying, "It's okay that you're coming here," because they could tell we were pretty embarrassed about being there in the first place. But just the whole bit on coeducation that Jenny and I were talking about last night, and people would ask me when I went back to Nashville and I was like, "Well, I'm applying early," or when I got in they're like, "Oh, well, I know why you're going there, you know, a thirteen-to-one ratio." I never thought about it that way. I really never thought, "Oh, I'm really going to get a lot of dates," and I'm glad I didn't think about it that way, because there was a certain backlash of "Don't invite a W&L girl to anything" when I got here, which really, I think, got to a lot of girls. But I had a lot of good friends and a lot of good guy friends that I would go to things with, so I never really noticed any problem. Warren: Tell me about that sense of a backlash. Hagewood: Well, it's really funny. I never really noticed it myself until a couple of my friends from freshman year transferred. A girl actually that I lived with half my sophomore year transferred to UVA. She was like, "This is ridiculous that there are only 200 of us, and yet half of us can't get dates to things." I think a lot of the fraternities were saying, "Oh, it's cooler to invite somebody from Hollins." And I can understand that, the whole aura of dating somebody that you don't have to deal with every day, but you get to see them on the weekends or on a Wednesday night. I ended up dating somebody from Hamden-Sydney, so I certainly can't criticize anyone for who they decide to invite to a formal. 8 But I do think that a lot of girls at first had a problem with that, because if you go to a Georgia, or an Alabama, or an Ole Miss, or wherever you go to school, it's all sorority rush immediately and fraternity rush. And then you have mixers, and the big deal is who's asking who to what, and we certainly didn't have that environment here. It was fraternities and then women, which I loved. I had no problem with that at all, and I was very opposed to sororities coming on campus. Of course, I ended up joining one, but that's a whole long story itself. I guess I'll get into that a little bit, the whole sorority thing. Our freshman year, a petition went around and we were like, "No, no, no, no, no. We don't want sororities to come. We're too small. We're a sorority in and of ourselves against Hollins, Mary Baldwin, Sweet Briar." The list goes on. "It's going to tear our classes apart when we've just kind of formed a bond." Sophomore year, same thing. We all said, "No, no, no, no, no, no. No sororities." So they didn't come. Finally, junior year, there were enough people, and there were enough sophomores now, and freshman, whose classes were larger, there were more women, and I think that the coeducation thing was not as much of an issue at all. The guys that they had applied with knew it was coed, didn't think about the all-male part of it, so they didn't feel like they were treading on anybody's toes by saying, "Go sororities." We still kind of felt like, "Watch your step, don't make the guys mad," until probably my junior year, which I guess at that point was when it was all fully coed classes. So when the petition came around again, we all finally said, "Okay, sororities are coming no matter what, so we either choose to be a part," and really what I thought was, I'd like to join a sorority, because I see what the male alumni have when they come back and they have this bond with their fraternity brothers. They don't know them, of course, but they get to go to their parties, and they talk to the guys and they're like, "Hey, I was a Phi Kap too," or an SAE, and I was like, "I don't want to come back and have all these girls running around Kappa Kappa Kappa," and me going, "I never was 9 really a part of that." So that I'm isolated, "I was in the second class of women, that's why we didn't have sororities." So I got together with a group of friends and I was like, "Well, let's do this." So we actually started the first sororities after being so opposed to it. We kind of said, "Well, they're coming whether we choose to get involved or not." So I think we thought ahead to how we might feel when we came back and were kind of excluded from a very integral part, obviously what's become a very integral part, of the women's life here. So I was real glad that we did that, and still when I come back, the Kappa's say, "Kappa alum," and I get a Kappa newsletter and it's a lot of fun, whereas before I was, "No, I don't want to do this." Warren: You were explaining how they got started, but what were the logistics of it? How do you go about starting a sorority? Hagewood: Well, actually, it's pretty funny. The thing that I didn't want about sororities was the whole "rush" thing. I've seen my friends at other big universities just get torn apart by rush. A couple of friends from Nashville went down to Ole Miss and they were rushing Tri Delt and rushing KD and everything down there, and they would talk abut how they'd run from sorority house to sorority house and throw their makeup in a bush and then they'd come out and they'd do themselves up and go to the next house. That sounded horrifying. And just the entire process. So I definitely didn't want to be any part of that. But when we were to start sororities, they had women come down from nationals and do interviews, so it was literally at one interview with a woman, and then they had matching, where they got together and decided. You had, I think, one party, and then one interview. And they had the matching process where you picked which one you wanted. There was no basis for knowing which sorority you wanted to be in unless your mother was in one or nationally you had maybe some friends that were in one. So we were kind of like, "All right, we'll pick this." And if they had picked us, 10 then you matched up, and, boom, you were a sorority. So it was a real different kind of rush for us. I think now it's very much more the traditional process. Warren: Was there anybody who wanted to be in a sorority who wasn't accepted into it? Hagewood: They were very, very careful about that the first year. I think there may have been—I'm sure they've got the statistics on it—but I think there may have been maybe ten to twenty people that didn't fit at all, but I think that they came up with a process of getting them in somewhere. I know there were some people that didn't match with exactly which one they wanted, but they got in one. I remember there was this talk that they were going to be extremely careful about this first year of rush, and even in the second year, because the second year of rush was when we were doing it for the first time ourselves, and it can be really hurtful, I think the school was real careful to watch how that process went to make sure that the exclusion wasn't going to be that great. I don't know the details of how many numbers, but I think it wasn't that bad. I think people got in what they wanted to get in. And then the whole housing issue is one that I am a little bit close to, because I remember they asked us back then, "What do you want for housing?" And we had heard all the horror stories about Panhellenic rules nationwide about sorority houses, and we were like, "Oh, no, all these restrictions on who can be there and when, and restrictions about drinking out of beer bottles." You're not allowed to drink out of beer bottles in the sorority house, just dating back from I don't know when. So we were like, "Oh, no." We were used to living in kind of an open environment where you can kind of just come and go as you please and you don't have a housemother wondering where you are or what you're doing. So we said no to that, and that might have done a disservice to the people who are here now still kind of struggling with the issue, especially now that they've required sophomores to live on campus, whereas before it 11 was all freshmen on campus, which was great, but then my sophomore year, you could move out to the country or live in the city, which I absolutely loved, living in those houses, because you learn a sense of responsibility and a sense of community that you don't have when you're in a dorm. When you start paying your own rent, paying your own bills, splitting everything, buying your own groceries, that, to me, was ideal living in college. So I think what's happened now, since they're requiring sophomores to live on campus, is that the men on campus also means in the fraternity houses. All I'm stating here is not necessarily my view, but a representation of a lot of discussions I've had with my classmates, the women, that it's kind of unfair, because now the women have to live in dorms their sophomore year, which is basically what it equated to, because the men always lived in the fraternity houses their sophomore year, so nothing's really changed for them. But now the requirement is that women have to live in the dorms because they don't have housing. And I think had we known that back then, or had they even known two or three years ago—this issue has come up every year and they've said, "No, don't worry about housing"—but had they known about this impending stipulation, I'm pretty sure they would have said, "Yes, give us a sorority house so that we can live in the same way that the guys do." I don't know. It's kind of been a touchy subject around the women, just the alumni, that it is so unfair that they have to live on campus. We certainly understand why the university—I struggle, because I'm also on the board, so I have to watch what I say, but I understand that the university has to fill the rooms. I guess that's enough on that issue. Warren: There aren't too many people who were there, so it's really important to get that story from somebody who was here. You were actually an officer for your sorority. Hagewood: I was a treasurer. Warren: What does that entail? 12 Hagewood: That was actually a lot more work, just being an officer, not just treasurer, but as treasurer, too. Being an officer in the sorority was a lot more work than we really thought it was going to be, because you do have to answer to a national board of people who are expecting you to turn in things. I had to turn in financial statements and all this stuff, whereas we kind of went in to it kind of like, "Oh, a sorority, be a part, have fun, have parties, do mixers," which never happened, really. That's a whole other story. But we realized it was a real commitment, and you had to be organized. I had to send in monthly statements about how we stood, and I was like, "This is like another job!" [Laughter] But it was a lot of fun, and I really do, I have a bond. Another thing about sororities that was nice is that otherwise, I don't think that I would have ever met the classes below me. I would have had no reason to, if they weren't in my classes. I was kind of in a very rigid major, accounting and business admin, where you took the same classes with your group of people. It wasn't like an English major, where sometimes you were in a class with seniors and freshmen. We kind of had a structured level. So I'm fairly sure I wouldn't have met very many, if any, of the juniors, sophomores, and freshmen had it not been for sororities. So I think that is another beneficial thing there, is that you meet the three classes above you, and as you rise up, meet the three classes below you, whether it's through a rush situation or just through interaction through sororities. I think that was real good for me, too, because now I've got multiple classes of girls that I'm friends with, not just mine which has a limited number of people to come in contact with. Warren: I think that really is a blessing. So tell me about those succeeding classes. Those girls—were they different? Hagewood: Yes. I hope I'm not published on this. We did notice they were different. This is going to sound really strange. The classes got prettier and prettier, more outgoing, and I know people are like, "Oh, you're just saying that because you were jealous of the sophomores and freshmen." But really it was a phenomenon that we 13 noticed, that the girls just got—but also there were more, more and more girls in each class. Our class it was a ratio of one to four, and by the time I was a senior the freshman class was approaching the sixty/forty mark. So I think that made a difference just in the whole makeup of the class. But we definitely noticed that they were, like I said, they were more outgoing about the sorority thing. They were less intimidated by the coed factor. It was almost as if they didn't notice anything at all. So we kind of did feel a little bit not special in a good way, but just special in kind of an isolated way. One funny thing that I remember on the coeducation issue is that obviously wasn't here in the first year, but from what I heard, it was kind of a kid-glove status the first year. It was like, don't say anything, don't upset the girls. Basically, if they heard any rumors of stuff going on—there was a lot of media attention on the whole process. By the time we got here, in the second year, the kid gloves were off. And it was like, okay, coeducation is here. So that's when kind of the backlash started. And Jenny remembered, when I was talking to her this morning, she remembered the exact same thing I did. The first thing that came to my mind is the T-shirt wars, that there was a T-shirt or a bumper sticker about anything related to coeducation. "The beginning of an error." "Washington and Leigh." It was just bumper stickers and T-shirts everywhere. So for my discussion tomorrow, I brought show-and-tell. I brought a couple of T-shirts. Warren: Great! Hagewood: One T-shirt that I bought, but never wore until I graduated, was a T-shirt that said "W&L coed" on the front, and that's the part I like, but on the back it says, "QUALITY does not have to travel." So obviously it was cutting down the girls' schools, which I didn't feel comfortable wearing when I was here, because I have a lot of good friends that went there. And I thought it was also kind of—that wasn't me. That wasn't a me thing to do. But I thought it was a funny T-shirt, so I wore it after I graduated. And I was just, actually, going through my closet a couple of days ago and I was like, 14 "You know, I need to take this back to school for show-and-tell," because this is what I remember from mainly my freshman year. The second class of girls, they had a petition that went around. It said on top of it "Repeal Coeducation." So by the time I was here, they felt comfortable enough to start talking about it. Warren: And who's "they"? Hagewood: I don't know who they are, but I signed it. [Laughter] I was like, "Try. This is gonna be funny." Obviously they couldn't. The legal ramifications of that would be astronomical. But they really were serious about this, or they were just trying to make a statement. But that's also what Jenny remembered, was just every week there was an editorial in the Ring-tum Phi about coeducation. Somebody was writing something about it. And the T-shirts that kept coming out, and who could make the funniest T- shirt about W&L women, or the fact that W&L had gone coed. That's the first thing that came to her mind, I said, "That is just so funny that you said that," because that was the first thing that came to my mind, too. And all that really died down. By the time we were juniors, it was almost gone. There was no talk of it at all. And after having been such a big money-maker, I didn't know how on earth they'd come up with a T-shirt to make any money after that. But that's really what I remember, is that the first year there was not much said, not much backlash at all, but by the time we got here, they felt like, "Okay, well, we did good for a year, now we're gonna tell you how we really feel about it." Warren: What about in the classroom? Did you sense tension in the classroom? Hagewood: I sensed a tension in myself, just because I had never been to school with boys. So whether it was a tension that was really there, or whether it was just me adjusting to raising my hand again in front of guys, I had really no problem with raising my hand, because I think that's what you learn. The whole single-sex education 15 thing is really an issue right now, both in higher education and in lower schools. And I can imagine if somebody said, "You're high school's going coed," I'd throw a fit. So I know how they felt, I know how the alumni felt. I do know that it was, I think, the best thing for the school. I've seen where W&L has come from where it was. Just being on the board, I see all these statistics fly through my desk every day and I'm like, "That's just great." And moving up in the rankings and just nationally, the way I hear W&L spoken about is totally different from when I was here, especially in my home town. And everybody knows what it is, everybody's kid wants to go there who didn't get in. So it really has changed. Warren: Well, talking about the classroom, I've heard that part of the reason they went coeducational is because the quality of students was not real hot. Hagewood: Well, when you think about it, just the number of applicants they had to choose from, and that's just a process that just degrades every year. Men just simply weren't applying here because they wanted to go to school with women. So just when the number of applications rose, not only from women coming in, but from men who'd now consider W&L a viable option, or even a great option, because they would have loved to have come here but they didn't want to go to an all male-school because of certain stigmas attached to that, or whatever their reasons were, obviously the application pool, being larger, they could be more selective. So that has definitely, I think, improved the quality. And I don't know how much the guys would interact with professors or things. I mean, girls have, I guess, a brown-nosing characteristic to them a little bit. They raise their hands a little more often, they speak out a little bit more. But maybe that encouraged the guys. So I don't know. The professors would probably be an interesting discussion, the ones that were here before and after, just what the classroom environment was. I never really noticed any tension in the classroom, but again, I 16 didn't take a whole lot of classes my freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year with other classes than mine. Actually I do have one funny story. I think if I had taken, as a freshman, a history class with a bunch of senior guys, from one of the more notable history professors who had a reputation for liking the all-male classes, I think you would have noticed a lot more tension. The one thing I do remember—and I just now remembered this story—my very first class here was a P. E., and I had tennis. It was eight o'clock, or whenever the first bell rang, eight o'clock out on the tennis courts, and I was the only girl in the class, which wasn't a rare thing at the time. Something like an eight o'clock tennis class and then only having two hundred women to choose from—they just did not choose tennis that particular semester. So I got out there, and the coach, who will remain nameless, and he was actually a really nice guy, but got out there, and it was kind of funny. I was the only girl out there anyway, and it was obviously going to pose a problem in playing matches, because I didn't have a girl to play against. I think he was kind of like, "Now what do I do with this girl?" So we're sitting out there. I didn't play tennis very well, which was why I took it in P. E. But I'd gone to this all-girls' preppy, hoity-toity school for seven years, so I certainly knew everything there was to know about tennis. I knew all the grips and all the rules and everything. That first day I walked out there, and he threw a tennis ball at me so hard, I remember it hit me in the gut, I wasn't expecting it, and he said, "The first thing to learn about tennis is hand-eye coordination." I'll never forget the men all just dying laughing, and I was literally like, "Oh my god, what have I gotten myself into?" But then he asked me, he said, "Now, Miss Hagewood, what do you know about the grips in tennis?" I said, "Well there's eastern, western, and continental." [Laughter] I'll never forget knowing the answer to that. And he looked at me, and everybody kind of looked at me, and I was like, "I just learned that." It was just really funny. And after that, he 17 didn't give me a hard time at all. But I'll never forget being tossed, at a land-speed record, that tennis ball and just being like, "Oh," and just kind of looking around and everybody was laughing. I really thought, "Oh, my God, I'm going to have to leave here." But after that first incident, I never had any kind of male/female problem at all. And I don't know what he was trying to prove. There was obvious tension there. Maybe he was just trying to break it up. Because it was really me standing there going, "Oh, my God. There's really no other girl coming to join me in this class." But that was about the only class that I had that was funny like that. I just remember that story. Warren: That's a good one. What about the big occasions, the big Washington and Lee occasions like Fancy Dress? Hagewood: Well, I had an interesting Fancy Dress experience. I don't ever recall worrying about getting a date. That was always a big deal, you know, people sitting around wondering are they gonna get a date to the big occasion. I asked, I guess, two out of my four years, I asked my own dates to Fancy Dress. Warren: That helps. That takes care of it. Hagewood: I never saw it as being real pioneer. I just kind of saw it as, well I'm just going to ask. One of the guys was a lacrosse player, and I knew that he wasn't going to—I forget what the circumstances were, but I think that they had a lacrosse game, or whatever, and I was busy doing something that Friday, and I knew he couldn't do the Friday night event. So I was like, well this would be a perfect person, and he was a friend of mine. This would be a perfect person to do Fancy Dress with, because I know that he can only do the Saturday night deal. He can't go out Friday night, and neither can I, because I think I was—I don't know what it was I was involved in. So I asked him to go, and he was kind of grateful. He was like, "That's great, because I didn't really want to ask somebody, knowing that I couldn't do the whole deal." I was like, "Well, this is perfect." 18 And then another year I asked an alumni, a guy who had already graduated, who was also a friend of mine and I was like, "Wouldn't it be fun for you to come back for Fancy Dress?" So I kind of like early on in the game eliminated myself from the running, I think, which made it easier. Because that was pretty stressful, if you weren't dating somebody at the time, wondering, "Who's going to ask me? Is anybody going to ask me? If nobody asks me, what am I going to do?" And I know a lot of girls went through that. But for two years I was dating somebody, and then the other two years I simply just asked somebody very early on, so I was not having to worry about it. I guess that was my self-protection. Warren: So tell me what Fancy Dress is like. Hagewood: Let's see. I guess everybody will also agree with me on this. I had a better time at Mock Convention than I did at—Fancy Dress was great, and every year it was fun, but Mock Convention just had something special about it, and I read something recently about how every four years when there's a Mock Convention, they might not have a Fancy Dress, which is probably a good idea. I mean, that's a lot of work for a lot of students who are involved in both. Warren: Fancy Dress kind of fell flat this year. Hagewood: Sure. And I hate to see that happen to a Fancy Dress, because Fancy Dress is such a great tradition. That's just something that I thought of. I think that would be a great thing for the university just to say, "Put your foot down. Let's make Mock Convention every four years a big blast, like it is." I think Mock Convention has just grown and grown and grown. Warren: It was pretty spectacular. Hagewood: Fancy Dress just can't even think about competing, not to mention their proximity. I think it's too much to handle. But I think if Fancy Dress stood alone in a year, it certainly is just a great event and a good time for students to do work together, 19 which I think is a lot of fun. And having the big bands is just a really neat thing that you don't get exposed to at that age. So I really think Fancy Dress is great. I think the Thursday night performances were always great. But I really do think it does not need to fall in the shadow of a Mock Convention, because if you go to one that's kind of halfway there, whether it's based on expectation or whatever, then you're going to kind of remember that. You're going to think, "Oh, Fancy Dress." I'd hate to see it lose its glamour. But I think the fact that it's been around for so many years is just great, and looking back at the old ones. I don't know if they're going to run out of themes or start recycling. Warren: Was there one that was particularly memorable in the theme? Hagewood: Oh, boy. The dark continent. I remember that one. That was a good theme. It was basically an African theme, and there was a live elephant. [Laughter] I remember that one. That was a real good one. I was also here during the controversy of the—I guess I even forget what the theme was. It was something about the Old South, and there was a boycott by law students, not coming to Fancy Dress because of obviously the racial impact. I thought that was real unfortunate. It's like you've got to stand up for something, but does it have to be at the expense of other people who are trying to enjoy this or other people who thought of the idea and have thrown themselves into it? So I thought that was a real unfortunate time for the school. I know it was an unfortunate time for me, because it was like, I went to an all basically white high school. The one black girl at my entire high school was a great friend of mine, and she came to W&L, and she was one of the black women here when I was here. Jessica Reynolds. She is just was the greatest girl in the whole world. Warren: So was she a different year from you? Hagewood: She was a year above me, so she came the class above me. But she was just awesome. She's living back in Nashville now. But I just remember, the race thing was always a pretty big issue back then. I guess it still is. Just the number of students, the 20 racial mix. I thought that was just a real unfortunate thing that they brought it to the forefront. You know, it was always kind of an undercurrent, which I think was fine with everybody at the time. I don't know, and I never really talked to Jessica about it. We drove back and forth to home a bunch. Never really talked to her about it. She seemed happy as a lark here, she loved it just as much as I did. So I never kind of got to the core of what the problem was, if any. And I think at that time, when the law school did that, it kind of dredged everything up and everybody started talking about it. And maybe that was for the better, but I just remember that as kind of souring that Fancy Dress. Warren: Do you remember what year that was? Hagewood: Let's see. It was probably either my sophomore or junior year. It was the Reconstruction. That was the name of the Fancy Dress. And maybe it was a weird theme. Looking back on it now in this P.C. time, maybe that was a little bit out there, but it was a theme just like any other era that's been celebrated, so I don't know. I remember that as being kind of a time when I wasn't happy to be here. I've never been a real bra-burning, protesting person anyway, and I kind of get at ill ease—I guess is not the right word— but ill at ease when I see protests. You know, I've never been one to really frolic in a Berkeley-type environment. [Laughter] I'm just kind of like, you know, go with the flow. Which, when people refer to me as a pioneer, I was like, "Really, I don't want to be a pioneer. I don't want to come across as being Miss Go Out There and Get 'Em. I remember when the girls in my class would run for things like Executive Committee, president of the Executive Committee, things like that, I remember there was just this undercurrent of, "Who does she think she is?" No offense to those girls. I know who they are, they know who they are, they would hate me if I said that. But I know a lot of girls thought that and a lot of guys thought that. "What does she think she's doing, this freshman girl coming in running for the highest office in the class?" I 21 remember that thought going through my mind, which I'm almost ashamed to say that, because that was great that they were getting out there and doing that and laying the groundwork for other women to be. and that's just, I guess, a me thing, is that I'm not the one that wants to always toss the boat. I also remember one funny thing along the controversial lines, is that the biggest controversy when I was here was Coke versus Pepsi. I look back on it and I think about people that went to school in the sixties and seventies and what they were standing for, and what they were standing up for, and what their bumper stickers were all about, and I look at the eighties, and I look at when we were in college, and that our biggest gripe and what we stood up for the most was that the school was going from Coke to Pepsi. [Laughter] And looking back on that, I was actually one of the people asked in one of those Ring-tum Phi things. There's a picture of me, and I've got it cut out, and it says, "What do you think about the switch to Pepsi?" And my quote was, "Worse things have happened." And that's really how I felt about it. But that may have summed up my four years here, was that the coeducation thing was going on, yes, but then the only other thing that happened was that the school changed over to Pepsi, whereas now, there's some serious stuff going on with fraternities and the hazing and students being upset about housing, and being sad about it. We just didn't have in my—or maybe I just wasn't aware of it, it didn't seem like we had that many big causes going on or that many big scuffles going on at that point in time. That's about all I remember. Warren: I need to turn the tape over.