FARRIS HOTCHKISS

                                              November 13, 1996

                                                 Mame Warren,
                                                   interviewer

Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the 13th of November, 1996. I'm in
Lexington, Virginia, with Farris Hotchkiss.

         My first question to you is a question I have never asked anyone else, Farris.
Why did you have a thick bandage around your head in half the pictures of you in
the yearbook?
Hotchkiss: Well, it wasn't that I was trying to be Tonto or the Lone Ranger,
although that was a nickname I picked up about that time. No, I was driving back
from Richmond, Virginia, in my little 1949 two-door Plymouth over Route 60, and
some idiot had run out of gas in the pitch black dark, and instead of pulling his car
off the road, or instead of leaving his lights on, he did neither. He left the car partly
on the road, turned his lights out because he didn't want to run his battery down,
and I must admit I probably wasn't the most alert person in the world, and I just
smacked right into the back of him. So that was the end of my little Plymouth and
that was the only car that I ever had at Washington and Lee, because when I was
here, cars were comparatively scarce. I would doubt that maybe a third of the
student body had a car, no more than that.

         One of the great games that you'd play back then, and the insurance
companies would have gone berserk if they'd knew what was going on, was whose
car could you borrow. These parents, who probably also were oblivious to this,
didn't know that all these automobiles would be driven by other people to Hollins
and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon. Because we generally back then, Mame-
and this is a bit of an exaggeration-but generally speaking, it was kind of all
business Monday through Friday, and we really did, it was almost like a job. You
kind of went to work, which was class, and you did your homework and you wrote
your papers and there wasn't a great deal of foolishness until Friday after class rolled
around, and then this place would erupt Friday night, most all day long Saturday
and most of the day on Sunday with a lot of parties and a lot of good fun. Then by
Monday morning, though, you'd sort of go back to work again, you know, it was
Monday morning again. We called it work hard/play hard, and it was a pretty good
description of what was going on.
Warren: Weren't there still Saturday classes in your time?
Hotchkiss: Yeah, but Saturday classes were Saturday classes, and there was a real big
difference between a Saturday morning class and any other class during the rest of
the week. You'd never have a test on a Saturday.
Warren: Is that true?
Hotchkiss: Or have a paper due. I mean, the professors were no happier with
Saturday classes than the students were, so it went Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and
Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday sequence would
generally be more intense, much more intense on Tuesdays and Thursdays than on
Saturdays. The kiss of death was to have what was called a 12:05 on Saturday. That
was the last of the classes. There were no classes after one o'clock. The only thing in
the afternoons back then were laboratories. So you'd live in dread of the registrar
signing you up for something that put you in a 12:05 Saturday class. If you did, as I
said, the professor was no happier with it than you were, and the classes would
begin at 8:25 and the last one began at 12:05, then that would be it.
         Now, remember, Mame, when I came back here on staff after a couple of years
and the faculty voted to do away with Saturday classes, and I remember so well the
faculty saying, "Oh, boy, that's just going to be great on Saturday mornings now we
can be in our offices and get a lot of work done." And for about three Saturdays
you'd hear, those were still the days of the typewriter, you'd hear the clickety-
clackety, but then each Saturday it got quieter and quieter until you could shoot a
canon down the Colonnade and not hit a professor, or a student for that matter, on
Saturday mornings.
Warren: I'll bet. Now, you got pretty involved with publication.
Hotchkiss: Uh-huh.
Warren: I didn't know that about you. I learned a whole lot about you there.
Hotchkiss: Gosh, where did I leave all those bread crumbs?
Warren: Well, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. So tell me about the Ring-tum Phi.
Hotchkiss: Well, we had two editions of the Ring-tum Phi back then, the Tuesday
and Thursday edition, with completely separate staffs, and not only did you have
the fun of being a reporter or a photographer or a columnist or that kind of thing,
but most of the staff would actually go to what was then the print shop and you
would help physically put the paper together. We used to set headlines with what
were called sticks, and you hold a stick in her hand and you had your, what's called
a sort case with your individual lead letters, and if you wanted to do a headline,
you'd pick up your letters and you'd put them in this stick until they came out like
that and then you'd lock it in, and then you'd take it over and put it in this big
frame that was what produced the paper. It was a letter press, it was not an offset
press.

         So the idea, to a large extent, really was to engage you in journalistic kind of
pursuits, and sort of as an extra fringe benefit at no extra cost, you really learned a
good deal about what was letter-press printing, and it was a lot of fun. It really was.
We would be down-the print shop was right where this library is now, an old
cinderblock building, and we'd spend hours down there having a great time.
Warren: Now, tell me, what was fun about it?
Hotchkiss: Well, what was fun about it was there was a certain degree of
competition, to begin with, between the two papers.
Warren: I wondered about that. Between the two editions?
Hotchkiss: Between the two editions. It wasn't liberal/conservative so much as it
was just picking up on some campus issue, let's say, on the way in which the
disciplinary system was working. There were certain things that were verboten, you
just didn't question: the Honor System, conventional dress, the speaking tradition,
things like that. But other things that you could kind of argue about a paper would
invariably take a position on it, argue a particular point and the other one just, I
think just for the dickens of it, would take the opposite point. So there was a fun
competition between the two, and there was also just the plain old competitiveness
of who's going to get the story, whether the Tuesday edition is going to get it or
whether the Thursday edition or the Friday, I can't remember.
Warren: I think it's Friday.
Hotchkiss: Is it Friday? You know, who can get there first kind of thing. We did all
of our own photography, in addition to our own writing.
Warren: Where are those pictures now?
Hotchkiss: Who knows. Have you seen the bound volume? You've seen those,
yeah. Yeah. Mame, I don't know where those pictures are. I guess, they probably
don't exist, I would think.
Warren: How did you decide which edition to hook up with?
Hotchkiss: Well, in one of three ways. Either you really didn't care and you would
talk to the editors of the two editions and one editor would need some help and the
other one wouldn't. I mean, it was kind of lackadaisical in that respect. Or, what I
think was usually more the case is that you were probably a sophomore at least,
maybe even a junior, and you had come to know one or the other editor and/or you
somehow became allied a little bit more with the viewpoint of one paper versus the
other, and you might say, "I'd like to be with that particular staff," as you know
them, you might have other friends who went on it.

         The third way, though, and what influenced so much of what went on back
then, was what was called sort of fraternity succession. A newspaper or a yearbook
or a dance set or even some of the campus-wide offices would, as it was said back
then, would get into a house, and it wouldn't be automatically passed down in that
house, but that house or the members of that house had a leg up on it.

         I later on in my senior year became the editor of the Calyx, and one reason
why I became editor of the Calyx was because in those days the editorship kind of
went back and forth between the Beta House and the ZBT House. That doesn't
mean that it didn't sometimes change a little bit, but if you look back in the middle
fifties, you'd see a preponderance of the back and forth going on between, in that
particular case, the Betas and ZBTs.

         But there was a tremendous political organization back then, as you probably
heard, called the Big Clique and the "little clique."
Warren: I was hoping you would talk about that.
Hotchkiss: They were just like the Republicans and the Democrats, they weren't
ideological at all, they were pure power politics. The Big Clique sometimes had
fewer fraternities in it than the Little Clique or vice versa, but if you had fewer
fraternities at any one time, but if you had been called the Big Clique you continued
to be called the "big clique." It's sort of gravitated to, sort of generally, to what we
know as the Red Square houses versus all the other ones, but not always.

         What would go on is what goes on in any political world, and that is, is that if
one of the fraternities wanted to get one of their folks elected, say, president of the
student body or even an office not quite as elevated as that, and it thought it could
do it by switching parties and making a deal with the party to which it switched to,
in other words, get a commitment from that party to put a particular member of that
fraternity in that slot, they'd do it. So there was this jockeying back and forth every
year of maybe a house or two, never more than that. It was almost in balance, so it
didn't take much to throw it off.

         But there were elections often where the clique that theoretically had the
greatest number of votes still wasn't successful with a particular position simply
because there was no law against if you were a member of the "little clique," but you
really preferred someone who was a member of a Big Clique house you could vote
for him if you wanted to, and there were people who crossed over.
Warren: So everything was secret ballot?
Hotchkiss: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, right.
Warren: So no one knew who the traitors were.
Hotchkiss: Exactly. Overwhelmingly, though it was sort of party-line voting as
much as anything. There were offices. As I recall, we didn't, on the one hand, I
don't think we elected class officers that way, I don't think. I think that was just
more total class voting as it is today. But in addition to the president and vice
president and secretary of the student body and offices like that, we also had elected
officers of what we called the dance sets. We had four of them, so each of those had
a president, and that was very political, perhaps even more political than the
student government offices.
Warren: Why? Why was that such a big deal?
Hotchkiss: Oh, because you didn't have to take it as seriously. I mean, you didn't
really have to worry as much about whether someone was really going to be a good
spring dance president as you did whether that person would be a good student body
president.
Warren: What did it mean to be a spring dance president? You were the finals
president.
Hotchkiss: Yeah.
Warren: What does that mean?
Hotchkiss: Well, if you were the president of a dance set, it was your responsibility,
first of all, to gather probably about six to ten vice presidents to the dance set, so that
you form a group of people that usually numbered somewhere between ten to a
dozen people, something in that rough order. And you collectively would decide
on a theme for the dance, you know, whether it was going to be Las Vegas or King
Arthur or what have you. All of our dance sets always had themes.
Warren: Okay, so just any dance then, not just Fancy Dance, they all did?
Hotchkiss: Oh, no, all four of them. Now, only Fancy Dress was costumed. My
dance set, for instance, the theme that I and my vice presidents put together was
"Tea House of the August Moon," which was a popular musical back then. What
you do in those days is that after you decided on your theme, then your attention
would be turned to the decorations, how are you going to decorate. And the way we
decorated was in the old Doremus Gym-we didn't have the Warner Center-and
what you would do is you would cover up every blessed square inch of that
gymnasium with paper. I mean, the fire marshals back then must have been asleep,
because I can't imagine getting away with it.

         But what we'd do is-you've been in the old gym. We bought, I don't know
where they came from, we bought these huge rolls of paper, that if you stood the roll
up on end, it was just about as tall as that distance between the bottom of the
running track and the floor. You would simply wrap up the gymnasium, cover it
up completely, just like you were wrapping a Christmas present. We had a cloth, a
black cloth ceiling, that we would suspend between the rails of the track so that
when you were finished with it and walked in Doremus, it looked like a really nice
room, it didn't look like a gymnasium. Then you'd paint this paper based on the
theme, and if you wanted to, you could have some freestanding things in the
middle. I think we had a little bridge going over a pond.

         But, Mame, I'll never forget it as long as I live, I think the greatest moment of
stark terror I have ever had in my whole life, believe it or not, was when we were
painting the things for the finals dance. As I recall, we had to paint all this paper
that we were hanging up a light blue to get it so it wasn't white. We figured out
somewhere along the line that it would take us utterly forever to paint all that
much paper with a paintbrush or paintbrushes, so we went to the paint store and
rented a spray painter. We were painting along and getting the job done pretty fast
when all of a sudden, Norm Lord-you know Norm-he walked in there and he
said, "My God, Hotchkiss!" And I froze in my tracks. As I recall, I was sort of over
like this. He said, "Look what you've done," and I turned around and, Mame, the
entire gymnasium floor behind me was blue. For a moment there, for more than a
moment, what I thought I had done was spilled wet blue paint on the gym floor.
Well, fortunately, and the only reason why I'm probably here today and still alive, is
that what was happening was is there was just enough of a draft in the gym to pick
up this spray, but fortunately, by the time it fell on the floor way down there, it dried
completely and you could just brush it off with a broom. But at rate-
Warren: A career almost dashed by blue paint.
Hotchkiss: An education almost dashed. Can you imagine?

         But anyway, so the dance sets were all thematic. They would always start on
Friday nights, you'd have a concert and it wouldn't be a dance, it would be just a
"come listen to the music." Wonderful music with Count Basie, just never will
forget that. So you'd come hear Count Basie and just sit and listen on Friday night,
and then on Saturday night would be the dance. It was only costumes at Fancy
Dress, but otherwise it was tuxedos at all the other three.
Warren: So the gym was full of chairs for the concert and then the chairs were
removed?
Hotchkiss: Yeah, chairs were taken out, they were set up auditorium-style on Friday
night and then removed. Speaking of chairs, we would put some chairs kind of
around the perimeter and then always under what would be the east basket, which
would have been hauled up out of sight, was always, what students today wouldn't
know what in the world it was, was what was called a chaperone's box. And in the
chaperone's box would be the assorted deans and faculty who were keeping an eye
on us.

         Usually, Mame, these dances would begin with a grand march, and you
would come in with your date and you would walk the length of the gymnasium
and bow or curtsy in front of the chaperone box, and then disperse. That was the
thing to do back then. I can just imagine how utterly and completely bored those
poor chaperones must have been and how, on the other hand, completely
unconcerned and totally oblivious we were to the fact they were even around.

         But there wasn't really much going on out there except dancing, and in those
days that meant usually that you didn't stay terribly long because no one really
wanted to be up there in their dinner jackets and long dresses dancing terribly long.
Then you'd take your date back to one of the houses in town where dates stayed in
those days and you'd change into Bermuda shorts and blue jeans and things like
that and go down to the Beta House or the Phi Delta House or one of those places for
the rest of the evening. So the dances sometimes weren't terribly well attended all
evening long. They tended to have kind of an initial rush of people, and after that,
they thinned out fairly quickly, except for Fancy Dress. Because Fancy Dress was so
fancy and you'd spent so darn much money on these costumes, and they were hard
to get off and get into Bermuda shorts from, so generally you'd stay down there.
         One of the great little funny, funny things about Fancy Dress was, and Judy
remembers it-every time she thinks of it, her face gets scarlet red-is that in order
for these costumes to fit, you had to ask your date what her measurements were.
The great fun was whether your date was really telling you the truth or not.
[Laughter] These measurements would come up from Judy and others at these girls'
schools. Judy claims that the measurements that she sent for her Fancy Dress dress
were correct, no padding or anything. But it was a lot of fun. It was great.
Warren: Do I take it that dress didn't quite fit right?
Hotchkiss: No, it did. No, it did, yeah. No, it did.
Warren: Oh, just the thought of giving the measurements.
Hotchkiss: Yeah, exactly, I think just revealing anything like that was something
that was-I doubt if any of those young ladies had ever been asked what their
measurements were.
Warren: Well, believe it or not, I've actually seen one of the letters where a young
lady sent her measurements.
Hotchkiss: Is that right?
Warren: Yes, I found one of those, which I think is a real treasure.
Hotchkiss: Well, it is.
Warren: I was real excited about that.
Hotchkiss: It is. It is.
Warren: Now, you mentioned Count Basie. Who would play at the dance? Count
Basie was a concert.
Hotchkiss: He'd do two nights.
Warren: Would he play at the-
Hotchkiss: He'd play at the dance, as well.
Warren: And people would leave with Count Basie playing?
Hotchkiss: Yeah, they really would, Mame, as inexplicable as that sounds. Now, I
don't mean that the place was ever empty, but generally speaking, there was a kind
of rush of people at the very beginning of the evening, but by, let's talk the middle
of the evening, it thinned out pretty quickly. What you surmise is correct, it was
probably a poor use of a lot of money for the second half of the dance, because
people, as I said, would gravitate back.

         See, the thing was in those days that your dates had to be in, they had to be
back home by midnight. So the dances, as I recall, began at eight, so if you were
going to have anything to drink, I mean, just to be blunt about it, and not stand
around in your tuxedo all night long, generally speaking, after you'd been at the
dance for a couple hours or so, you'd go on back to the house. But they never
emptied out entirely.
Warren: Okay, I've got a logistical question for you. We're talking the fifties here.
Where did Count Basie stay if he stayed overnight in Lexington?
Hotchkiss: That's a good question, Mame, and the best I can do to answer that was
that there was a motel, not in Lexington. It was on Route 11. As I recall, it was
somewhere kind of up near Staunton that allowed black people to stay there. That's
a very good question, and I don't exactly know the answer, but I think that's what
was going on.
Warren: Who would take care of the logistics of something like that?
Hotchkiss: Well, you had what was called the dance board. I didn't have anything
to say much or hardly at all about who was going to play at what turned out to be
finals dance, because by the time the elections were held and all that, Count Basie
had been lined up long ahead.
Warren: Oh, so it wasn't your choice?
Hotchkiss: No, you had to book these people, you know, way ahead of time. So I
guess, basically, those arrangements were made by the dance board, which was a
separate group of students. There was a wonderful man, who you may not have-
has anyone ever mentioned Sam Rayder to you?
Warren: Yes, Frank has. He's a banker?
Hotchkiss: He was a banker, he was the head of what's now Crestar Bank. Sam
Rayder, purely out of the good of his heart, just as a volunteer, was kind of the
advisor, if you want to think of that, think of it that way, of the dances. I can see
him as clear as day because every-see, you had to pay to go to these dances, and
either you bought, in essence, your season ticket for all four of them or you could
pay at the door. Sam Rayder would sit there at his little table, and he always had a
little cigar in his mouth that was not lit, he would just eat it up slowly, and he'd sit
there and either take your ticket or sell you a ticket to get into the dances. But he
also, I think, helped the dance board out of some tight spots sometime when they
got into squabbles with contracts and things of that nature with the bands.
Warren: Is he still alive?
Hotchkiss: He is still alive.
Warren: That's what I thought.
Hotchkiss: Still alive, he's ninety-
Warren: I should go talk to him.
Hotchkiss: He's ninety-some-odd years old. He lives right over there next to
Waddell School, the elementary school.
Warren: But he's not an alum, is he? I don't think he is. I think Frank just
thought he'd be a real interesting person to talk to.
Hotchkiss: Well, he was-you know, I'm not sure. He was very closely associated
with the Sigma Chi House, because the Sigma Chis wanted to have the house that
we call the Mattingly House named for Sam Rayder. Now, whether he was just a
Sigma Chi somewhere else or whether he was a W&L Sigma Chi, I don't know. I
think you're probably right, I think he probably didn't go here, although I don't
know why I say that.
Warren: I'm going to check into him for another reason. I'm looking for someone
in that age group.

         Who else in your four years here, and actually more than your four years
here, what other big entertainers have you seen here?
Hotchkiss: The biggest of them all was when Louis Armstrong was here. Louis
Armstrong was here for Fancy Dress in either my sophomore or junior year, I forget
which. The Louis Armstrong concert was just absolutely packed. Again, the fire
marshal must have been asleep. You've heard the expression, "hanging from the
rafters." There were people literally sitting on the rafters of the gymnasium. I don't
remember why that false ceiling hadn't been put in there. But anyway, I can
remember people dangling from those rafters, listening to that guy, and he was just
absolutely magic.

         Guy Lombardo's Band, although by that time it had been adulterated
somewhat, was here. The successor to the Glenn Miller Band was here. Lester
Lanin came a number of times. The band that plays the "A-Train," whatever their
name is, I can't remember their name, but they were here.

         Those were the days when Washington and Lee dance sets, as we called them,
were big deals insofar as these bands were concerned. And the bands themselves, I
think unlike today, a lot of their bread and butter was the college circuit. It was very
definitely, now that I remember, it was very definitely a circuit, because you'd sort of
be able to get Louis Armstrong because he could be at Virginia and then W&L, and
then I don't know where he'd go, maybe the University of North Carolina, you
know, maybe Duke, Vanderbilt. I mean, their agents would kind of line you up and
that's part of the way that-now, what they did during the middle of the week, I
don't know, maybe they didn't do anything. But we had the biggest names in music
here.

         That's the only kind of music we had, though, because when I was a student
here, if you were interested in symphonic music or opera or any sort of
instrumental performance, there just was none. I can remember, and I didn't do
this but twice in the whole four years I was here, but if you wanted to hear any
symphonic music, you had to go to Lynchburg over to E.C. Glass High School,
because there wasn't any in Lexington. I don't think there was any in Roanoke that
I can recall.
Warren: Times have changed.
Hotchkiss: One of the differences back then, Mame, that I wish was the case today,
was that the law students were very much a part of the overall student body. And
since the university had no dining facilities, if you can believe that, here's a
university that doesn't feed its students, but it didn't. So either you had to belong to
a fraternity to eat or you had to get a meal ticket in what was called the Dutch Inn,
which is right here on Washington Street, or a meal ticket at the Southern Inn.

         So when you went down to dinner at night and whatnot at the Beta House,
for instance, in our case, there would be probably seven, eight, or nine law students
who were eating down there, and they exerted a somewhat more mature influence
over the house. For instance, what brought that thought to mind was, is that if
anybody, let's say, was getting together what was called a team to go hear the
Philadelphia Orchestra or something like that that used to travel in those days, it
would usually be one of the·older law students who'd take that initiative.

         We have an emeritus trustee whose name is Dick Haynes down in Dallas,
Texas, who was a very influential law student during my undergraduate days. Dick
would gather us younger guys together and say, "Look, fellas, it's time for you all to
get a little culture. I'm going to take you over to Lynchburg so you can hear
Beethoven's Fifth," or something like that. But it was good for us and we really
profited from that kind of influence, and I wish that the fraternities had that
influence now, because you don't ever see a law student much in a fraternity house
anymore.
Warren: Don't see them on this side of the creek much.
Hotchkiss: No, no, they stay on that side of the ravine. That's probably coeducation
and the law school moving over to where it is now, undoubtedly during my time
here the two largest and most significant educational or academic alterations on the
student body. Of course, one came long before the other. The law students got over
there in 1976. But as soon as that happened, the personality that this campus had
had disappeared, just overnight it was gone.

         When the law school was in Tucker Hall, even long after we had dining
facilities and all the rest, you still had these law students, who were not always
paragons of perfect proportions, but they were invariably older and, as I said, more
mature and they were around. You'd see them in the co-op, you'd seen them in the
library, you'd see them in the fraternity houses. And we've lost that.
Warren: Was that loss foreseen?
Hotchkiss: I don't think so.
Warren: Did people realize that was going to happen?
Hotchkiss: Well, I guess we should have figured that out, but I can't say that I really
recall any specific conversation about it. One reason why there may not have been
is that there really wasn't an alternative, because the idea was to double the size of
the law school, and you simply couldn't add on to Tucker Hall in any kind of
satisfactory way to double the size of the law school. So it just, I mean, we hadn't-
let me think here. We hadn't begun planning the library, the Leyburn Library, yet. I
guess the law school could have been built like this building is built. I guess this
could be the law school, and I guess there could be another one of these buildings
like this, you know, on around the ravine behind Reid Hall a little bit. But because
of its size, it went across that ravine quickly.

         I would say probably, Mame, to your question, that we didn't really anticipate
the division that it was going to bring about, and it's getting worse and worse. I
mean, now the law school is not only divided, but now there are comparatively few
Washington and Lee undergraduates in the law school. So that place is made up 90
percent of people who have their undergraduate degrees from other places. Now
that they're becoming alumni, they have far different attitudes about what they
want in the way of alumni services. I'm not being critical, it's just different, that's
all.

         My daughter is a fairly good example of that. She is a lawyer from here, she is
down in Charlotte, North Carolina, and she complains to me every once in a while
that when alumni gatherings and events and plans are made in Charlotte, they're
always undergraduate in their focus. So it's something we have to pay a lot of
attention to now. Of course, coeducation, don't have to say much about that.
Warren: Let's save that.
Hotchkiss: That is the other big one.
Warren: We definitely need to talk about that, but let's save that. Let's make that
leap back to student days, because we're getting really good stuff here.

         You were talking about entertainers. This gentleman doesn't follow the
category of entertainers, but he certainly was a big name. You were here when
Arnold Toynbee was here. Tell me about that.
Hotchkiss: That was just electric. And I can say that, Mame, from a person, a former
student, who was not-and I'm sorry about this now-but I was not nearly as aware
of what was available to me with Arnold Toynbee being here as I should have been.
I wasn't a particularly inquisitive student. I always was much more interested in
extracurricular activities and things like that, so I didn't take his course as I could
have, but I did go to all of his public lectures.

         Just to have a mountain of a man here, whether you were taking his courses
or not hardly made any difference. All he had to do was walk down the Colonnade,
and the place, you could just feel the pride and the awe of having a person of his
stature on this campus. He was well aware of that, and he played to it and he was
very gracious. Anne Farrar, Jimmy Farrar's mother, was his secretary during that
time, and she knew this place frontwards and backwards and she did a wonderful
job sort of steering him around so that he was seen by a lot of students who
wouldn't have a chance to ever have contact with a man of that sort.

         But I remember his public lectures were always done at Lee Chapel, and the
one I remember the best, in fact, the only one I really frankly remember what he said
precisely, was at the very end he told us-it was, of course, in the late fifties and
people who were bright like he was, they were seeing the handwriting on the wall
with the Russians. But he stood up there at Lee Chapel that last lecture and he said,
"Gentlemen, the world is concerned about Russia and China, as well it should be,
but let me give you the advice of an old man." He said, "Never, ever, ever turn
your backs on the Germans."

         Now, fortunately, so far, some forty-odd years later he was wrong about that.
But that had a very chilling effect, because after all, there were still veterans on this
campus at that time who had fought in the Second World War, and he was
obviously very much influenced by the Second World War himself. But we've
never, Mame, had anything like it since, and if I had a zillion dollars, what I'd do is
I'd give Washington and Lee a zillion dollars specifically for the purpose of bringing
here, maybe not every year, because I think you could wear it out a little bit, but
every three or four years some real giant, somebody who really was world-class.
Warren: Do you know how it came to be that he was here?
Hotchkiss: There was a professor here named Edward Myers [phonetic], I think it's
Edward. Anyway, he was a professor of philosophy and he had gotten to know
Toynbee when he, Myers, was at Oxford. How exactly he did I don't know, but at
any rate, it was through their friendship that he suggested to Toynbee that he come
here. He told Toynbee he thought he'd enjoy a place like Washington and Lee. So
it was a connection. I mean, I'm not sure we could have gotten him if we had
simply set our sail for him without any .connection to help us out.
Warren: That old W&L network.
Hotchkiss: It is, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is that.
Warren: Now, he was clearly a giant on the world stage. But you were here at a
time-well, it seems like there were always giants at Washington and Lee. Were
there any faculty members who made a big difference to you?
Hotchkiss: Yeah. Of course, there were a number of faculty members who made a
huge difference to me just because they were wonderful people, not because they
had any particular national presence. John Gunn, whom you may have met, who's
still around, certainly did. We had some wonderful fellows in the economics
department, one professor whose name was Blackjack Behrman. Blackjack told us,
he said, "Gentlemen, I usually have ten questions on my quizzes," and he said, "it
doesn't take any leap of brilliance to figure out they're probably each worth ten
points." He said, "But what I want you to understand is, is that if you know the
answer, or you think you know the answer, you'll get ten points if you get it right,
or you may get fewer if you're on the right track. But if you don't know the answer
and you just think you can write something and keep me going," he said, ''I'm
going to take off double." No one thought he would do that until the first time we
started getting "minus" papers back. You know, you'd get back a "minus ten" or
something like that.
         But the guy who was kind of fascinating back then was a man whose name
was Harvey Wheeler. You may remember a book named Failsafe, a very popular
book back in the early sixties. It was one of those nuclear bomber books. Harvey
Wheeler was the author of that book, and so he was kind of somebody.

         Probably of the same kind of glamour on the campus as this fellow, Larry
Watkin, probably was long, long before I ever got here, who was the guy who lived
in Castle Hill, as a matter of fact, up there, and went out and became one of Disney's
chief script writers for a long, long time. He wrote a lot of books that are in this
library.
Warren: What was the person's name who wrote Failsafe?
Hotchkiss: Harvey Wheeler.
Warren: Harvey Wheeler. What did he teach?
Hotchkiss: Political science.
Warren: I hadn't heard that name.
Hotchkiss: He left and went out to California, and last I heard of him, he was
associated with some think tank out there. But the faculty back then, there were lots
of just plain old characters, Mame. I mean, most of us had nicknames for the faculty
like, Eddie the Axe, that was Ed Atwood; and Blackjack Behrman; and Snortin'
Morton; and people, you know, Sleepy Williams, and folks like that.

         There was a math professor named Felix Welch, and he was the leader of, and
almost the sole member of, the Lexington Polar Bear Club. What Felix used to love
to do was to go out in the Maury River in the wintertime and break the ice and
jump in naked. He was a brilliant mathematician, but a real kick otherwise. One of
the things that he'd do once in a while, well, not very often, I don't mean to blow
this out of proportion, but once in a while on one of those famous Saturday
morning classes, and particularly after what he perceived to be probably a rough
Friday night, he would walk into class with these little glasses of tomato juice for us
in class. You know, those were days when you could do that kind of thing. It
should have been absolutely disallowed. I mean, I can't imagine letting a professor
do that, but he did and he got away with it.

         I think back then professors had-I'd hate to be quoted on this, but I think
they had more individualistic personalities. It's almost as if they'd worked at it.
There was a guy who-
Warren: Hold on, I need to turn the tape over.