Latture interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] 11 LATTURE: ... met him on the Colonnade, and he said, "Dr. [unclear], I see you had egg for breakfast this morning." [unclear]. He said, "No, that was yesterday morning." [Laughter] In the law school, had "Sunny" Jimmy Staples [phonetic]. He was from Patrick County, by the way. Had "Jingles" Crow, who was in English, a very good teacher. He went from here to the University of South Carolina as president. He had seven daughters and not many of them got married. There were other professors. Jack Letton [phonetic], Dr. Letton, he was a very good teacher of history. TURNER: He married someone here, didn't he-Dr. Letton. LATTURE: Yes, Miss Junkin [phonetic]. Miss Junkin lived over the hill. He had two stepsons, Berty [unclear] and Billy Cox, very fine young men. Both of them were very fine people. Berty died a couple of years ago, and Billy Cox is still active. Very fine alumnus. TURNER: Dr. Curl was quite a punkster, wasn't he? LATTURE: I don't remember about that. I know that he was an interesting teacher. I had epic and lyric poetry with him. I remember that very well. I had Dr. Shannon, too, the father of Dr. Shannon who was the president of the University of Virginia for fifteen years, and who's a member of our board of trustees now. Dr. Shannon taught a very fine course in Chaucer. I was supposed to take Anglo-Saxon under Dr. [unclear], and he left and Dr. Shannon came in, and he was a specialist in Chaucer. So I took that course. I think probably the best course I ever had in college was his course on Chaucer. I can tell you an interesting story about being valedictorian. I'm given credit for being valedictorian of the class, but that wasn't because I had the highest grade. There was a class that had a higher grade. But in those days the valedictorian was I chosen by members of the senior class, and Morgan Keaton was a politician, and he and Dick Fowlkes, who became a doctor later, framed up to folks who want to be the 12 leader of the final ball, and Keaton wanted to be valedictorian. So they had an election, and folks elected the president of the class to lead the final ball, and Keaton would have been valedictorian. But when the end of the year came, Keaton flunked his degree. So after the baccalaureate sermon at the end of the year, Dean Campbell called us together and said, "You don't have a valedictorian. He's flunked his degree. So you'll probably have to get along without a valedictorian." ' At any rate, the members of the class met up in Repti Hall, which was the [unclear] at that time, and they finally resolved this problem by electing me valedictorian under those circumstances. The baccalaureate sermon already been preached. So I went to Dr. Shannon. He had to approve the valedictory address. At that time they had that requirement. He said, "Well, I think it's too late now probably to do anything. But we talked a little bit. He said, "You go to your room and write up something. See what you can do and bring it back to me tomorrow," which I did. He said, well, he thought that I could get by with that, and he made one or two suggestions. So that's the way I happened to be the valedictorian and valedictory speaker of the class. TURNER: What year was that? LATTURE: 1915. What I did, there was certainly nothing profound in what I had to say, but for the most part it was poking fun at Dr. Henry Lewis Smith. He had a lot of pet phrases that he used. For example, he'd say he wanted his boys to be locomotives, not boxcars, that sort of thing. He said he wanted to bring into Washington and Lee the cream of the South. So I started out my talk by saying that we were lucky to have gotten in under Dr. Denny, the year before Dr. Smith came, and bring in all that cream of the South, to swamp the campus with cream of the South. And that's just that sort of thing that I went through the rather brief remarks that seem to have been accepted. 13 TURNER: Where was the commencement held? LATTURE: We had it in the chapel. Had no problem at that time. We could seat everybody they wanted a seat, I think, in the chapel. TURNER: What was the enrollment that year? LATTURE: It was around 600. The year I came in, it was 630 students, I think, and then it dropped some because at that time we didn't have any automatic rule, and students could come and stay as long as they wanted to, as long as their parents would support them, I guess you might say. So when Dr. Smith came, he wrote a lot of these boys that hadn't been doing any work that they needn't come back. So it cut the enrollment down to 500- and-some. Then it began to move back up later. But that was the enrollment. But I think it's interesting to note that they didn't have any automatic rule. They put in an automatic rule, which meant that the student had to pass half his courses in order to return. TURNER: Mr. Latture, what field was Dr. Henry Lewis Smith in as a professor? LATTURE: Physics. He was physics, and he is given credit for using first X-ray machine in operation, something like that. Do you have that little book called, let's see, Dr. Smith- TURNER: No, I don't, sir. He also won a prize, didn't he, during the war, for some X-ray- LATTURE: Well, Dr. Smith suggested that the propaganda, that they get a large number of balloons and attach the leaflets to these balloons and let them blow over Germany to make an appeal for peace, and so on. I don't know whether it was true. At any rate, he wanted to get a message to the Germans, and so he used the balloons as a messenger, as the carriers for these leaflets over into Germany. I think it is reported that Woodrow Wilson told him that he was one of the most effective features of propaganda against the Germans. Dr. Smith was quite an interesting 14 man. He was a good friend of mine. Needless to say, I'm very fond of Dr. Smith. He was good to me in many ways. TURNER: He was a good speaker. LATTURE: Oh, yes. He had a tremendous vocabulary. He had specialized in synonyms. He used a lot of synonyms. He was a very good speaker. When Virginia gave England the statue of Washington, was it-that he was representing Virginia and went to England to deliver this statue, and made an address for the English people, I've forgotten now just where, Trafalgar Square, I think, somewhere. TURNER: Tell us something about the period of Dr. Gaines here. He came in 1929 and he succeeded Dr. Henry Lewis Smith. LATTURE: That's right. Dr. Smith was in a very bad accident out in far west, California, somewhere, out in Washington, I think, maybe, and he was in a very serious accident. He never was quite the same after that accident, so he retired. After that, he had been here for-started 1912 up to 1929, '28, '29. Then Dr. Gaines came here from Wake Forest. Dr. Smith had come from Davidson. He had gone to school at Davidson and had taught there, and was )) president of Davidson. Then he came here from Davidson. Dr. Gaines came from Wake Forest to Washington and Lee. He was, of course, a very popular man. He was an excellent speaker, one of the best. I've never heard a man in my life that J \_ \ could hold an audience any better than Dr. Gaines. He was just a wonderful, orator speaker, one of the last of the orators of the South, really, in ways. You've seen the cartoon which John Chapman [phonetic] drew, in the chapel showing Dr. Gaines speaking, and the statue rising up to listen to Dr. Gaines. [Laughter] That was an r, ', excellent cartoon of John Chapman. T.URNER: And Dr. Gaines always taught a class, too, as the president? 15 LATTURE: Not always, but he did teach the Bible as literature. He had an excellent grasp of that subject, and he was a really gifted teacher as well as speaker and president. TURNER: Was he trained to be a professor of English? LATTURE: Yes, English. He was a professor of English. He taught at Mississippi State, where he met Mrs. Gaines. She was the daughter of the dean. She was a rather frail person, and she didn't go to college, I believe, but they had asked him to serve as her tutor in English. She was somewhat younger than he, but they fell in love, and they married. So they had three sons that came to Washington and Lee. TURNER: And all three of those sons were teachers at one time-professors at one time. LATTURE: Yes, they all went in the field of education. Two of them are still at the University of Arizona. [unclear] is in administration; Edmund was teaching history. TURNER: Didn't Dr. Gaines write quite a classic volume at one time on a Southern topic? LATTURE: Yes. His book is well known. I forgot the title of it now, but it has to do with literature in the South. TURNER: He had a great ability to raise money for the university, and he raised more money possibly than any one president up to his time. LATTURE: Oh, yes, I think so. I had a little summary of things that he did along that line for the board of trustees. I did that several years ago, hoping that they would name the library for Dr. Gaines because of the fact that his acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. duPont was very important. Dr. Gaines went to-well, a Washington and Lee alumnus, a lawyer by the name of Glasgow, Mr. William A. Glasgow, was Mr. duPont's lawyer, and he had the idea of getting Dr. Gaines to meet the duPonts, which he arranged and did, and they became very fond of Dr. and Mrs. Gaines. After Mr. duPont died, Mrs. duPont continued in her interest in Washington and 16 Lee and the Gaines family, so she gave Washington and Lee about six or seven million dollars altogether, which is quite a considerable sum, but we needed it, really. Those were hard days. At the end of the school year, I think she'd asked Dr. Gaines how much the deficit there was, and she gave enough to take it up. Well, another interesting thing was that Mrs. duPont had a party and invited Dr. and Mrs. Gaines, and invited Mr. Pratt to the party. That's when Dr. Gaines met Mr. Pratt. They rode home from Wilmington on the train together and struck up quite a friendship. So Mr. Pratt invited Dr. and Mrs. Gaines down to Fredericksburg, and then they invited him up to Lexington. They saw a good deal of each other. I recall particularly once when Dr. Gaines made a trip down to see Mr. Pratt, and he came back and he said he had a very pleasant visit. He didn't know whether it would amount to anything or not, but he said they had a very pleasant visit down there. Then several days or a week or two after that, he got a check from Mr. Pratt for $50,000, which was quite a nice sum for those days. That was to provide for scholarships. It was anonymous; nobody was supposed to know where it came from, and nobody knew for a long time, I guess, that it came from Mr. Pratt. But that was the beginning of that relationship which eventuated into the tremendous of $12 million which came from Mr. Pratt's estate eventually. TURNER: He was in business. What business did he do? LATTURE: He was with General Motors. He was with the duPont people, and then General Motors. I think duPont more or less took over General Motors. I'm not sure just what that relationship was, but at any rate, his wealth was accumulated through General Motors. A good thing he did it then rather than now. [Laughter] Then there's another gift. These two I've mentioned, Dr. Gaines had something to do with. TURNER: Mrs. Evans. 17 LATTURE: Mrs. Kelly Evans. Dr. Gaines had a friend named Jones, who was with Coca-Cola people, and, of course, Mrs. Evans had tremendous stock in the Coca-Cola Company. I recall Dr. Gaines asked his friend Jones about meeting Mrs. Evans, and he said, "Well, I can arrange it." Mrs. Evans lived over at Hot Spring, had a home there. He said, "You're too late, though." Told Dr. Gaines he was too late, says, "She's already arranged the disposition of her estate." At any rate, he did arrange the meeting, and Mrs. Evans was charmed by Dr. Gaines, like many other people had been, so the outcome of that was that she gave Dr. Gaines a good deal. I know one of the things that she gave him for [unclear] was a ring, about a $30,000 ring. At any rate, her first gift was $10,000 to surface the tennis courts. I remember that very well. Then, of course, another is the Student Center that a woman, Mrs. Fairfax, from Roanoke, he got acquainted with her, and she gave the money, or her family. I don't know the whole relationship with Mrs. Fairfax. I remember meeting her on the campus. What she gave was what's called the Fairfax Lounge you see over there. I forgot the name-the plaque on the front there when you go into the [unclear], there's a plaque on the side with the names of the people who gave money for that. TURNER: Would you go back now and tell us about interesting, colorful professors, like the gentleman we were asking you about earlier who had classes at the corner store? LATTURE: That was Professor Krobal [phonetic], who was very liberal, and he had classes down at the corner store where the boys would go down and could drink beer if they wanted to, I guess, and that was considered quite inappropriate then. They say that he got his wife off the picket line. She looked as if she had been on the picket lines. [Laughter] She was a rather odd person. Krobal was an interesting fellow. He had these [unclear] ideas, people thought at that time. 18 They used to have a kind of club, almost a club, up at McCrum's. At the back of the store there was a kind of elevated section there where they served meals, lunch. So three or four dozen faculty members would go up there for lunch, and they called that the McCrum Sibiki [phonetic] group of professors, because they would settle a good many questions and have a great deal of influence on faculty meetings as a result of this group which met there regularly. They settled a lot of questions. They were making policy for the university, I guess you might say. But that was an interesting group. Of course, Larry Watkin was another interesting member of our faculty that wrote the book called On Borrowed Time and he sold the movie rights to that for $25,000, and he built the house where Dr. Brush lives now. TURNER: Could you tell us something about [unclear] Williams: He was a most colorful character when I arrived here. LATTURE: Well, he was one of my good friends. I had him in class. Then he went into-I don't remember if it was after he graduated or not, but he went to-let's see, out in India, in that direction somewhere, as the representative of the American Consulate Services. He came back here and was looking for a job, and I recall that he had thought that he was going to get a job in Kentucky, probably at the [unclear] College or somewhere out there, and it turned out somebody else got the job. So when school started, he didn't have any job when he came over here looking for work. At that time, Dr. Riley needed somebody to teach two sections of history, and I needed somebody in two sections of political science, so we [unclear] our wishes together and employed Hig [phonetic] to teach. [Tape recorder turned off.] But Hig was a very popular fellow, because he had very strong opinions. He was a dedicated Democrat. He was a dedicated bachelor, too, I guess. He didn't like the idea of family members getting extra pay because of the number of children they 19 , had. He was pretty conservative with regard to matters of that kind. But he would- TURNER: He was a most popular teacher. LATTURE: Very popular. He was very lenient with a lot of boys, too. That was one of the basis for his popularity, but he was a very likable fellow. We had offices side by side for years, and I was very fond of Hig. TURNER: I ate by him at the table, at the Barker table, and I always remember him there as one of the interesting persons that I had conversation with. LATTURE: Yes. Yes. He was always good for conversation and expressing his views, which were not always [unclear]. LATTURE: Didn't he have an apartment for many years with Mrs. Clarkson? LATTURE: Yes, he did. He died there in Mrs. Clarkson's house, just died sitting in his chair. TURNER: There was a wonderful picture of him in the old union, over the fireplace- LATTURE: Yes. That's right. TURNER: -with his pipe. And it was so characteristic. I wonder where that picture is today. LATTURE: It ought to be around there somewhere. I don't know. They've taken the pictures out of Washington Hall. I wonder what that was for. So it looks like we've about used up our time here, haven't we? TURNER: We certainly appreciate your cooperation here. LATTURE: I don't think this is much of a contribution, but- TURNER: I do. [End of interview] 20