HARDIN MARION July 16, 1996 — Mame Warren, Interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the 16th of July, 1996. I’m in Lexington, Virginia, with Hardin Marion. Are you from Baltimore originally? Marion: Not originally. Warren: Where did you come from? Marion: Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Came to Washington and Lee from Richmond. When I graduated, I didn’t go back. I went to Baltimore to practice law. Warren: Why Washington and Lee? Why did you choose Washington and Lee? Marion: I knew Washington and Lee probably by reputation, although I didn’t know much about it. When I graduated from high school, I was given a scholarship that was presented to me. I graduated in January of 1951, and my mother told me that I was to go to the June graduation from my high school in Richmond. I said, “I’m not going to do it. There’s no reason for me to go down and sit through a graduation. It’s hot.” She said, “Well, you really have to do it.” And I said, “No, I just don’t want to do it.” She, finally, said, “Well, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but they’re going to give you a scholarship.” So I went a sat through a long, steamy, hot graduation, and near the end, the principal called my name, and I went up to the stage. He handed me an envelope. In 1 the envelope, all it said was "Washington and Lee University." I had no idea how much the scholarship was. It turned out it was $100, but it put me in touch with Dean Gilliam. I had not applied to any college. My family, I think, thought I was going to go to Davidson at some point because Davidson is in my family tree. But I called Dean Gilliam and talked to him and said that was very nice, but $100, which was a lot more then than it is now, wouldn’t get me far enough to go to college in Washington and Lee. After some discussion back and forth, he found me a Mink Miller scholarship which paid $400, which I think was probably the tuition in those days. So I came to Washington and Lee in September of 1951 with a Mink Miller scholarship. I’d been to Washington and Lee once before in the spring of either my junior or senior year of high school as a delegate to the Southern Interscholastic Press Association (SIPA) convention which was held up here in those days every spring, and had hosts of college kids show up for three or four days. So that was my one visit to Lexington, Virginia, before I showed up to attend the university. Warren: You are the first person that I’ve talked to who came to that convention. Can you go all the way back? Can you remember what it was like coming here for that convention? Marion: Very little. I remember I stayed out on Lee Avenue. My belief, without being able to confirm it, is that I stayed in the house that Randy and Elaine Bezanson just sold there, whatever they call it, right on the corner of Lee and Preston, in a front room that was the Gadsden sisters’ house for year. That’s the way my memory tells me it was. I stayed in some front room there for two or three nights. I remember very little about Washington and Lee. I remember we went over to VMI for a meal or something during that time here. I have no recollection of anything else I did. Warren: So you were on your high school newspaper staff? Marion: Yes. 2 Warren: So did you think you were going to have a career in journalism? Marion: I came here to major in journalism. Warren: And? Marion: That was my intention through my first two years, and in my sophomore year, because I did not get the grade I thought I should have gotten from an Introduction to Journalism course, I lost the scholarship. So I decided I would not major in journalism. I lasted one year without the scholarship, I guess, my junior year. Then somehow I was able to reclaim a scholarship for my senior year, but I decided to major in history. And I had always thought about law. Law had been something that was in my family because of my grandfather, and people periodically would tell me, “Gee, you ought to grow up to be a lawyer. You ought to be a lawyer when you grow up.” So I always had law, I guess, in the back of my mind and so I majored in history. In my senior year, I had to deal with the military, which in those days hovered over everybody’s head as something that you had to deal with in your career planning. So along with a fraternity brother of mine, I went down to Norfolk to apply to the Navy Air Force. Figured that if I was going to be in the military, might as well go in, learn how to fly a plane and be an officer. He did not pass the test because he did not have the absolutely 100 percent perfect peripheral vision that the Navy required. So after a day, he was told that he did not meet the physical qualifications. I went on through and did a whole bunch of psychological testing and was interviewed by people the second day. They said to me—this was probably April of 1955—they said, “You’ll hear from us in a couple of months.” So I came back to Washington and Lee. I graduated. I had several odd jobs during the summer. I kept waiting for the Navy Air Force to get in touch with me, and I didn’t hear anything. So long about August, I picked up the phone—things were a whole lot easier in those days—and called Mrs. McDowell in the law school office and said, “Mrs. Mac, is it possible for me to come back to law school in September?” 3 I don’t know that this is exactly the way it occurred, but I sort of have the perception that she put her hand over the phone, had a brief conversation with Dean Williams, came back on the phone and said, “Yes, Mr. Marion, you can come to law school.” Well, I said, “Ms. Mc, can I get a scholarship?” She put her hand over the phone again, talked to the dean and came back and said, “Yes, we have a scholarship for you to come to law school.” I had the foresight to apply to become a dormitory counselor, which would give me a place to live courtesy of the university for my first year of law school just in case I came back to law school that fall. So I was kind of hedging my bets. So I got a scholarship to law school. I had my room. I took my meals at my fraternity house all the way through law school, and I ended up being a dormitory counselor throughout law school. That’s how I came back to law school. It was probably January or so of my first year of law school that I got a letter from the Navy Air Force congratulating me and telling me I had been accepted to some program at Pensacola. I wrote them back and said, “You’re a little late. I’m halfway through my first year of law school.” Warren: Well, the bureaucracy did it’s thing, and you did yours. Right? [Laughter] Marion: You’re exactly right. I did what I had to do. Warren: I’m real interested to hear more about Mrs. Mac, but let’s go back to your undergraduate days. It sounds to me like Washington and Lee picked you instead of the other way around. Marion: Well, there has to be something to that. You know, Dean Gilliam, in those days, was sort of a one-man recruiting admissions committee, did everything as it related to students. I don’t know what he knew about me and how I came to the school’s attention. I may have done something that initiated it, but I have no 4 recollection of it. All I know is that I had the one contact with the SIPA convention, and I was given a scholarship. Then I came to Washington and Lee and never looked back. Warren: So what was it like to arrive in 1951? What was Washington and Lee like then? Marion: Well, I can tell you this, I was the youngest person in my class. I was still sixteen years old when I landed in Lexington to start school. My parents put me on the bus in Richmond, probably with one suitcase and a trunk. I arrived in Lexington on a bus that parked and left me off in the parking lot behind the Southern Inn, which I guess was the bus stop, bus station. I have no recollection of getting from there to the freshman dormitory, but I was as unsophisticated as you can get. I was living in the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. I probably listened to country music, wore ties that would be an embarrassment to me or anybody else today, and came into the freshman dormitory, and my roommate was Peter Steven Stuyveson Pell from Oak Forest, Illinois. He was, as he told me, the heir to the Armor meat-packing fortune. Peter Pell had more money than I’d ever heard about. He was a prep school graduate. He was probably a year and a half older than I was. He was tall and handsome, and he had a lot of prep school friends who were here. I was just Hardin Marion from, at that point, Bonnaire, Virginia, which was in Chesterfield County outside of Richmond. We did not have a great relationship, because we were like oil and water, I think. So at the end of the first semester, he and I agreed, or maybe it was a fraternity brother, agreed to switch rooms with one of his good friends from his prep school. He had gone to St. Andrew’s School in Delaware. So he and one of his friends got together for the rest of the first year, the freshman year, and I and one of my fraternity brothers got together, and we roomed together for the rest of that year. Peter Pell, I don’t think lasted beyond the first year at Washington and Lee, and I’m not sure whether the school knows where he is today. Warren: But you’re certainly still very much in evidence. 5 Marion: I’m still around. I’m still around, yes. If Peter Pell is out there listening somewhere— Warren: Well, we’re not real concerned about him. What was the place like? Academically, what were the classes like when you arrived? Did you find any difficult? Marion: Challenging, challenging. I did very well in high school without doing any appreciable amount of studying. I got here and found that I did not know how to study, certainly at the college level, and I had to scramble at the end of my first semester to master the courses sufficiently to pass them. That semester, I got the only D I got in a course in college. I got one A and the rest Cs and was lucky to come out with that, and had to really turn over a new leaf in the second semester to hold that scholarship I was telling you about, which I ended up losing when I dropped below a B average by one grade in my sophomore year. I didn’t know how to study. I probably never really learned to study in an adult kind of way until I got to law school and had to deal with the way of studying for law school in class preparation and for the examinations. I had difficulty in the undergraduate school in stopping four courses while I studied for an exam or test in one. Then I would sometimes find that I couldn’t pick myself back up again. I couldn’t pace myself so that I could study sufficiently for all five courses that I was taking in each semester. I’ve often said, I don’t know how much truth there is to is, but in law school, it was easier for me to do it because you didn’t have tests along the way. In law school, everything was focused on the exam at the end of the course. There was time to study for each exam, and if you kept up during the rest of the year, then studying for the exams made it a lot different. It was a different method of studying, I found, and suited me a lot better because I did a lot better in law school than I did in the college. But my perception is that the school was very much then what it is today, on a smaller scale, a little more intimate scale. There were less students here, there were less 6 buildings here, probably less administration and less bureaucracy, but the town was very much the same. The Colonnade was the same, the Honor System was the same, the students related to each other much the same as I think they do now, although we’ve gone through some phases in American life that probably changed that. But it’s probably more now like it was in the fifties than it was in the seventies, for example, compared to the fifties. Warren: That’s an interesting observation. You mentioned the Honor System. Was that concept new to you when you came here, and how was it presented? Marion: I’m not sure I know how it was presented. I certainly knew about it. We all knew about it. Whether we heard about it from Dr. Gaines, who was the president then, or we heard about it from student leaders, or we heard about it from just our colleagues, I’m not sure, but we certainly knew there was an Honor System. We knew the ramifications of the Honor System. We learned about General Lee. He was part of the tradition and the life that we grew up with from the beginning. Everybody just sort of knew that Washington and Lee had an Honor System that worked. Warren: And how did that manifest itself? How did you know it worked? Marion: Well, you knew it worked because you were trusted by professors. There weren’t people standing over you when you took an exam. You knew that you were free to take an exam out of class if you wanted to. You knew that you could make up an exam if you had to. You knew that you put a pledge on every paper you turned in. The language was essentially the same, but it incorporated the concept of the Honor System every time you turned in a paper. So that reminded you of it when you had written work that had to be presented to a professor. And you heard every once in a while that the Honor System, there would be results of people who had violated the Honor System. One day somebody would be here, and the next day, that person was gone. There were never any public trials then, which I guess was a right that one had, as it is today, and I understand that there are more of the open trials, although not 7 frequent, they’re occasional, but that never happened when I was at school, to my recollection. I had one occasion when I was a dorm counselor and a law student, when I was called in front of the Executive Committee as a witness. They were doing an investigation of some incident. Based on whatever information they had, they thought I was a witness or that I had some information that would be helpful to them or maybe helpful to the person who was under investigation. They never told me which, but I knew they were very interested in what knowledge or recollection I had of a particular event. I cannot remember anything about it now. It was one of the first, I guess, serious personal illustrations in my life of something that I came to learn once I became a lawyer, and that is the frailties of human memory and that people who are witnesses can remember things differently or some people cannot remember at all something that happened fairly recently that you think they’re bound to have recalled, because I couldn’t remember enough to be helpful, I think, and answer all the questions that they put to me during the course of this hearing. But that was the only time I had a direct exposure to the Honor System, the enforcement process, at work, although I saw illustrations of it with other people whom I knew. Warren: Were there any particular teachers who made a difference to you, positive or negative, anybody that was a real character or that you remember particularly? Marion: Well, there were always characters. I mean, I remember my freshman geology professor was Marcellus Stowe. One of the things everybody knew about Marcellus Stowe was that somewhere on his geology exam he would ask you, for probably one point, what McGraw-Hill was. The answer that he wanted was it was the publisher of the textbook that everybody was supposed to have for the course but that nobody needed to buy. But he knew that nobody was buying the textbook, and he would always ask what McGraw-Hill was. 8 Warren: That’s great. [Laughter] Marion: I remember my journalism professor. I don’t even remember his name now, nor would I want to mention it, but he upset me sufficiently that I wrote to Dean Leyburn to protest what I thought had been an unfair treatment of my work. My grade stood. So I remember him. The professor during undergraduate school that I found most interesting and really challenging was Marshall Fishwick. I took each of the courses that Dr. Fishwick offered. He taught freshman history, and it was just by luck of the draw that I was assigned to his class. I could have been assigned to any number of history professors who taught the freshman history overview course, but I got Dr. Fishwick. So I took his course, history, in the freshman year. He offered a sophomore sociology course, I believe it was, a junior fine arts course and a senior, I think it was called, humanities. Those were the official titles of it, but each one was Fishwick. Freshman Fishwick, sophomore Fishwick, junior Fishwick, and senior Fishwick, because he was the one who injected himself and his own personality in each one of these courses. I came to believe afterwards that he was not well respected by other faculty people. They thought maybe he was pop sociology and maybe not as deep a thinker as they thought he should be, but he certainly was intriguing and interesting to me as a sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-old. I enjoyed his courses, although I never did as well in them as I thought I should. They were interesting. He was a good lecturer, and each of his exams was a challenge. I had other professors. I had Ollie Crenshaw for American history. I had, I thought, a good rapport with Ollie Crenshaw in class such that he frequently would talk to me as he delivered his lectures. I can even remember there were times when he would be lecturing on some subject on American history, and he was looking right at me. Somebody sitting between me and him would shift in the seat, and Dr. Crenshaw 9 would lean over to the side so he could maintain eye contact with me. I always got good grades in Ollie Crenshaw’s class. Warren: That must have been flattering to feel like the class is directed to you. Marion: Well, it did. I enjoyed American history. I enjoy all history, but I enjoyed American history, and Ollie Crenshaw had a wry, dry sense of humor. I enjoyed his lectures. I had Allen Moger for English history. I had Dr. Bean for some history; I don’t know whether it was American history or European history. Probably it was American history. Never had Charlie Turner, who I have seen in Lexington, not in the last year or so, but who’s I guess still around. I never had Bill Jenks, who I certainly knew and had a great deal of respect for. I knew him well enough so that when I came back to an Alumni College ten years or so ago, he was going to participate in the program as one of the lecturers, my conversation with him suggested that I had a recollection of his having been one of my professors in school. He said, “Nope. You never took one of my courses.” So he knew, even if I didn’t remember. But we’ve become good friends through the Alumni College in the last ten years. He’s traveled a couple of times abroad on trips with us, and my wife and I frequently stop and visit to say hello to him and his wife here in Lexington. He lectured twice last week to the Alumni College while we were here. Other professors. None stick out, I guess, as much as those I’ve just named. Warren: I’ve been curious about that with the Alumni College. How much is your sense that they remember you as students? I guess, other than Bill Jenks, you haven’t mentioned anybody who is still teaching, like Sid Coulling. Marion: Sid got here just after I left the undergraduate school. He came in, I think in 1956 as an English professor. So I’ve never had him. Fran Drake, who’s still around, was my French professor for a year. 10 Warren: Sometimes when I’m sitting in those lectures I look and I wonder if that guy up there is looking out and seeing you all as you are today or seeing as you were as students. Marion: I’m sure that many of the professors remember some students. There are probably others who are forgettable, who they don’t remember. Some may remember more than others just because of their teaching styles or the way they related to students while the students were here as their students. Warren: Someone like Fishwick, who obviously was important to you, would you have had a personal relationship with him or was it strictly in the classroom? Marion: Strictly in the classroom. Warren: And were you Mr. Marion, or were you Hardin? Marion: I believe I was Mr. Marion. You know, he wasn’t all that much older than I was. He probably was less than ten years older than I. He was a pretty young professor, and he’d only been here for three or four years when I was here as a freshman. But anybody who was eight or ten years older than I looked like they were Methuselah in those days. I mean, Bill Jenks, in the 1950s, was in his thirties, I guess, but he seemed to me a much older man. There were some professors with whom students had, I guess, a friendlier relationship than I can remember with any particular professors. In law school, I worked with some. I was editor of the Law Review, so I had to work closely with Bill Ritz, who was then the advisor to the Law Review. So I got to know him, and I enjoyed his courses. He was not a stimulating lecturer, but I enjoyed his courses because he always challenged us on a final exam with something that was different. I’m a puzzle person. I like the challenge of a puzzle. Some of his exams were just well thought out so that it really was puzzle-like, and you had to think, and think like a lawyer, I guess, to be able to see everything that he had in his exam and be able to answer the question. Some people didn’t like those because they didn’t follow form. 11 One of the ways that people studied for law exams was to look at the same exam, or the exam that the same professor had given last year in the same course, and you got some guidance from those exams. That was one of the traditional ways to study. Bill Ritz was always a little different. You couldn’t be sure that he was not going to turn the tables on you completely and give you a type of exam that followed no form whatsoever that you’d seen before. So it was interesting. My sense is, and it may be just simply because I know more professors now on that kind of a personal basis through the Alumni College and through being involved in the alumni activities, but my sense is that more professors today are closer to students, and it was my perception that professors and students were close back when I was a student. Warren: I’m intrigued by this idea of making exams into a puzzle. What do you mean? What kind of things did he do? Marion: In first-year law school, he taught criminal law. On his exam, he had one question that had in it every conceivable common-law crime that the common law knows, and you had to identify all of them because they were all there, including the crime of misprision of felony, which is an arcane term that means that somebody else has committed a felony, and you know about it but don’t turn them in. That is a crime in itself. So he had all of these things. In the third year, he taught a course in conflict of laws, which is a tough course. His examination was some key quotations from some of the opinions that we had studied, some of the cases that we had studied. We had to identify the opinion from which the quotation was taken and then explain its significance. A lot of people just hated that. I thought it was terrific. I mean, somehow I knew the answers. I mean, that’s the way my mind works. Warren: It does sound like something out of the newspaper, Sunday newspaper. 12 Marion: But that was not a typical kind of exam for law school. I think some people grumbled because they were expecting something different, and it didn’t fit the mold or the format, and so they didn’t like it. Warren: So you were in law school in old Tucker Hall. Marion: Correct. Never heard of Lewis Hall when I was in law school. Warren: Tell me about Tucker Hall. What was it like going to school there? Marion: Well, it was like going to almost any of the other buildings on the Colonnade. It was the last one. It was one of five buildings on the Colonnade, with a couple of exceptions back behind the Colonnade. That was where all the courses were taken, all the courses were conducted, all the classrooms were there. In Tucker Hall, there were just probably fewer classrooms and some of them were bigger because most of the law students in a class were in a course together. So everybody would be in a classroom. It was more intimate because there were less law students then than there are now. My recollection, which could be off, was that there were about 100 law students altogether. We started out with a larger number than we ended up with, because in those days the three-three program was something that a lot of students did. They would take their first three years of undergraduate school, and then if they were interested in being a lawyer, they would take their senior year of undergraduate school as the first year of law school, using the law classes as elective course credits to get their undergraduate degree after four years. But then many of them left Washington and Lee with the undergraduate degree and with one year of law school under their belt, and went wherever they were going home to, South Carolina, Maryland, New York or wherever, and went to law school to finish up, but they only had two more years to go when they got to whatever law school they decided to transfer to. So we lost a lot of students after the first year. So the number declined in the second and third year. In those days, a lot more students in law school had been Washington and Lee undergraduate students, which is different today because the Law School reaches out 13 much further across the country and attracts students from undergraduate schools all over the United States. Although some come from Washington and Lee, the proportion is much smaller today. Warren: When you made that phone call to Mrs. Mac, how would she have known who you were? You had been an undergraduate. Marion: Well, for one reason because Mrs. Mac probably knew everything. Warren: Tell me about that. Marion: Well, the students' perception was that Mrs. Mac ran the Law School and that she knew everybody, that she knew everything. There were not so many people here that she wasn’t aware of people. I may have made an inquiry about it, I don’t know, before sometime that spring, about law school. But she knew enough about me and my record to be able to get the answers quickly when I made that phone call in August of 1955. Warren: What was she like? Marion: She was always pleasant. I remember she sat in that outer office outside Dean Williams’ office on the first floor of the Law School. She was almost like not a traffic cop, but she was there, so she could see everybody who came in, everybody who went out, and she knew most everybody. She was friendly. Her husband, Charley McDowell, the professor, was right across the hall in an office. His office was across the hall from hers in Tucker Hall. She just had her finger on the pulse of everything that went on in the Law School. If you had a question, you went to Mrs. Mac. She was the source of answers to all questions. Warren: Was there anybody who was her equivalent on the undergraduate level? Marion: Not to my knowledge. I mean, Dean Gilliam on the undergraduate side was the one who had his fingers more on the pulse of what the students did. He knew every student. He knew how every student was doing. He communicated with parents, friends. People who had recommended a student to him got letters from him 14 about how the student was doing. He was, in effect, my boss when I was the head dormitory counselor for my last two years in school. The dormitory counselors worked for, if you will, Dean Gilliam as dean of students. He was the one who selected the dorm counselors, and I worked with him. I can’t remember a lot of the details about the things that we did, but I know that I was periodically in his office and I had to report to him. When things went wrong, I had to go over and explain them to him. Warren: And how would things go wrong? What would go wrong? Marion: Like when a student blew part of his hand away with a cherry bomb firecracker when I was the head counselor. A student right around the corner from my dorm room went into another student’s room to throw a cherry bomb out the window into the quadrangle where it reverberated and made a lot more noise. He lit it and threw the firecracker, and it hit the window sill and bounced back into the room and landed on his fellow student’s desk. Instead of just ducking and letting it destroy a book or two, he decided he'd better go grab it and throw it out the window, and while he was holding it, the firecracker went off in his hand. He lost a portion of a finger, probably some of his thumb. I had to drive him out to the old—well, it was then the new Stonewall Jackson Hospital, because I had been in the old hospital myself for one night when it was in where Stonewall Jackson’s birthplace is, his house. This was the new hospital out when you went to Buena Vista. I had to drive the student out there where whoever the doctor was on duty in the emergency room had to give him novocaine. It was painful, painful to watch, and I’m sure it was painful for the student to go through. I had to give Dean Gilliam a report on that and what had happened. We periodically had to deal with alcohol in the dorm, which was forbidden, and other things like that. I had to keep Dean Gilliam advised from time to time. 15 Warren: Whew. You’re the first cherry bomb story. I haven’t had one of those before. A while ago you mentioned writing a letter to Dean Leyburn. He was the academic dean? Marion: Yes. Warren: Was he accessible? Marion: He was probably more accessible than students perceived him to be. At some point in my senior year, I was invited with a small group of others and it perhaps was because I was taking a course of his, although I don’t really remember that, just for an evening of conversation, and he played the piano. So he gave us like a sort of mini recital of some piano pieces that he played wonderfully well in his home. He was in one of the homes on the front campus down from Lee House. I’m not sure which one it was. But he periodically invited students, I think, into his home for things like that. But I can’t tell you how accessible he was, because my perception, I guess, was that he was pretty much a figure who was up on a pedestal. Your views about these people, you know, change after you’ve been away for a while. You come back as an alumnus, and you find out they're really people that don’t know everything, that they sometimes have to study to teach you a course, and that they just can’t stand up in front of a group and talk for an hour about whatever the subject is they’re supposed to teach. But that awakening comes later. Warren: We think they have all knowledge at a time like that. Did you take any of his classes? Marion: I don’t remember. He taught a course, a sociology course, and I don’t think I took that. I did take the one course that Dr. Gaines offered. Warren: You did? Marion: Dr. Gaines taught a course, maybe every spring, maybe every other spring, on the Bible as literature. It was a wonderful course, and he was a wonderful lecturer. He would lecture about different books in the Bible like the Song of Solomon and some of 16 the others, and talk about the literary content and analyze it. It was a fascinating course. It was a small course. I took it, I think in my senior year. He did not, I think, allow more than ten or twelve students in the course. I don’t really remember taking a course under Leyburn, but I do remember listening to him play the piano, which makes me think that I must have been in some course of his. Warren: I never knew that President Gaines taught. You’ve taught me something that I hadn’t heard before. Marion: He did teach that one course. Warren: That’s fascinating. I need to turn the tape over.