Marion interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: You mentioned that you were in a fraternity.
Marion: Correct.
Warren: Was the fraternity important to you? What was fraternity life like?
Marion: It was important. When I came here, as I told you, I was very young and
unsophisticated and naive. I really didn’t expect to get into a fraternity because that,
too, sounded like something that was for all the people who came here from prep
school. But I went through the Rush Week, which was at the very beginning of school,
and ended up being invited to join two fraternities. I accepted one, and that one was
Phi Gamma Delta out of Preston and Jackson. My best friends throughout my
undergraduate years were my fraternity brothers, most of them classmates. Obviously,
it was very important then. I have not seen many of them a lot since school except
occasionally at reunions. I now see probably other people in my class other than my
fraternity brothers more often than I see some of my fraternity brothers from those
days.

         One of my good fraternity brother friends has been particularly close for the last
ten or fifteen years, although he was two years ahead of me. He’s now on the board of

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trustees with me—Grey Castle. He and his wife and I and my wife are friends, and we
visit in their home. They now live in Lexington.

         I became the president of my fraternity. But although we were taught that
fraternities were a lifetime thing, to me, now, fraternities can sometimes operate to
prevent you from having the bonding with your entire class or with others in the school
that is important for good alumni to have. You have to overcome, I think, the fraternity
bond in some ways to become as an effective an alumnus of the school as many people
are and more people ought to be. But it was a good place to be. I mean, they served
good food. I ate my meals there. I slept there in my sophomore, junior, and senior
years. I came to Washington and Lee, as you might imagine from my scholarship story,
on a very thin budget and did not have a lot of money to spend. So I couldn’t have a
room out in town. The fraternity house offered me the most inexpensive place to stay.
Warren: Was that true? That was the best deal, to live at the fraternity house?
Marion: Yes, and in those days, it was essentially the only place to eat meals. That was
just before Evans Dining Hall, which, I think, was built right after I left law school. But
in those days, there was a freshman dormitory and no other sleeping facilities that the
university had for students except for some married students' housing facilities. There
was no dining facility at all, so you either had to eat your meals out in town or at a
fraternity house.
Warren: Was anybody not in a fraternity?
Marion: There were some, but not a lot.
Warren: And where would they eat?
Marion: Some of them would eat together. I guess they would eat in places like the
Southern Inn and whatever the other food establishments are in town. There was
something in those days called the Beanery, which may have been a place for people
who were not in fraternities could eat. It was a university facility somewhere on the
back campus. But I always associated that with athletes who had to eat training meals,

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football players and such. Maybe there were other facilities that I just never knew
about. But I never gave that any real thought, either, because I was going to eat my
meals at the fraternity house.
Warren: You mentioned athletes. You were here during the cheating scandal.
Marion: I was.
Warren: What was it like to be here at that time?
Marion: I believe that happened at the end of my sophomore year, which would have
been in 1953. I remember that there was a lot of quiet conversation, secret conversation,
among a lot of people about something going on. Then we heard a lot of people had
left school who had been guilty of Honor System violations, and that a lot of them were
football players, scholarship football players. I think it had a striking effect on the
student body. It was right after that, I guess, that the board decided to do away with
big-time athletics, on the ground that Washington and Lee's academic program was
really not appropriate and created too many conflicts for people who were here on
athletic scholarships who maybe should be getting their education somewhere else.

         I don’t know how much I thought about it, really, at the time, but I thought it
was the right decision, and I thought the university did the right thing in stopping
playing some of the football opponents that we played when I first got here. I mean, I
can remember playing the University of Maryland on Wilson Field when Maryland was
ranked number one in the country. Washington and Lee was just wiped up, although
we also had that wonderful victory of my freshman year over at the University of
Virginia when it was the only loss UVA had all year long. Washington and Lee just
played a wonderful football game and beat UVA forty-two to fourteen. That, too, was
here on Wilson Field. That was the highlight of the big-time football program while I
was here.

         I had a fraternity brother my freshman year who was here on athletic
scholarship. His brother is here this week, Ben Bolt [phonetic], who’s here with his wife

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Ann. They’ve come back to several Alumni College programs. He came here for one
year, and he was a freshman, although he was older because he had served in the
Korean War. He came back here for a year in my senior year. Then he went away and I
graduated, eventually, from a college in Mississippi. I never saw him again until he
took an Alumni College trip with us to Russia three years ago. We met at Dulles
Airport as we were ready to leave on that trip. I haven’t seen his brother, who did not
graduate from Washington and Lee, but was here for a couple of years as a football
player.
Warren: Were you involved in sports at all?
Marion: Intermural sports. No varsity sport. I wasn’t either big enough or good
enough, but I played intermural just about everything at least once.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Marion: Oh, my. Well, I played football, basketball, softball intermural. I wrestled
once. I played volleyball. I bowled in intramurals. I played handball once. I played
ping-pong. I mean, there was virtually every kind of sports activity in intramurals, and
I think I did it all. I may have played tennis, although I’m not sure about that. I played
golf once in intramurals. Some of these I did more regularly than the things I did once.
I tried to wrestle once, and I can remember trying to lose weight to make the weight,
which was a number of pounds below my current weight. But even then it was a strain
because I had to stand in a hot shower and sweat all afternoon and do whatever I could
do reduce my weight by another pound so I could make the weight limit. They fed me
a big steak that night at the fraternity house, and then the next day I went out and
wrestled and got pinned right away. [Laughter] But that was my intramural wrestling
experience.
Warren: I had no idea there was that much of a variety.
Marion: Oh, yes. I mentioned I spent one night in the old Stonewall Jackson Hospital.
That was what the doctors thought was a possible concussion from playing intramural

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football. I remember I was passing the football, and one of the players on the other
team tagged me so hard that I went back and landed on the back of my head. They
took me to the hospital just to watch me overnight. I thought I was fine, but they made
me spend the night in the hospital.
Warren: Now you can say you slept in Stonewall Jackson’s house.
Marion: I guess I can say that, and I will. I slept in Stonewall Jackson’s house for one
night.
Warren: You and a lot of other Washington and Lee students.
Marion: I think that’s right. Let me tell you about one experience that you haven’t
asked me about and that you wouldn’t know about without a lot of research, but that
you probably ought to know about. You know, I guess, that Alben Barkley died in
Lexington at the Mock Convention.
Warren: You were here?
Marion: I was not only here, but Alben Barkley died with his head in my hands,
because I was on the platform. I've seen some of the old clips of the 1956 Mock
Convention, not for this Mock Convention, but maybe four years before in one of the
little promotional pieces that the students did, they used a clip from that 1956 Mock
Convention, and there I am sitting on the stage.

         It was in the old Doremus Gym. There was a platform, and there were maybe
half a dozen officers of the convention, and I was the secretary of the convention,
because of my interest in politics and student government and all that sort of thing, and
I was then in law school, but they made me an officer of the convention. Alben Barkley
was giving his speech, which most people have heard about, and he had delivered the
phrase, the last phrase, that he mentioned, “I’d rather be a servant in the house of the
Lord than sit in the seats of the mighty.” With that, his head kind of went down almost
like he was bowing his head in prayer, but then his hand somehow flopped across the

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podium in front of him. There were all these microphones set up and some of them
went scattering in different directions.

         He then collapsed, and he fell right behind my chair. So I turned around and put
my hand under his head, and he kind of wheezed three times, like three gasps of air,
and he was dead. I knew he was dead. There were all the other people, all the students
on the platform. His wife was out on the first row and President Gaines and all sorts of
other people were out there. All I remember was saying to whoever was the chairman
of the convention, I said, “Maybe you ought to ask everybody to stand for a moment of
silent prayer,” because, I mean, I just knew he was dead. I mean, there was no time for
any emergency medical people or anything to get there.

         That happened, and I really don’t know, and I can’t remember all the details of
what happened after that, but the convention was postponed for a week. Barkley’s
widow urged that it be continued after that week. His funeral was in Washington
sometime in the middle of that week, and we resumed the convention and finished it a
week late the following weekend. As I also think, that was the first person that I ever
saw dead who I knew was dead, and here I was in law school at the time. I had never
seen a dead person, to my knowledge, until Alben Barkley died.
Warren: That’s quite a beginning.
Marion: Yes.
Warren: Did you become a celebrity? Did people interview you?
Marion: No, not that I know of. There were other more important people to interview.
I was just one of several people there.
Warren: Today you’d have been on CNN within two minutes.
Marion: Probably. I might have sold a book if I had had an agent or played my cards
right at the time.
Warren: That’s quite a story. It's interesting doing these interviews because I know all
these major moments in history, but, you know, you get involved talking to somebody

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and you don’t really do the arithmetic. Of course, I should have realized you would
have been here.
Marion: It occurred while I was here. That’s right.
Warren: Not only were you here, but you were central. So you were real involved in
student politics?
Marion: Yes. There were two political parties on the campus then, the University party
and the Independent party. The way it worked in those days was that the University
party consisted of ten fraternities. It was the Red Square fraternities and five others
were in the University party. The other seven fraternities were in the Independent
party. So the Independent party typically always lost the elections.

         What was elected was the president of the student body and maybe two other
offices, like secretary—I don’t remember what the offices were. Then there would be
elected the president of each of the four big dance weekends, the fall dances, Fancy
Dress, spring dances, and finals. They were elected offices. So each of the parties sort
of put together a slate, and they’d have to keep different fraternities happy by making
sure that ones got nominated, but it didn’t always work out that way with only seven
offices to fill and ten fraternities in the Big Clique, they called it, the Big Clique and the
Little Clique, the University party and the Independent party.

         So when I was in my senior year, maybe, one fraternity switched allegiance and
came into our party, and then another fraternity did that, so that it became nine to eight,
and it made it much closer. I guess we elected the president of the student body the
year we had nine people. The following year, my first year in law school, my party
nominated me and put me up for president of the student body, and had the alignment
of fraternities remained the same, I would have been elected. But on the night before
the election, through some, I guess, what was typical of student politicking in those
days, the other party went to one of the fraternities in our party and persuaded them to

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switch their allegiance on the eve of the election. So that took sixty votes from my party
and gave it to the other party. So I lost the election for president of the student body.
Warren: So do people vote strictly along party lines?
Marion: That was pretty much the way it worked, yes, because it was in each
fraternity's self-interest to vote for the party in which it was a member, because its turn
would come to have a prestige office, either president or the particular dance head. It
was a rarity for somebody to be so popular that enough votes could be siphoned off
from the other party to elect that person. I mean, everybody went through the motions
of it every year as if it was a truly contested election, but the minority party rarely won
an office. It happened occasionally.
Warren: So when you arrived, say, as a freshman, and you are choosing your
fraternity, at that point do you have any idea about all this?
Marion: Some people probably did. I didn’t have a clue. I had no idea. I mean, the
other fraternity that gave me a bid to membership was one of the Big Clique fraternities,
but I didn’t know that at the time. I just sort of went with what seemed comfortable to
me.
Warren: This is complicated politics.
Marion: Oh, it is, it is. But what an education to the real world.
Warren: Really. I’ve heard allusions to Big Clique and Little Clique, but you’re the first
person who’s really explained it to me.
Marion: I don’t know how long that process continued, but that’s pretty much the way
it was during my seven years here. There were ten fraternities against seven. Then
there were nine against eight. Then there was some shifting back and forth. I don’t
know what it went to after I left. It was very important to some people. The leaders of
the fraternities were expected to get their membership solidly to vote for the ticket of
the party in which they happened to be a member.

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         It was kind of like Red Cross blood drives in those days. Twice a year, the Red
Cross would come up and have a blood drive, and whichever fraternity got 100 percent,
or the closest to 100 percent, would win a keg of beer. Well, that was very important to
my fraternity and a lot of fraternities. So they would get 100 percent in order to get a
keg of beer. Even if people were not qualified, if you showed up and offered to give
blood, even if you were rejected for medical reasons, that, of course, counted. So there
was great social pressure, particularly in my fraternity, to have 100 percent, because
they wanted that keg of beer. I wasn’t a beer drinker, but I went and gave blood
religiously.
Warren: So who was supplying the keg of beer? The Red Cross?
Marion: I’m not sure. Probably it was the Interfraternity Council. I don’t think it was
the Red Cross. I'm not sure they could—
Warren: Talk about interesting politics. [Laughter]
Marion: I assume it was the Interfraternity Council that probably donated a keg of beer
to the winning fraternity, in an effort to do our civic duty and support the Red Cross.
Warren: And the keg of beer. [Laughter]
Marion: And the keg of beer. Right.
Warren: Well, this has been a real education for me. I really have learned a lot. So am I
correct in understanding that everybody really, in his heart of hearts, wanted to be in
the Big Clique, but he wasn’t? Not everybody was?
Marion: No, it didn’t work that way. But I think, by and large, most of the fraternities
that were perceived to be the better fraternities, were Big Clique fraternities. Just by
way of illustration, at that time there were two Jewish fraternities at Washington and
Lee because, obviously, in those days, none of the other fraternities would take a Jewish
member. So there had to be Jewish fraternities, and there had to be two, apparently, for
there to be some alternative. Clearly, the preeminent Jewish fraternity was Zeta Beta

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Tau, which was in the Big Clique. And Pi Epsilon Phi, whichever Jewish students ZBT
didn’t want was in the Little Clique.

         There were some other fraternities that were perceived as being not as strong. I
always thought that my fraternity was one of the leaders of the Little Clique. It mean, it
had good people, and nobody looked down their nose at my fraternity. But there were
people who looked down their nose at some of the other fraternities, and most of those
were in the Little Clique. But was it important to a lot of people? Obviously it was
important to some, but most people, I think, didn’t lose a lot of sleep over it.
Warren: You’ve given me such an education. Can you answer the question that
nobody else has been able to answer for me? Why is Red Square called Red Square?
Marion: Well, my guess is it has something to do with the Red Square in Moscow,
because there is a square and all the fraternities are brick. So somebody probably just
called it Red Square and the name stuck. Now, do I know that as a fact? No.
Warren: Nobody seems to know. It’s just always been.
Marion: That’s right. It’s like, why not?
Warren: Why is the Colonnade the Colonnade?
Marion: Right.
Warren: I just can’t thank you enough. I’ve really learned a lot. You were in the Glee
Club?
Marion: Yes, I did the Glee Club kind of like I did wrestling for intermurals. I did it
once. I’m not a trained singer, and I think some of the people who were, recognized
that my voice didn’t mesh with the rest of them. So my Glee Club experience was not
anything that lasted very long. I may have been in Glee Club my freshman year and
my sophomore year, but certainly not beyond that.
Warren: This was not a highlight of your career at Washington and Lee?
Marion: No, it was not. I can remember we went over to Charlottesville and we sang
over there once. I can remember a couple of the songs we sang. “When the day has

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dwindled down to a precious few,” whatever that song is, that was one of the songs
that we sang in the Glee Club. But I would not remember my Glee Club experiences at
the top of list of my recollections in Washington and Lee.
Warren: What is? What’s at the top of your list?
Marion: Well, you’ve got to understand that most of my recollections of Washington
and Lee have been recent recollections, because I’m living a different Washington and
Lee life over the last fifteen or so years. I had a wonderful time here. I used to tell
people that I spent four years in undergraduate school and then three years in law
school, and that if Washington and Lee had had a medical school, I would have stayed
here for that. That was a bit of an overstatement, but it expressed my view about how
much I liked life here. The idea of leaving Lexington and leaving Washington and Lee
and going somewhere and going to work was certainly not continuing this wonderful
experience, but I had to do it.

         I went to work. I went to Baltimore, I became a lawyer. I had a career to develop
in the practice of law. I didn’t have a lot of connection for a long time with Washington
and Lee as an alumnus. I was class agent for my class for a year or so in the late fifties
or early sixties. I occasionally went to a Washington and Lee alumni gathering in
Baltimore. I came back to Lexington just a couple of times, but not for any kind of
formal alumni reunion activity until my twentieth reunion in 1975. I came back for that.

         Then I came back again in 1980, and that was the first time I brought Heather.
We had met the year before. At that point I just decided, with her support and
enthusiasm, because she fell in love with the place immediately, that I want to get
involved and get more active as an alumnus, and so I did that. Beginning in about 1980,
I became a class agent again, and I became the vice president of the Annual Fund. I
eventually became the chairman of the Annual Fund for two years in the late eighties. I
got elected to the Law Council in the eighties. I became the president of the Law
Council when I got elected to the Board of Trustees in 1991.

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         While all this was going on, beginning in the mid-eighties, I started attending the
Alumni College, and we got hooked on that. So we come back to Lexington for Alumni
College. We come back for Law Council meetings. We come back for trustee meetings.
We come back for any other meetings that anybody will have and invite me to. As I
say, “Just give me a ticket, and I’ll be here.”

         So my recollection and my feelings about Washington and Lee are so much
colored by my recent experience that it’s hard to separate that out and think back to a
lot of things that went on forty years ago.
Warren: Well, you’re doing a great job this afternoon.
Marion: Well, you’re testing my recollection on some things.
Warren: I do notice you have "35" on your name tag. That’s one of the higher numbers
there.
Marion: Yes, it’s the highest one right now.
Warren: It is the highest?
Marion: Yes. Heather and I have been to more Alumni College programs than
anybody else. We’re one up on Jim and Jo Ballengee.
Warren: I’m impressed. I didn’t think anybody could be up on Jim Ballengee on
anything. [Laughter]
Marion: Well, he would like to get ahead, I think, and he may one of these days. He
has a little more time than I do right now. I devote a lot of time to the Alumni College.
Warren: And do you find that it really is a continuing education kind of thing?
Marion: Yes, I mean, if you spend a week in an Alumni College, it is not like going to
graduate school and really concentrating on something in an intense and extended way,
but it’s informative. The experiences are wonderful experiences. You’ve sat in on some
of the programs. You know the kind of participation there is. We have fascinating
teachers, and it’s the interdisciplinary nature of it that’s so fascinating. If you’re here to
learn about a country, you learn about history, you learn about geography, you learn

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about culture, you learn about art and music and literature and just all those sorts of
things that are woven together by Rob Fure and the way he plans these so skillfully.
Rob is a—I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it on this tape—I think he’s one of the
wonderful assets that this university has and that these programs are the best things the
university has ever done for its alumni. I’m just committed to getting as much of a
benefit from them as I can.

         I’ve traveled now—I counted up with Heather this morning—I think we have
done fifteen Alumni College Abroad trips. We’re going to go to Turkey in September,
and we’re going to go to Africa next January. So it won’t be long before I hit twenty.
Warren: And Jim Ballengee will be nipping at your heels.
Marion: He’ll be doing as many of those that he can right along with us. Yes.
Warren: How long have you been a trustee?
Marion: Five years, although this counts as my sixth year. I was elected to the board in
October, or sworn in in October of 1991.
Warren: And would you say there have been dramatic things that you’ve been
involved with as a trustee? What are the highlights of being a trustee?
Marion: Well, I wasn’t a trustee when we dealt with the—I mean, the two or three
major things, I guess, that the trustees have dealt with over years are the decision we
talked about doing away with Division One athletics back in the 1950s and the
coeducation decision in the mid-1980s are obviously two very critical things. I was not
on the board for either of those.

         The board continues to wrestle with what are always important issues about how
the university should be run, about how it manages itself, how it plans for the future,
how it pays for the things that it has to pay for to keep making this a better institution
in a world where every educational institution is trying to upgrade itself and achieve
more important things or be better than it was yesterday. Washington and Lee is doing
that, and Washington and Lee, considering its size and its sort of relative isolation in

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little Lexington, Virginia, it’s got wonderful national attention, both the undergraduate
school and the Law School. So the board deals with all the sorts of things constantly
that go into making this as good an institution as it is.
Warren: So you say you were not on the board at the time of coeducation, but I’ll bet
you had some point of view about the issue of coeducation.
Marion: Well, I’ll tell you, my view at the time as the debate was going on—and I did
not have the information that the trustees had. I had some of it. I remember that the
trustees authorized a poll of some sort of the alumni, and I can’t tell you exactly how I
filled that poll out, but I probably said, as I suspect a lot of people did, that all of the
things being equal, my preference would be to keep the university all-male, because
that’s the way I remembered it, but that if it were a question of preserving the quality of
the institution, then I thought we ought to accept women rather than see the quality of
the university go down. I understood the arguments then, apart from quality, for
admitting women, and I sympathized with it.

         My view today is much stronger that it was the right decision. As soon as the
decision was made, I supported it wholeheartedly, although not everybody, I think,
was prepared to go quite as far as I was at that point. When I did know was that the
admission figures for entering classes of students had been declining steadily over a
period of about twenty years. What I did not understand at the time the board made
the decision was the practical effect of Washington and Lee’s trying to preserve its
single-sex education and competing for a steadily shrinking pool of male students who
only wanted an all-male education. That number, even among male students, was
getting smaller and smaller because of just changing habits and culture. More students
were looking for coeducation by the time we got to the 1980s.

         So the board made, clearly, the right decision. I think it’s been proved to be the
right decision by the result of what has happened since. All of the things being taken
into consideration, the transition was very smooth. I think you had to work your way

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through four years of classes where there was some students who continued to take pot
shots, I guess, of having women on the campus. But now that that’s behind us, you
know, the women are strong students. I think the board and the administration were
surprised at how quickly the numbers of applications increased for both males and
females and how many females they could accept and how strong their qualifications
were. The university has only been strengthened by the quality of the students who
have come here ever since, both male and female.
Warren: Yes, it sure seems that way. You said you were on the alumni board. Were
you involved in Fraternity Renaissance in any way? Was that going on while you
were—
Marion: No, I was not on the alumni board. I was on the Law Council. I was on the
Law Council during the mid- to late eighties.
Warren: Were you aware what was going on with Fraternity Renaissance?
Marion: Well, I knew about the decision. What you describe as Fraternity Renaissance,
it's at least a two-step process. One was upgrading the quality of all of the fraternity
houses, which were in pretty sorry shape, and, secondly, was the university taking over
ownership and control of the fraternity houses so that they could monitor the conduct
and the upkeep of those houses in which students are permitted to live sort of as
tenants. Something had to be done about having students living in houses that they
would trash for four years and leave to people coming along behind them without any
regard to the conditions that they were bequeathing to their juniors.

         So I knew about all of that when it was going on, for a couple of reasons. One is
that when I became the chairman of the Annual Fund in 1987, I was invited to attend
trustee meetings in that capacity. I’m not sure whether it had been done, and if so, how
effectively before that. Jim Ballengee was then rector of the board, and Farris Hotchkiss
came and talked to me about doing this job, and I accepted it, and he told me that I

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would be invited. He said, “None of your predecessors for the last several years has
been interested enough to accept the invitation of coming to the board meetings.”

         I said, “This is wonderful. I’d be happy to attend the board meetings.” So I
started, and so for two years I was invited to all of the board meetings as chairman of
the Annual Fund. Then there was a gap of maybe a year when I didn’t go to any
meeting, but then I got invited again for a year as president of the Law Council because
Jim Ballengee also had decided during that period that both the president of the Alumni
Association and the president of the Law Council should be invited also to attend
trustee meetings and to give a report and to be able to just sit in and get a sense of what
the board does. So I was almost a regular in attendance for several years before I got
elected officially to the board five years ago.
Warren: That was a real opportunity to get groomed, wasn’t it?
Marion: Well, I think that is one of the things that the board is doing now. It looks at
people who hold these positions of alumni leadership and certainly considers them as
prospective members of the board of trustees. I’ve not been the only one who’s been in
a position like that who has subsequently been elected to the board.