CHARLES McDOWELL February 14, 1996 Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is February 14, 1996. I'm in Washington, D.C., at the National Press Club Building. I'm speaking with Charles McDowell, Jr. You grew up on campus. McDowell: I did, in the Hollow. Warren: Describe the Hollow. McDowell: The Hollow is the hollow. It's what a southerner would call a hollow. It is directly below--it runs from the KA House to the Beta House. It is eight or nine faculty houses, I think eight faculty houses, in a row backing on Main Street, fronting looking up the hill to, I remember, the house of Fitzgerald Flournoy, the new Alumni House that's up there, the Law School, the old law school, etc., and the Colonnade and the back of Lee Chapel are all visible from the Hollow. Warren: Who were your neighbors? McDowell: The neighbors. Let's start--and my memory is nil, but these go back so far, I can remember them, I think. Starting at the KA House side closest to Toby Agnor's grocery store, was a little grocery store at the bottom of the alley that goes from Main Street up to the KA House and comes out on Letcher Avenue. That's where we're starting and we're coming toward the center of town. Dr. Bradley, professor French, with his wife and son Jim. Then in the magnificent white spectacular house, Dr. William Gleason Bean and his wife and 1 their two sons, Coleman and Bill Bean. Bill Bean's still living in Lexington, and Coleman living in Washington. Warren: What did he teach? McDowell: Dr. Bean--history. We're talking head of the history department and we're talking head of the French. Dr. Bradley taught French; did I mention? Dr. Bean, history. Then the Hancock House, it was called, where the McDowells lived, but houses were usually known for their--in our case, we pretended, anyway, it was, "Where do you live?" "In the Hancock House." The Hancock House was--Dr. Hancock was, as I recall, maybe dean of the university, but when we moved in there, it was where, I guess, my parents moved. We lived in three houses in the Hollow. Let me keep naming them off. The McDowells lived in the Hancock House, and that was my mother, who worked up the hill at the law school, and my father [Charles Rice McDowell], who taught up the hill at the law school, and me and my brother John. Next door to that, Charlie Light, Charles Porterfield Light, who was a law professor, like my father, a graduate of VMI, which is very unusual in the W&L law school, and the son of the manager of the Willard Hotel that you're looking at. It's a small world. [Laughter] It's a very small world. And indeed, as manager of the Willard Hotel, he put into the minds of newspaper people who lived in a little row of shacks over here to invent the Gridiron Club, which was invented largely to fill a banquet room over at the Willard Hotel. I mean, it is a small world. No one in the Gridiron Club knows I knew Charlie Light and who his father was. I mean, that's all esoteric, but you and I would understand it; they wouldn't. Next house. Lucius Junius Desha, head of the chemistry department, with his marvelous wife and his two or three daughters, led by Mary Desha and Lucia Desha and Julia Desha. 2 Warren: You get extra stars for that. McDowell: Yeah, isn't that good? And they were older than I, and I was awed by all three of them. They were the first females I ever looked at, and they were so beautiful and awesome that I was scared of girls for many years, just on being so impressed with them. Next to the Deshas, Annie Jo White. You know about her from the book. Warren: No, but I want you to tell me about her. McDowell: Annie Jo White was what was known as a maiden lady who founded Fancy Dress Ball, invented Fancy Dress Ball at W&L. She worked probably in the library for a lot of her life. I don't know where in the hell she was. But she was a marvelous intellectual and cranky woman who lived in the Annie Jo White House. How she got it in Faculty Row is also not clear to me. She rented rooms to students, a lot of rooms to students, and the student that came out the best that lived there was [U.S. Supreme Court] Justice Lewis Powell. When I was eleven, twelve, growing up in the Hollow, playing baseball, out in the middle of the trees, we'd play baseball in the trees, and football, two hills, the hill that comes down from the KA House and the hill that comes sort of down from the Lee Chapel end make a real swale of a hollow, and that's where we hit baseballs out toward the KA House. But Lewis Powell lived in Annie Jo White's while he went to the W&L Law School, so he would walk up the hill from his room to his classes, and if we were playing some sport, he would tend to come down and throw a ball with us or hit one or move on. So I've known him since I was eleven, covered him when he was a justice, and covered his swearing-in at the U.S. Supreme Court. It's a small world, is all I'm saying. Next to Annie Jo--oh, there's an anecdote about that that I'll tell real quick. Lewis Powell tells this story. He came to Annie Jo's house. As he started law school, he had gone through his undergraduate days as some kind of counselor in 3 the dorms, so he'd never had to maybe pay for a room or something. He negotiated some price with her, which I'm sorry to say I've forgotten, but it was very much like $15 or $7.50 a month or something, but they settled that after walking up the steps and looking at the room, and he said, "Perfect. I can walk right up to the law school." Annie Jo knew he was a good student. I think he'd been the president of the student body already, and he was a real good student. As he stood saying good-bye to her in her little entrance hall, he looked behind her shoulder and realized he was looking at a Miley photograph of General Lee on Traveler, and he realized that there was a little bitty girl sitting in General Lee's lap on the horse, and said, "Who is that?" She said, "That's me." "You knew General Lee?" said Lewis Powell. And she said, "Of course." And he said, "And I know you?" And she said, "Well, yes." And he said, "I can't believe what a small world it is." [Laughter] So he and I are both taken with the small worlds. Warren: Do you have any idea what happened to that photograph? McDowell: No, but they'll know around the library. It's a famous photograph. Miley's stuff became classic Civil War stuff, and I would think--1 know nothing about it, but my hunch is that a photograph of Annie Jo at three or four, sitting across the front of that saddle, must be somewhere. I mean, it would be hard to lose it. It was hanging in a University-owned house, rented to a lady on the staff. The Miley picture, God knows, but anyway. All right, moving along our little row of houses, I'm at the end, and I've described all the houses. The Moffatts. My friend there was Joe Moffatt, and Mrs. 4 Moffatt was Lela, L-E-L-A, I guess, or Lelia, L-E-L-I-A. And Dr. Moffatt was head of English, and I can't say his first name. Warren: Doctor. McDowell: Doctor. But we can do a poem that will not appear in the history. At least I don't think I'll recommend it. But a member of the English department named Lawrence Edward Watkin, who went to Hollywood and became a great moviemaker and also wrote a fantastic book about Lexington, set in Lexington, called On Borrowed Time, and it's a marvel. I don't have one here; I've got one at home. It's decided to my mother and father and two or three other mothers and fathers around that were friends. But Mrs. Moffatt was the head of the UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy in Lexington certainly, Virginia probably, and I think had been head of the UDC across the whole South. So there so near to the rear of the Lee Chapel, about the closest house to the grave of General Lee, lived the Moffatts, and Mrs. Moffatt was a UDC absolutist. Larry Watkin's poem is a limerick that says: "Leeland Nance Moffatt sat on a toffet under the UDC, so busy thinkin' how stinkin' was Lincoln he forgot about Robert E. Lee." Warren: [Laughter] That's great. McDowell: I have changed the opening words because I think of her son Joe, so I say, off the record, that the real poem begins "Old Miss Moffatt," like the limerick it's taken after, whoever, but "Old Miss Moffatt." I just changed it to "Leeland Nance Moffatt," because I just don't like to call her "Old Miss Moffatt." [Laughter] But that can go either way. I don't feel deeply about it, but if it's attributed to me, I remember it as "Leeland Nance Moffatt sat on a toffet." All right. Then next to that was the Old Blue Hotel, which is gone. Warren: Tell me about the Old Blue Hotel. 5 McDowell: I don't know much. Warren: I am enchanted by this. McDowell: Well, you're going to have to find someone who can tell you some history. It was a plain, good-looking building, it was very large, it housed scholarship athletes in my time, and now it's sort of a blank place. The Conoco station was just across the little road in the Beta House, but it filled a big chunk and it backed on to Main Street, and it had some kind of a rear porch with a drive- through under it for carriages, I'm sure is that it was. By that time, that was just kind of like a back porch behind a hedge, but it must have been a place where people drove their carriages in, and it must have been an old hotel in another century. I don't know how long. If I ever knew about it, I've certainly forgotten it. But we had athletes in there. I remember Bill Ellis, an end on the football team, specifically used to take me in there, and we'd talk and all. He got me a job at Lee Chapel, showing tourists through the chapel part of it. Warren: Who ran the Old Blue Hotel at that point? How did it function? McDowell: W&L owned it and ran it. Warren: Did they serve meals there? McDowell: I think so, because I think they had to feed those football players. But it was full of the scholarship football players. I suppose they fed them, or they went to the--what do you call the place where students, the run of the student body eats their meals? Where, if not in a fraternity house? Over at the Beanery. Maybe they ate at the Beanery. Warren: Is that what it was called then? McDowell: Beanery. [Laughter] Put that down. Warren: That I haven't heard about before. McDowell: Well, whatever it's called. It used to be over near Harold Lock's print shop and now where it's over opposite the Episcopal church, it seems to me. If you 6 were a student who wasn't a member of a fraternity, you'd probably go there to eat. Well, anyway, they could have gone there. They could have eaten in the Old Blue. I don't remember a dining room in there, but I don't remember the Old Blue very well. I just remember the marvelous football stars that I would watch play. Warren: Tell me some names. McDowell: Joe Arnold was from Kentucky, who my mother and father knew very well, was a great star there for a long time. Then all the way up to my time, Andy McCutcheon and Joe McCutcheon were both starting players. They didn't live in the Old Blue; they lived in the Phi-something House, I've forgotten, the one opposite the Student Union. Corner Store at one end of the block by the post office. Then you come down the block to this fraternity house. But the McCutcheons, who are as close friends as I have, are the ones I remember from my own time. Then I remember all the way back to, I think, Joe Arnold, when Tex Tilson was coach. Joe Arnold probably played there in the early thirties. I hung out around the football team a lot and saw hundreds and hundreds of games and went to practices and helped take care of the loose footballs. It was a good thing for a kid to do, and I was the ball boy for the basketball team, sort of, for a period. Then I played on it, which is the pride of my life. It was just an interesting place to hang out. Remember that one of the best experts in all history on all this is Lea Booth in Lynchburg, and I'm sure y'all have got him as a prime interviewee, but get him quick, because he's old. I heard from him only last week, and he's just funny and still keen, but go while he's hot, because he can put together stuff you wouldn't dream of. He is amazing. Okay. So much for that row of houses. I've carried us a long way. Gassy, gassy. [Laughter] Warren: I'll be an early memory that you have, that I would love to have a first- hand account about, were you old enough to be aware when Tucker Hall burned? 7 McDowell: Oh, yeah. Warren: Tell me what that was like. McDowell: Well, Tucker Hall was a very big thing in our lives, remember my father's office was there. Warren: Describe it before the fire. McDowell: It was like an outrage. It was a total outrage. I mean, here was this Colonnade, famous across America, and at one end of it, where you expected to see sort of a matching building to the business school, as it was at the other end, was a mostly round, bulbous, ugly, ugly, ugly graystone thing, lump, sat there on it. And my father, the eager law professor and live wire, hated the building so, that when one of the jokes that went around was that he burned it down. I firmly believed that. And when I got old enough to have the nerve, asked him if he did, he was utterly astonished. "You really thought I burned it down?" I said, "Well, you hated it, and everyone said you were the only one who got his own law books out of it." He went in when it was on fire and rescued a whole lot of stuff, including some of Raymond Johnson's books and teaching notes. So it was very dramatic. Warren: Did you watch that? Did you see your father go in? McDowell: I did not. What he did was go in and save what he could save, got his head into Dean Moorland's office. I don't know what he got out of there, but some stuff. A little bit out of Charlie Light's and Raymond Johnson's offices, and nearly all his own stuff, because he was the newest professor, I guess, and his was nearest the door or something. I don't know. But Mother didn't work there then, but she worked in the Alumni Office then, as I recall. But what he did, he brought it out. By then, Mother was out there, and then they came home to where me and John had been asleep, and woke us up and took us out on the roof. From their bedroom, you could go on our porch roof. So John 8 and I were wrapped in blankets and sat out there to watch the law school burn. The flames by then were up to just one towering torch, and there was something wrong with the water supply or something, and they weren't getting much water on it. So we watched it burn. Then my father went back up there. But as my understanding is, he had done his brave mission and saved some stuff before he came home and got us up and said, "Now there's something to watch," and we watched. The Lexington Fire Department was there. If you grew up in that town, you even knew some of the firemen, which I did. I don't remember who they were. But it was an awesome thing, and we weren't sorry it was burning. At our house, we were fine. Then I will not forget that within three days there was a law faculty meeting in our living room where that faculty began planning for the new law school, which I thought was awesome, a place where a faculty would dare to presume to plan. I don't mean the architecture, I mean, "Let's be sure we each have such and such a kind of office, and we'll need a much bigger library, and we'll need--" and they went around, and each took responsibility for something. As it was built, my father was put--I mean, other people did more important things, I think, but he was put in charge of the furniture, what kind of desks, what kind of chairs. But that was members of the faculty putting together their--! think that was so awesome and admirable. But he found a man in Staunton. My wife will remember his name from when I used to tell this story or when my father used to tell it. The law school chairs are fairly famous. If you'll ask around there, you'll know that in the law school they have these chairs, designed, they're colonial, sort of, designed by a furniture maker in Staunton or thereabouts, Waynesboro. I'm not too sure. Warren: So you're talking about Tucker Hall now. 9 McDowell: I'm talking about what then went up at the end of the Colonnade and was the law school from the thirties to the seventies or whenever you built that one over in the woods. Warren: So how did everybody feel about the new building architecturally? McDowell: They loved it. It looked like the Colonnade. It was made to fit. The architect from Lynchburg, whatever his name is--someone will know. The most famous architect in Lynchburg was a colonial nut, and he designed a law school that absolutely fit into the ancient plan, and it looked great. Warren: That must have been such an event to see. McDowell: And it's still sitting there, of course. I don't know what's in it now, what goes on in there. I've forgotten. Warren: A lot of computer stuff is in there now. McDowell: It's nice. It's nice. I always thought it was wonderful, and my father had the first office on the left as you went in. Then my mother moved from the Alumni Office, neither of them feeling any conflict of interest, and became the secretary to the dean, who had the other front office. The dean had it; she was the second door. So if you went to see your parents, your father was on the left and your mother was second door on the right. She was given a lot of sort of authority by deans who preferred to teach, and she did a lot of the routine administration of the little stuff. She didn't make policy. But there they were, both sitting there. And I think it was somehow fairly typical of something that W&L was so good at. I never grew up thinking that women were held down or mistreated or treated arrogantly. I caught on as I got older, that they were, but not much at W&L, relatively, because there was my mother. As far as I could tell, she ran a law school. Miss Mary Barkley, as far as I could tell, ran an Alumni Office, which had Cy Young as its token leader, as I liked it. He was my favorite athletic coach anywhere in the United States ever, so I'm not putting him down. But women were running key 10 things all over W&L. When all the secretaries and librarians and everybody got together, you were looking at the core of the institution, I always thought. Even Dr. Gaines' secretaries, whose names I don't remember, were not just shrewd and dramatic, but knew they had power and didn't apologize for it, and helped run a college. I liked that. I didn't know that was going to be so different from how the rest of the world worked. Warren: That is a really important and interesting story. McDowell: That ought to be pursued. Warren: How can I pursue that? McDowell: I don't know. Warren: Are any of those people in that generation still alive? McDowell: No, but our librarian upstairs, I mean our law librarian, whatever she was, the Press Club librarian-- Warren: Barbara Vandegrift. McDowell: Barbara has surely heard my mother talk about it, if I'm not crazy and have imagined it. I imagine that those two worked together when Barbara was very young. I could have her easily mixed up with somebody else. I don't remember asking her. She and I have gotten to be friends up there, but I think she knew my mother. She might have heard more in those days. But somebody there that could talk about Miss Mary Barkley, that's an important one in the Alumni Office, and then she had the house two doors from the post office on whatever that little street is that-- Warren: Lee Avenue. McDowell: Yeah, it's Lee Avenue. Miss Mary lived in this grandest old house with her sister, a magnificent home, and she was, you know, with all the good old Virginia broad As and things. In fact, she was pretty much in charge of whatever 11 she was. I mean, these were fairly assertive women and they were given lots of responsibility by teachers. Warren: Who was giving them that responsibility? The faculty or Dr. Gaines? McDowell: Individual situations. I don't think women's rights or women's anything were probably ever discussed at W&L. I think when Cy Young, who was a basketball coach and an extraordinary coach of any of the main sports, wound up as alumni secretary and found this outspoken, forceful woman, he let her sort of take over. I think deans let my mother take over. I think it went on up and down that Colonnade, you know. Teachers like to teach. I mean, a lot of the thing that in business would be very prestigious to get to be in charge of whatever, making the schedules or whatever that is, I don't think a teacher thinks that's very interesting. I think teachers want to teach. So I'm not sure they meant to be as modern as they were being and saying, "Women can do this." I'll bet the women were paid a pittance to do it, I would bet, but the faculty wasn't paid much more. So I doubt if there was any big--1 mean, the pay was remarkably low, but it was a good life. Warren: And yet you were given a house. McDowell: You paid token rent. I don't know how much the rent was. I may have this all wrong, but I think that we rented that house for $60 a month, and it had five bedrooms. We rented out one or two of the upstairs rooms to students. Everybody did. Warren: If you rented out rooms to students, you kept that money, even though the University owned the house? McDowell: Yeah, damn right. Damn right. Yeah. I mean, they just set you up in the house and charged you a nice enough rent to be sure they took care of it and maintained it. A guy named Boss came and mowed the yard, a huge gasoline mower. Warren:· Who was Boss? 12 McDowell: Boss was a huge black man who ran the groundskeeping crew at W&L, and all us little kids got to know him. He was just one of the nicest people I've ever known, ever will know. I knew most of the others. But they'd rake the leaves in the leaf-raking time, and they mowed and they came and hammered nails if something went wrong in your house. And Boss was, I guess, head of them, because he was huge, among other things, an absolutely delightful man, good, kind man. You'd regard him as a very close friend. That was another good thing about it. W&L had lots of black people employed there, and it seemed to me there was a wonderful, gracious--I'll bet those black people were patronized royally, but I wasn't aware of it, and I know that if I had said, "I went up town with Boss and we bought some stuff and then we went out and sat on the wall by Miss Mary Barkley's and drank our Cokes," the family would have thought, "Well, why are you telling us about it? What else happened?" I mean, it would be perfectly normal to do that. Warren: It seems to me that in an institution of that size, there's just so many personalities that make it work. McDowell: Oh, my God, yes. Warren: And you were there long enough to be aware of that. So many students just move through for four years and they don't have any idea what makes the place tick. McDowell: I never thought of myself as a student there. I was a faculty kid, which is a very special thing to get to be, both parents involved, both parents, partly because they were Kentuckians, very full of the folklore of the place, really interested in Boss and Miss Mary Barkley and Annie Jo White, who founded Fancy Dress and really was sort of a caretaker of some part of the tradition at W&L about social things. You'd talk to her about how do you protect these little Mary Baldwin girls and Sweetbriar girls and Hollins girls and all that come over here for dances. I think 13 maybe Annie Jo coordinated some kind of way that you advise our all-male college about how to have rules, about chaperones. I don't know. But anyway, it worked. But you were very much a part of an institution and you knew it. My father was for a considerable period head of kind of the Professors Association. It's kind of union, and he was at cross-purposes with Dr. Gaines on many occasions for many reasons, but I still went up to the Gaineses' to play football on the side yard, and I was very close to Bobby and Edwin, who were my age area, and on rainy days we would set up in Traveller's stable and play checkers or funny games, roll dice and move men around. I don't know what all that was, but the fact that we were in Traveller's stable didn't strike us as very weird. [Laughter] But it was pretty weird. You know, you lived in the midst of great Confederate loyalties that Dr. Gaines kept pumped up. Warren: Was that a big deal? McDowell: Yeah. Warren: Tell me about that. McDowell: Well, someone ought to tell you better, because I came out of a prejudiced house. My father, a Kentuckian, was not a big fan of the Confederacy, nor my mother, out of Kentucky. So Dr. Gaines' ensoaring poetic speeches in tribute to General Lee, also after you've heard them from the time you were about two until you're twenty-two, you've heard a whole lot of Dr. Gaines' raving on and on and on about General Lee. The faculty used to sit on the stage for convocations, and you can imagine a convocation could be held in Lee Chapel, I don't know how they got the students in there, but later in the gym, but when it was held in Lee Chapel, the faculty would be seated on the stage. My father has showed me personally, and other professors have said, "Yes, that's how he did it," my father, when Dr. Gaines' speech started, my father would sneak out. He would go down the--there's a set of steps that spiral 14 from the back of that stage, and he would sit near that, and as Dr. Gaines would get his ovation as he walked to the rostrum to deliver his Lee message, my father would go down those steps and take off his hat and coat and fold them up and walk across Letcher Avenue and home, or over to the law school. I mean, he didn't feel he had to sit through that. What did you ask me to concentrate on, the Lee stuff? Warren: The idea, the Confederate spirit of the place. McDowell: There was a Lee spirit, and the faculty, I think, converted uncomfortable with too much Confederate. This is a pretty sophisticated faculty, and if you added up all the Yales and Harvards and such there, you weren't dealing with a bunch of square Confederates, you were dealing with some pretty learned people. They kind of converted it into a respect for Lee and his principles and his etc.. And Stonewall Jackson was colorful, and there was a lot of kind of Stonewall Jackson fans around, because he was such an old crank and interesting. They were part of your life. My parents, my father got to be so senior on the faculty that they moved from the Hancock House to the Dean's House, as it's called, next to the President's House. It's the Lee-Jackson House. So from the time that Ann and I got married, her first visits were to the Lee-Jackson House. Warren: That's pretty prestigious. McDowell: That's pretty nice. That's where I remember going home. Dr. Shannon was, of course, gone but Edgar Shannon was president of the University of Virginia at the time, and he'd grown up in that house. Warren: He did? He's one of the people I want to talk to. McDowell: Oh, boy, do you need to talk to Edgar! Whew! He's great, too, and he's marvelous. But he grew up in the power structure. If you'll go look at that house, there's a funny place where there's a window. It's on the side, the second floor, there's a·damn window. Dr. Shannon got up the nerve, as dean, to order a window 15 put in that house so his son would have a window in his room. Edgar had bitched about not having a window to look out of, so Edgar's window is there. Hedrick [phonetic] can tell you a whole lot of stories about the house and the marvels of it. One thing made me very proud of my father. Tourists would come literally knock on the door and say, "Is this the Lee-Jackson House?" and if my father was there, he would show them through it. Sometimes he'd be taking his afternoon nap and just have a bathrobe pulled around his pajamas. He would show them the house and explain to them that Lee lived in it more years than he lived in the Gaines House next door, and he would show them where Stonewall Jackson's room was that he rented in that house, for how long. My father gave a good, no-knocks- on-Lee tour to tourists. He thought that was a fair thing to do. He was honorable about that and spared them his feelings that Lee was pompous and Dr. Gaines was double pompous and all that. Leave all that out of this; it's off the record. [Laughter] Dr. Gaines was always marvelous to me, by the way. Warren: Tell me about Francis Pendleton Gaines. McDowell: He was striking, sort of handsome. He was short, always carried a cane. That's the main thing you remember. Any kid would say Dr. Gaines always carried a cane. When you went to the house to see the boys, as I often did, inside the main front door was, I guess, an umbrella tall receptacle, as I recall, made out of some dramatic copper or something, and in it maybe forty canes. He carried his canes. From his house to his office was--well, you know the walk. It goes around past McCormick statue, curves, gets under the Colonnade, goes. He made that walk in the morning and then home to lunch and back, then home, maybe down to the chapel if there was something. But he didn't use the cane; he spun the cane, he flipped the cane. He didn't twirl it like a baton, but he did all kind of--he threw it way up in the air with each stride and would catch it and sometimes turn it that way as it came down. Very dramatic. I thought he was awesome. 16 He was very congenial and very nice to all the little kids, would welcome you there, "Stay for lunch," and all that. That was done all over the campus, if you were somewhere, somebody would say, "Stay for lunch, Charley Boy." That was my name, Charley Boy. "Stay here and eat lunch." He was nice that way, and the faculty's complaints about him was that they weren't too sure how concerned with substance he was. They thought he was concerned with tradition and being gracious and all that, good qualities, but they weren't so sure he was trying to get their pay increased or get some more books into the library, stuff like that. But there were people who were, and they took the lead themselves. Warren: Who were those people? McDowell: Well, professors and people. There you could get professors fired up about a library, and the librarian was always a crucial person. You could make an argument that Gaines would then take to the Board, sort of as your messenger, that, "We need to really beef up our British 15th through 18th century stuff. It's weak and it's going to make us look bad in the next ratings," or something. Warren: Who was the librarian? McDowell: I can't remember. I'm just sitting here searching for librarians and trying to avoid it. Warren: This Annie Jo White was a librarian. McDowell: She must have been. Warren: I don't know which years. McDowell: I would say the earliest part. I would put her down, if that was right, then let's say she would have been the librarian in the twenties and thirties. Then there was a marvelous Middle Western kind of a guy, a little guy who came in and took over the library, and you could feel it go pow, pow, pow, start going. He started moving it. And he was a great friend of Larry Watkin's and my father's, ·and used to gather with the group that would gather and drink bourbon in 17 our living room. And a lot of them wrote books, too. Larry Watkin wrote books and my father wrote two. Larry wrote four, many Hollywood productions, and then Disney movies. But there would be "Hig" [John Higgins] Williams, Ollinger Crenshaw, who wrote the W&L history, and Hig Williams I don't think ever wrote any books, but he was a marvelous teacher in political science. And Dr. Desha would join them sometimes, and Monk Farentholt [phonetic], he had been to Oxford, I remember that. They were proud to have a Rhodes Scholar there. I'm not sure what the hell his subject even was, but he was a marvelous, funny man. He would be in our living room. Me and my brother John would get up out of bed and come sit on the landing of the stairs and listen to them talk. It would be like going to a Broadway play they were so funny, and they were all storytellers, and they would tell the most incredible tales, and laugh until the room shook. We had a student who lived there, a first baseman named Harry Fitzgerald, who was an outstanding, great W&L athlete, Harry Fitzgerald, maybe in the thirties, and sometimes they'd be so loud downstairs on Saturday nights and he'd get up, too, and come sit on the steps with us and listen to them talk. [Laughter] They were just marvelous, just incredible. I have to take time out. [Tape recorder turned off.] Certainly fun to do, and long winded. Warren: You just mentioned a name, a gentleman I feel like I'm walking in his footsteps, Ollie Crenshaw. McDowell: Oh, boy. Warren: Tell me about Ollie Crenshaw. I've never talked to anybody who really knew Ollie Crenshaw. Well, Frank knew Ollie Crenshaw, but I want to hear about him. 18 McDowell: His wife lived an awful long time. She was marvelous. He didn't get married until very late in his life. He got married very late in his life to a marvelous woman who'd been by herself around Lexington for a decade or two. In any case, he was very tall and very thin and very angular. I think he was a tennis player; I know he was a tennis player. He's always reminded me of Bill Tilden. If you saw a picture of Bill Tilden, you'd get a pretty good look at Crenshaw, since he got gray early. He spoke superbly well, spoke in whole sentences, like he writes, and was hilariously funny, told anecdotes. All these people, Watkin, Crenshaw, Hig Williams, Farentholt, my father especially, Charlie Light, and others, they would take over and entertain a room, and they would entertain for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes, and others would ask set-up questions. I mean, they knew what to ask and to get this response and move on to the next storyteller. They were marvelous, and Crenshaw was just very, very good at that. All I remember about him was how charming he was and how Marge, was his wife's name, how everyone liked her so very much, and how long it took him to write a book. The going joke was, "Well, our grandchildren will see a book and will read it, won't they, Ollie?" "Well, I hope I get it done." [Laughter] But that was just a one-joke thing. I don't know that he was particularly slow, but it seemed slow. I don't remember much more. He didn't have children--yeah, he did, too. Albert. Albert Crenshaw works at the New York Times in the business section, a major player there. That or the Wall Street Journal, and if he is at the Times, he came from the Wall Street Journal, but you can find him easy. He's immensely bright, and I think the sort of child born when his parents were 52. I don't know where. His father was older, because I missed him entirely. I mean, suddenly there was little Albert Crenshaw around after I was gone off to work. I mean, that's my 19 memory. My memory's weak. But the Alumni Office can find you. In your nice book there somewhere is Albert Crenshaw's address. He's well worth talking to about what it was like. He's really a super reporter and he will remember a lot, and it's one-half generation after me. Warren: A different time period. McDowell: And would really be able to pick up, it seems to me. We left Lexington, just for the record, we left Lexington during World War II when my father rejoined the Navy, and we moved from W&L in my--1 started my junior year in high school in Jacksonville, Florida, so we could count back to the year. If I was born in 1926, and if you couldn't start first grade 'til you were seven in Lexington, Virginia--that was a very famous problem in Lexington. You had to be seven instead of six because a nutty school principal thought that was how you ought to do it. We could figure out when it was I would have moved to Jacksonville, Florida. And just to be sure that everyone understands what a small world it is--and Lewis Powell and I talk about that at all times, "Got a new small world for you"--we moved to Jacksonville, and in the area where we lived, the high school was the Robert E. Lee High School, and the school song to which I played basketball was "The Washington and Lee Swing." [Laughter] Warren: It goes without saying it would be "The Washington and Lee Swing." [Laughter] McDowell: Yes, yes, it does go without saying. Warren: We need to turn the tape over.