WARD BRIGGS July 1, 1996 Mame Warren, Interviewer · Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the 1st of July 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with Ward Briggs. You are class of 1967. I did a little homework on you, not too much. I went and looked at the Calyx and saw that you're from Delaware. You're the first person I've talked to from Delaware. What brought a Delaware boy to Washington and Lee? What was the attraction? Briggs: I had gone to a camp. We had long had Southern sympathies. Although Delaware was a border state, our sympathies were Southern. As a boy, I had packed off to a place called Camp Greenbriar in Alderson, West Virginia, and it was basically populated by people from Washington, Norfolk, and Richmond. It had originally been a kind of athletic camp, athletes they were trying to recruit to the University of Virginia, and it was basically people from St. Alban's and St. Christopher's and Norfolk Academy. It was run by someone from Norfolk Academy. There were people who were going to UVA and people who were going to VMI and people who were going to W&L, and that was it. It was not Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, as far as I was concerned. It was those three, and all my friends were choosing between those. We stopped to visit them two years in a row on my way back from camp. We parked on Washington Street and walked. We said, "Well, here's a sidewalk. Let's see where it goes." The moment we turned that curve and we saw the colonnade, I 1 remember we all just said it's the most beautiful sight we'd ever seen. It was more beautiful than Charlottesville, as far as I was concerned. I came back for the first time since graduation about '85 or '86, something like that, almost twenty years afterwards, and the same thing happened. I walked up that walk and I saw it again, and you're just absolutely struck by it. It's such a beautiful sight. So that's what I wanted to do. I had a couple of friends from Wilmington who actually came down. There was actually a reasonable Wilmington contingent here. So down I came. It was the only place I wanted to go. I'd applied to other places and got in other places, but this is where I wanted to go, and there was a fraternity I wanted to be in. When I graduated from high school, my godfather gave me a little key chain with a sort of slab of silver on it for my name and address, and he said, "We'll put down Washington and Lee." I said, "Put down Phi Kappa Psi, Washington and Lee, because that's the fraternity I want to get in, and I'll get in or else." And I got in. Warren: How did you know which fraternity? Briggs: That's where a friend of mine from school, who was two years older than me, had gotten into, was at Phi Psi, and he showed me pictures and we went by the house. It's not what it is now. It was a mirror image of the SAE house. It was just· this beautiful white sort of wedding cake house, completely rotten on the inside, but it looked the part. It was on this big hill. And all the brothers were just very attractive in all ways. I mean, they were great. I think I just profited enormously from the fraternity system. I was an only child and had sort of Victorian parents, so I always sort of was at sea about what to do and being sort of serious about life, and all of a sudden I had thirty-five older brothers who very carefully sort of took care of you. I mean, they told you when you were doing something stupid. They told you when you were dressing badly or when you said something that was uncool or something like that. I personally 2 needed that greatly, and I think a lot of other people, to varying degrees, needed that, as well. For me, one result of the fraternity system is that I have just-I can say I have never met a socially inept Washington and Lee person. They may not be setting the world on fire intellectually or anything, but they know how to behave, and they're decent, honest people. I never knew anybody here who you just knew was dishonest or would cheat you or anything. There was just something about this place, that was reinforced at the fraternity level. There's plenty sort of debauchery, too, but what was that which was supposed to be instilled really was carefully instilled, and it's integrity and it's just this wonderful sense of honor. So I was very fond, and I remain very grateful, to the fraternity system as it was then. It certainly had faults, but I liked it very much. Warren: Have you remained friends with your fraternity brothers out in real life? Briggs: It's funny, actually, no, I don't see them, and I'd love to. I love them all, and I wonder really what happened to them, how they're doing, particularly the ones older than me that I just idolized. I don't know, I don't see that many people from Washington and Lee. Partly that may be the problem with one of its virtues, which was geographical distribution. We were always told that W&L had the greatest per capita distribution of any school, and it certainly was true. I mean, people from Montana, South Dakota, all over come here. So the result is that I don't see them very much. Most of my fraternity brothers were confined to Short Hills, New Jersey, and that sort of area. But now at least half of them are retired and have been so for a number of years, working their way up from the top of daddy's brokerage agency or real estate concern. So now they're even more scattered in places like Aspen and Montrose and places like that, so it would be even harder to get them together. Warren: Yeah, a lot of people have a leg up before they even get here. Briggs: That's certainly true. 3 Warren: You made an allusion to that the fraternity brothers gave you advice on how to dress. Now, you were here during the time period where-one other person has told me about that I'd like to hear more about-you were here at the beginnings of questioning the concept of conventional dress. Do you remember anybody challenging conventional dress when you were here? Briggs: The only challenge I remember was one transfer student, somebody who came in, I think, came in maybe a sophomore, his sophomore, junior, who had an earring. He claimed that he'd been in the merchant marine or something and had crossed the Equator and was allowed to have an earring. But this made him sort of an instant outcast. The dam seems to have burst. I think mine was the last freshman class to wear beanies, I'm not sure, and I know we never wore blue jeans. But I think the dam really burst when I left, in '68 and '69. I don't hold myself responsible for the dam bursting, but I think that that's probably when. So I think I really sort of missed that. Fancy Dress was a big deal when I came, but I don't ever recall going to Fancy Dress. I think that was sort of morbid. One of my fraternity brothers had been president of Fancy Dress my freshman year, but I didn't go to that. I didn't go that year, and I cannot remember going to a Fancy Dress. Our speaker, who went to UVA, just admitted that he went to more Fancy Dress balls than I did. His last one was in '62, though. I think we all pretty ungrudgingly wore coats and ties to class. I thought that was okay, and I bought into it. I mean, I really believed that if you took the class seriously enough to dress up for it, you would take it seriously enough to prepare for it. It meant that serious business was going on. For some of these teachers, I wouldn't dream, I wouldn't dream of going to Dr. Leyburn's class without a tie. It 4 was beyond belief. Dr. Jenks, you know, all these people. Harry Pemberton's class I would go to in a T-shirt, maybe, but not-just because it was more relaxed. Warren: Let's talk about those faculty people. Who was important to you and why? Briggs: It's funny, because we're here this week talking about General Lee, and there really are a great number of parallels between, I think, General Lee and Dr. Leyburn, in the sense that Leyburn really, he was distant and unknowable, yet he was accessible to everyone, took the greatest care with every student. If you missed his class too often, you would get a card. He wouldn't call you, but you would get a card in the mail, a postcard, "I notice you have missed my classes. I trust you're not ill. Remember we have an absence policy," things like that. He was a very interesting lecturer, I thought, and he was, especially now, having been in academic myself for a while, amazing in his ability to return tests. He would return every paper the next class meeting, very carefully marked, every paper. And when the exams were done, if we had an exam in the morning and the exam would get out at noon, he would say, "Gentlemen, your grades will be up at three-thirty or four or something like this." He would take all these exams and go in and grade them, and our grades and exam grades and or final grade would be tallied, and it would be posted on a board, on a kind of bulletin board on a little stand, and it would be brought out to the front of the library where his office was, and we'd all go out to see what our grades were. It was just phenomenal. Warren: In less than twenty-four hours? Briggs: In less than six hours. I mean, he would do this. It meant that he was looking for certain things. It meant that he was looking for certain answers. These were all essay questions, of course. That would be miraculous enough with multiple choice, but these were all essay questions. But there was no doubt, when we looked at the exams, we looked at what he'd given us, he very carefully, very carefully marked these. 5 On papers, he would not only mark errors of fact, but he was particularly good on infelicities of style, or usage particularly, and all he had to do was just mark something in the margin and you never forgot it. I said, "I have always been intrigued by Schiller's response to this," meaning interested in, and he would say, "An intrigue is a mystery. You mean interested in." Bingo. I said, "This is a masterful treatment of the Trojan War," and he'd say, "Masterful means tyrannical. You mean masterly," thinks like that. I didn't try to make these errors, but I loved getting these precise comments back from him. I've never forgotten one that he did. Again, from my academic perspective, all he had to do was say that to me once, point that out once to me or other people, and you never forgot it. I mean, you didn't. Now I grade papers, and I say these same things. I have a system where essentially students write basically the same paper three times in a class, just adding to it, and I'll correct the same error three times and still get it back to them. I think its importance, it was just the aura that he had, and I think that aura really gave the place its Zeitgeist. I think he really was the equivalent of General Lee here in that he was really what the university was about. He was the one faculty member, I think, who really came up to the dignity of the place. I just remember that distant affection that we all had for him. He was always tremendously interested, and he was enormously sentimental about things. In my senior year, I was taking a class on the Roman poet, Horace, and so I just decided I was going to translate the first book of Horace's, Odes, in their original meter, very complicated and a not very friendly English. I did it, and I had the person who did cartoons for the paper, named Gary Apgar, draw up some drawings in watercolor. I mean, he did them with pen and ink and then filled them in with watercolor, the first, I don't know, four or five of the poems or something like this. When I graduated, I went down and gave it to him in his office, and he started to weep. He just started crying. He was just so grateful for them. I mean, 6 they weren't any good. They were awful, sort of embarrassing. But he was just absolutely so touched. It was the only I could do to give him back anything like what I felt he'd given me. And yet that sentimentality led some people to sort of question whether or not he was really performing rather than genuinely experiencing these feelings. In my time, there were two famous lectures, and I heard one of them three times, in his ancient history class. At parents weekend, he would do a lecture called, "Arete, the Pursuit of Excellence." He would start, obviously, with the Garden of Eden the beginning of the semester, and so by October or so he was just starting fifth century Athens, which is where he really felt at home. Of course, parents would come to this. He'd start talking about Athens, and it was this beautiful society on a hill and kind of on a foothill in the middle of Attica, and he said, "And it was full of just beautiful highly intelligent, aristocratic, athletic, golden youths who contended with each other in the arts and games, athletic contests, and literature, philosophy, constantly striving to achieve excellence in each and every area of interest, as opposed to this sort of barren, joyless militaristic society over the hill in Sparta. Whose services were necessary to, certainly necessary to keep off the Persians and people like that, but basically not a society that you could be as proud of as you could this fabulous, fabulous fifth century Athens." Well, it was very clear, and I don't have the skill to do it, but it was very clear he was talking about Athens and Sparta, but he was really talking about W&L and VMI. It was a bravura performance when I saw it, and the parents just went ape. I mean, the parents couldn't write their checks fast enough. It was really the only lecture I knew that was attended by the University treasurer. Every time it was given, Mattingly was outside the door. The thing I remember, because he was a distinctive-looking guy, he was outside the door, and the parents were there just 7 handing him the money. They were just so, not literally, but they were just so thrilled. This is what it's supposed to be. I know my parents liked it. That was parents weekend. And then at Thanksgiving, we'd be at the end of the 5th century, and this would be the day we were to leave. It was the day Thanksgiving vacation started. I think it was probably a Wednesday. Maybe a Tuesday, I can't remember. Probably Wednesday. It was at ten or so in the morning, something like that. And nobody ever thought of cutting their class. There was just no possible way. Now our Thanksgiving vacation starts on Tuesday, and students the previous Friday are wishing me a happy holiday, so they're taking off. But none of us did that. It was the end of the 5th century, which was the death of Socrates in 399, when he was convicted. He would start talking about how Athens existed to produce someone like Socrates, and yet it was Athens that killed Socrates, and in killing Socrates, essentially killed itself, etc., etc. He went on to the historical and sort of cultural justifications of it. Then he opened up the Phaedo, the dialogue that describes his last days, and he would read. The last half of the class or so would be him reading the death of Socrates. At the same moment every time, he'd say, "He'd drink the hemlock," and would pause, and then he would feel his legs, Socrates would feel his legs going under, and Socrates would be talking to his disciples, and Leyburn would pull out a handkerchief and dab his eyes. Then gradually all the Socratic systems were sort of shutting down. He dabs himself again. And then finally he says his last words, "Remember, I owe a cock to Asclepias." So off would come the glasses, and he would dab and his voice would break, "So ended the noblest life of Western civilization," or something like that. Then what really killed you was, he always ended exactly on the buzzer. You know, the bell would then instantly ring, and he just brought the house down. You 8 applauded. You applauded his conviction and his love of it. I now know, as a classicist, there was a lot about what he said that was bogus, but you had to applaud how much it meant to him, and that's what we were all after. It was a wonderful experience to be in his classes. He had a course in comparative literature, which was just Greek and Latin in translation, classics in translation, which they were just beautifully polished lectures and ranging lots of different aspects of classical literature. But then your paper in there was the influence of classics on anybody you wanted, anybody you were interested in. It could be the influence of the classics on Milton, the influence of the classics on Freud, the influence of the classics on James Joyce, the influence of the classics on Karl Marx, anybody you were studying, because he knew he got people of various different majors. And he'd grade them all. The way he was able to do that was by, again, bringing certain expectations. Do you talk about the person's education? Do you cite his reading? Do you mention where he cites these authors in his book? He was just sort of looking for that. It's not that he had huge knowledge of all these people, but nonetheless he could intelligently grade all those papers and say something meaningful about it. It made him very admirable. The lectures were also sort of moral instruction, behavioral instruction. He was describing one time modes of humor. I remember him saying in classes, "Bodily noises seldom divert me." That was a period when bodily noises diverted all of us. We thought there was nothing funnier in this world. He just sort of said that, and, boy, we are not amused, you know. We all took that to heart. Suddenly it wasn't that funny anymore. He was a wonderful person. I think he was one of those all-time educators who got into the profession to have an effect on people's lives, and it is almost impossible for educators now to do so. It's impossible to challenge students on their 9 sort of deepest convictions, largely because many of them don't have them, and if you do challenge them, they sort of occur to talk about private property, it's none of our business, get on with it, you're harassing me because of my political, religious, whatever views. I don't know if there could be a Dr. Leyburn these days. Warren: Did he influence your choice of careers or did you already know what you wanted to do? Briggs: He influenced me to be a professor. I just thought, I mean, that was the noblest guy I've ever seen, and I said, "This is a decent model." My father was a physician, and I thought he was a terrific role model. But they had me tested, and I didn't have the aptitude for the medical career, because they determined early on that I used to get nauseous at the sight of money, so I was not suited. Also, I couldn't do chemistry and math, so I was hopeless as a doctor. But I thought, "If you could be like Leyburn, it wouldn't be bad. It wouldn't be a bad life." And he sort of convinced me that there was inherent value in this life, and I did it. He was strictly an amateur of the classics, but he brought the classics into it. I took his sociology courses, I took his religion in society courses. I remember he shocked us once because he was talking about a tribe in-well, the Latin word for character is the plural of a singular word, mores. He knew it was a plural word, but it had a singular meaning. I remember one day he said-and he's talking about applying this to a tribe in New Guinea, and he said, "The Maoris' mores is something, something." He said "the Maoris' mores is." And he said, "And so the hoi polloi would say," because he knew hoi was the definite article and stuff like this. If you were paying attention and you wanted to pay attention, if you paid attention, you could get a lot out of him. He was basically an amateur of the classical world. Also, he was one of the few faculty members who produced two really exceptional books, really, really first-rate books, one on the Haitian people. I don't 10 know how he got interested in it, but really a good book that he did at Yale. And then the Scotch-Irish. I think everybody who lives in Virginia ought to read the Scotch-Irish. It's the history of the indigenous peoples over here. He had that terrific scholarly background that a lot of people didn't have, too. Like Lee, I think he was bold and audacious, also, where he didn't have to be. As dean, he could have taken a defensive strategy and just operated on a problem-solving basis. But he came and tried to radically change the school. He tried to do away with intercollegiate athletics and the grading system, and he even wanted the students to wear uniforms. This is curiously enough what Tom Wolfe remembers about Leyburn, that he wanted everybody to wear uniforms and so forth. I think he was, some people might say aggressive, maybe pro-active on this, but he really did try to make changes. He was ultimately stymied from doing it, but he really did that. This has only just occurred to me this afternoon, but I think you could really make a lot of parallels between Leyburn and Lee if you wanted to. Warren: Was he still dean when you were here? Briggs: No, he wasn't, no. I came in '63, and I think he left-he didn't last long as dean, as I recall. Warren: That's what I thought. Briggs: He went out in the fifties, early fifties, I think. But he stayed, and I think he could have-I mean, he had family connections here, but he could have gone on, it seems to me, could have gone on other places. Warren: Well, Rob was right, you do wax poetic. Leyburn, that was a magnificent performance. Briggs: Oh, no, no. Of course, the other great, great influence I hope will be treated very carefully is my coach, Joe Lyles, who contributed greatly to the tone of the place and also to the legend of the place almost as much as Leyburn did in my era. Warren: I don't even know this name. 11 Briggs: Well, Joe Lyles played two professional sports. I think he was a pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, major league baseball, an he played basketball in that golden era of the early fifties, maybe late forties, I can't remember. But he was injured in both sports, but he did play. When I came, he coached varsity soccer, JV basketball, and varsity baseball. In addition, he refereed and he ran PE and he played handball without gloves. I think he singlehandedly made handball the most popular sport on campus. Everybody played handball, but not everybody could play without gloves. As a result, he has trouble turning doorknobs and things now. You'd always see him and his hands would always be sort of vaguely purple from all the hematoma from playing. I loved him enormously. I played soccer for four years and baseball for two, maybe one. I remember we were playing Miami of Ohio in baseball, and Joe, for his own reasons that I still do not understand, used to call me Walt. He knew my name very well. He would write Ward on things, but he called me Walt. He said, "Walt, do you see that pitcher out there from Miami of Ohio?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "He's going to be good. He's going to be really good. You'll be glad to know you played against him some day." I said, "Well, who is he?" It was Mike Schmidt, all-star third baseman of the Phillies, greatest third baseman that ever lived. But as I recall, he was pitching that day. But my fondest memories were playing soccer with him. I thought of it this morning, because Norm Lord got us all lined up during our little walk this morning at 6:45, and Norm said something that Joe Lyles had said to us that first day on soccer. He lined us all up and he said, "Now, count off by ones."' We sort of looked at him. I remember we looked at Joe, and he said, "Count off by ones." 12 We all went, "One, one, one, one, one," down the line, and he got mad and we all had to run laps. Joe said things that were tremendously profound of a Yogi Berra quality. True, there are a lot of bogus Lylesisms going around, but there a lot of true ones, and the way you tell, they have their own distinct quality. We went up to play the NCA championship in soccer in '65, I think. I think it was November of '65. We left with the university cars, and we had no gas in them. It was Sunday night, a rainy Sunday night, and went out and not only did we have to find a gas station on Sunday night, but we had to find one with a university credit card, which was something like Spud gas or something appalling. So anyway, it turned out to be a guy's house, and here we came in two cars, two station wagons, maybe three. We hit this guy's house. It was rainy, and he comes out and he's got this slicker on. We honk the horn, and he comes out. I roll down the window. I was driving, and Joe was in the passenger seat. The guy says, "Fill it up?" I said, "Of course." Joe said, "No, no, no, don't fill it up. We want 14 3/4 gallons in the tank." The guy looked at him, "Okay." I said, "Coach, why 14 3/4 gallons? Just tell him to fill it up." He said, "Oh, we can't fill up the tank, Walt. There's still some gas left in it." I thought about this for a while, and took it back to Harry when we got back. And then the next morning we were driving, and the most famous Lylesism of all, I think, I was driving and we were coming up, and Joe had the map. We were going up. I said, "Coach, the road forks up ahead here." He said, "I know." I said, "Well, you have the map. What do I do?" He said, "Walt, you see that fork in the road?" 13 I said, "I do." He said, "Take it." I finally just turned, and somehow we got up to Medford. So I took these back to Harry Pemberton and I said, "Harry, this guy's nuts, saying these things." Harry found deep meaning. He found most of the essence of Western philosophy in the kinds of things Joe was saying. This was the existential choice. This is pure Camus, pure Sartre. You are going down the path of life and the road forks, and nobody tells you what to do. You take it. You go your way, and that's it. Then you can never purge yourself completely of experience, you know. You can never fill up the tank, because there's always a little bit left in it, and all this kind of stuff. It was wonderful. I can't remember all of them, but I remember an absolutely extraordinary day, which would probably be of no value to you, but an extraordinary thing. It was two days. I was in the student union. I was having a milkshake or something. My Greek teacher, Mario Pellicciaro, came in. Mario I think was always too busy doing a hundred other things ever to finish his dissertation, which he never did. But he taught us Greek, and two of us went on to become classics professors and published and, you know, we did our thing. But he had a unique way of teaching Greek. But he was always interested in all these other things. So Mario comes in. I said, "Mario, what are you up to?" He said, ''I'm busy. I've got so much to do. I'm going to this opera over in Lynchburg. I've got to write a review of that for the paper. I'm working on this book. I'm working my way through Dante with some people here. I'm trying to write a commentary on this. Meanwhile, I've got this article I got to go, and Washington's calling. I've got to do all. this." 14 I said, "Mario, I don't understand. Why do you work so hard? Why do all this stuff? This is supposed to be a calm, reflective life. Why are you working so hard?" He said, "I'll tell you something, Ward. You got to keep working. You got to keep rolling the rock up the hill, keep rolling the rock up the hill, because if you don't, all you got is the wisdom of Silenus, which is that it was better if man was never born, so keep rolling the rock up the hill. Wow. I mean, I was inspired. The next day, I swear to you, the next day I'm back in the student union, which is nothing unusual in itself. Joe Lyles comes in. I said, "Joe, what are you doing? What's up?" He said, "Well, I just finished playing a tennis tournament. I had two PE classes this morning. We've got baseball practice starting in the gym this afternoon. Then I've got to play a handball tournament. Then I'm refereeing a basketball game over in Stauntor1.. In the morning, I've got to get ready for this." I said, "Joe, you're the second guy I've talked to in two days that's working like a maniac. Why do you work so hard? Why do you do this? Why run yourself ragged this way?" He said, "Walt, you got to keep supplying oxygen to the blood. You've got to put oxygen to the blood. Otherwise, all you've got is lactic acid." I swear that happened. I swear that happened. It was just magic. Joe's right there. Believ~ me, I worry about lactic acid a lot more than I worry about the wisdom of Silenus. That was a wonderful experience and typical about how there was wisdom everywhere on this campus. Everybody, Bob Murray had wisdom for you, everybody. Everybody had something to teach you. Warren: This is Murph? Briggs: Murph, the campus cop, yeah. 15 Warren: Tell me about Murph. Briggs: Murph was magical, because he had just a seventh sense, a sixth sense or a seventh sense about where trouble was going to be. At a fraternity, you'd have problems. All of a sudden you'd say, "Okay, the parking lot. Let's go." You go out to the parking lot, and all of a sudden Murph would just sort of show up. And problems with townies sometimes. You'd square off against townies somewhere where you shouldn't be or they shouldn't be, either one, and then Murph was suddenly there, his presence. He was like a mafia enforcer in that he was kind of a parapoliceman, paramilitary. He wasn't really the police, but if you had any problems, he was just magically there, like this sort of fairy godfather, and he always forestalled any kind of violence or trouble, because no one dared challenge Murph. I mean, it was out of the question. I mean, grown men. There were some people who prided themselves on campus as being tough. I knew one maniac who used to go over to UVA and just challenge guys, whole fraternity houses to fight, and he wouldn't touch Murph. He wasn't going to have a problem with Murph. But then, if you did get into trouble, if you broke a window downtown or got caught for drunk driving or something like that, Murph got you out. Today you'd go to jail and you'd lose your license and you'd be in trouble, but Murph just got you-he just said, "These are W&L boys, and I'll take care of it from here." Then if Murph told you not to do it again, then you just didn't do it again, that was all. Warren: I need to turn the tape over.