ELIZABETH MUNGER February 21, 1996 — Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is February 21, 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with Elizabeth Munger. So let's just head right on into this. I want to know when you arrived in Lexington and why. Munger: Well, we arrived the fall of 1941 to practice medicine here. My husband, Bob, had been teaching at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans for two years, but it was perfectly obvious that I, a transplanted New Yorker, could not survive in—this was, of course, before the war when we were living in New Orleans, and there wasn't any air- conditioning in the whole city. It just didn't exist. It hadn't been invented, practically. I got down to ninety pounds, and it was obvious I would have to go home to New England in the summer for four or five months. So we got in the car and drove from New Orleans and looked at every town we came to, and we picked out Lexington, looking for an academic community, a place with hills for me, because the flatlands of New Orleans flattened me, too, as well as the heat. Then we also wanted a place where he could practice, and Dr. Reid White, who was the university doctor at the time, in 1941, when Bob was a student there, he had loaned Bob a copy of Dr. William Osler's Way of Life, and that had persuaded Bob to go 1 to medical school in the beginning. So we stopped here in Lexington to see Reid and to see the Cy Youngs, who were very close friends of Bob's mother, and we stayed. Reid said, at the time when we first came, that if war came, he was attached to the Pennsylvania Hospital Unit, and he would have to go, and he would see that Bob was hired by Washington and Lee as the university doctor, which he did. Bob, who had never even gotten an A.B. degree, he went to medical school after three years of college. In those days they did it once in a while. Warren: And the college that he went to was Washington and Lee? Munger: Yes, yes. If you go into the wrestling room there at the university, there's a picture of him. He was the Southern Conference wrestling champion. He won every single meet, match, whatever they are, by a fall, and then he went on. When he entered medical school at Tulane, he wrestled that first year in the Southern Amateur and won that. Somewhere we've got the medals that he got. But his picture, and his neck is wider than his head. [Laughter] Warren: I never knew that about him. Isn't that interesting. Munger: Yeah. And wrestling was the sport here. They just packed the gym. Bob's mother was a house mother for Sigma Ki House for, well, four years, I guess, three years, and she went to every lickin' wrestling meet, and I couldn't any more have gone to watch my son go through all those contortions in a matter of six minutes, turned them into absolute states of collapse, they worked so hard. There was a superb coach in those days who would be, I think, worth looking into, Archie Mathis, who was a very unusual and interesting man, and the commitment was total. There were days, sometimes two or three days ahead of a meet, where Bob would be allowed three eggs a day and that was all to eat, to get his weight where it had to be. And the crowds of students who went to it! It's like lacrosse now, lacrosse being the sport at Washington and Lee now. 2 Warren: What years did he attend Washington and Lee? Munger: From 1930 to '33, I guess, because he entered medical school the fall of 1933. Warren: And his mother was here when he was a student. Tell me about that. Munger: When Bob was at Choate School in Connecticut, his junior or senior year, 1928, I think it was, his father dropped dead. He was only forty-eight. And here was this kid all alone, two nights' travel from Dallas, Texas, and went home, seventeen years old, and his whole life was wrapped up in his father. They hunted and fished and did all the kind of western Texas things, and he was very close to his father. It was a very dramatic and traumatic experience for him at seventeen and riding two days and two nights all by himself home to Dallas for the funeral. So the following year, he entered Washington and Lee, where his brother already was as a Sigma Chi, Collett Munger, who was a great old boy, but academics really weren't his thing, took him five years, in the twenties, to go through Washington and Lee. [Laughter] As I say, he was a good old boy. And here were her two sons here, and her husband was dead, and her house was rented, so she came to live here, and she lived for the first year in the Robert E. Lee Hotel, and then after that she moved over to the Sigma Ki House. It was the loveliest apartment she fixed up on the right-hand side of the Sigma Ki. It was Prohibition, and in order to try to keep the boys from drinking, she would get expensive food from New York and feed them on Saturday nights and make them play games. I don't believe it was a success particularly, as Bob had the agency for Canadian Club Prohibition whiskey. [Laughter] Once a month, the man came down from Washington with the Canadian Club whiskey. And it's very interesting compared to the ruckus over marijuana, that here it was against the law, the liquor, and he was considered a benefactor to the whole college. He did very, very well on it. Warren: What do you mean, he had the agency? This was a formal arrangement? 3 Munger: I guess. I don't know. I don't believe any papers were signed, but the guy came. It was on his route, and he brought the supplies for the month. Warren: It was delivered to the fraternity house? Munger: Well, Bob lived in the building that is gone now, and it was a lovely building, next to the Episcopal church where the Sunday school building is now. He had a room there in Mrs. Beverly Tucker's house. I remember her. She came to call on me. We were living, when we first came to Lexington, in the little white house next to the Sigma Ki House, in the middle. That was the Mattingly home. In fact, Mr. [Earl Stansbury] Mattingly lived on one side, and two maiden lady nurses lived on the other, and we were in the middle. Mrs. Beverly Tucker came to call one day at eleven o'clock in the morning, and I was making a cake. She said, "Is Mrs. Munger in?" I said, "Oh, no, I'm so sorry, she's gone downtown." [Laughter] People called. People called. Warren: Tell me about that. What was Lexington like when you first arrived? Munger: We were in the spotlight right away, a new doctor coming to town with Washington and Lee connections. It was very simple. It wasn't until Pearl Harbor came along and Reid left, Reid White, that the university looked at us, and Bob was immediately made a full professor. He, without an A.B. degree, was a full professor. And they came to call. It was the darnedest thing. I guess I was three or four months pregnant and queasy, and they would come to call. They would leave three cards, two for the man and one for the woman. The man left his card for both husband and wife, but the woman, it wouldn't have been seemly if she had left one for the husband. And all the faculty, all the deans, I kept a list in Bob's study on the wall of all these people, because I had to return them. Of course, the first thing to do was to go and get cards printed, which I did. I've still got them. I would keep a list and cross them off as I did them, and I learned fairly soon that winter that the thing to do, since all of the 4 proper ladies in Lexington were making bandages on Tuesday afternoon, the thing to do was to go from house to house and leave your cards and come home and cross them off. [Laughter] White gloves, hats, always hats, always hats. And it was at that time that we made the oldest and closest friends that we made here, because they stayed the same for four years during the war. The population, they were wives, and there were about ninety students who were 4F or something like that, and so we got to know everybody that we met on the street. We knew who they were. I could be very sure that I was known right away as the doctor's wife. For thirty-eight years I was the doctor's wife. [Laughter] And doctors' wives didn't work; they did good works. Warren: That's a nice distinction. Munger: Yes, yes. Warren: What were good works? What were considered good works in Lexington? Munger: Margaret McCrum, Dr. McCrum's wife, took me to the Junior Women's Club. And what else? Oh, the cancer drive, that kind of thing. I remember being involved in the establishment of the United Way. It wasn't called the United Way, I don't think, at first. It changed names several times. It was the Junior Women's Club, which had been started in late 1930s, which went looking for a project, good works. This was unified good works kind of thing. There was a senior women's club. There were several women's clubs, as a matter of fact. Mrs. Adelaide Davies [phonetic], whose son-in-law is on the Board of Trustees, or was, she had a lot of connections with W&L, suggested to the Junior Women's Club—she was the senior women's advisor to the Junior Women's Club—suggested that they think about a bookshelf, lending library kind of thing, and one of the banks gave, I think—this was before I came in the late thirties—and everybody ransacked their attics and put books in. I think it was open one afternoon a week, something like 5 that. I'm not absolutely sure about that, and I'm not sure there are any documentations, although I've looked at a lot of that stuff in the library. Then they began to raise a little money, and "Tex" Tilson gave them a room up over McCrum's, where they could put the books. I don't know where they got the shelves, because when I saw it, it was a one room on a very creaky floor on the second floor of the McCrum building, and it was open afternoons. So the Junior Women's Club had the project which was raising money, $300 a year for the public. It wasn't even a public library then; it was the Junior Women's Club lending shelf, lending library, called something like that. I remember seeing some of the books that were still stamped with this kind of thing. But that's sort of off of Washington and Lee. Warren: But it gives a feeling of Lexington. Munger: Lexington, yeah. Warren: I would have to say that my sense of this place is that there's such a bond between the university and the town that it sometimes gets hard to make that distinction. What do you think? Munger: Certainly it's one of the two big economic contributors. One of the deans did a study, and I have a copy of that somewhere, of the economic contribution of Washington and Lee to the community. Town and gown is complicated. It always was, I'm sure, sometimes worse and sometimes not. The resentment of the academic—for instance, pressures which were very strong when the League of Women Voters took over a study of the school system, the pressures for getting the children of Ph.D.s into Harvard conflicted strongly with, say, the people who lived on North Main Street who wanted their kids to get better jobs, which made for also attention there, and also the amount of money that the town had to spend, and sometimes it was the town and sometimes it was the city, depending on how mad it was at the county. And they needed a bigger police force, a bigger fire force, than they would ordinarily have had, 6 than the town of Bedford has, for instance, because Washington and Lee was more at risk, put it at risk. So the town's budgets were big. And there was no question but what at a time when the League of Women Voters first began to study the town and the county, that Washington and Lee and VMI, it never appeared on any book. Now they support the town in lieu of all the taxes they don't get because so much of the land is taken up with tax-exempt stuff, including fraternity houses, I think. I don't know whether it's still that way or not, but it was. And we got them to say, yes, that we helped out, was the idea back when the League did its first study of the town of Lexington. I don't believe we were ever told how much it was, but we suspected, looking at the budget of the town and income and all, that we suspected that it was $20,000, I don't know, which would contribute to the police and so forth, because the town bought the equipment, even if it was a volunteer fire department. Warren: Let's get back to 1941. You mentioned that there were some students who stayed. What else happened at Washington and Lee? First of all, let's address that. The school continued to function as a university? Munger: Many, many of the faculty went away, of course, into service, but there were a lot of the older people who were here, older faculty whom Bob looked after and delivered, and also cared for people like Fitz [Fitzgerald] Flournoy, who got chicken pox in the middle of the war, and his mother, Mrs. Flournoy, absolutely—Mrs. Flournoy was a character. His temperature shot up. He taught English. He was the Shakespearean scholar. You had a feeling about Fitz that when he walked around Lexington, he was seeing Shakespearean England, and he was wonderful as a teacher of Shakespeare. It just roared in the pines, it seemed to me. I audited a couple of courses, I think, from him. The last thing Reid White had said was, "Watch out for Fitz Flournoy and pneumonia," the last thing he said to Bob before he left. There's a funny story about his 7 departure, too. Anyway, there he'd been sick, running a fever and all, but the fever had gone down and everything. Lo and behold, up goes the fever, and Bob rushes over there. They call up. Mrs. Flournoy's sitting on the top step with an apron over her head, screaming, so Bob goes and listens to his chest and then he tells him to lean forward so he can listen to the back, and he's covered with chicken pox. [Laughter] And Bob came home just absolutely convulsed. Warren: What age person are we talking about at this point? Munger: Oh, gosh, late fifties, something like that. Warren: Are you saying that his mother was there? Munger: Oh! Now, Mrs. Flournoy, Sr., is a case unto herself, really. F.F.V., dowager, big-bosomed, dominant, she, on her ninetieth birthday, the United Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to give her a birthday party, and she went down to the News Gazette and asked that they be careful not to put it in the paper that the UDC was going to give her, because they might take away her license. [Laughter] Warren: Her driver's license? Munger: Because she was ninety. [Laughter] Oh, she did once go up on the sidewalk and crash into the pay place at the movies. She was one of Lexington's characters. When I was invited in 1942 to be a member of the Ignorance Club, I thought this is going to be pure hell in Hockinson [phonetic], the cartoon, the lady in the New Yorker, who was always presiding at clubs. Oh, so funny. I went to laugh, and Mrs. Flournoy had the paper and it was on Erasmus, and I came home bowed over, I was so impressed with the quality of the papers that were given at the Ignorance Club, the [unclear] outside of Washington and Lee. Warren: That was quite an honor for you to be invited to be part of the Ignorance Club so early, wasn't it? Munger: I'd never heard of it when I got this letter, and I went across to Rachel Biere. We were living up on Morningside Heights at that point. I went across to ask her what 8 this was. Biere's Pharmacy, John and Rachel Biere. Then she said, "Oh, oh, that's egghead. You'll like it, Betty." [Laughter] Washington and Lee during the war. I don't know. Our contact was after Pearl Harbor. That fall I didn't know much about it, although we used—no, it was later we used to go swimming over there. Pearl Harbor. I was in bed with a threatened miscarriage, and Bob had made some cocoa and soup and brought it up, and we were reading out loud. I was reading out loud War and Peace. The next morning he went to the hospital and called up and said, "Hey, did you know we were at war?" And we were the only people in the United States who didn't know about Pearl Harbor, the afternoon in the symphony when it happened. Warren: How appropriate that you were reading War and Peace. [Laughter] Munger: That's right. We've always thought that was funny, interesting. Things changed very fast. All the people who were in the reserves were called up fast if they hadn't been already drafted. In fact, Bob had expected to be drafted, and we decided that the thing to do was to move to where we wanted to live and get me settled, and if he got called into the Medical Corps, why, I would stay put wherever it was, if I couldn't go with him. There were, for instance, Al [Allen Wesley] Moger, Ollie [Ollinger] Crenshaw, who wrote the history, Fran [George Francis] Drake was here, John Graham, who was one of the great men of Washington and Lee. There was a kind of nucleus that we saw all the time, and some of them were town people like Stewart Moore, Louise Moore's father, and mother, and the Barkley sisters, who lived in the house that the Tutwilers live in now. There was a whole row of old maids along there, with the Gadsden sisters on the corner, where the De_____ live now, and then there was the Barkley sisters, both of whom worked at Washington and Lee. One was alumni secretary, just one person, alumni secretary. And Cy—not Twombly, Young was the alumni secretary. And Mary 9 Barkley did a lot of the work. Then there were the Anderson sisters right behind where the rectory is now, two old maids. They danced too long. They partied, you see, year after year to the dances and all, until they didn't settle down, so they ended up old maids. Warren: What a charming way to say it. [Laughter] Munger: Yeah. They had a wonderful time. Mary Monroe and Marshall. Mary Monroe Penick is, certainly in my years here, the most important person in Lexington. Warren: I am very sorry I didn't get to interview her. Munger: Yes. Well, it was a long years before you would have—I mean, back before, because she was over in Roanoke most—oh, for six or eight years. Warren: But I do remember her. I met her. Munger: Good. Good. Warren: Back when I was doing the Miley exhibit. I had a very nice evening with her. Munger: Yes. She was quite a gal. She never married. Her sister Marshall married twice, fascinatingly each time. Marshall was the gal who—there wasn't anybody like her. She was just crazy, but marvelous. After she got ill with cancer, her name was Marshall Penick—well, first, gosh, I can't remember. Jimmy. It was Winfred Tyree's cousin, nephew, something. And I went by to see her often, and one day I got there. She loved chartreuse nightgowns, chiffon all over the place and chartreuse. She had two books, one on each side. She had cancer. One was called Healing Through Prayer and the other side was How to Win at the Races. And that is Marshall. That is Marshall. The Marshall stories are wonderful. Their father was treasurer of Washington and Lee. Warren: Paul Penick. Munger: Paul Penick, yes. Warren: Where was this street that all these ladies lived on? Which street was this? Munger: Lee Avenue. Warren: By the post office? 10 Munger: Yeah. Reid White's father sold the post office lot to send his kids through medical school, and Reid White grew up in that house behind where the Philbins live, the house behind the post office, and it had been all the way down to Lee Avenue with a walk and stuff. He sold it to the United States Post Office to get the money, country doctor that he was, to send two children—yeah, Preston and Reid—to medical school. Warren: You mentioned that it was a funny story when Reid White went off to the war. Tell me that. Munger: Oh, yes. The last day, which was New Year's Eve, and he was leaving the next morning to go to Philadelphia to join the unit, ended up sitting three years in New Guinea somewhere with a big hospital. They bypassed it. Anyway, he kissed all the nurses goodbye, and much hugging and kissing in sending him off to war, and a little bit later the phone rang and it was Tom Riegel, and told Reid that Jane was having pains, and Reid said, "Gosh, well, take a couple of aspirin and talk to me in the morning," and he hung up. [Laughter] He called back and said, "Oh, my God, get her over to the hospital," so he unkissed all the nurses and delivered Dean Riegel, and then went off to war in the morning. And we always thought that was—Reid, the war did him in. He came back really rough, and died in 1950 of cancer of the lungs. Warren: I remember your telling me stories about what Lexington and Washington and Lee were like during the war, and the people who came here. Munger: Oh, yes. Special Service School. Warren: When did that start and what happened? Munger: I don't know dates. Probably within a year after Pearl Harbor. It was an ideal from the Army's point of view and certainly from Lexington's point of view. We just fell on our feet. It was unbelievable, the life we led during the war. Some of the most brilliant performers in the musical world, in the theater world, were sent here. They were only officers, and about fifteen hundred a month came in, and they'd stay a month and get trained on how to entertain the troops, a hundred games to play on shipboard, 11 that kind of thing. And also information and education—why were we fighting, that kind of thing, was taught to them. And the faculty was brilliant. Warren: Who were the faculty? Were they Washington and Lee faculty or people brought in from elsewhere? Munger: People brought in. Warren: What kind of people? Munger: Musicians. B____ Rubenstein, who was conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, I think it was the Cleveland, anyway, somewhere out there in Ohio. Eugene Liszt, Gene was here for two years, a year and a half. I know he had Christmas dinner with us two years, and everything was rationed, of course, and I found a duck, so we had a duck one year. He was a private, a private first class, I guess, and they sent him to Europe after he'd been here teaching how to entertain the troops. He went; he was called over, and he went from camp to camp with an upright piano. One day he sat on the terrace here and told us about it later on. It made quite a lot of attention. His officers said, "Have you got a clean uniform?" And Gene allowed as how he did, I guess, and they gave him a ticket on the train and told him to get on the train that day and that at the end to get off and that he would be picked up, and he was to play for a group of men. So off he goes, and when he gets there, it's Potsdam, and he played for Truman, Stalin, and Atlee for two or three days while they conferred. It was at Stalin's request that they have somebody playing. Truman asked for "The Missouri Waltz," and Gene said, "I never dug as hard for anything in my life as that." [Laughter] And they kept the door open, halfway open into the room where they were conferring, and he said he could hear the rumble of their voices and the translators and things while he played. We kept in touch with him. We'd see him when we'd go to New York, and later on he came and gave a concert for free at the Concert Theater Series, which was kind of nice. 12 Then there was—gad, now it gets complicated, because I can't remember. George Sander, Maurice Evans, Melvin Douglas, all these people. Our house, before we bought it, on East Washington Street, a woman there rented out rooms, and one of the rooms was to Gladys Swartout [phonetic] while her husband was here during that month before he was going overseas. Every month they put on a show, because that was part of their training, and so we had these marvelous performances, ballet. There were dancers. Oh, I'll have to ask Jen Drake what the name of that guy was. For instance, George Sander and Gene, here they were, privates, not even officers, they were teaching here, and if we'd get a bottle of rum, even, we'd have a party, and they would be there. I can hear Sander saying to Gene, "Well, this is the way I do the theme by Couperin," and they'd swap back and forth on the Drakes' beautiful Steinway. You just felt like you were in seventh heaven. This was unbelievable, the people that we got to know, whom we wouldn't have ever seen otherwise. Warren: Tell me, physically, how did they use the campus of Washington and Lee? Munger: As classrooms, and they were in the dorms. I was trying to think what the fraternity houses were used for. I remember one woman came here with her husband, and their home was in Greenwich, Connecticut, I think, she had five kids and she rented a fraternity house, one of the fraternity houses on East Washington Street, and my kids were the same age as some of hers, so the governess would bring them up and they'd play up on Morningside Heights where we lived then. There were officers, of course, all over the place, and there were black officers, which was interesting, and there was a rumor, at least I never heard it directly, but there was a rumor that the VMI cadets—VMI, of course, was full. If you were going to VMI, you were exempt. Then you became an officer and went to war. They had been ordered to salute every officer, and they objected to saluting the black officers. General Kilburn handled that beautifully. He just issued an order that of course it was understood that you saluted the rank and not the person. So he got around that one. It 13 was very interesting to see General Kilburn going down the street, saluting, saluting, saluting, because there were so many of them. [Laughter] It was just as well maintained during the war. Warren: The campus. Munger: The campus. There weren't any tourists, of course, because nobody had any gas. You got a certain amount of ration points for meats and then there was another ration book—I've still got them—for the canned goods. Those were the two things. And this was difficult for us, because patients paid with produce a great deal, and they would pay with a ham, what we called a "baby ham," because it was usually done in payment for a delivery. But the ham weighed forty pounds. We went to the ration board and asked if we could take them, because it helped the people pay their bills, without any ration points, and they said no. And a lot of people resented the fact that we wouldn't take them because it was on the black market, of course, if you did that. What else happened during the war? It was a very busy little hive where we all talked to each other for four years. Warren: I need to turn the tape over.