Munger interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Munger: ... all the gas he could use, but we never took the car out Rockbridge County for four years. We never went anywhere by car, except once every six months we would go to the Roanoke Hotel for dinner, six people, we would go, and you'd think we were going to Europe. We would discuss what we were going to wear by the hour. [Laughter] And those champagne cocktails in that beautiful dining room at the Roanoke Hotel, it was the event that got us through for the next six months. Oh, we did go to New York once a year. We went on the train from Buena Vista, sitting up all night, because if you did that, you were only allowed five days in a hotel in New York, and so if you went one night on the train going and one night sitting up coming back, you could get one more day in there. We wrote for theater tickets and we 14 went every single night, to say nothing of a couple of matinees, and roamed New York in a way that it just seems unbelievable that we could do this. There were special places. We always stayed at the same hotel, the Seymour Hotel, where the Saturday Review of Literature met every Monday luncheon for their editorial luncheon, and we'd look in and try to pick out which one was which. It was next door to the Algonquin, and so we would go in there and watch the Algonquin Roundtable. Warren: Oh, that must have been special. Munger: It was kind of fun. Warren: I've picked up tidbits here and there, but I don't know, I haven't done enough research to really know, I've heard something about that there were some women who went through Washington and Lee during World War II. Munger: Yes. Warren: Tell me about that. Munger: In fact, one of them is still here, Alta Fowler. Warren: Oh, really? Munger: Yeah. They had summer school and they took women during the summer school. Warren: Were they on a degree program? Munger: I think so, but after the first year, the board of trustees voted never to do that again. [Laughter] I wonder if W_____ White is still alive. Alta would know about that. She's an alumnus before there were any women admitted. She would tell how many there were. There were only four or five, and there were certain courses. Somewhere along the line, the United Stated Army decided that they were not going to make the mistake which Britain had made in World War I by sending the cream of its youth to war, you know, in the "Guns of August." The loss was—and England, I don't think has ever recovered completely from it. So the very smart boys 15 were sent to college instead, which there were nine hundred of them, ASTP kids, and they came to Washington and Lee and took courses. Warren: What did ASTP stand for, do you know? Munger: Army Student something. I don't know. I don't think I ever heard. Warren: So nine hundred of these people came to Washington and Lee at one time? Munger: Yeah, to go to college. They sent them to college instead of to war. Warren: So along with the Special Services Program, there was a regular college program going on at the same time? Munger: Uh-huh. Warren: I didn't understand that. Munger: Well, they were draftees. They didn't apply to Washington and Lee. The Army sent them here. Warren: Would they have been wearing uniforms, attending class? Munger: Yes. Warren: So your image of Lexington, it was full of uniforms. Munger: We didn't see very much of them. They were kept pretty well shut up somewhere. I don't remember them. Bob saw them, because he was the doctor for them, and he had to set up a whole pharmacy because the Army, of course, bought and sold its own drugs, and so down in that funny little office building he had a whole pharmacy. Warren: Which funny little office building? Munger: It's near where Frank's office—where is Frank's office now? Warren: Where the "overnight guests" sign is. Munger: Yes. Warren: It was right by that? Munger: Right by that. Well, it was one of those houses along there, which was the doctor's office. 16 Warren: That's what someone told me. Munger: Yes, that's where Bob practiced all during the war, as well as there were times when VMI didn't have a doctor, and he ended up being both the VMI and Washington and Lee doctor, plus an enormous practice all over the county, fifteen hundred miles a month and he never let on. [Laughter] Yeah, it was a strange world, but we were incredibly lucky to have had this kind of Army installation, the cream of the crop. No, those boys—this probably should be off the record, but one of the things that Bob had to do as part of being the doctor for these very healthy boys was a short-arm examination, which kind of tickled him because it was so—and he had to do it at VMI, too. Do you suppose they still do it? Warren: I would assume so. My husband talks about how he had to go through it when he was in the Army. Munger: Really? I'd never heard of it. I was a total innocent. In fact, it wasn't until I went to Washington, was at the bookstore that I got a good broad range in sex education from all those students who were totally uninhibited about talking. Warren: Shall we make that leap? Shall we talk about the bookstore? Munger: Have I told you what you want to hear? Warren: You've given me a real good picture of that time period, but I'd love to hear more if you want to talk about more. Munger: I don't know. I had two children during that time. Warren: There's one thing before we go on. You mentioned someone named John Graham being important. I've never heard that name. Who's John Graham? Munger: He's a longtime descendant of the Grahams, who were among the founders of Washington and Lee, and he went to Princeton after Washington and Lee, in graduate school, and he taught at Washington and Lee, he grew up in Washington and Lee, he was Mary Monroe's closest friend. He was extremely obese. He was in World War I and he used to do his fatness exercises in the privy. He was on General Pershing's staff 17 doing something. He used to make General Pershing so mad because he would get in there and do his sitting-up exercises, and Pershing couldn't get in. I remember him telling that story. Warren: Why was he so important to Washington and Lee, other than being a descendant of William Graham's? Munger: At that time, before World War II, there was no art, no music, no drama, at all. It took two hundred years before they had any. John, on his own, he taught Spanish and French, but on his own, he contributed what music there was. He contributed paintings. For instance, I remember him going around asking for signatures on a petition to buy a painting to go in the music room. He set up a music room upstairs in the library where he supplied records. Now, whether he got any money—and I rather doubt it—from Washington and Lee to buy records to go in this music room, I don't know. He was a composer. He did a lot of music for Mary Monroe in the Presbyterian Church Choir, and that was something that I was surprised at at Mary Monroe's funeral, that they didn't play any of John's music. One of the ones I remember the best was called "[Unclear] Upon the Death of a Beautiful Friendship." He did very interesting things. He was a marvelous raconteur. He was at the core of our social group, and it was he—him, it was he—who suggested that Dr. [James G.] Leyburn to come here as dean of the university, which turned Washington and Lee around, there's no doubt about it. Washington and Lee had never named a building for a person who contributed themselves to a place; it had to be money. That's the only building on campus that's named for—I guess [Francis Pendleton] Gaines Hall. Warren: Let's talk about Dean Leyburn. What was your experience of him? Munger: I knew him very, very well. I have a folder of letters like this. Through John— John died in 1946, just before Jimmy came. I spoke at the dedication of Leyburn Library, as a friend. When he came, because we had loved John, Jimmy came into the group, and he was incredibly shy, I think, but the letters he would write were just wonderful. This 18 was the way he communicated. He had a hard time, and there were people— [Laughter] I remember Ollie Crenshaw at a dinner party once saying to me that the worst thing that had happened to Washington and Lee since Lee's surrender was Dr. Leyburn coming to Washington and Lee. I guess he wasn't head of the history department then, but he became later. I'm sure there were other people who felt that strongly; in fact, I know there were. Warren: Why do you think they felt that way? Munger: Because he didn't have— [Phone rings.] You'd better unhitch me. [Tape recorder turned off.] Warren: Let's get back to Jim Leyburn. You were talking about Ollie Crenshaw thinking he was the worst thing that ever happened. I'm fascinated by that. Tell me about that. Munger: Well, Ollie was a great talker, for one thing, and the students adored Leyburn. In fact, he never married, and his whole emotional life was wrapped up in his students. He'd been head of Sterling College at Yale and head of the sociology department there. We had him to dinner, to Sunday night supper, even before he'd unpacked all his books, and he had many, many books. That night he told us—it was before school started that first fall—he told us, Bob and me, sitting out in the August dusk, that when the invitation had come, he had walked the floor all night with excitement, dreaming about what he could do, and his goal, which he was clear about, was to make Washington and Lee the preeminent academic university in the South. And he did a pretty good job. He came at a time, or he got the blame for the abolition of subsidized athletics at Washington and Lee, football particularly. We were playing Army up there and trying to make money, and it was the most painful thing that Dr. Gaines ever had to do, I think, was to make athletics non-subsidized. They didn't buy players anymore. And the Lynchburg Alumni Association was livid, and they blamed it all on Jimmy Leyburn, 19 that he came along and was going to make an egghead school out of it. That was the feeling. He took some very, very rough name-calling, all sorts of things during that time. He was a superb musician, and I can see him now, when those marvelous concerts that Mary Monroe would give, I remember "For a Requiem," which they did for John, after John Graham died, and Jimmy played the piano accompaniment. He practiced every day at 5:30 in the morning. When he corrected exams, he corrected the spelling along the side. I mean, he did it instinctively. And I can't think and spell at the same time. He insisted, at the beginning, that any auditors take the exams, and I gave that up, but I went on and audited, I think, just about everything. We saw each other socially a great deal, all of us in the John Graham circle, although John was dead. He was dead before Jimmy came. Warren: So why do you think Crenshaw had such a negative feeling about him? Munger: I don't know. I don't know. Bill [William] Pusey felt that way. I used to go over and have lunch with Bill when he moved to the Colonnade, because he was trying to transport Lexington to Charlottesville, he was so lonely, he missed Lexington so. So I'd go over about every two months. After we talked about Jimmy once or twice, it was sort of tacitly agreed that we wouldn't talk about it anymore. Warren: So you think that Leyburn did make a huge difference? Munger: Yes. Warren: Tell me exactly what you mean by that. Munger: Well, he was dean of the university, which they've never had since. It's dean of the college and dean of the commerce school and dean of the law school now. Well, he was dean of the whole thing. I don't know the actual technical innovative things that happened, except the kind of faculty he brought in was very interesting. Marion Junkin, for instance, who, incidentally, was Jimmy Leyburn's first cousin, and then on the other side, Charlie [Charles Porterfield] Light, who was dean of the law school, was Jimmy 20 Leyburn's first cousin. These things go in and out. My little New England, I learned to keep my head down, because John Graham used to say, "You are speaking of my cousin," about everybody in Rockbridge County. [Laughter] Warren: So Charlie Light came after Leyburn? Munger: Oh, no, he came before Leyburn, but he wasn't dean of the law school then. He was just on the faculty before Leyburn. I think he was probably already dean of the faculty when Leyburn came. It's just coincidence, really, that their mothers were sisters or something. Academia is so squabbly. They thrive on it, you know. There's always academic ruckuses, one kind or another, I think, and I don't know what precipitated all of them. I do know that he never entertained the faculty. He never entered into bull sessions with the faculty. He was totally emotionally involved with the students, teaching, and he stayed on as dean until the middle fifties, I guess, and then he went back to being head of the sociology department. Then he retired and moved up. His family—it's a long, intricate family—owned a whole watercress farm up in—oh, gosh, Williamsburg. No, not Williamsburg. McKeesport? Something straight up 81, you go right through it. He did a lot of things. He wrote the definitive book, up until recently, on Haiti. That was his field. He wrote the best book that could possibly be on the Scotch Irish, wonderful. And then he did one about growing up in Durham, North Carolina, after he retired. I didn't ever see that. But it was this "one step removed" relationships. For instance, in the campus mail I would get a note saying, "I was going by your office today and I just thought how lucky we were to have you," this kind of thing. Warren: In note form, rather than stopping in to tell you. Munger: Not one on one, until way into—no, it was before Bob died. He seemed awfully glad to see me. [Laughter] One time he—it was the last time I saw him, as a matter of fact, it was some big thing at Lenfest, and then everybody was milling around afterwards, and I looked up and standing smack dab in the middle of the stage was 21 Jimmy. I didn't even know he was here. So, me, I go up, and he turned around and looked at me, and he was frail then, I thought, but he picked me up and spun me around twice. It was just such fun to talk to him. I had gone with Connie Feddeman, my next-door neighbor. When she got back there, she said, "Who was that glamorous man who was whirling you around in the center of the stage?" [Laughter] We wrote a lot after he moved up there, and once I got a postcard from him from Oacha [phonetic] and Monte Arban [phonetic], and when I went to Oacha I went and I was just bowled over by it, and he had said in the postcard that this was one of the most extraordinary places he'd ever seen, or something like that, and I've always sort of thanked him for Monte Arban. Warren: I don't know where Oacha is. Munger: Mexico. It's fairly far south. It's on the border of the Chiapas area which is having such trouble. Warren: So he wrote to tell you how happy he was that you were there. Let's make that leap to the bookstore. How did that come to be? Munger: Before I had anything to do with it, it was the result of a part of the self-study of 1966, and it was the primary need of the university, according to the self-study, was an honest-to-God bookstore, not textbooks, but real books, as it were. So they built this wing on the coop building and stocked it, and they hired Jane Rushing to set it up, pick the books, set the whole thing up, which she did for nine months—yes, from December to July. Then her husband got a job for a year as a visiting lecturer in Illinois. So I was sitting in a League of Women Voters luncheon one day and she said they were going, and I said, "Could I mind the store?" And she said, "Well, I'll tell the committee," and they had a huge Bookstore Committee, great big. So here I trotted over to be interviewed by all these people I had known all my life, and there must have been eight or nine people in Mr. Whitehead's office. And I got hired. This was an interim thing for one year, and I loved it. It was a round peg in a round hole. 22 Jane had done a beautiful job of setting up the policies, the standards, and, importantly, the university was willing to underwrite a loss on it. It was considered part of the academic program, which was very wise, because you have to sell much larger volume to make any money on a bookstore, trade bookstore. It was a fun year. It was an exciting year in that I figuratively jumped up and down and screamed and did anything that I could think of to attract attention to stop them as they came through, to make them look around. I participated as well, and all these were things that Jane Rushing had taught me. I was there for a month before she left in June of '67. I participated in whatever was going on in the university community, from lacrosse to having coffee and conversation with Betty Friedan, anything that happened. Any lecturer I would snag and have coffee and conversation. There are some people who came who I would have sadly missed, like Arthur Ash, who came and talked. He tried to talk about South Africa, and all they wanted to know was Borg going to beat Connors. [Laughter] So I enjoyed him and many, many of them. At the end of the year, the last day, everything—in fact, Jane had come back for a few days to look over everything and pick up the reins, and then the last day, everything was in perfect order and my secretary and I were waxing the desk and making everything all right, when the phone rang and it was Jane from Maine, where her family had a summer place, and she was crying, and she said that she and Bob were getting a divorce and she wasn't coming back. Warren: Oh, my. That's pretty definitive, isn't it? Munger: This was the thirtieth of June, and my contract ran out that day. [Laughter] And she said, "I'm calling you so you'll have time to think whether you want to do it anymore." She said, "I'll call Mr. Whitehead and tell him." And I was there for sixteen years. It was wonderful. It was the most exciting thing I ever did in my life. I loved it. I got involved in the things like American Booksellers Association on the national level, 23 being on committees with Maya Angelou and people. That was always fun. And the National College Stores Association, although I had nothing to do with anything, for the first seven years, anything but the trade books, the general books, and then changes came along. It had been obvious to me from the beginning that to run the textbooks and the general books, to buy textbooks from MacMillan and general books from MacMillan and have two accounts, it was a mess. So it was changed. I did the textbooks and the— but I never did mugs and teeshirts and stuff like that. Warren: Did you have any training for this at all, or were you just thrown into it and started to swim? Munger: Well, Jane was good training, because she had learned from scratch. She was teaching at the high school, so she took the job at $5,500, which is what I was paid. No, I learned by going to state meetings, for one thing, and after two years I felt I was ready to go to booksellers school. I knew enough to go, so I went to Oberlin for two weeks. Washington and Lee paid for me to go to Oberlin for two weeks and take the whole booksellers course. There again I got to know more people in the whole business of bookselling and books, and wrote in the Manual of Bookselling, which the American Booksellers Association published 35,000 copies, I wrote the chapter on selling trade books in college bookstores and university college bookstores. I don't know how, but I was a judge of the National Book Award in [unclear]. Warren: Really? What an honor. Munger: Well, it was incredible. I wrote it down, and they were deciding that they would include that year booksellers, so members of the ABA got a chance to write down what they would be interested in, and I wrote down two things. One was history, because a very close friend, an old beau of mine, had had an impressive book published, and I wanted to see that it got the National Book Award. [Laughter] It didn't; it got the Pulitzer later. The other reason was I liked poetry and had always read 24 a great deal of poetry and still do. So I put down poetry, and I got picked, with no qualifications at all. Never had a poem published in my life. Warren: Isn't that interesting. Tell me about a day in the bookstore. Munger: There was no day like any other day. I could hardly wait to get there, because things would happen. There would be some kind of ruckus or some kind of excitement or things that had to be planned. There were things that we did every day. I had anywhere from eight to twelve student work-study boys—there were only boys while I was there. It went coed the year I—I was called "Betty the Red," not because I voted for McGovern or anything like that, but because I was in favor of coeducation. All of the boys who worked had certain jobs that they did. They kept the inventory, what was called reading yellow cards, and you'd write down how many were on the shelf, and any that had one or none were put in a box, and I would go through and decide whether to reorder, depending on how many had been sold. Of course there would be a particular book that would be the rage, and you'd have to keep ahead of that or you'd lose out. Every few days, every week, certainly every week, I changed the table and what was on it. When Tolkien died, for instance, I went out and stole some of the Atwood's' flowers that were on—clematis, and put it in a circle around the obituary on the table. Just a single thing to attract attention was the way I did it. Now Sue does it just the opposite, and I think it's equally—I mean, she's got her table loaded with books, the display table. Then there'd be somebody, particularly Monday morning, if I didn't read the New York Times books section on Sunday, there would be a faculty member by nine o'clock in the morning who was in there, who was saying, "There's a book reviewed in the New York Times book section. I've forgotten the name and the author. It's about—" That's about all they would give you. I wanted to be able to call that book, and I usually did, for special order, and that was a great deal. And running books down to see 25 whether they were in print, that kind of thing, which should be done right away. We prided ourselves on the fact that we could get books in five days. Brenda really did the work, my secretary, did the work in the bookstore, the scut work, the endless scut work, while I talked, and talked to students all the time, as much as I could. I was like Jimmy Leyburn. But I certainly got to know the faculty, too, and that was interesting, because I hadn't realized that in the League of Women Voters and the library and all those things that I had worked on, I had known wives, and now I was getting to know their husbands. We had a wonderful time. I hung paintings by local people up above the bookcases, shelves, so there was all those kind of things that I did. After I got into doing textbooks, that was the impossible, but one aimed at it, task of having every faculty member's books on the shelf in the number, and I changed it from what it had been before. Before, they had ordered the number that the faculty member wrote down, and as one of the standard stories that the UVA bookseller guy came in and wrote down the number of textbooks he wanted ordered, and it was the number of seats there were in the room. [Laughter] And those are the kind of things you had to watch very carefully, because you only got a 20 percent discount on textbooks. You probably know all this. And you had to pay shipping coming and going. You could return them for credit, but by the time you had done all that, you had to cut very carefully the number. Warren: Did you then work with the registrar to make sure how many people? Munger: Yes, yes. In fact, I took the privilege, if you want to call it that, away from the faculty of picking the numbers, and we kept a track record of the number and we would go by the registration. Then that last night or two nights before classes start in the fall, they print out the registration, the final registration. There's a week of drop/adds, so you have to play with that, too, after classes have started, but I and all the faculty were over there about 7:30 at night getting the printout of how many there were, and what you would do would be to go down in a hurry and find out where you 26 were short, and hit the phones before the faculty came along and breathed down your neck. You could just say, "Yeah, we called that in this morning. We picked it up right away." Warren: So how much time would you have between when they registered for the classes and when they came in to buy the textbooks? Munger: Four or five days. Warren: It's tight. Munger: Yes, it's tight, and every college in the country is calling in to the publisher at the same time. So you walked a tight rope all the time. The faculty couldn't understand why you couldn't just order five, ten over. Well, when you're cutting it at a margin so thin, and after I did pick up the textbooks, add the textbooks to it, the advantage of buying back books second-hand and reselling them, you buy them back at half price and resell them at a quarter, and so you make that little margin, which makes all the difference. The staff that was there before weren't administrative people. The gal had done it for time immemorial and she didn't understand any possible changes, so I made a profit. Mr. Whitehead, I don't think quite really believed it. [Laughter] With the exception of two or three people, faculty, it was a very, very pleasant relationship. Warren: We need to switch tapes. Munger: This is enough, isn't it?