Rouse interview [This should read Tape 1, Side 2] [Begin Tape 2, Side 2] Warren: Well, Miss Annie Jo is legendary, of course. So I'm interested-were you involved with the Troubadours? Rouse: I was a press man. I wrote all the publicity. I never acted, but I was on the board, and I saw a lot of Larry Watkin in that connection. While I was there, we took a little brick building that was on the corner near Mr. Remsburg's funeral establishment and grave stone establishment, and made it in to a small theater, and I believe it's still there, isn't it, the Troubadour Theater. Warren: Yes, it is, at Henry Street and Main Street. Rouse: Henry Street and Main. We managed to raise the money to fix it up, buy seats and put them in there. We did some pretty good plays. Warren: Did Miss Annie Jo come around? Was she actually involved still when you were there? Rouse: She would always come to see the shows. As I remember, she had collected a lot of the costumes for the costume collection. But she was, by that time, pretty well retired from that. I think she was always honored at Fancy Dress. She was invited by Dr. Gaines to sit in the President's Box, because she was said to have originated Fancy Dress. I think once somebody proposed that we do the Court of Queen Victoria and let her be Queen Victoria and have the students represent the ambassadors from the various nations that had to deal with Queen Victoria, but I don't think that ever happened. 16 Warren: Oh, but it was a great idea. She would have loved that. What was she like? What was her personality like? Rouse: She was small, and she had really bright eyes, and she was fairly unconventional. She'd say things like she wished she'd had that baby. A lot of the professors enjoyed her and liked her because she was not insipid or self-effacing or any of that. She was a feminist who believed she was just as good as any man around, and she could hold her own with the faculty. I was a great admirer of Blanche McCrum, too. I had a sense that she felt that as a woman librarian, she was not accorded all the dignities and salary she might have been if she'd been a man. But that was just the impression I had. She used to hold play readings on Friday nights. There was a nice room in the McCormick Library, and each week of the play for the next week would be chosen, and people would be chosen to read various characters. Then we'd come back to that room. One night we were reading a play called "Men in White," which is a story, I believe, of interns in a hospital, and they were talking pretty frankly about anatomical parts, and when we got to the first one, somebody inadvertently read the word. "Oh," she said, "Skip it, skip it, skip it." From that time, we'd call Miss Blanche "Skip It McCrum," because if it was a four-letter word or anything anatomical, she'd say "Skip it." She even-this I disapproved of-there was a theater magazine then published called Theater Arts, a monthly, and they'd often have pictures of theater women, actresses, or nightclub performers, virtually nude, and she would, apparently, or somebody at the library, would cut them out with a razorblade so that you couldn't see the page was out. She didn't think that young men should be exposed to all those temptations. Warren: Well, I suspect they found their own ways of being exposed to those temptations. 17 Rouse: Yes, they did. Warren: One thing that amused me was that there was a quotation from Robert E. Lee that someone had made into a printed card. He said, "Young men should at an early age get used to drinking alcohol, because they may find that as they get old they will need the stimulus it provides, but if they've had it all their lives, it won't be that stimulating." That was a favorite display in most of the fraternity bars, I think erotically, because we were all drinking, or most students were drinking, yet that was there. I always assumed from that that Robert E. Lee must not have abhorred whiskey or wine, although I've never heard otherwise. Warren: I don't even know the answer to that. Now, by the time you got there, Prohibition was over? Rouse: Prohibition ended while I was there. A liquor store opened on-I can't remember the streets anymore, but it opened quite close to the lower end of the campus, and it was said to be one of the very top liquor stores in Virginia. In terms of the population, it was a very successful, very busy ABC store. Warren: How did things function before the store opened? During Prohibition, what happened? Rouse: Well, I was told that bootleggers from the county would call and delivery whiskey to boys in the various fraternities. There was a story I remember hearing that once a bootlegger was being followed by a policeman of some sort, so when the bootlegger delivered it and told the boy buying it that the policeman was coming right after him, the guy took his hooch and went up and sat on the roof for a while of the fraternity until he felt the policeman was gone. But I can't honestly say. I think it must have been just about the time I got there, because I never remember a time when whiskey was not available. As you know, Dr. Gaines didn't like to serve whiskey in the president's house. I think he said Robert E. Lee had not served liquor, and he didn't like to 18 serve anything in the president's house. Maybe this is something if you want it you'd better check. It seems to me that he and Mrs. Gaines generally arranged for the whiskey to be served somewhere else before you got to dinner at the president's house, but later on, before the Gaines left the president's house, my strong impression, after I left school, my impression is that they did begin to serve liquor. The practice was so universal by then, you couldn't stop it. Warren: Was there any celebration that you remember when Prohibition was repealed? Rouse: No, I must say I don't remember any change there, but I do think the ABC store in Lexington was a great success. There was only one, and I believe people had to come from nearby towns like Buena Vista to the liquor store in Lexington. One of the things I liked, townspeople took an interest in the university, and I got to know Matt Paxton. I saw a lot of Mary Monroe Penick and Marshall Penick and their father, Mr. Paul Penick. He was treasurer of Washington and Lee. Sam Rader, R-A-D-E-R, he was in one of the banks. Sam Rader was a very nice, modest guy. When I got elected manager of my fraternity, I asked him to take over the records with me. I was elected house manager, which paid my dues and room and board, which was very welcome to me, but I never kept records and never had any interest much in mathematics or bookkeeping. So I went to see Sam Rader at the bank and I said, "Mr. Rader, what'll you charge me to take the books I bring to you every month and reconcile the income with the outgo?" I think he said twenty-five dollars a semester, which was more then than it is now, but it was still a very modest charge. So that year he kept me from being sent to prison by looking after the records. Warren: Another thing that makes Washington and Lee not unique, but unusual, is that one of the governing themes is the Honor System. Can you remember first 19 learning about the Honor System and what kind of import it had when you were there? Rouse: Yes. I always thought one of the reasons the Honor System worked so well is that the law school was such an integral part of the university. I hope it still is. But so many of the boys in the undergraduate school were headed for the W&L Law School. I don't think that's as true anymore, because the American Bar Association, for some absurd reason, wants law schools to have a wide mix of students coming from all kinds of schools. They tell me it doesn't help you to get into W&L Law School at all if you've been to W&L undergraduate. But I think there were a lot of people who knew something about the processes of law and the rules of evidence and all that. It's very sad, but I knew several people who ran afoul of it. The most tragic, I thought, was Pendleton Gaines, who was the son of Dr. Gaines, who was kicked out of Washington and Lee, I believe, for violating the Honor System. There were other cases, but, on the whole, I thought they seemed to work very well. Warren: Was it something that people were always aware of? Rouse: Yes. They would do things like take their examination out of the examination room and go sit in the grass outside the building and answer the questions, and there were no really serious problems except in a very few cases ever arose. What bothered me a good deal more was the fact that a lot of students were chronically behind in their fraternity dues and paying for their board and room. When I got to be house manager, I found that a tremendous number of people owed, graduates who'd gone on, some of whom were now well-to-do, and owed the fraternity. I tried writing them letters, but I didn't get much. Then I got permission of the fraternity to hire a collection agency, but the collection agency couldn't do very well either. But that was not an Honor System matter, so people got away with that. 20 Warren: I hadn't heard that before. So that wouldn't have been considered stealing to not pay your room? Rouse: No. I guess that that was a matter between the fraternity and the student rather than the university and the student. Warren: I see. Well, you've done a marvelous job of describing what Lexington was like, but we didn't talk about the characters of Lexington. I brought you this picture. Tell me about the characters of Lexington. Rouse: Well, one of the most obvious one was Herb the dog man, who sat on a wooden box halfway between the Robert E. Lee Memorial Church and the president's house, and he had another box full of puppies. He'd usually get the puppies quite young, so that they would be cute, and everybody who came by, "Hey, mister, you want to buy a dog?" Often girls coming there for dances would be infatuated by these little dogs and ask their date if they'd buy them one. I'm afraid a lot of the dogs had a bad history after that, because once they got home, their owner would realize he really didn't have a place for the dog. But Herb lived out in East Lexington. Somebody said that his house was a breeding ground of [unclear]. He would just put these dogs together and let them cohabit, and then collect the puppies and let them age two or three weeks, and then put them in this box and bring them up and sell them. VMI boys would buy them and try to sneak them in their rooms, and then somebody'd come around on a room inspection and find the dog, or so the stories went. Incidentally, VMI was right much a part of my W&L life, because being from Tidewater Virginia, where VMI was very strong, I knew a lot of the guys there. They would march up Main Street to church on Sunday, and one or two of them would often drop out of the rear ranks. I think the student running the parade didn't care if they did. And would drop out and come up into the PiKA House and sit in the living room with me and read the Richmond Times -Dispatch on Sunday and have 21 coffee, and watch through the window for the group to come back after church, and then run out. There was a whole lot of the business of VMI cadets asking their friends to come over and sleep in for them after a dance, a VMI dance, so that they could stay with a girl. I never got asked or never accepted, I don't remember which. But that suited me. I wouldn't want to have run that risk. But it was quite common for girls who came up to VMI for a dance, after the dance was over to be invited to a W&L fraternity house, and they would stay up a couple of hours later. I think the girls from the girls' schools were not permitted to do that. Some of those chaperones got to be very familiar people at W&L. They would be there three or four times a year. Some of them were good friends of the housemothers, and apparently enjoyed coming over to W&L a lot. We were talking about characters in Lexington. Mr. Letcher was an amusing person. He would come out of his house, which was between W&L and VMI, in the morning, and on his way to his office, which was on, I think, Washington Street, he would drive his golf ball with a golf club across the W&L campus, and with maybe six or eight or ten strokes, he could get himself from his house to his office. In the afternoon, Mr. Letcher would go back from his office to his house driving his golf ball. He had a charming wife. They were very old-fashioned, and they had me to lunch a couple of times because I was my uncle's nephew. I used to see Mr. Letcher in Richmond later when he would come to Democratic party gatherings, and he always wanted to ask about my uncle. He and his wife lived in a style that I imagine Lexingtonians of maybe the Robert E. Lee period would have recognized, with dark rooms and lots of Victorian furniture. There were-let's see, other characters that lived around. Warren: Did you know Jabbo? 22 Rouse: Yes, there was a business called Joe and Jabbo's, and they served food and beer all night, or at least beer after you would get-they would serve it as long as the law permitted them. That was a little store down there right by the corner of the W&L campus. I can't remember anything particular about Jabbo except everybody knew his name. There were some faculty characters that were much talked about. John Higgins Williams was a political science professor. Everybody called him "Higg." He was a bachelor, and he always wore a pipe out of one side of his mouth. He was a very droll man. He would say very funny things in a quiet sort of way. The law professors were a rather bright group of men. I think McDowell was very bright. Charlie Light was a well-liked professor. He later became dean of the law school. "Skinny" Williams, Clayton Epes Williams, was a tall, thin man. He was the faculty advisor for the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He was also a dean of the law school. Then there was one man named R.I.T. Johnson, and he was called Red I. Turkeyfoot. R.I. was supposed to be Red I., and the T was supposed to be Turkeyfoot. All those law professors were pretty thick together. Catherine McDowell, who's Big Charley McDowell's wife, was the secretary to the dean of the law school, and she was there through about three or four deanships, and she really was extremely knowledgeable about the law and about the students. In fact, I've been told that one of the law deans was really quite jealous of the fact that everybody spoke of her as Dean McDowell, and found it a little frustrating that her word was sought before his on certain issues. I remember the night the old law school burned. It was the strangest thing. The biggest lumber company in town, which was right there by the old railroad station, burned, and all the fire wagons and everything went over to it and were absorbed in it, and then all of a sudden they found that across town a little way the law school as on fire, the same night. That's led a lot of people to think that the 23 whole thing was sabotaged. Some people felt that somebody high up in W&L wanted the law school destroyed, because it was a granite structure totally out of context with the other buildings, which were brick and white, and that he had evidently burned the law school. I find that hard to believe. But it was on, I remember, a night about eleven o'clock, I believe. The lumber yard went up, and we all went over to that. While we were there, they found that a fire had started at the law school. There was a very successful campaign. This would have been in the '36-'37 era, to rebuilt the law school. A man named John D-A-W-something, who was an executive of Proctor and Gamble, came from Cincinnati, paid for by one of the trustees, and he ran a campaign to raise something like, I think, a million dollars to-no, it wasn't a million dollars, it was something like a couple of hundred thousand dollars, because I've always been amazed that the law school was said to have been built for a hundred thousand. That was the law school building that's at the end of the Colonnade at Lexington. Now that is used for some other purpose, because the law school is all back down in the ravine. As I mentioned, the train used to come down that ravine. There was a trestle that crossed the North River. I was looking at a picture of it the other day. The trestle crossing North River near the covered bridge-you know where the covered bridge is? Warren: Yes. Rouse: Then it went along Woods Creek valley up to the train station. It went under a hill behind VMI and W&L, and stopped at that station. I'm trying to think of other curious people. There was a real stout black man, who actually was a mulatto man, who was in charge of the bell at W&L. The school bell was rung, I think it rang ten minutes before an hour, that meant that classes were about to change, and then it rang on the hour, and that meant you were 24 supposed to be in your new class. I think later that was all electrified, but when I first went there, it was all done by hand. The old Washington College buildings were getting quite old, and they were very much in need of repair. I had geology class on the third floor of Washington Hall, and it had great high ceilings and great big windows. The windows were very poorly insulated. Wasps used to get in from the outside and buzz around the head of the instructor. I wrote a letter about this to the W&L magazine not long ago. Dr. Henry Donald Campbell, who was a small man, whose father had been on the faculty with Lee, we had a great domed head which was bald, and the wasps would come around his head and buzz, and he would take one hand and make motions to deter the wasp. With the other hand he would hold what he called a trilobite, and the trilobite was a little prehistoric growth that had been found in the rock of Lexington years ago. He would say, "Little trilobite, what was life like in Lexington four million years ago?" Then he would put his head down near the trilobite. [Laughter] It was a marvelous, unforgettable scene to me, and the other hand batting the wasp away. Then he would tell us what the trilobite said about life in Lexington a million, three million years ago. As I said, I wrote a letter that was about three issues back. His son who was a distinguished Washington lawyer, died, and this man, Dr. Campbell, is shown in a photograph in the saddle on Traveller. Robert E. Lee hoisted him up one Sunday, because his father was dean of the faculty, and he wanted the little boy to see what it was like to ride on Traveller. There's a picture of that somewhere. Warren: Have you ever seen that picture? Everybody tells me about it, but nobody seems to have seen it. Rouse: Isn't that funny. Warren: I actually went to his wife, Mrs. Campbell, trying to get it. 25 Rouse: You know all about that. Warren: Well, I've heard about it, but she doesn't know anything about it. Rouse: Isn't that funny. Warren: And Ed, of course, died last year. Rouse: Did you know them? Warren: Well, I just a few weeks ago went and met Mrs. Campbell. Rouse: She's still living. Warren: She's still alive, very good shape. She's wonderful. I had a marvelous time visiting with her, and she shared some really wonderful things. I have a picture of Ed as a little baby being rocked in his mother's arms. Rouse: Oh, that's nice. Warren: It's a really charming picture. Rouse: I was always interested in hearing about Lee as president. One story I heard was that the Lees didn't have the money, or the inclination, maybe, to give wedding presents that were new, so they just took things they had in their house, and she'd inherited a great deal of good stuff from the Custises, and would just wrap them up and give them as a wedding present to their friends. So that a fair number of people when I was in Lexington claimed that such and such an item in his house had been given by the Lees as a wedding present to Uncle this or Uncle that. I was also told that Mrs. Lee said once when she was asked why none of their daughters ever married-they had four daughters, four or five, and none of them married-she said, well, they were Anglicans from Tidewater, Virginia, and at the time they were of marriageable age, the country was either at war or they were at Lexington in a Presbyterian society, and that apparently accounted, to her mind, at least, for their not marrying. Somebody else in a recent-I think Mary Coulling- said that perhaps it was because they were so closely allied with their father, that he 26 was sort of their god, and they never made room for anybody else. But I don't think that would hold water. But anyway. Somebody said that once there was a gate there by the street right next to where the Episcopal church now stands. You'd have to go through that gate to cross the W&L campus and go on to VMI, and that Lee was walking along from his house one day, and he saw a colored woman with a huge basket of laundry. So he got off Traveller, or walked, or whatever he had to do, in order to open the door for the woman. Somebody commented on it, and he said, well, he thought that was a duty that he owed to an older person and a woman, and it didn't strike him as anything gallant at all. I used to hear a lot about the Franklin Society, which had gone out of-I think the Franklin Society was a really remarkable element in Lexington, but, of course, that went out, I think, even before the end of the last century. You see a lot of pictures of the two boat clubs that used to compete on the North River. Have you gotten into that? Warren: Nobody's talked about it. I've seen pictures. Rouse: That had ended before I got there. I've often wondered why they didn't keep it up. It seemed to me to sound like a nice form of athletics, and there are other schools around there that have crews. Warren: I think it's because of the dam that was built on the Maury River ruined their course. They no longer had a course on which to row. Rouse: I see. Warren: Then later when crew was revived after World War II, they went down to the James and rowed on the James. Rouse: Oh, I see. The fraternity housemothers were interesting old ladies. There was one named Mrs. Beverly Dandridge Tucker [phonetic]. Well, now, actually Mrs. Tucker 27 wasn't a housemother, but she had a sister, Mrs. Lee, who was a housemother of the Phi Delta Thetas. They were, I think, born-they were Grahams. They were kin to John Graham, who was a professor when I was there, and the Grahams were old Lexington Presbyterian. Mrs. Tucker had beautiful flowers and a very pretty house. Two of the guys and I had an apartment right next door to her, and she bred a rose which she put in a flower show. You undoubtedly heard this story that she said- put a little tag to identify, "Mrs. Beverly Dandridge Tucker, good in a bed, but better against a brick wall." That was what she said. You know that story? Warren: Well, you had it in your talk, and I have had more fun telling that story. My husband loved that story. Rouse: That's right, I did put it in there. Larry Watkin was a real hellion and was a real jokester. He wrote a limerick. Did I put that in there? "Old lady Moffat sat on her toffet under the UDC, from thinking how stinking was Abraham Lincoln, she clean forgot Robert E. Lee." He was a great-well, he was an agnostic. He sent his kid-has a son named Parke. The odd thing is, Mrs. Watkin's father had been a Congregationalist minister, and here Larry was an agnostic. I said, "Why do you send your kid to Sunday school?" He said, "Well, this is Lexington. If you don't send your kid to Sunday school, everybody thinks you're an agnostic." [Laughter] So he sent the boy. Parke grew up without an "E" on Parke, and later Larry put an "E," before he got grown up he started using the "E." I said, "Larry, you damn snob, what are you trying to cash in on a Southern connection?" He said, "No, but everybody assumes it's got an 'E,' and puts an 'E' on it." So he decided it was easier to be Parke with an "E" on it. I don't know, unless you want to ask me questions. There was right much drinking at W&L, but I'm told that men's colleges in small towns generally have this. Our rector here went to Sewanee, and he said they 28 did a lot of drinking in fraternities down there, but that was because they couldn't get out and go downtown to a restaurant or a bar or something, so they had to make entertainment at home. One thing that struck me was the impression of age and dignity that you got from the senior faculty. Dr. Howe, James Lewis Howe, who taught chemistry, was a greatly admired man. He was a big deal in the Presbyterian Church, and he'd gone to Amherst, in Massachusetts. He got his graduate degree at Harvard, and he was a great believer in having high academic standards. Dr. Hoyt was a biology professor. I had him. He was excellent. Dr. Tucker I mentioned. Dr. Shannon I mentioned. There was a professor of modern languages called Dr. Delawa Benjamin Easter, and he was very erudite. He left all his books to the W&L library. It was fascinating-I worked in the library for the NYA one year- fascinating just to go through his books and see how he had edited things. He would write under something, "Not true. The author's in error. That should be so and so." He was so erudite that he could pick up on all kinds of small-all kinds of details how people had erred in. That's about all I can think of, but you- Warren: I have a couple more questions. Is it okay if I pop in another tape? Rouse: Sure.