Rowe interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Rowe: I don’t think I could have attended W&L financially unless I had had the benefit
of a scholarship from Mrs. Alfred duPont. My recollection is it was a full-tuition
scholarship. I don’t think it went beyond tuition into any living expenses or anything.
But I do remember, that was almost critical in my being able to go to W&L, this full-
tuition scholarship. I look in this catalog, and the tuition for one full year was two
hundred dollars. A two-hundred-dollar difference, a two-hundred-dollar scholarship,
in a sense enabled me to come to W&L. Now, maybe they could have been some way I
could have found the money, but that was an overwhelming amount of money to me at
that time.
Warren: Was Mrs. duPont a real person to you? Did she come on campus when you
were there?
Rowe: I think I may have met her one time, yes, and I remember writing letters to her,
thanking her for her generosity and everything. But I believe I met her. She was a good
personal friend of Dr. Gaines, who was university president, and I think he may have
had a group of us who were beneficiaries of her monies over to meet her at maybe a
lunch at his house or something like that.
Warren: As president of the student body, did you interact with President Gaines very
much?

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Rowe: Yes, although probably more than I had previously, but I had been fairly close
to him all the way along. Well, number one, the school was so small, you know, he
could be close to an awful lot of the student body. There was probably around 1,000 of
us. But also, his second son was a classmate and fraternity brother of mine, so I had an
opportunity to be over at the Gaines’ house many times.
Warren: What was he like, not as president, but as just around the house?
Rowe: He was always the president, even around the house, I must say. I never saw
him, and probably he didn’t spend that much time with us when we were at the house,
but I never really saw him unwind. He, at least in my vision, was always President
Gaines, by golly. He was not Bobby Gaines’ dad.
Warren: Did Bobby Gaines think of him as President Gaines?
Rowe: I don’t know what was going through Bobby’s mind.
Warren: Speaking of family, you have a brother who went to W&L, too. Were you
there at the same time?
Rowe: Yes. We overlapped for two years, I guess.
Warren: What was that like? W&L seems to be such a family thing. Did he go there
because you were there?
Rowe: That probably had a lot to do with it. He may have had other reasons. When he
started there, I was not on campus. I was away in the navy then. He started there in the
summer of—I don’t know whether it was the summer of ’44 or ’45, but there was only a
handful of civilian students on campus. I mean, most everybody around there was in
this army unit that was on campus.
Warren: So would you have helped him through when he arrived and gotten him
through rush week and that kind of thing.
Rowe: No. As I said, I was not on campus when he got there. He had really finished
two years.
Warren: So you didn’t get to be big brother very much at all, then.

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Rowe: No, not really. I was coming back as a war veteran and all this kind of stuff.
He’d not been in the service. I sort of viewed him as just a young kid or something. I
had my own friends my the pre-war days and everything, and he did not socialize as
much as I did. So while we were fraternity brothers and all that, we did not have a lot of
activities together outside of the fraternity activities.
Warren: I’ve asked you the questions that I have. Is there anything you’d like to
summarize or anything you’d like to say about Washington and Lee that I haven’t
asked?
Rowe: No. I think if you could pull it together from this part and that of our
conversation, I’ve pretty well given you my feelings about W&L and the major
recollections. I could ramble on and on about recollections of this and that event, but
they’re highly personal-type things and I don’t think would add to what you’re trying
to do.
Warren: Was there any specific event that you remember that was real important to
you? Was Fancy Dress going on when you were there?
Rowe: Oh, yes. That was a big deal. I have some of the stuff my mother collected over
here. Why I saved them I don’t know, and then why she saved them beyond that is
beyond me—all kinds of letters from girls accepting invitations to dances or saying they
couldn’t come and all this kind of business. I’ve got to organize this stuff at some point,
because it’s all in a great jumble and everything.
Warren: Oh, I’d like to take a look at that.
Rowe: You really want to see some of it?
Warren: Absolutely.
Rowe: When we’re finished, I’ll dig them out. Just this morning I came across this letter
from Dr. Gaines to my father, just saying that my high school principal had written
about me, and so Dr. Gaines wanted him to send some information and all that kind of
stuff.

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Warren: He was quite a letter-writer. I’ve read a lot of his correspondence. Well, thank
you. Let’s wind up this part of it and take a look at what you’ve got, because I know
you’re on a limited time schedule.
Rowe: Right. You know, should anything major come up, I’ll drop you a note, give you
a call, and if you want to get together again, I’ll come on over to Lexington.
Warren: Great. Okay.
Rowe: All right.
[End of Interview]

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