RICHARD SESSOMS November 12, 1996 Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the twelfth of November, 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with Dick Sessoms. My first question to you is, how does a Hampden-Sydney guy switch his allegiance to Washington and Lee? Sessoms: [Laughter] Well, I'm glad you asked me that. I've had that question a time or two, so I have my answer down. Mame, I tell all my Hampden-Sydney friends it finally took a tiger from Hampden-Sydney to come up to Washington and get this place straight. I tell all my Washington & Lee friends that there's not a W&L male alive that would take this big a cut in salary to take this dumb job. [Laughter] So that's the superficial answer. I married into the Washington & Lee family. I married, in 1962, the daughter of a Washington & Lee professor. Francis Drake is my father-in-law. He's now in his mid-eighties. He taught romance languages here for forty-three years as head of the French Department and head of the romance languages for a number of years, a great teacher, as sworn to me by many alumni that I've run across on the road. I came to Lexington in 1960. I had been a reporter for the Roanoke newspaper, and I was offered a job next door at Virginia Military Institute, as director of-well, as business manager of the Athletic Association and director of sports information. That brought me to town on July 1st, 1960, the same day that General George R. E. Shell went to work at VMI. He and I always kidded each other about starting together. 1 In any event, after I'd been in Lexington for a year or so, my roommates and I were giving a party, as we frequently did, over in east Lexington. One of my roommates was none other than John A. Jennings, who at that time was a brand- new instructor in the journalism school. John had worked for the Roanoke Times World Corporation, so he and I knew each other from working at Roanoke. Anyway, the day that my announcement was made in the newspaper that I was coming to work at VMI, John called and said, "I've got a great place for you to live up here. Come in and move in with Dr. Bill Old and me and a young Washington & Lee graduate of the class, just graduated last month, the class of 1960." That was a fellow named Press Rowe, who has since-well, at that time he was Frank Parsons' assistant. Press is now a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. Warren: Press Rowe? Sessoms: Press Rowe, yeah. Warren: R-0-W-E? Sessoms: R-0-W-E. The newspaper Rowe family from Fredericksburg. His Uncle Charlie was a trustee here. So Press was from that newspaper family. So Press was my roommate, along with Bill Old, Dr. Bill Old, a surgeon, and John Jennings. I guess we'd been there together maybe six or eight months, or whatever, we were giving a party one time and they invited the Drakes, who said, "May we bring our daughter?" We said, "Of course," and that's how Sally and I met. Dr. Drake, I think, took a shine to me, because he was a French professor and at that time I was driving a brand-new Peugeot, and he must have figured I had something on the ball. [Laughter] So I guess Sally and I had our first date maybe two or three months later. I wasn't that swift in those days, and I was working pretty hard at VMI. \ But anyway, after a year or two or marriage, two or three years, I guess, maybe just one year that we were married here in town, but it was my third year at VMI, I got real lucky and was offered a job at Colonial Williamsburg, and Sally and I 2 moved to Williamsburg. I spent, oh, I think fourteen and a half years, the best years of my life, working on the PR staff there. I had many, many experiences that still permeate my existence, learned a lot working for the Rockefeller organization there. Some of that experience came in very handy to me in my W&L-still does, come in handy up here, as well as some of the things I learned at VMI. So I think I've learned along as I've gone. When I moved to Williamsburg, we, of course, by that time had known a lot of the VMI family and, of course, I knew the W&L senior faculty through my father- in-law. So many of the people who I came to know early on, Frank Parsons, mostly through Press in those days, but Dr. Jenks and Dr. Starling, these were great friends of my father and mother-in-law, and Bob Huntley, at that time, was just a young professor, I guess, around here. But I met a lot of people that way, so when I say I married into the Washington & Lee family, that really is, I think, kind of the case. Years later, as people in Lexington tracked my career in Williamsburg, I guess it would have to be Bob Huntley who started me on my way back here. I'll tell you that story if that's of any interest. Warren: Sure. Sessoms: We were talking one day, I guess I was director of special events in Williamsburg for about ten of those years, and everything that happens down there tends to be a special event, I guess, but this must have been an occasion, probably our prelude to independence event, in which college presidents from the state were invited. I think Bob and Evelyn were there. He and I had a conversation in the palace gardens about Lexington, and one thing led to another, and two other people that were involved with us on a peripheral basis, one was a man named Justin Moore, who was the wonderful chairman of VEPCO in Virginia, but Justin was a chairman at one point, along with Ross Millhiser, who later was a W&L trustee, Ross being with Phillip Morris. They were trustees of something known as the 3 Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, which we all know Lea Booth ably pioneered and lead with Dr. Gaines for many, many years. Of course, I knew Dr. Gaines early on. As a matter of fact, one of my treasured wedding pictures is a picture of Mrs. Gaines and Mr. Mattingly. Mr. Mattingly gave the names in the receiving line at our wedding reception, and I have a picture of Mrs. Gaines coming through. I think Dr. Gaines at that point, this is 1962, was still alive but too ill to come to the wedding. So I go back a little way through the family, and I guess when people say to me, "How is that you left your Hampden-Sydney ties and worked all these years at Washington & Lee?" it really goes deeply into family roots on my wife's side. But back to coming up to W&L. I think Bob and Justin Moore and Ross Millhiser were all thick as thieves, great personal friends, and they were looking to the future of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and thought that I might be a worthy successor to Lea Booth in this job over in Lynchburg. So as a total shock, I guess, to my colleagues and friends in Williamsburg, where I'd raised both my daughters and was very happily ensconced in a brand-new house that I had built there, one day I'd decided that I needed something new to do with my life. So off we packed the family to Lynchburg, Virginia. That was 1980-I'm sorry, that was 1977, because I came here in 1983. About two and a half years later, Washington & Lee was in the final concluding stage of the previous big campaign. Now, W&L tried a campaign back in 1949 in concert with the then bicentennial, and had not succeeded, but the big campaign that we did in 1970 to sort of shore up the physical facade, along with the Colonnade historical national landmark, built the law school, built this library that you and I are sitting in today, that campaign which had been ten years in length and way too long by everybody's reckoning, was coming down toward the final two years, and it was decided over here, and I've always been grateful that it was a decision that Bob and Farris 4 Hotchkiss and their consultant made, was that they really hadn't contacted a broad enough group of alumni. They had really worked pretty much at the top of the pyramid, but the base had been pretty much ignored. I had just a little b~ of fundraising experience in two and a half years with the VFIC, Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, concentrating primarily in the corporate sector, some foundation work, but mostly businessmen in Virginia. VFIC, I think, still has about a thousand supporters and we led the nation in the average gift for college. So it was a successful operation. In fact, I quickly determined that the towering Lea Booth really didn't need me. He was so good and he still is good and remains one of my dearest and closest friends, and a man who, I must say, taught me what little I know about fundraising, along with Farris and others. But I think when we were coming toward the end of that campaign and recognizing that we still had a long way to go, it was decided to take me on as a little insurance, I think, to develop some area campaigns around the country and go a little deeper into the constituency. So as a result, I was offered a position which I accepted in about eleven seconds flat, because I really was very anxious to come back over the mountain. I was close now, I had gotten from Williamsburg back to Lynchburg. So now the next sixty miles was the easiest of all. My kids were in high school at that age, so we'd already rooted them up once, which was difficult, but now it was a little easier to come back. So off we came. I think I started to work at W&L on the first of November, 1980. So that's sixteen years, just about right now. Warren: I started on November 1st, last year. Sessoms: Well, now good for you. Warren: We share an anniversary. Sessoms: I'm fifteen up on you, Mame, but anyway. So that's how I got over to Lexington and it's been a honeymoon ever since. 5 Warren: So you arrived here in 1980. So you've seen some interesting things going on. Sessoms: Yeah. The last two years of the previous campaign were fascinating years, I thought, and I'll never forget the sense, especially in, I guess it was December of 1981, the campaign was over that month, and it was an awesome feeling to sit there in that development office, which at that time was the Howard House, where now we have personnel and Rob Fure's Alumni College Special Programs Office. All of us in development were jammed into that little house in those days. What I saw come in over the transom the last month of that campaign, I can't remember the number, how many millions it might have been, but a huge decade-long effort as coming to its conclusion and a lot of people were making gifts that last month, and it was an unforgettable experience to be part of that, the great joy that we had in going over the goal. I think I've gotten more of a thrill out of it then than I did in our more recent campaign, if only because it was newer to me, maybe, and I had not been involved in many of the-well, the cultivational work and the solicitation work, and therefore most of the gifts that were coming in were people whom I didn't really know that well. It was awesome, to me, as a relative newcomer. Now, having said "relative newcomer," the fact of the matter is, in the two and a half years that I worked in that job, I did go out and immediately-I remember Farris said to me, "I can't apologize and I won't apologize. No one has the time to take you by the hand, so you just have to get out there on your own and swim." Now, of course, I wasn't exactly wet behind the ears. I was in my early forties, I guess, and therefore I had a lot of experience and a lot of public relations positions and all, and I'd had two and a half years of direct fundraising solicitation experience with the VFIC. So I knew generally what I was about, and one of my first experiences-I can't imagine why I would remember this, but its the sort of thing you do remember. The 6 first trip I took on behalf of Washington & Lee in the month of November 1980, I hadn't been here even a full month, was to run down to Fort Worth and to Dallas, and at that time, the Texas economy was better than it is now, for sure, or-well, it's coming back now, but it was booming. The oil business was really going. So we were going to try to develop some area campaigns in those two cities. In Forth Worth, where I started, my chairman was to be a fellow by the name of Frank Bailey, class of 1966, who remains one of my finest and dearest friends, and I was just chatting with him last week-isn't that amazing, sixteen years ago, but he was calling me because of a young freshman here, this year's class, the class of '00, who he'd recruited and he was so pleased that the freshman had come to see me and we'd gotten to know each other. Anyway, in 1966, I presented myself in Frank Bailey's office, the Frank Bailey Grain Company in Fort Worth. In those days, I think I just had to sell myself, first of all, because who was I to come wandering in- Warren: "Who's this Hampden-Sydney guy?" [Laughter] Sessoms: Exactly. Who was this Hampden-Sydney guy? So it's really funny, remind me to tell you more about that, but in the days when I used to be introduced as the alumni secretary here, the first one or two times that happened, the chapter president would read my resume or read my biographical sketch and that happened about twice, and I said, "Just forget the VMI Hampden-Sydney background. People will assume I'm a Washington & Lee person." That's the way it's worked ever since. Warren: That's great. Sessoms: Really. But I went down to Fort Worth and I was in Frank's office, and I remember Dick Haynes, the trustee-well, at that time he was a trustee over in Dallas. He was certainly the lead attorney in the great Haynes & Boone law firm. Dick called, and I did not know Dick either, of course, and he called Frank Bailey and said, "A fellow named Dick Sessoms's in your office." This was around three o'clock 7 in the afternoon, and he said, "Yeah, he's right here, he just walked in the door." He said, "Could you put him on?" So I got on the line, and Dick said, "I am really sorry, but I've been called to Chicago and I got to catch a plane tonight, and if you want to see me about getting a campaign going in Dallas, you'd better get over here right away and maybe our friends in Fort Worth will let you come back over there, since we're only thirty miles apart." So that was okay with the Fort Worth folks, so I remember saying to Frank Bailey, "Well it's been a long time since Colonial Williamsburg travel had me in Dallas. I've been to Dallas a time or two, but it's been so many years ago." Dick worked that time at the First Interstate Bank Building. I said, "Tell me how to drive over." He said, "Well, you just get on Route 30 and just go on into town." I said, "Well, where's this address?" He said, "Don't worry, it's the tallest building in town, you won't miss it." I said, "Come on, give me a little bit more than that." He said, "No, that's all you get from me. Just go on over there." I thought, "Well, this is a part of getting hazed by Washington & Lee alumni. He's not going to help me here, so I'll have to find it on my own." So off I drove to Dallas, so help me gosh, I pulled right into town. I remember going through the Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy had been assassinated a few years earlier, and looking up I saw a great big tall building, I saw a parking lot, and I pulled into the parking lot and it turned out to be the First Interstate Bank Building. So from that point on, I've trusted everything that any Washington & Lee alumnus ever told me. I never doubted from that moment. [Laughter] Anyway, I got going with Dallas, and that night I went back, or a night or two later, back over in Fort Worth, and I caught up with Frank and some of his great 8 friends, Frank Bailey's friends. One of his great friends was Frank Young, now deceased, a classmate of his, who was in the Marshall R. Young Oil Company, had two brothers, George and Kelly, who are still living, a little bit older than Frank, but the three of them were great supporters, still are. I remember going to dinner that night at a wonderful restaurant in Fort Worth, and I never go to Fort Worth without frequenting this place, and you can ask any Texas kid from either Dallas or Fort Worth and they'll know all about Joe T. Garcia's. It's a wonderful restaurant in Fort Worth. So that night I went to Fort Worth and had dinner with Frank Young and Frank Bailey and one or two others. We were having a wonderful time, and they asked me about my first day of working with Forth Worth alumni. I had visited a fellow who later became a great friend, but maybe was a little suspicious of me because of my background, and had worked me pretty hard that day, I thought, because I was trying to immediately get a gift and he wasn't having much of it. So after a couple of drinks in this wonderful Fort Worth bar, they said, "Tell us about your afternoon. What did you think of old So-and-so?" I'm not going to give you that name, because this guy is still alive and he's a good friend of mine now, but in that first instance, I said, "Well, he's kind of full of it." I said a couple of things I probably wouldn't have said about him had I been sober, maybe. But they thought that was outrageously funny, but apparently they agreed with my assessment. I remember Frank Young looking at Frank Bailey saying, "You know, this guy's not like those other development people at that school. He's telling us what it's like." So to make a very long story short, and I've made this story too long, I got back to campus, and about a week later I got a phone call from President Huntley. He said, "I want you to go back to Fort Worth and Dallas and do some more drinking with your friends." I said, "What could that be?" 9 He said, "I've got a check in my hand here from Frank Young for $400,000." [Laughter] So I said, "Well, Bob, I'm sure I didn't have that much to do with that," but that was a great way to start my career as a development officer at Washington & Lee, in honor of my visit. It was a gift, I'm sure, that he was going to make anyhow. Warren: That's marvelous. Sessoms: It was a great way for me to start. People always ask me, "Why do you spend so much time in Texas?" I said, "It's kind of like why does Willie Sutton rob banks? That's where the money is." At least that's where the money was at that particular time. So with that as a kind of development beginning, Farris and I began a long and dear relationship. We've been working together and are best friends for, what, sixteen years now. We don't see that much of each other out of the office. We probably see so much of each other inside and we've dealt with so many issues together over these years, and I think whenever you find the strong development program, you'll find the kind of maturity that we have here. At least it's my observation that schools that have strong development programs have great continuity in their senior people. So Farris and I kind of-I guess my sixteen and how many for him, thirty, I guess. Warren: Can you count that high for Farris? Sessoms: Yes, he's up there. He came to work here in the late sixties, so he's closing in on thirty years now, probably in another year or two. Isn't that amazing? Sometimes I wonder how he can stagger to another homecoming or another event. It does become a way of life, and it isn't work and it never has been for me. I think enthusiasm in what you do, if you enjoy what you do, you're going to be generally good at it. So working here, I've always felt that way. I've enjoyed the time. 10 So anyway, the background for those first couple of years working in the development office and doing area campaigns all over the country, we did twenty- two area campaigns in 1978 and '79 and '80, in those years. No, I'm getting my chronology wrong. I guess '80 and '81. Then I continued in '82. At that time I began to do more corporation and foundation work. One of my early assignments there was to do the beginning research on what turned out to be the Lenfest Center. We were anxious to build a performing arts center. As I used to always say to people- I'm quoting Buddy Atkins now-fine arts at Washington & Lee was in a phone booth in those days, and we were determined to do something about that. I remember doing the early research on potential foundations that might support us. Went several times to the Owen Corporation Foundation, Owen Foundation in Minneapolis-St. Paul. I think I made three trips up there at one point. I came back and told Bob Huntley I really thought I had them sold on the whole project. They were only interested in doing the entire building. And there's an Owen Hall over at Roanoke College. So they were building theaters, or they had previously. So we did a lot of research in those days to figure out where on Earth we could raise the kind of money that would take to build a performing arts center. There were a lot of people who doubted that we could raise it within our own family, and indeed it turned out to be a very difficult task. We raised money for go,,..sh, what, four, five and six years. I guess we had gotten up to about $6 million before/ Jerry Lenfest came into the picture. I presume you have that story. & Warren: I've talked to erry. I've talked to John Wilson and I've got Frank. I've got all three of them telling the story. Sessoms: You've heard that many times. Warren: That's a wonderful-and they all tell the same story. That's what I like. I know I'm on to something when they all tell the same story. 11 Sessoms: I wonder if I have any different version on it, but you know-oh, I won't get into it, because I wouldn't want to tamper with the official version. [Laughter] Warren: When you get such consistency, you do begin to feel you're getting the official version. One thing I would like to talk about with you- Sessoms: Yeah, I'm droning on here. Warren: No, you're doing great. But you're making me think about all kinds of things. I have had the honor of interviewing a number of these major donors and a lot of other people who've gone to this school. What is it about this place that makes people so generous years out of it? Sessoms: That's a many-faceted-I guess the answer to that, there are many facets. I think of the wonderful Jimmy Leyburn, Dean Leyburn's quote that we used in the campaign. He'd asked the same rhetorical question, "What is it about this place that makes us love it, the moonlight walk on the Colonnade, and all those wonderful things?" I've always had an immigrant's kind of a feeling about Washington & Lee. I mean, I immigrated here, and immigrants love the place in ways that those who are of the place will never know. You're so proud to be involved and pleased to be here, and that sort of thing. I think it has to do with the close the relationships of faculty and students, and administrators and students, just close personal relationships that people develop. Of course, the great courses and the victories and all the things that Leyburn referred to, the going down the road and all the things that sort of make up the experience of being at Washington & Lee, and I think that's remained true in our more recent years when the school was a little bit larger and we've had women introduced to the undergraduate divisions as well as the law school. I think this is a special little town. I think it's a special place in the Shenandoah Valley. I know John Wilson used to refer often to the architecture of the school, almost in the way that it's shaped the way people felt about it. He used to 12 refer to that little ridge line, this little college on that ridge line. Blue Ridge Valley, Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Scotch-Irish coming down the valley road, that kind of fierce independent streak, building the cabins and the churches and the schools, this is a great pioneer school, a frontier school. I think the root is so deep, historic root is so deep. So when you get through the history of the place that we take almost for granted, I really feel that, it's all around us, yet we do almost in a way take it for granted, Washington's saving gift in 1796, two hundred years ago this year, and then, of course, moving ahead by sixty or some years, sixty or seventy years to General Lee's leadership and all that's come thereafter, which we've always had .~ ' .j great leaders. I think of the leadership of Mil<-e Denny, the president early on before I\ Gaines. Then of course, Gaines, had a great twenty-nine-year run as president. Gaines, in my view, really put this place on the map in a way that perhaps it needed to be or perhaps in a way that.it had not been previously, and I'm not sure has been there yet, or since. We're certainly widely known in many educational circles. We don't have a national [unclear] alumni like, say, Notre Dame does, but we tend to be known well in the right places. Dr. Gaines was an educator, if I could use that word. He entertained the greats and the near-greats at Lee House. To look at the guest book at the Lee House during his years there, and I guess there's probably not a guest book, if there was one we should've developed it years ago, I guess. But I read "Penny" Gaines' book, Dr. Gaines' son, Pendleton Gaines, who had been president of a college out in Arizona, and he wrote a chapter about growing up in Lee House. He published in that chapter of his the people that his mother and father had entertained during his time there. Well, it was a "Who's Who" of Washington politicians, governors, ambassadors of foreign nations, great writers, poets, newspaper editors, people who were influential and who were opinion-makers all over the country. I don't know that we've ever had an occupant of Lee House that 13 did that for the college. Now, Gaines was great copy, too. Everybody that's listened to his speeches heard his great eloquence. But Gaines was a thoughtful man who seemed to put in context his mission here as president of this great Southern institution. He had a great feeling for it and its place in American higher education, and he articulated that so well. Washington & Lee made editorial pages more so in those days than I think we do now, and I suspect it was because of Dr. Gaines' great standing in America, not just in the educational community, he was simply well known. Warren: What do you mean it made the editorial pages? Sessoms: I mean people would write-maybe I dreamed this up, because I can't produce the evidence, if that's the case, but I have this sense that Washington & Lee was held in this great high esteem because of its leader, because of this man who everybody loved to hear. I was over at the Greenbriar Hotel within the last two years, and they have a nice little museum not many people know about, but it's in the area of where General Lee used to stay, those rooms in that particular wing, Cottage Row, is still there. I was struck as I went through that museum, looked at the photographs, where you see the great Duchess of Windsor or the great VIP visitors that they had in the early-well, not the early days, but earlier days in this century, and in just about every other picture frame, Gaines was in the picture. That should tell you something. He walked with the mighty. That had an enormous impact on this university in ways that I don't think people recognized then, and perhaps I'm trying to recognize it now. Warren: Dick, I'm just sitting here absolutely fascinated, because you didn't know Francis Pendleton Gaines. Sessoms: Well, I knew him barely. Warren: Did you? Sessoms: Yes, I knew him barely. 14 Warren: But you didn't experience all this yourself. You have absorbed this, sort of like I have. I have heard the Francis Pendleton Gaines stories. Is that your experience that people bring him up when they talk about Washington & Lee? Sessoms: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I think the alumni that we've raised all this money from over the last two campaigns revered Gaines and revered Dean Gilliam. In fact, I have a saying that no one else uses, but early on, in working, when I became director of major gifts and was working with other gift officers and, in fact, helping Farris hire the very capable young staff that we have today, Tom Jennings and David Long and Mike Boyd and younger people that are so good now, early on I remember saying to my fellow gift officers at a meeting, "I don't want to hear you or anyone else claim that you got such and such a gift. We don't get-" You know, the accumulation of experiences leads up to someone making the kind of major gift that I described earlier, that Frank Young was making. Now, it's a cute little story for me to think that I had a tiny credit in there. I was just a messenger at the last at the end of the line, the food chain there. But when a great gift comes in from someone of enormous proportions, I say, "Well, that's a Gaines and Gilliam gift." I like to think that some day, long after all of us are dead and buried, someone's going to say, "That's an Elrod," "That's a Wilson gift," or maybe, "That's a Sessoms gift." It's the sort of thing, I think you have a great cumulative sort of experience here. I think it's because the school has a very deep historic root that people feel the history and know that it's not going to wash away with the next fad, and we know we're going to be strong. Strength begets strength. So you're adding to this cumulative experience and cumulative enterprise, and it's been a great procession over almost two and half centuries now, when you trace our family back to 1749. So the great gifts that have come have come from people who feel and who believe that their gift can make a difference. Why do people make these major gifts? 15 Good question. I think it's because if you get them involved enough with the university, you don't have to ask, they step forward, because they are aware. That's the Jerry Lenfest experience. He asked Frank-well, Frank Parsons was talking about Gray Castle's gift at the reunion. I'm telling that story again now, but it's so apropos, telling the story about the gift of what is now the Castle House, but at that time a man named Joe N_ _ lived up there, in the house above Liberty Hall athletic fields, next to Liberty Hall. Joe was a VMI man and had been for years. When he and his wife decided to move over to the Westminster Canterbury and that house was free, he offered it Washington & Lee, first refusal. Maybe I will tell you this story, because this is a story that you wouldn't have gotten from John Wilson, because I don't think John Wilson knows this story. The truth is now going to come out. John Wilson and Jim Ballengee, who was then the rector of the board, initially did not want that house. You know the one that I'm talking about now? Warren: Describe it for posterity. Sessoms: For posterity, it's the house that sits above the now Liberty Hall athletic fields and is within two hundred yards of Liberty Hall itself. It's a painted white brick, slate roof on five acres of land up there. It had been owned by Joseph D. N_ _, who had been the executive secretary of the VMI Foundation and the man who raised the money for the Marshall Foundation, to get that whole operation started. I had known Joe N_ _ during my VMI days quite well. In any event, that house was going to go on the market. The VMI Foundation had agreed to buy it, but Joe wanted to offer it to W&L, wanted to give W&L first refusal, because he felt that it was so close to Washington & Lee property and we were beginning to sort of fence him out. We were developing athletic fields in what was his front yard. He had used it for entertainment purposes up there, many VMI 16 parties over the years. There was a heated swimming pool out in back, and it's a pretty nice piece of property. So he had approached, I guess, Frank Parsons and he told Farris and so forth, and they had, with great enthusiasm, relayed this up the line to John Wilson, who was in his early years as president. John consulted with Jim Ballengee, and between the two of them, pretty well concluded that the $300,000 asking price or thereabout, that we could use that $300,000 for better things and we really didn't need this property. Farris and Frank, I'm sure, were a bit disappointed, but that was the way the cookie was going to crumble, and I don't think they were going to fight City Hall over that, but I was not so encumbered. So what happened was that I got a phone call from Joe N____ in dismay, and he said, "I probably should've called you first, but it looks like Washington & Lee is not going to buy the house." At that time I was serving as alumni secretary. Joe said, "I figured you would've wanted this house for all the receptions and things that you might've used it for, for homecoming and Parents Weekend and other things. I said, "Oh, Joe, indeed I would've wanted it, I just would love to have it." So at that point it looked like it was a lost ball in the high weeds, as they say, but because I was fearless in those days and didn't know better, I began-well, we had a meeting, we had a board meeting coming up. We had a Development Council, and I happened to talk to a couple of people who were on that Development Council, who later became trustees, but they weren't trustees at that time, and one was Gray Castle. The other was Bill Lemon over in Roanoke, and another fellow at that meeting was Ted Van Leer. The three of them really made that happen. They had more to do-do you need to change the tape? Warren: Let me flip the tape over.