Walker interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: Okay. Let's see. You've mentioned about eighteen things I want to pursue here, but I'll go for the one dear to my heart. I'm an English major, too. Walker: Ah, yes. Warren: Tell me about being an English major. Walker: Well, I was known as the phantom English major, which was not good. I don't remember how I picked English, and, in retrospect, there were only three or four disciplines that had comps in those days, and English was one of them, and I don't know how many times toward the end of my four years I thought back what an idiot I had been to get myself into this terrible mess. It was a fascinating department. I think Sev Duvall, in many respects, is my most memorable character. I was just awestruck by him. George Ray was there. I studied 19 Shakespeare under Ray. He was pretty young when I started, and so I think the people in my class had kind of an affinity to him just based on age, and it turned out, when I joined White & Case in 1987, his daughter Jenny was the recruitment director in New York for White & Case, and that was also about the time that I became involved, seriously involved, again in alumni matters, and my son went off a few years thereafter, so we struck up quite a renewal relationship around Jenny. Of course—oh, for God's sake. I can't think of his name, the English professor of all English professors. Warren: Sid Coulling. Walker: Sid Coulling. Sid Coulling was there, and I have my own Coulling story. Warren: Please. Walker: Well, it's sort of a personal thing. As I said, I flunked out my freshman year of undergraduate and had to apply for reinstatement, which, fortunately, Eddie Atwood was nice enough to let me back in. There was a tradition in those days, at least we thought there was a tradition, that the number-one graduate in the law class, if they had an A average, was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, and I think, at least I thought for a long time, that that was really the only place in the United States where a graduate student could get into Phi Beta Kappa, which is basically an undergraduate thing. I did finish number one in my law class. I mentioned earlier that Rob and I finished like three-one- thousandths of a point apart, I think, and mine was like 4.001, and his was 3.99- whatever-8. So I was just over an A average. The story got back to me sometime thereafter, not long after all this happended— I was not invited to join Phi Beta Kappa—that when my name came up, and Sid Coulling was then the president or whatever of the Phi Beta, he ran the chapter, that he asked somebody if that was the same Walker that had been an English major several years earlier, and they confirmed that it was, and he said, "Not on my life." For all the right reasons. Certainly during my undergraduate years, I was the antithesis of a Phi 20 Beta Kappa student. At the time I was very angry about that, but I got over it pretty quickly. I realized about three years later that all that stuff only helped get you your first job, and then nobody really cared about it anymore unless you went back into academia. But he was there. Jim Boatwright, who some years later died in Key West, was on the faculty. Warren: Tell me about them as teachers. Who was really memorable as a teacher? Walker: My most memorable, and I don't really remember why, was Sev Duvall. I took a course from him, I think, my first semester—well, it doesn't matter what semester, I guess, my junior year, on Southern novels. He's almost a caricature, to me, of a Southern professor—the accent, his look. He clearly, as much as any professor I ever remember having, was in love with his subject. He loved everything about what he was doing, and it glowed through him, how happy he was doing what he was doing, and it was kind of enchanting. Actually, that course might have been my sophomore year, because he was one of the reasons I decided to major in English. He made a huge impression on me. Sid Coulling was always just sort of a mystery to all of us. He was so smart, and I think we were, in a different way, not as warm a way as with Sev Duvall, but I think all of us were in awe of Coulling. He obviously was so incredibly intelligent, and so much that he said we didn't really understand, not that he wasn't a great professor, it's just when he'd get off on some of the things on which he'd get off, you'd kind of wonder where he was. They were just a very, very impressive group of people, perhaps more so, at least to me, than any other discipline I met there. I was never very good at science, so I never got too into the science group, other than Jim Starling, who was just a favorite of everybody's. "Well, Mr. Walker, consult your friend in the corner." He kept a dictionary in the room, and that was "your friend in the corner," if you didn't know a 21 word. The English professors were all very conventionally dressed. They were just— they were a great group. And other than comps, it was a great experience. Warren: Did Sev Duvall bring his dog to class? Walker: I don't remember. He was known for his dog in more recent years, I know from my son and from the alumni magazine. I don't remember that he had a dog then. If he did, it's gone to me now. Warren: I just think that's so charming. I see him going off into his office. Walker: And it's such a beautiful dog. Yeah. He and his dog have become, I think, joined at the hip somehow in everybody's mind, as well as in fact. Warren: I think it's very funny that the head of security now has a puppy and is taking the puppy with him everywhere. Walker: There were a lot of kids that had dogs at W&L, and I have a son who's a sophomore—a junior at Sewanee now, and it's sort of the norm at Sewanee. There are hundreds of dogs running around the Sewanee campus during class time while their masters are in class. There are dogs everywhere. That can only happen in places like W&L and Sewanee. Warren: Were there any particular places you hung out? Walker: Oh, yeah. Doc's Corner Grill, which is cater-cornered from the post office. I guess that's still the main post office. The College Inn, I guess, was the biggest sort of official hang-out, which is now the bakery, I guess. It's in that little stretch. I'm not sure what's—it used to be the CI. The Central Lunch, which was—oh, what was the guy's name that used to run the Central Lunch? He had a glass eye, and he was a real strange character. And there was another place right across—next to the CI and across from the Central—I can't remember what it was called—which had the best pool table and pinball machines in town. For the people that liked to do that, that was a hang-out. Warren: Is that Jabbo's? Walker: No. 22 Warren: I think Jabbo's was gone by the time you got there. Walker: Yeah. That was gone. And then, in a sense, I guess, the Lyric Theater and the State Theater were kind of hangouts. There wasn't a whole lot to do in Lexington in those days, other than the fraternity house. Some movies were—they were usually eighth-run movies, but they were pretty popular. Warren: They're still eighth-run movies. [Laughter] Walker: One of the things to do in those days was called the double flick. I think the movies were at seven and nine, so you'd go to the seven at one, and then you'd get out and run to the nine at the another. But the most popular spot, I guess, all in all, was the restaurant-bar kind of thing, was the CI, which was upstairs. They served pizzas and spaghetti, I guess, sort of a typical Italian kind of place, college Italian kind of place. Downstairs wasn't opened my freshman year. By the time I left law school, there was a big downstairs. It was a bar, kind of fancy bar, with more eating, and then upstairs was the VMI room. Every place had a VMI room. At Doc's, the VMI room was a back room. At the Quid, the Liquid Lunch, I can't remember where it was. I guess it must have been up upstairs somewhere. But every place had a separate VMI room. Warren: What do you mean, a VMI room? Walker: Well, they couldn't take off their bLewse, and they couldn't drink beer in public. I don't think they could drink beer anywhere, but they did, and the schools all knew they did, and they all knew they did, but they just didn't do it where you could see them through a window. So they would have a room at each of these places where they would go with their dates or just together, and they'd take off, or at least unzip or take off their tunic, whatever it is, get comfortable, and they would drink beer and whatever, party, but because they couldn't do it out in polite company, they always had to have a back room or an upstairs or downstairs room where they could do it, which always seemed kind of crazy because everybody—I mean, as I say, the schools all knew 23 they were there. You'd have members of the faculty out in the main room while the cadets were back wherever they were doing their thing. But it's just the way life was. Warren: I grew up in Annapolis. I know the scene very well. Walker: Ugly. I was saying to somebody, as matter of fact, coming in the office this morning—I've got that W&L bumper sticker on my car—D-U-B-Y. Warren: Me, too. Walker: And people stop me constantly, "What in the world is that?" In fact, I was at church six or eight months ago, and a lady in our parish—we were in the parking lot leaving at the same time—came over to me, and she said, "I've been meaning to ask you this. I see that thing every week. It's driving me nuts. What in the world does it mean?" Of course people sort of struggle to pronounce it. And I said, "It's my alma mater." And she said, "What?" I said, "W&L, Washington and Lee." And she turned beet red, and she said, "Oh, my God. I'm so embarrassed." I said "Why?" She said, "I went to Mary Baldwin. It never occurred to me." [Laughter] Warren: Well, she was a good Mary Baldwin girl if she blushed. Walker: Yeah. Right. So in any event, it's— Warren: One of my favorite interviews that I did was with Charley McDowell, Jr. Walker: I can imagine. Warren: And we had a big discussion about how you spell W&L, because he never said "Washington and Lee." He always just said "W&L." So when I saw that bumper sticker, I bought one for me and for him, and sent it. Walker: Oh, I think it's great. I think it's absolutely great. Whoever thought it up was a genius. 24 Warren: I think so, too. I took it home, and my husband and I started trying to figure out how you do UVA, and all the others, trying to figure out. Walker: I think schools are jeaLews that they can't do it. Warren: It's probably an industry coming up here. Fancy Dress. Walker: Ah, yes, Fancy Dress. I think a bigger deal in those days than it is today. Warren: Was this in the dining hall when you were there? Walker: Yeah, I think all seven years. I don't think it was ever in the gym. I don't remember that it was ever in the gym. Usually there'd be a big concert for Fancy Dress weekend, and that was usually in the gym, although one time, for some reason, we had it in the VMI field house. I don't remember what that was. Maybe the dance was in the gym. But all the recollections I have of Fancy Dress are that they were in Evans, which was much nicer than the gym, but those are the only two places in town it could have been, that would have held it. It was a big deal. It was after exams. We weren't on the trimester system then, so we went home for Christmas, and we had to go back and take exams, and then the big blowout was Fancy Dress, and it was famous, like Dartmouth Winter Carnival or a handful of others. It was a famous weekend, and we were probably as much caught up in its fame as in the reality of it in those days. The women came from all over. That was one of the weekends that—the four big weekends were openings, Fancy Dress, springs, and finals, and those were the weekends, if you had a home-town honey or a girl hundreds of miles away, that was one of the weekends she would come down, and it sort of started Thursday and went through Sunday. It was always a big orchestra, at least a big orchestra, and once or twice we had two bands, although I think that was more popular after I'd left than before. Particularly when I was an undergraduate, although rock-and-roll was the thing, people still knew how to dance enough when they got to college that you could have just a big swing orchestra and nothing more, and people could still dance to it, where, 25 today, if you have a big swing orchestra and nothing else, half the kids can't dance because they don't know how. The dance itself was a big deal, but it was more the weekend than the dance itself. The dance itself was, at that point, no longer a costume ball. That was already pretty much gone. The stories I've heard, which I'm sure you've heard more than I, were that ten years before I got there, maybe even five years before I got there, you would go be sized somewhere, but you never knew what you were going to be until you went to pick up your costume, you and your date's costume. I never wore a costume to Fancy Dress. I went every year—I know I went every year as an undergraduate. I probably went every year as a law student, and I just wore white tie and tails. I think that committee members, at least, probably came in some kind of thematic costume, Old South or whatever it might have been. I don't recall that there was ever a theme ball, and I don't recall many people wearing costumes. I think of it as just a black-tie, a big fancy black-tie dinner dance, a dance. Then there'd be—the fraternity houses had parties every night of Fancy Dress, usually with a big band, or not necessarily big, but a well-known band. The Thornton Sisters or the Hot Nuts were popular around then. There was a group around the South called the Thirteen Screaming Niggers, which was, I guess, because of the name it was funnier than the band itself, but they were popular then. Warren: Who were the Hot Nuts? Walker: You don't know the Hot Nuts? Warren: I do, but I want you to tell me about them. Walker: Oh, Mame, they still play at Washington and Lee. Warren: I know, but you tell me. Walker: They were a group—Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts—out of Chapel Hill, and they still drive that—I'd swear it's still the same van they show up in, who, in an era of, I suppose, still relative propriety, popularized what then seemed terribly dirty, off-color 26 lyrics. By today's standards, what we see on television every night, it was really pretty stupid, but they were very popular, and they were almost impossible to get back in those days, because it was the height of their—their records were selling nationally, and they were sort of sweeping the nation. So they were very difficult to get, but they played once in a while back then. I think they play more at W&L today than they did then, and Doug Clark, by God, is still leading the group. Warren: Who else? What other big entertainers came? Walker: Well, Ian and Sylvia, because my era included that one or two years of folk music. I remember Ian and Sylvia’s concert. Probably to this day the best concert I ever heard was the Lettermen, who did a concert either my junior or senior year—no, my freshman or sophomore year, because I was not there with my wife, and I didn't date anybody else after we met my junior year. A phenomenal concert. Dionne Warwick did one of the concerts when I was there, and she was very popular. Ian and Sylvia are memorable because it was Fancy Dress. There had been a terrible snowstorm, and this had to be my sophomore year, and they couldn't get over the mountain. They were coming from the Roanoke Airport, Roanoke or D.C., I don't know which, and everybody was in their seats. Somebody did something for an hour, and they kept coming to the microphone and announcing that they just got a phone call and they were making their way there, and they ended up walking into this with their band and setting up while everybody sat there, and they started sort of singing one at a time. Somebody would just—while they got tuned up, they'd play something while everybody else got ready. It was just a neat—kind of a net experience, neat concert because of the way it all came about. And that was the weekend that Central Virginia got absolutely snowed in. It was the heaviest snowfall to that date in recorded history, supposedly, and the entire Eastern part of the state was just absolutely shut down. This started, I think, Friday, and it sort of went straight through Sunday. By Sunday, all the roads were closed. You 27 couldn't get—well, you couldn't get out of Rockbridge County, much less anywhere else. And I had a date with my hometown honey, who had to be back at Jackson, which was then the women's section of Tufts, for registration Monday morning, or Monday sometime, and we ended up, along with one of my fraternity brothers, later one of my roommates, who had a date with a girl from Dickinson College, I think, who had to get back. We ended up getting in my Volkswagen and driving to D.C., which in those days was about a three-and-a-half hour drive. It took seven hours to get there. When we got there, National [Airport] was still closed, and we ended up staying in a hotel, which was impossible to find because everything was full, in Alexandria, I guess, that night, and they finally got out sometime the next day. Incredible snowstorm. Some of the girls from Sweet Briar and Hollins were still at Washington and Lee on Wednesday, the following Wednesday, because they couldn't get back, or used it as an excuse not to go back. But Fancy Dress was—I have very warm memories of Fancy Dress, as I said earlier, I think as much probably because of what it was as the particular weekend, but we always had a good time. Warren: One of the other uniquely Washington and Lee things is the Mock Convention. Did you get involved with that? Walker: No. In fact, I didn't go to the convention, which was 1968, my senior year. I never got involved in it, and I didn't go. I might have been out of town the weekend of the convention itself, and I don't really remember why. Nobody in my fraternity was involved with it, which is probably a big part of it. Warren: One of the things that I was intrigued by as I've been looking for photographs in the book was that [Richard M.] Nixon was on campus that year for the ODK Founders Day talk. Did you go to that? Walker: No. I was tapped for ODK in law school, but I was nowhere near ODK as an undergraduate. I remember that Claude Kirk [phonetic], who was then the governor of 28 Florida, was the keynote speaker at that '68 convention. I don't remember Nixon being there. Warren: He didn't come for Mock Convention. Walker: No. I understand. But I don't remember that. Warren: At first I thought I was looking at Mock Convention, then I said, "Wait a minute. I thought the candidates weren't allowed to come to Mock Convention," then I later figured out from Calyx that he was there for Founders Day. Walker: Which would have been before. Warren: Yes. Walker: Yeah, because Founders Day was normally in like February, I think. Warren: January 19th. Walker: Yeah. Warren: Robert E. Lee's birthday. Walker: That would make sense, yes. Warren: We just had it. Were there any other speakers that you remember from your time? I know Barry Goldwater was there when you were there. Walker: Yeah. Who was the fellow that wrote All the King's Men—Robert Penn Warren. I remember hearing him speak, and I remember being very impressed by him. He read his poetry and spoke, and I loved All the King's Men. I loved that book. Other speakers while I was there. I remember some speakers from law school. I don't remember any other, in particular, speakers that were there when I was an undergraduate. Warren: Let's go on to law school. You were in Tucker Hall, right? Walker: We were in Tucker Hall. Roy was sort of designing the law school while we were there. We were not the last class in Tucker Hall, but we were one of the last. There were probably three more after we left, and to this day it seems a tragedy to me that they moved the law school off of the Hill. It's clear to me, although I'm assured by 29 people like Lash LaRue and Joe Ulrich, who were friends of mine, Uncus McThenia, they say I'm romanticizing, that it really wasn't the way I remember it. And part of my romanticism, probably, is again the fact that I was a seven-year man, so I had ties to the undergraduate school that most law students didn't. But with all of that, it seems to me that the law school was much more a part of the university then than it is today. It's very clear to me today, talking to both college students and law students, that you can go to three years of law school there and never have any thought that you're a part of that thing up on the Hill. You're just a part of the law school. Warren: It's perceived that way. Walker: And that's sort of sad. We had the white lawn chairs in those days, which were lined up against the front wall of Tucker Hall, and then, in the spring, they'd just sort of be carried out on the lawn, and only law students could sit in them. Law students were very much—they weren't a role model, I don't think that'd be a fair way to put it, but all the undergraduate students—you were aware that they were there. You were conscious that these older men, more responsible, more mature people, were around, and I think that it—I don't suppose I could define it, but I think to this day it had a measurably positive impact on life at the university. Certainly was a better experience for the law students that experienced the university than what they get today. I still think if they could find a way to move at least half of the classes or something on the Hill so that the law students would have a meaningful presence on the Hill, that it would be much better for the law students and probably better for the college. It's a shame. Warren: It's very clear to me that there's a big difference, whether people realize it or not. Walker: I was there—as I said, '68 was—I think My Lai was in '68. I think that's right. I had deferred—I had taken ROTC largely because we had a guaranteed deferment for law school, and I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I would have if I'd had to, obviously, 30 but I didn't want to. So by going to law school, we were guaranteed three years, and it worked for me. The war ended, basically, the beginning of my senior year in law school, and I ended up going in for eighty-nine days of active duty and was then discharged from active duty, anyway. So we had a huge number of vets that were coming back. I had in my class probably as many as ten VMI grads, which was very unusual, very unusual in those days. But these were guys that were coming back, had the G.I. Bill, although it wasn't that big a deal in those days by then, but they knew Washington and Lee because they had spent four years in Lexington. We had a great time in law school. I was married. I got married at the end of June graduating from the college. I had a job lined up. I told you earlier I was working at the College Town Shop, and Red Patton [phonetic], who was then running the College Town Shop, one of my dear, dear friends, had agreed to let me work that summer. So we got married, took our honeymoon, raced back to Lexington. We had an apartment in Bean's Bottom, which was a great coup. Bill Bean was a good friend of Red's, and when we told Red we were going to get married and come back, he set me up with Bill Bean, who just happened to have—the day we went to see him, had received word from whoever was living in what became our apartment that they were leaving, and he gave us the apartment. Those were the most sought-after places, literally the most sought-after places out there, unattainable, for the most part, by undergrads. He only rented to law students and faculty. But we had a magnificent apartment out there. We had three bedrooms, one bath, on the second floor of the second building from the bridge. We were unfortunately there for the great flood of 1969. Warren: I was about to say, I think—but you were on second floor? Walker: Yeah. We had five feet of water on the second floor. Warren: Oh, my God, worse than last year. 31 Walker: We had moved into the apartment. All of our wedding presents were—most of our wedding presents that we weren't using, and we didn't use a lot, were in barrels, still packed, professionally packed. We must have had ten barrels of china and silver and crap that were stored in the extra bedroom and in the closets and whatnot in there, all of which ended up just dissolving in the water. That night Bill came down. Mickey Philipps lived underneath us. No, Mickey was in the building next to us, on the ground floor. He was the university photographer forever. I'm sure you must have come across his name. Warren: No. Mickey Philipps? Walker: Mickey Philipps. He was single. He was emotionally more student than non- student. I don't think he had an official faculty role in terms of teaching anything, although he might have taught photography, but he was the official—what's the guy's name now, Hinely? Warren: Pat Hinely. Walker: He was the Pat Hinely of his day. Warren: I've never heard his name. Walker: And he was there for ten or twelve years. Warren: Well, I must have lots of his photographs, and I've never seen his name. Walker: You must have hundreds of them. Warren: He didn't use a rubber stamp on the back. Walker: Mickey lived downstairs next to us. Warren: Do you know where he is today? Walker: No. I have no idea, although I would— Warren: Had he graduated? Did he graduate? Walker: I think he was a W&L grad. He must have been. I don't know that for a fact. Fran and Mickey were buddies. If you get back to Fran, he'll probably know where Mickey is. 32 Immediately below us was actually a lawyer who works right across the street, who was not a W&L grad. How he and I ended up in the same town, I'll never understand. The other name I remember in our building was Bill—he was the swimming coach there for years, Bill Sterns, who I understand is still in Lexington and owns half the town. My wife and I were counselors at a girls' camp in northern Michigan the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. We had just gotten back into town that day. We came back early for moot court, which was sort of an honor and an activity in the law school, and Rob and Lanay Hartmann, I mentioned earlier, my best friend, I don't remember where they'd spent the summer, but they'd been back for four or five days, and they were living in town, actually right near Bea Copper, Bea Copper's house, in an apartment, a garage apartment, and with their son, they drove out that night because we'd just gotten in, and we had dinner. We later concluded that Rob and Lanay were probably the last car to get back in—I forget what the official name of the road was, but we always called it the Goshen Road, that got back in that night, and Rob said that when he got down by the old mill there, the water was about up to his door, but he'd gotten down to that last flat part, and he'd gotten far enough into it that he couldn't go back and just had to keep going forward. The water was literally rising. You could see it that the point. But they got through, and we still weren't taking this very seriously. We had not been there for the four or five days of rain that led up to it, but it was just unthinkable that what ultimately happened could happen. Bill came down about, I don't know, one o'clock in the morning, maybe, and knocked on our door and woke us up. We had gotten to sleep, so we weren't too worried about it. The house next to us, which was the first one, the most downstream house, was starting to shake real badly, and they were worried the houses were going to go, and there were big trees, trucks, cars, we had a two-story house float by us 33 ultimately that night. I mean, big debris was starting to come down. At that point, he wasn't so worried about our safety as just saying, "Wake up, be aware, sort of keep an eye on it." An hour or so later, when it first became clear that—by that time the ones downstairs were totally under water, and they weren't even back. The guys that lived downstairs, Mickey was there, because he lived there full time, but the students down below us, who were classmates of mine, weren't even back in town. They didn't have anything, so it didn't really matter. So sometime in the night, when it became clear that we might get some water in the apartment, the first thing we did is we took drawers, we took the stereo and whatnot and put it up on the beds, never thinking it could be more than, you know, a foot or six inches, because the top story of those apartments were all like two and a half feet above the driveway. I don't remember why. That's just the way they were built. Eventually water came in front of the house as well as behind it, and when we finally stopped going in to bring stuff out, it was because enough water and debris was rushing past the front of the house and about two and a half feet deep. It wasn't safe to walk into the front to bring stuff out. But I put most stuff up on beds. We finally got most of the clothes out and tossed in the trunk of our car, and we ended up going up and spending the night at Al and Jan Orgain’s house, who were also law students, and they were up higher on the Hill and they never got wet. They were actually a little higher than Bill's house, Bill's own house, which was out there. It turned out we had about five feet one inch inside, because there was a mud line ultimately. Amazing things happened. Our refrigerator was in a cove in the kitchen. The refrigerator had moved out of that cove, and there wasn't room on each side to put your hands to pull it out. It had moved partway across the kitchen. All the beds, of course, ended up floating, so they dumped everything that was on the beds. 34 And virtually everything we owned was wet. There was nothing higher than five feet in that apartment. It was a pretty devastating experience at the time. We had befriended a couple in Buena Vista, who had been operating a restaurant for a couple of years in an old Southern mansion over there. I don't remember the name of it. It was a great restaurant. The guy had sort of a secret recipe for steak. It was one of these places you'd take a bottle, you'd go and sit in the living room, and they'd come in and take your bottle and mix you drinks on a silver tray, then take you in the dining room. Very popular place. Warren: Doesn't sound like Buena Vista. Walker: No, it didn't. We somehow had become—these people had befriended us, and they ended up, they had bought—by the time this all happened, they had bought the old—it's now a retirement home. It was then called the—it wasn't Southern Inn. Warren: The Mayflower? Walker: Yeah, the Mayflower, up there on Main Street, and they gave us a room in the Mayflower, and we were in that room probably for ten days. When they first went into our apartment, the first thing was they wanted to get the snakes out, because there were snakes everywhere. And then they literally went in with hoses just to get the mud out, hoses and shovels. But we ended saving virtually everything, the beds. We slept on that bed until four years ago. We still have a couple of lamps that were in it. That's about all we still have left. We kept the lamps because they still had a little mud on them. We never wanted to forget the experience. We took the TV and the stereo over to someplace in Buena Vista that worked on them. And the clothes, what we hadn't gotten out, we took to a cleaner. A little bit at a time, it all came back together. This all happened three or four weeks before I went back to school, because we had to be back early for this moot court thing. We had a lot of research to do. Laura was teaching at Rockbridge County High School. In fact, that was the year, or the year after, she was Rockbridge Teacher of the Year. So she had a couple of weeks before she 35 had to get back to work, and we managed to get cleaned up and get back in. I think we were back in before classes actually started. That's something I would not want to do again. It was literally the hundred-year flood. That was 1969, and I think it was either 1868 or 1870 had been the last time that there was any record of water being that high out there. And it's happened since is the amazing thing. Warren: Do you know it's happened three times? Walker: Yeah. Warren: Not last year, but the year before. Walker: Christopher, my son who graduated two years ago, lived in a road that I don't even remember knowing was there when I was in school, on the opposite side of the river from Bean's Bottom. As you go across the viaduct, if you go out to east Lexington, before you go across the bridge, there's a little road that runs down. There's now—not a Pantry Pride. There's some kind of a little 7-Eleven kind of place there, and a little road that goes down behind it on that side of the river. Warren: Yes. There's a little park there. Walker: And he lived in an apartment on that road, about two years when he was there, second and third year, I guess, and he lived there one of the years of the flood, one of the floods, and they had about four feet of water in their place. So it's just amazing. We would never live on a river again. Warren: That happened twice in one week. I guess it must have been when your son was there. No, that was in the summertime. Was he there in the summertime? Walker: No. Warren: He must have been there when—well, that was a year ago January. Walker: His flood would have been at least five years ago. Warren: Oh, I don't know about that one. But this last Founders Day, a year ago Founders Day, it took me four hours to get into work, and when I arrived, I said I'd 36 never been through hell and high water before, but we had to go round and round and round to find a road that we could get through. Walker: It was ugly. Brought out the best in people. I will say that we had no shortage of help. People drove out along the river and stopped, got out of their cars, rolled up their sleeves and helped people clean up. But it was very traumatic at the time. Warren: It's quite something to see. Our area where we live was the area that was most devastated a year and a half ago. Walker: Where are you? Warren: Up in Walker's Creek, north of Goshen. Our area was the most devastated in that flood. Walker: The power of—we were here for Andrew. We were in our house for Andrew, but I was not as impressed by Andrew as I was by that river. Part of it, I guess, is in a thing like Hurricane Andrew, ultimately in the worst of the storm, you're in the middle of the house. We were under mattresses and thought the roof was coming off. So we weren't out experiencing it. You can stand next to that river in the middle of that flood and stand there two feet away from the water, perfectly safe, and watch it happen. After we finished getting stuff out that night, we sat there and watched it, until a point where there was two or three feet of water inside. I was exhausted. I went to bed. I distinctly remember standing there and watching that. I remember this two-story house going by. It was sort of breaking up as it went by. There weren't any two-story houses within—I'd been pretty far upriver from there. There weren't any close by, so it had come from a distance. And they found a couple of cars down there under the bridge in east Lexington that had come from miles away. Warren: We had one family that lost four cars. Walker: The one interesting—in those days, there was no federal flood insurance. The only thing that anybody owned that was insured was their car, and this was back before the roads were rebuilt at Bean's Bottom. It used to be the main road you came off the— 37 in fact, the old bridge was there. You came off the bridge, had a hard right, and went right by the front door of the houses at Bean's Bottom. Since then, the road goes more up the Hill and you swing back into Bean's Bottom, but back then, when it became clear the water was going get that high, we must have had fifteen farmers from a couple miles up road from us, all bring their trucks down and park them by the bridge, these older trucks, and, sure enough, a lot of them had insurance claims. Warren: Bizarre. Walker: Yeah, it was pretty bizarre, because it was sort of blocking our ability to get stuff in and out at the time. Warren: I've got a couple more questions. Can I pop in another tape? Walker: Sure.