Walker interview [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is Mame Warren. This is tape two of Bill Walker, January 28th, 1997, in Miami, Florida. Do you have any pleasant memories of the Maury River? Did you used to go there? Walker: Oh, yeah. Sure. We went out in the spring, and we'd go tubing. And actually, where we were in law school, at Bean's Bottom, both before and after the flood, it was a very popular place to have a party on Saturdays and Sundays, particularly Sundays in the spring and in the fall when the weather was decent. All the people that lived there would sort of pour out the back of their houses and party out there. It was very common to have fraternity parties or law school parties or whatever in the back, and we used the river that was right behind us for entertainment, to tube and to swim. The Maury was the center of social life, particularly in my undergraduate years, in Goshen itself. If you didn't have a date at Goshen on Saturday or Sunday, you just weren't with it. That was the thing to do, buy a couple of cases of beer and drop them in the river, and one person would drive a group up river, and as far as you wanted to 38 float, you could float for two or three hours or half a day, whatever, float back down and do it over again. So, yeah, I have very pleasant memories of the Maury. Warren: You don't happen to have any pictures of that, do you? Walker: I know that in some drawer at home, we have a half a dozen, but they're not really pictures of Goshen. They're really pictures of the people at Goshen, fraternity brothers and whatnot, sitting out in the rocks. I could probably find a couple. Warren: Oh, I sure wish you'd try. Walker: One of them might cause some stir. I mentioned two of my roommates had married two of my wife's roommates, and one of them is one of those couples, and they're the only one of the three that are not still married. [Laughter] In fact, I just went to their daughter's wedding in Chicago last November. The daughter was the reason they were married, actually, and we were talking about—a lot of old W&L talk. The husband was from an old W&L family. His oldest brother is on the board of trustees, and he went there, and then his younger brother followed him, the Staniar family. Bert Staniar's a board member. Lee was my roommate. He was a year ahead of me in school. Then Andy Staniar, probably class of '72 or '73, '74, something like that. Warren: W&L does seem to be a family kind of place. What was it like for you when your son decided to go there? Walker: Oh, it was great. I don't know what it is about Washington and Lee that produces such deep emotional ties, but it seems to in generation after generation of students. It always struck me as something of an anomaly that W&L has not ranked through the years more highly in terms of its alumni giving and its endowment and whatnot, because of the incredibly strong feelings its alumni feel. And I'm sure if I went to similar gatherings at Davidson or Sewanee or Dartmouth or whatever, I'd get the— it's probably not as uncommon as I think it is, as I think most W&L people think it is, but it is incredible, the loyalty that the place generates. So it's not surprising to me that families go back generation after generation. 39 All three of my kids went to the summer program. They call it Summer Scholars. My oldest ended up going there. My second son, he's a junior at Sewanee now and absolutely happy as a pig in slop, wasn't interested in going, and I think a large part of it might have been that his older brother was there. They would not have overlapped. He would have started the year after his older brother graduated, but I think he wanted to go do his own thing. And my daughter, who's a freshman at Duke now, applied early. My oldest son had gotten in early. She applied early and was convinced she'd get in, and we sort of subconsciously were as well. She was a much better student than he was and had a better record, but didn't get in early. She applied early with her two or three best high school friends, who all applied early wherever they applied. She was the only one of the group that didn't get in early and had probably been most convinced of the group that she would get in early. She was devastated. She cried for three days, and she wouldn't come out of her room, and she was absolutely devastated. I knew she'd get in the regular pool, which she did, but she wasn't about to go. In fact, she told me she was going to show them. I said, "Linley, I don't think they care enough for you to show them." And she said, "I don't care. I'm going to show them anyway." So she went to Duke. But she'd wanted to go there very badly when she applied early, and we always assumed that she would. It's great to go back. I'm sure this would be true of any campus, but when you go back, it's like you never left. Warren: What do you mean by that? Walker: Well, I mean, like I walked down the same sidewalks, Washington and Lee having changed as little as it has, and through my eyes, if I see a good-looking coed, you know, I'm sort of thinking the way I always thought. And everything you see and 40 do there, there's been this thirty years since I've been there, but subconsciously nothing's changed. It's still me. It's still my campus. Particularly with my son joining the same fraternity, every time I went back, which I did fairly regularly, the experience was like I'd never left. It's an incredible emotional experience. All the years just sort of melt away. The only bad part about it is the reality that it's not the same you and you're not part of it anymore, you're not part of what's really happening. But when he was a student there, I'd stay out 'til three or four in the morning, go to the fraternity parties. I was a real popular fellow around the fraternity house. They loved me, and I loved being a part of it. I didn't want to take my wife home to the hotel. She'd act like a rational person and go to bed at eleven or twelve, and I'd go back and party with the gang. And for her, it was very much the same thing, because for her undergraduate years, although she also dated before we met at UVA, probably more at UVA than W&L, after we met, she was very much a part of Washington and Lee and the fraternity house, and she was the sweetheart her senior year and very much a part of it during law school. So it's kind of the same thing for her. It's like going home. It is surprising to me in one way and not surprising at all another way to find that there is a huge influx of retiring or pre-retiring W&L grads who are either buying or planning to move into retirement homes in and around Lexington. It makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. You've got great medical care, or very good medical care, something always going on, and you're sort of going home. My twenty- fifth reunion two or three years ago, there were a pretty substantial number of students— [Tape recorder turned off.] Warren: You were talking about people buying property. Walker: Oh, yeah, this gentrification. In fact, I'm told that it's a pretty significant problem for the university that the cost of housing has already gone, and is increasingly 41 going, beyond the means of incoming faculty and that they're really starting to feel the pinch from people coming in and buying up property. We thought about it. We thought about Lexington. But I think that also bespeaks this sort of mystical tie that W&L—and probably, in fairness, universities of W&L's type—develops in people. It's just a great warm feeling to go back, and the university is so welcoming of its alumni. There's so much about it that's kind of stereotypical. The people who are involved in alumni affairs and the people on the faculty or the administration that had the most direct contacts with alumni are all just so W&L—they dress W&L, and they talk W&L, and they think W&L, and the years just all peel away when you walk back. Most people, I guess, love to see the years peel away if you have fond memories of all of that. It really is like stepping back into a bit of history when you go back there. And I can imagine it'd be a wonderful place to go back and sort of have that permanently. Warren: It's a real nice place to live. Walker: We came reasonably close to staying. I had never been to Florida until I met Laura and visited her family down here, and her uncle, who was a semi-prominent businessman in town, had me convinced that it was essential to go to the University of Florida if you're going to practice law in Florida, and I learned in later years what he meant. In many respects, if you wanted to be in politics in Florida, it wasn't essential, but it sure helped, and there's quite a network of Florida lawyers in Florida, as there are Virginia lawyers in Virginia and Tennessee lawyers in Tennessee. So I had applied to Florida, because by that time we had decided we were going to come back here. She wasn't willing to live anyplace else. Spring had come. I'd applied to W&L, too, and we had this meeting with Bill Bean, or found out we could get a meeting with Bill Bean to find out about the apartment. It was on a Friday, and Red called me and said, "Gosh, I've got this thing set up. Bill says he might have an 42 apartment." And I called the admissions office at Florida and asked if I could find out about the status of my application. I tried to explain that I had this opportunity, and they were a little snippy and said that decisions would not be made for ten days or something and then I'd find out by mail; there's nothing they could do for me earlier than that. So I called Laura. I met with Bean. The apartment was available. We just talked about it and decided this was a perfect place to live. We like it here, let's just do it, because I'd been accepted at W&L by then, and we did. Monday I got my acceptance at Florida. It had to have been in the mail or I couldn't have gotten it, so but for that, I would have—and then I called her when I got it Monday and said, "What do you think?" We talked about it for about half an hour and finally said, "We suffered enough on Friday making the decision. We've decided. Let's just leave well enough alone." And then largely because of my work at the College Town Shop, I'd gotten to know "Happy" Swank. I don't know if you know the Swanks, old, old-time Lexington family. His wife ran the bookstore at VMI forever. Red Patton, who I worked with at the College Town Shop, had been the alumni director of VMI before he bought into the shop. Don Huffman owned the shop in those days. We met the Swanks and—oh, the Rabys [phonetic]. He was a local business guy. And I'd gotten into Kiwanis somehow, through some of these older guys that Red introduced me to, and I really got involved in the town a little bit. Kiwanis was two nights a month or whatever, and it was pretty unusual for law students to do that. It would only have happened to somebody who had been there as an undergrad and probably only somebody who had made contacts through—maybe church would have been a way, through my case the shop in town. So I knew a fair number of people, at least casually, when we graduated. 43 Eric Sisler was two years ahead of me in law school, and he had hung out a shingle. He was in Kiwanis. In fact, if I recall correctly, he had something to do with my getting into Kiwanis, and I kind of admired that. We talked about it semi-seriously for part of my senior year, and in many respects, I, through the years, from time to time, I won't say I've regretted it, but I've wondered what it would have been like. Clearly a different life, economically totally different, but then I'm sure you don't need to make a whole lot of money to be very happy in Lexington and to be very successful in Lexington. Warren: The cost of living is real different there. Walker: The schools, I think, are probably better here than they are there in many respects. The public schools here are terrible, but the private schools are very good. But it would be a great place, notwithstanding, to raise kids, I think, maybe a realer world than this one is. Warren: Probably more like the world we grew up in. Walker: Well, it's like the world we'd like to be the real world. Warren: I was interested a few minutes ago when you said you go back like that and you don't feel any real changes. There's been a real big change on campus. Walker: Oh, you mean women? [Laughter] Warren: Yeah, I mean women. Where did you come down on coeducation? Walker: Dead-set against it. Radically against it. Warren: Where are you now? Walker: I was hurt, dismayed, like just the traditional male alumnus. "Male alumnus"—there's a redundancy. I thought it was a terrible idea. I was a traditionalist, I suppose. I have to say that history has proven it to have been a great thing. Again, when I got back involved in alumni matters and started concerning myself with the reality of what happened, if you look at all the numbers, it's astounding what happened. It's just incredible. There's no other way to explain it. There's nothing else 44 to which you can attribute it. Starting with the decision to admit women, the application pool changed dramatically in terms of the quality of students, and everything just goes like this, including ratings in U.S. News. Whatever measure you use, it is a very measurably better university today, in the great scheme of things, than it was when I went there. There's just no other way to explain it. So it was a wonderful experience, but like so many things in the world, those experiences—I think it's a shame that there aren't men's schools around anymore. I loved the four years there. We played real hard on the weekends and worked real hard during the week, and there was some overlap, but not a lot. The kinds of relationships that developed with guys, I think, were unique because of the fact that you didn't have the sexual tension of women there at all times, and I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything, but I think it's a better university, and the fact is, apparently, there's just no market for that today. People just don't want it. There are only, what, two left, I guess, Wabash and Hampden-Sydney. We've had several young men—my wife's the principal of the Episcopal school from which our kids graduated, and they've had two or three students the last four or five years go to Hampden-Sidney, and nobody's lasted longer than a year. They just say it's—when I did it, heck, most of the best schools in the United States were either men's or women's schools. In fact, I can't remember there were any highly regarded universities—Stanford and Duke, maybe— that were coed. All the best schools were single-sex. And today, I don't think any of the single-sex schools are highly regarded, including the Sweet Briars and the—I guess Wellesley is still all women and still highly regarded. Smith, I suppose, is still all women. Warren: Go back to 1983 and '84. Tell me more about what your opposition was and what kind of conversations you had with people. Walker: My opposition, it was purely emotional. It had nothing to do—I didn't even— I don't think I bothered to read whatever economic and, whatever the word is, 45 whatever scientific evidence the university had that that was something they needed to do. They were changing the most elementary thing about the university, and it was two hundred and thirty, I suppose, whatever it was then, years of history, and everything about the experience of Washington and Lee was male. All the fraternities, everything. It was a wholly male place, and we had all gone there because it was a wholly male place—W-H-O-L-L-Y—but I guess it was sort of both, and it was like changing the name. I mean, you were changing the most defining thing about the experience. And so it was very emotional, the same kinds of emotions that caused it, and still cause it, to occupy such a deep part of people's emotional psyche were all there and they were going to take it away. It was a terrible thing. And I know guys today that— what's it been, now, ten, fifteen years, thirteen, twelve, whatever it's been, and with all the evidence that's there and nobody can dispute it, nobody in their right mind can dispute it, we have several alumni here in Miami who still—they'll never change. They'll never forgive the place. One of them gave a million dollars to the capital campaign last year after two years of wining them and dining them, and he's still not happy about it. He's male all the way, through and through. He's a chauvinist from the word go, and came around to seeing on the intellectual level that the demographic change was the best thing that ever happened to the place, but he doesn't really believe that. I mean, deep down inside, he doesn't really believe that, and recognizes, in talking to him, that there is no market anymore. Regardless of how much we liked it and how much we'd like the world to like it, the world doesn't like it. They just don't want it. But it was a dark day. It really was. Warren: Tell me about it. Walker: Well, just when they finally announced it—of course, we knew they were talking about it. It was like a terrible betrayal. We had this wonderful brief period in our lives that, I think, for most people—that's a terrible generalization. For lots of 46 people, it was the greatest four years of your life. With respect to my kids, I've always looked at it like this is going to be the greatest four years of your life: you're away for the first time, you're going to make friends in a way you've never made friends, you're going to have experiences you never had before and you'll never have again, because they'll never again be the first time you've had the experience, you're going to grow up more. It's really a defining point in your life. And it was that way for all of us, and it was that thing that they were messing with. It was just a terrible blow. I'm far enough away and have been all these years in Miami, we have a relatively inactive chapter here, and my experience generally is, although there are pockets where it just depends on the people at any given time, but my experience generally has been that the further away you get from campus, the harder it is to have an active chapter and get people to show up and do things, because they don't get back very often. So here it wasn't something I dealt with every day, whereas if I'd been in Richmond or Roanoke, I suspect it would have hurt me even more and for a lot longer. I could get over it here by just kind of not thinking about it for a while. Warren: You've actually been through this before. Did it upset you when the law school went coed? Walker: No. The law school was the year after I left. No. It didn't seem like—to me, even today, and certainly then, the law school and the college, as much as I talked about and believed that it was good to have them all be one, the law school was different, but the law school was always different. There was the Vietnam years, when all the craziness happened in the college, the law school was still pretty sane. Part of that was we had these ten classmates who were Vietnam vets who weren't too into this radical crazy stuff. One of them was Bev Read . Bev was a law school classmate. He was as crazy then as he is now, I think. We didn't realize how crazy. When the law school went coed, it didn't seem to me like Washington and Lee had gone coed. I could distinguish the two. I don't remember even being the least bit upset about that. And 47 that happened—we knew it was happening my senior year in law school, while I was there. It just didn't—that wasn't a big deal. Warren: In a way, that wasn't the choice of the university, if they wanted to continue as a law school. It had to be coed. Walker: Is that right? Accreditation? I don't think I ever knew that. Warren: The ABA. Walker: I never even thought about that until you asked me right now, but it was totally different. It didn't bother me in the least. I'm sure at the time we would have preferred that it not happen, but by the time it happened, I had very different attitudes. I was married. I don't think we knew that my wife was pregnant at that point. We found out she was pregnant at graduation, a couple weeks before graduation my senior year, but we were very different people, a lot older and a lot more—not a lot older, but a lot more mature. Warren: The last couple of questions, we haven't really talked much about the law school experience as your school experience. Were there faculty members there that made a difference to you? Walker: Oh, yeah. Joe Ulrich, who's still there, was a great buddy. We were his first class. He came in '68 as well, so we were his first class to go all the way through. Roy Steinheimer, we were fairly awestruck by him. Interestingly enough, as I think back on it, there were no professors in law school that struck me with the awe that some of the professors in college did. There was no Sev Duvall, to me, in the law school. Roy Steinheimer would come as close to that as anybody. Warren: Did you realize that he was going to change the school as much as he did? Walker: Steinheimer? No. No. Because I didn't know what it had been. Warren: So you didn't have any sense that there was a real shift happening? 48 Walker: No. Again, because I never had any sense of what it had been, other than Charley McDowell was a friend of Granddaddy's and he was a great old Southern gentleman. Warren: How about Mrs. Mac? Did you know her? Walker: Oh, I knew her very well. Warren: Tell me about her. Walker: She was a doll. She was everybody's mother, but particularly mine, because even after Charley died, which must have been—I don't know when he died, but I think he probably died before Steinheimer got here, didn't he? Is that why he left? Did he die in office? In any event, Mrs. Mack was the—she was Roy's secretary for the three years and thereafter, and she and my dad were on a first-name basis, so I was always very close to her. One of the things I discovered in law school which I'd never known in my undergraduate years is that if you're in the top of your class, you're a different person to everybody than if you're not, to faculty, administration. You take on a certain level of credibility and importance, which is probably totally out of measure with reality, but anyway, it's kind of a neat feeling, and wealth begets wealth. I became editor-in-chief of the law review, not the way it is today where you have to earn it. In those days, the top two guys in the class were the editors-in-chief, one of the first edition, one of the second edition. It was totally unfair, made no sense, and the system they have today is much better, but in any event, I benefited by it. So I had great relationships with people throughout the law school, and, in part, having been there as an undergraduate, too, that was a tremendous advantage, I think, to me, particularly freshman year, just getting to know the place and getting acculturated. But throughout the time, you were just sort of more a part of things. She was not so much a mother, I guess, as a grandmother to everybody. She really cared about every kid there, and she knew something about everybody there, and 49 I don't know that many of us ever felt we needed a grandmother there, but to the extent you did, she was it, and she was different than the faculty, obviously. So you had kind of a relationship with her that was—you never had to sit in front of her in the class or give her an exam or whatever. It was more a personal thing, I think. But she was a very, very sweet woman. Warren: How about Uncus? Did you take class from him? Walker: I did, and Uncus was—we weren't his first class, but we were pretty close. We were all in awe of Uncus at the time because he had been—I'm sure you've heard this before—he'd been president of the student body in his era and had led a movement to deny tenure—I think he was president of the student body as a law student and had led a movement to deny tenure to—he was then the only tax professor in the law school— Jim—the name escapes me, and it failed, but the two of them were then on the same faculty, and it was a—needless to say, a very tense relationship, and Uncus was—he may have been more a character then than he is today, I don't know, but he was a character. He used to chew tobacco in class, and he'd carry around a paper coffee cup, and he'd spit his tobacco juice in it, but he'd carry the damned thing all day. So by mid- afternoon it was getting pretty full of tobacco spit. He and Lash, who, I guess to the extent there was anybody on the faculty that served sort of a Sev Duvall role for us, it was Lash LaRue, because he was very much the academic. Roy was striking and awesome in that he had been one of the principal drafters of the code, which just had been adopted, was being adopted around the United States, Roy and Soya Menkoff [phonetic] and a couple of others, and he was the only guy there on the faculty, other than maybe Bob Gray, who was a retired general counsel at Bethlehem Steel, I guess. They had been out and done it. The rest of the faculty at W&L were academics who had no practice background that we knew of. But Lash was at the other end of the scale. He was the ultimate academic, very—he spoke in riddles, and he was very much the Socratic teacher and 50 was very deep, we thought, and he was probably—he was young. He was probably pretty caught up in all that himself. Susie LaRue was, particularly with the married law wives, she was very active and kind of a hand-holder and somebody you could go to if you had an issue or a problem, whatever, but Lash was kind of out there. None of us were quite sure we understood him or really had a handle on him. Joe was very down to earth and, although in his way very shy, as I think he still is today, he was very close to us. We felt a real affinity to him. Bill Ritz was well liked and very well respected, but he was kind of quiet and not—he wasn't real open to students. There was definitely a line between where he was and where we were, and although we knew, with Uncus and Joe, for example, we knew they were professors and we were students, but there wasn't a very deep line. We thought of them as friends, and they acted like friends. They came and went to parties and had us into their homes. Charlie Laughlin was active then and was a bit awesome, but he was such a character. In retrospect, he was more like Lash. He was a very academic, esoteric kind of fellow, but he was kind of a character, which, to some extent, we were probably wont to sort of laugh at him behind his back as much as to respect—that's not fair. We did respect him deeply, but we thought it was kind of funny, so that detracted a little bit from what otherwise would have been, I think, a bit of worship. And Charlie Light was still there, and even then, he was the grand old man. I don't think we all thought he was that good a professor. We thought at the time he was sort of reading his notes for classes, that he'd been giving the same lectures for years and years on torts and whatnot, but he'd been doing it a long time. He was obviously well respected in the academic world, and we had great respect for him because he was who he was. Then, as I said, I think it was Bob Gray, Bill Gray, who always wore three-piece suits with a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging out, had retired from Bethlehem or—I think 51 Bethlehem Steel, and bought a big old plantation home out in the country somewhere, beautiful old place, that he was restoring. Obviously had a lot of money. He was far and away on the faculty—he had the money, but we all had great respect for him because he had done it, you know. And this was the era, I think, in law schools where practitioners were being sort of brought back in to try to bring a greater sense of the practicalities of law practice. We had the first trial practice course—I think our class was the first one for whom it was developed. Bill Ritz started the Alderson program to counsel women at the women's penitentiary in West Virginia. These kind of hands-on, practical experiences, I think, were just coming into vogue in the legal teaching field. But, for the most part, Washington and Lee was—they were non-practicing. We did have a couple—we had one lawyer from Lynchburg, whose name escapes me, and it shouldn't because his sister-in-law was one of my mother's best friends in Cincinnati. He was a tax lawyer, a tax and business lawyer in Roanoke, and he came up a couple days a week and taught classes. The faculty was very small. I think I've probably just named the whole faculty, other than the one guy I can't think of who was the on-site tax professor, who, supposedly, incidentally, was the drunken husband, I guess, in Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee had been on campus at W&L a couple of years before I got there, I think, in '62, '63, and it was widely reported then that although the thing was set somewhere in the Northeast, that it had been about Washington and Lee, that Boatwright, Jim Boatwright, was the Richard Burton role. And this guy who was in the law faculty was supposed to have been the cuckolded husband. God, I can't think of his name. I didn't like him. In fact, I avoided tax like the plague because of him. Warren: You know, I've heard that legend, too, but it turns out that Albee was only on campus for two weeks. A lot of people think he was there for a whole year. 52 Walker: Yeah. I, to this day, thought he was there for a semester as a playwright-in- residence or something. Warren: Well, from what I've done in my research, he was only there for two weeks. So I find it kind of hard to believe that got to him. Walker: It's amazing how those rumors get started. Warren: You're not the first to tell me. Walker: Yeah. Through the years, I've heard stories about people's—reportedly say that he either confirmed or denied, but this thing about Jim Boatwright was so widely told, I really came to believe it. I'll never know if it's true or not, I guess. Warren: Boatwright was supposed to be the younger husband? Walker: Yeah. He was the—I only remember the play very well anymore. Warren: Well, Richard Burton was the older one. Richard Burton was George, and Elizabeth Taylor was Martha. Walker: I think he was supposed to be the older one then. I'm not sure. Boatwright was quite a character, quite a character. Warren: Tell me about that. Walker: Well, he published the Aerial—I think it was called the Aerial. There were a few professors in those days like Chuck Phillips, who was not only teaching, but he was doing things. He was a consultant. We'd hear periodically—you'd read somewhere in the paper that Chuck Phillips had testified in Washington or was quoted in some Business Week article or whatever. Jim Boatwright was a working poet, and we'd read his poetry in—I don't think it was the New Yorker but things like that. We realized from things we'd heard and things we'd read that he was really respected in the English world as a working writer, as opposed to just—see, that was just kind of—that was impressive. Anything, in those days, when you realized these professors had national reputations or were being recognized outside of just showing up in class every day, it 53 was always impressive, and there weren't that many on campus that fit that role. Roy Steinheimer, again, as—I don't think we knew it because we didn't know what the Uniform Commercial Code was when he first came, but during the years that we were there, and certainly the five or six years after all of us left, and we suddenly realized that this was the biggest change in commercial law, God, in our lifetimes probably, even now, and that we had studied it under one of the five or six principal writers of it, that was pretty awesome. And Boatwright was, as I say, was a working poet, and we realized while we were there he had quite a reputation outside, plus he just—he cut quite a figure. He was a pretty flamboyant fellow. I think he died of AIDS, and I assume, therefore, that, as one always does, particularly back eight or nine years ago when it happened, that he was probably gay, but had no thought of that then. It's funny, as I think back on it, of all the things you'd think of at a men's school, you would have assumed—I don't remember that there were more than one person I knew at W&L the whole time I was there that anybody openly thought of as gay, and I'm sure he was, and he suffered mightily for it, but I was pretty shocked when I was here in Miami and I read this news in the Miami Herald that James K. Boatwright had died in Key West of AIDS, and I thought, "God, that's strange." We had no thought of that at the time. Maybe he wasn't at the time, I don't know. Or maybe he wasn't at all. I don't even know that. I just assumed that he was. Warren: So you had no awareness of any gay community at Washington and Lee? Walker: No. None. None. I don't believe it was there. I mean, if it was there, it would have been sublimated to the nth degree, because it was a very macho male place. I think it still is. When I go back there, I think it's still a very macho male image that is the W&L man. It certainly was then, and any gay students would have been very uncomfortable. Gay eighteen-year-old men in 1964, '65, '66, would have been damned uncomfortable anywhere, but of all places, in Lexington, Virginia. They would have 54 been scorned by the students, by the town, by the state, by the whole culture of central Virginia. Warren: Yeah. I expect you're absolutely right. There's an ongoing dialogue in one of the student newspapers defending the gay and lesbian community. Walker: There was a thing when I was on the law board, alumni board, a couple of years ago. How'd this issue come up? Is it Bill Flowers, the Flowers Bakery? There's a very, very wealthy W&L alumnus—I think it's Bill Flowers, who's the founder, chairman of Flowers Baking, which is one of the biggest baking concerns in the Southeast, and he's in Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere, constantly writes letters to the president of the university. He was ultra, ultra conservative and still has not, and never will, forgive the university for going coed or anything that's changed. And I remember him being involved in it. There was some issue—it's probably the same issue's still being debated about the male and female gay group—it's wrapped around some event, some letter that was written or something. I can't remember what it was, but it was a huge issue. And I was kind of surprised at the time it was such a huge issue because I don't think of those things as being that big an issue anymore, but it just underscored for me the fact that W&L among men and women is still perceived, I think, as a pretty macho male kind of place, and the women that are there kind of worship the macho male thing. It's still a pretty traditional Southern school, I think, in most respects, which I think is one of its great qualities. Warren: Well, we're at the end of this side. I have one last question. Walker: Okay.