Whitehead interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: I’m intrigued about Dr. Cole. I was here when Bob Huntley was president, so I have a pretty good sense— Whitehead: A good friend of Dr. Cole’s, too. Warren: I’ve interviewed him, so I have a pretty good sense of that administration, and Dr. Gaines is just legendary, but it’s almost, I don’t want to say a black hole, but it sort of a brown hole, the Cole administration, and the more you can tell me about that, the better educated I’ll be. Whitehead: I don’t know if you’ve heard about any of the personal characteristics of Dr. Cole. Well, he’s the only man that I’ve ever seen smoking three cigarettes at one time. You’d walk into that office where part of his office was until Dr. Wilson moved, and you could hardly see across the room. I was a smoker, so I was not as concerned about that when I was smoking as I would be today or anyone else. Well, you wouldn’t go in the room, it was just—but he would have one in his mouth, one in his hand, and 17 one in an ashtray. It was just like a constant cigarette, he never let up. Poor man died, I’m sure, of complications because of it. So that was a personal characteristic. Beautifully groomed, always the finest suits and looked fine. One-to-one, he could be very personable, but in a group he was very uncomfortable, and that’s the why the alumni never really took to Dr. Cole, because he was just not comfortable. He would have Frank write his speeches. I guess Frank would. I’m sure Frank wrote some of them. He just was not a public figure, but he could stand and—he’s the one, I think, brought us out of the Dark Ages in terms of faculty and salaries and recognizing what the university needed in terms of upgrading its faculty, upgrading salaries. He was excellent at that kind of thing. He can certainly be given credit for it. He had a vision. I’ll tell you this, I don’t know that it was written down anywhere. I walked into his office one day and he was looking—I’m trying to acclimate you—but Washington Hall is there, his office was on the back of Washington Hall, overlooking the ravine to where now the law school is. One time he visualized, I recall, C______ College for Women there. It could be a part of Washington and Lee University, but would be a separate college for women before we went co-ed. So he really had that vision of us eventually becoming a co-ed institution, I’m positive of that. Or at least I felt that in what he said to me. We traveled together. He was a good friend. He was just private, he was not a public figure. Mrs. Cole worked so hard on anything that she did, and that Lee House had to be absolutely perfect, and she worked so hard to achieve it that by the time it occurred, she was a nervous wreck. Poor thing. She’s still alive. She came by here a few months ago and stopped over in the Reeves Center because she had known, she had met Mr. and Mrs. Reeves once. I was anxious to hear her comments about that. Warren: Was it during the Cole administration that President Truman came? Whitehead: President Truman. It would have to be during Cole’s administration, because Dr. Gaines was only here for a year, and I don’t think it occurred when Dr. 18 Gaines was here. Arnold Toynbee came when Dr. Gaines was still in office. But President Truman spoke at a Mock Convention, everyone was disappointed because it was such a mild talk compared to what they thought it was going to be. I can’t tell you. It must have been during that, and I’m thinking, could it have been during the period of Dr. Pusey’s interim acting presidency that he was here. But I know that Mr. Nixon came during Pusey’s administration, that short period in between Cole and Huntley. Warren: He was here in ‘68. I have a number of pictures. Whitehead: Well, that would be— Warren: So what was it like having that level of—of course, we had so many interesting people come to campus. Were you involved in hosting any of those people? Whitehead: Certainly neither Nixon or Truman. I can remember being involved with Goldwater when he came, but, no, I was not involved in that area of the university at all at that point. Most of that was done by students, and that was really a student affair. If you were invited to something, you certainly went to it and those kind of things. But nothing to do with the arrangements or anything like that, that was all the students. Warren: Were you here when Toynbee was here? Whitehead: Yes, I was here only for his last public appearance in the chapel and then the Gaines had a reception in their home after that affair. It seems to me that it was covered by a national magazine here, or the staff from a national magazine was covering Toynbee, but I don’t recall which one it was. All of a sudden National Geographic comes to my mind, but I don’t think it was National Geographic. It was another one. But I’ve heard so much about Toynbee. But that last lecture he gave was not a sold-out event, where some of them, of course, when he first came, getting a ticket to hear Toynbee was [unclear]. But there again, Frank was the one that was involved, I believe, as anyone on this campus at the time. But going back to women—let me do that. Warren: Please do. 19 Whitehead: Mrs. Evans, a lovely lady, an heir to the part of the Coca-Cola fortune through her marriage to Mr. Whitehead, and then she later married Mr. Evans. That’s where we got Evans Hall. Doremus Gymnasium, funds for that came before I arrived here, but it came through both Mr. and Mrs. Doremus, so she was very much a part of that gift. That story has been told and retold so many times now. That was before I came. I’m just trying to think of women and names on the campus. Newcomb Hall, Mrs. Newcomb from, I guess, New Orleans, gave the funds in honor of her husband and Newcomb Hall. Sophie Newcomb, the college Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans, is the name of the lady who gave us really the money for Newcomb Hall. That’s another lady. Lewis. That’s Frances and Sidney Lewis, but there again there’s this lady that was very close to the university. But there’s some others. Of course, the ones that I’m most familiar with would be the Reeveses, Mrs. Reeves, who was the ultimate donor of the Reeves Collection. Mrs. Watson of the Watson Pavilion. A great lady. There’s more ladies. I’m forgetting some of these angels. Anyway, one time I made a list of all these people. It seems to me it’s something to do with—those are the ones who are recognized that have been large contributors to the university in one way or another. Warren: Miss Parmly. Whitehead: Parmly, that’s the lady. She was great. Warren: Tell me about Miss Parmly. Whitehead: You’ve heard this from everybody, but she was, she was just absolutely super. I may be the only person that ever spent the night with Miss Parmly, but not in her room, but in her apartment. I had a meeting in New York and I came up, and I couldn’t get a room at any hotel. Ms. Parmly had asked me to help her with getting, sometimes, some transportation, things that you could get in Lexington, it’s 20 unbelievable, but in New York she couldn’t get it because just the throngs of people that were trying to get things. I can do some things for her, which I did. I had to go to New York. I called her and I said, "Miss Parmly, I’m having a very difficult time getting a place to stay. Do you have any suggestions?" "You stay right here," she says, "there’s a guest room here in 825 Fifth Avenue." Well, the guest room really was what had been the maid’s room for one of the people and it could be used. So I stayed until about midnight in that room. It had no window, and I got up and walked on over to the Plaza about midnight. And there was no bath. I asked them at the Plaza if they had a room, and they did, and I checked in there because it was only a couple of blocks from where I was. Anyway, I spent part of a night with Miss Parmly. We had a party for Miss Parmly at our house. Bob Keith’s favorite story. Here again, it was sort of like Miss duPont, and Miss Parmly was coming, and this is when Bob Huntley was president, and he and Miss Parmly got along fine. He’d get along fine with anybody. But she was coming, so we were going to have a dinner party for her at this old house of ours. There certainly wouldn’t have been over fourteen, because that’s all we could seat at the table, and so everybody kept telling me everything we should do. So I loaded up on everything conceivable, the brandy, and I thought, well, she would like scotch. I had everything right. So here I am. Miss Parmly arrives. I don’t believe I’d seen Miss Parmly at this particular time, never seen her before. She arrived at the house and came in. That’s when we had drinks in the library then. Miss Parmly came in and everybody else had been there for sometime before she arrived and I’d already given them something to drink. And I said, "Ms. Parmly, may I fix you a drink?" She said, "That would be nice." I said, "What would you like?" 21 She said, "I’d like a bottle of beer." I didn’t have a cold bottle of beer in the house. I went back and threw a can in the freezer and wrapped ice around it and did everything else. But Bob Keith likes to kid me about that one of giving Miss Parmly— then after we became friends, a very wealthy lady living with her mother most of her life and not doing anything that I could figure out would be fun, I’m sure she did many things that she enjoyed doing like hiking and saving islands off of Georgia and developing beaver dams in Vermont and New Hampshire, but she’d never had an opportunity to attend some of the things in New York she liked to do. So Bob Huntley, when he’d go, he would ask her where she’d like to go to have dinner or something and she’d tell him. So I was going up one time and I said, "Miss Parmly, where would you like to have lunch?" She said, "I’d like to go to 21." So it’s pouring rain. Oh, it’s just raining, and I’m staying at some hotel and I get a cab to go over to 825, and when I got out of the cab to go in to usher her out, I stepped in water that came up halfway up to my knee. I mean, it was running by the curb. Well, that didn’t matter. I go in, and here’s Miss Parmly. She’s got a ski cap on pulled way down over, she’s got her rubber boots and an old coat, and here I am taking her to 21 thinking that, oh, Lord. So when I walked in, I had made a reservation through Ross Millhiser, who had friends there. The people weren’t as shocked as I was. But anyway, this couple, wringing wet, had come in and they took us to the best seat in the house and next to us placed Van Johnson, who was—you probably don’t remember Van Johnson. Van Johnson the movie star. She was so thrilled, I don’t think she could eat, being in this place that she had always wanted to and then sitting next to a movie star, one like Van Johnson, who was so nice to her. We were seated on a long whatever it is along the 22 wall, and he was right next to her and he started a conversation with her. Oh, what a wonderful lady. What a wonderful lady. What a wonderful lady. Warren: I have some pictures of her here and she just looks so delightful. Whitehead: Isn’t she nice? Warren: She has this angelic smile. She looks like a cherub. Whitehead: She does. She told me the two things that she had enjoyed most was her association with Washington and Lee, which came late in life, and this island off of Georgia that she had helped save, preserve. Those are the two things that came from her life. It was through an alumnus of ours that she became generous to Washington and Lee, who was, I guess, counseling her on her estate to be and so forth, and mentioned Washington and Lee. She had heard about Washington and Lee through her father talking about Mr. and Miss Doremus and what they had done for this school, and she loved General Lee, as well. So no one person is ever responsible for a gift. I mean, it takes a lot of people working together. It’s the total group that brings about happy situations. All of us would love to think that we were totally responsible for it, but that’s not true. Not true. There’s another lady that I liked. Miss Gottwald. Miss Gottwald is an angel. It was her money that made possible the Reeves Center. So she was— Warren: I don’t know Gottwald. Who is she? Whitehead: Mrs. Floyd D. Gottwald is the wife of Floyd D. Gottwald, Jr., who was president and chairman of the Ethyl Corporation. He was a VMI alumnus on the board of directors or the board of governors. But they had two sons that came to Washington and Lee. The family’s tradition was VMI, but their two sons came here. Once when they were here for Parents Weekend, Celeste and I were at the same table with them over in Evans Hall in the private dining room over there, and I mentioned this collection of ceramics that had been given to the university, and they both indicated they would love to see it. 23 So it was in a basement at that time, and I took them down in the basement and they opened some of the cartons that the stuff was in. We became friends. Then when I found the paintings that Louise Herreshoff had painted, she saw those and both of them then were very excited and she said they’d be happy to give her a show at their home in Richmond, where they had a gallery almost. Well, it was a nice place. We didn’t do that because we were able to have a one-woman show at the Corcoran. But I always said we had a collection in search of a home, and that’s what it was. I had talked to them several times and they’d ask me what was going to become of this, and I thought, well, the way things are going, we had so many needs at Washington and Lee that certainly a place to house dishes was unheard of. So one day they had been asked to give to the new library—I mean, to the Commerce School, to the Law School, and they did not have any interests. So I talked to Bob Huntley one day and I said, "I know you’ve never given me permission to ask for funds from anyone that was a prospect for all of our other needs here," but I said, "would you permit me to talk to the Gottwalds?" He said, "You won’t get a damn penny from them." And I said, "Well, let me try." So Celeste and I make an appointment to see them. They were at their beach home in Virginia Beach, and we drove over. I showed them a little model that I’d had made up, and they gave us the money to restore the building for that purpose, without letting us put their name on it. I mean, they’re that kind of people. So that was a gift of almost a half a million to do that. Then down the road they made a gift of, I think it was 750,000 to endow the directorship, which was my position, and that was their second gift. And then after that, I think when I retired, I never knew the amount, but I think it was enough to bring that probably up to a million dollars, maybe a little more. And then at another point they gave another major gift. So they were very good to the Reeves Center. Mrs. Floyd D. 24 Gottwald, Libby. She’s still alive. She is one of the few ladies that, along with Frances Lewis, is alive. So that was that one. Then Miss Watson, after we got the collection, she and her husband came over and had lunch at Bill Pusey’s house. He was acting president, I think, at the time. I showed them the basement where all the porcelain was stored and, by that time, the paintings, and she and her husband who had lived in the Orient, they invited us to come over to Lynchburg to see theirs. Then over a period of years she became friends and would travel with us. That was the key to the support of the Reeves Center. The Gottwalds traveled with the students every spring when we’d take them to some special place. We had another couple in South Carolina, the Carters [phonetic], that financed it, and Miss Watson traveled with us. They saw what happened to these young people when their eyes would open to art and these different great collections that we tried to expose them to. So Mrs. Watson’s gift was a major gift to the university, probably around three million, I would imagine. The Bill Lindon [phonetic] Endowment and the professorship begins to add up. Warren: Help me to understand that the porcelain that’s in the Watson Center is part of the Reeves Collection? Whitehead: Some of it is. Well, we’d hoped, and I hope that it will continue, that the Watson Pavilion would be an extension of the Reeves Center to the extent that it would take us back in time in the history of ceramics to the Neolithic period. That’s where we wanted to start, and that’s the big jugthat you see over there that Celeste and somebody else, I had to have somebody help me because I couldn’t have done it by myself. We bought that, because that’s where it really begins and then comes forward up to the 17th and 18th century. But part of it in that building belonged to Mrs. Watson, some of it belonged to the Reeves Collection, and then other additions have come from the McBrides that lived 25 in Blacksburg, of all places, but now in Florida. Tom was very active in getting that collection on display there by the time the building opened. Warren: Tom Litzenburg? Whitehead: Tom Litzenburg, right. And he’s more acquainted with the McBrides. They met me once when they came up here to see the Reeves Collection, I let them in and showed them around. But Tom really worked more closely with them and continues to do so. Warren: You mentioned the building that the Reeves Center is in. You mentioned the building. What was that building originally? Whitehead: It was built in 1842 [sic 1840] as a faculty house and remained a faculty residence until, oh, it really was a faculty residence when I came here. One professor, Dr. Howe, that Howe Hall is named for, lived in the house for fifty-five years. It was built in 1842 for $3,500, those four houses, two on each side of the Colonnade. Warren: Each one was built for $3,500, or all four? Whitehead: The building was built for $3,500 in 1842. My figures, I may be off one, but I think that’s about right. 1842. They served in that capacity really up until the only one now that’s a faculty home is Howisons. It was usually seniority in terms of faculty that were able to live in the houses. But before we restored the Reeves Center, it was an extension of the Law School, there was some law school offices in it, as well as religion and some other departments. So it served for a while as a classroom or faculty offices, mainly. Warren: Which house did Leyburn live in? Whitehead: He was in the Reeves Center. Warren: He was in that house? Whitehead: He was in that house, and he was the last faculty occupant of the house. It was just falling down. Warren: So after law school— 26 Whitehead: After Leyburn, faculty offices, including one time the archaeology group was in there and then there was some in there from religion department, and then I think mainly law school offices were there as the law school began to expand and before they moved into their new building. So it was a faculty. It’s the only one that was used for that purpose of the four. Now, the one that Howison is in, the dean of students, the Lee-Jackson House, has always remained that. I didn’t get on Miss Morris, but anyway Mrs Morris, she another name, surely don’t want to forget her. That house was a faculty home until it was restored for a guest house. She and her husband were from Houston. Mrs. Morris loves history and preservation and restoration. She and her husband always entertained whenever they had these national meetings that their particular company held. They own Stewart Title Company, which is a mortgage insurance company, and they have offices in over 2,000—she wrote to the president, who was then Wilson, to said that she would like to bring a group of guests to Lexington. Am I right about this? No, it was before Wilson. That was before Wilson, I guess, maybe Bob Huntley—for entertainment and would like for them to be able to see Lee Chapel. So he turned the letter over to Captain Penniston, and he turned it over to me, and I thought, well, there’s no reason not to try to accommodate these people. So I called this lady in Houston and told her, yes, that we could arrange for it, could she give me some details about the dates and her organization, and she said yes. She said, "We’d like to bring them over and I’d like for them to have lunch in the Lee House where General Lee died." I said, "Well, that’s not possible. That’s a private residence for our president." I’m sure it was then Bob Huntley, because they moved out and used it only for entertainment. I said, "That won’t be possible." She said, "Well, I’d certainly like to do it." 27 I said, "Mrs. Morris, that won’t be possible." So then she went on to the next thing of what she wanted to do, and I said, "Why don’t you come up here? You’ve never been to Lexington, and just see what it’s like." Well, I went to the airport to meet this lady, and she got off the plane and she was this tall, strawberry blonde, big lady, graceful though big, with this high-pitched voice. Everyone thought, "You’re dealing with a real dizzy blonde." Well, what had happened, she had an operation on her throat that causes her to do this. Smart as a whip, I found out. Well, anyway, she got off, we came over here, and the more I was with her, the more I liked what she had in mind, but I said, "That’s not possible." "Jim, do you think..." Anyway, she had a certain way about her. Well, the way it turned out, her guest list at the Homestead included 125 people that she had buses sent, they had the big buses bring them to Lexington, they arrived. They both loved carriages and horses, and they had friends in Virginia that had these big carriages and so forth come into Lexington, and we had a parade downtown and the horn blower that they brought up from Texas. They arrived at about 11:30, and we had lunch at the Lee House. We had it. Sat them on the porch and all around, and these people from all over the country had never been anyplace like this. Then after lunch, Pam Simpson gave them a tour of the campus and historic buildings, and they went through the Reeves Center—no, we didn’t even have the Reeves Center then, it was just before we opened. Then they took them downtown and I had the mayor give them a proclamation in Lee Chapel, and got the city to put up the flags, and we called it Stewart Title Day, and they were very impressed, and we became friends. Later, they came up shortly after that to the dedication of the Reeves Center, and I took Stewart around. I could tell he was a very sensitive-type man. I’d talk about Lee and Washington, and every now and then he’d have to wipe a tear. Well, then he asked 28 me if I would speak to their organization or a similar organization in Boston, the Gardner Museum, and I said yes. He said, "Well, I’ll pick you in our plane." He was flying his own jets at the time, so he and Joella—her name was Joella—picked Celeste and me up in Roanoke and flew us to Boston. And as we were making our approach to Boston, we were at about 30,000 feet, I think. "Stewart, I’ve had something on my mind," I said, "Washington and Lee needs an official guest house. Would you think about restoring one of those historic houses that you saw when you were up there, exactly like the Reeves Center, as a guest house in honor of Joella?" And the plane almost did a nosedive. But anyway, we landed, and I didn’t hear a word from him. Then they came to a meeting where I was speaking in Natchez, Mississippi, and he said, "Have breakfast with us tomorrow morning." When I got there, he had a folded piece out of a yellow tablet and it said, "Dear Jim Whitehead, I give you $250,000 to restore the Morris House." So that’s where that got restored. So I do think in that case I did have a little something to do with it, but the rest of it took a lot of people working hard. Warren: You had them more than over a barrel, you had them over a planet. Whitehead: I really did. But they’re such nice people. Great people. He was at Washington with me this past weekend, and we dedicated a new sixteen-sided barn at Mt. Vernon. That’s been my outlet has been Mt. Vernon, in a volunteer capacity, and it’s a great institution. Warren: I read about that. Whitehead: Oh, you did. I have not seen a thing about it, because I haven’t seen any papers. Warren: It was written up in the Post. It was quite a write-up. 29 Whitehead: I’ll have to look upstairs, because it would have been—although I knew the news media was there, but I had no idea. Warren: It might have been last— Whitehead: Well, it was dedicated last Friday, so it had to be in Saturday or Sunday’s paper. Warren: Or it might have been in the "Home" section last week, in the tabloid section. Whitehead: Oh, yeah, right. Warren: I think it might have been that. My husband was reading all about it and kept reading out loud to me. He was very excited about it. Whitehead: Oh, they did such a beautiful job. They had someone, though, who has done things here for us who acts as Washington and thinks he is Washington, he looks like Washington. See, Washington’s great love was farming, that was number one. They had maybe 500 schoolchildren in different colored T-shirts sitting on bales of hay in front of the barn, and as they came around they had them, each giving them a little stack of wheat to take in to put in the barn before the horses went in and so forth. Roger Mudd, our Roger Mudd, who is on the advisory committee up there with me, was the master of ceremonies, and, oh, what a beautiful occasion. Then they had the children, each with one of their animals, a pig or a lamb and then there were sheep and so forth, walk up with these and tell George Washington why they were so important to farming and so on. I think if they’d have passed a plate, we could have raised—we’ve got to raise $60 million annually. Kellogg provided the funds for this. They gave us the money to do the barn. Fortunately, there had been an old photograph that had been saved by somebody that showed what the barn looked like as it was deteriorating. I’ll have to look up in the library here and see in the paper. Warren: It was in the Post. I know it was written up. I just took things to the recycling center or I’d bring it to you. 30 Whitehead: That’s all right. You’ve had enough for one day. Warren: Are you done? Whitehead: No, I’m all right. I have to go to the hospital to be with my son around four o’clock. Warren: Okay, I know that, but I would love to have just a few minutes, and it’s probably a much longer story than that, but let’s get the essence of the Reeves story. I’ve got to tell you, whenever I have visitors come to see me, the highlight of the tour is to take them to the Reeves Center. It is my favorite thing on this campus. I love those paintings. Whitehead: Right. Oh, gosh. Mullan: Porcelain is one thing, but the paintings just tear me up. Whitehead: That’s right. Porcelain is a known factor, you can research it and it’s been around for a long time, since 900 A.D., and it’s all chronicled, but to find somebody that was an artist like that. Warren: Tell me about that. Whitehead: I’ve told you this story— Warren: No, you have not told it to me. Whitehead: Okay. Warren: Please. Whitehead: Well, you can’t tell the story unless you start at the beginning. A postal card, a penny postal card, arrived at this university, I think in the alumni office. But anyway, Dr. Cole was president, and I’m assistant to the president. I’m not treasurer at the time, I’m assistant to the president. My major job as assistant to the president was to keep peace between the Office of the President and the treasurer, if you really want to know the truth. That was a major job, because Mr. Mattingly could never accept what was happening at the university. Although it was all good, it was still impossible for him to go beyond the Gaines years in terms of his ways of thinking. 31 Okay. This postal card arrives and it says, as best as I can remember, "Some day I may wish to give a work of art to the university. Are you interested?" signed, "Euch Reeves, class ‘27, law." That’s all it said. Well, that card went around from office to office and finally came into my hands, and I thought, well, when you say "gift," that caused me to give it a little more attention. President Cole and I were going to be in New York for a meeting with our advisor at U.S. Trust Company, Henry Grady. So I called Mr. Reeves, this man that wrote the card in Providence, and said, “Mr. Reeves, I’m going to be in New York with Dr. Cole in early February. Would it be possible to come by to see you?” "I’d love to have you come," he said. Southern accent. He was from South Carolina. So the date was set, and I called, and he said try to arrive in time for lunch. So I thought, well, on the map Providence looked like it was a suburb of New York, and it was not. I went over to Grand Central and picked up a ticket and got on, and it took until about noon to get there, to Providence. But in any event, it was cold, ice cold and was just terrible, snow everywhere. I get in a cab and tell him I wanted to go to 89 Benevolent Street, and the cab driver, obviously a very talented driver, got started up, I think it’s called College Hill, past all these magnificent Federal houses. It was just like going into another century. Magnificent mansions, as well as some of the houses that were built at the time of the Revolution there, Benefit Street and Waterman and Hope Street, all those kinds of things. So he started climbing that hill, and I just kept looking and I thought, gosh, I wonder what in the world he has to give us? Because my only connection with art, I had no knowledge of art whatsoever. Of course, the university had a Peale portrait of George Washington and a Waliston of Martha’s family. I thought, "I wonder if he has a Copley or a Peale or something like that." Well, he drives up by these mansions and turns the corner and pulls up on Benevolent Street in front of this little house. You’ve seen the picture of it, and that’s a 32 wonderful picture of the house. That day it looked far worse. But anyway, it was a little one-room-wide, two-and-a-half-story, wood-shingled, little house. I said to the driver, "Is this 89 Benevolent Street?" He said, "Yes." I said, "I don’t think so." He says, "There is no North Benevolent, or no South Benevolent, no East Benevolent or West Benevolent. This is the only Benevolent Street." I said, "Okay. Well, keep the motor running I’m going to the door to find out if we’re at the wrong place. I may be wrong about the address." I knocked on this door and it was flush with the front sidewalk, it was right on the sidewalk. The sidewalk was right at the house, and there was a Christmas wreath on there—this now is February—and it was dried and had reached the point of decay. I knocked on the door, and finally the door opened and this real dark-eyed and dark- haired man opened the door. I thought, "Is that Mr. Reeves? I know now that I’m at the wrong house." And then I heard a voice say, "Is that you, Jim Whitehead? I hope you’ve come to stay two weeks." And that was Mr. Reeves. I walked into a vestibule that was only four feet wide, and there was a table there, and here was Mr. Reeves with his handyman, Whitehead, and a barking dog, and the dog was a little toy Boston bull terrier. The dog was so excited, he was jumping vertically. It was unbelievable. But three grown men and a dog, plus a table. I couldn’t see where I was because I’d just come out of the ice and here I am in a dark house. He said, "I hope you’ve come to stay two weeks. Joe has readied the guest room." I thought, "Oh, my God, if I stay more than two minutes, it’s longer than I want to." So I walked in from the vestibule. He guides me, and I’ve got on a coat that I held like this to keep from knocking things off. He sat me down in the chair and he had 33 to move some porcelain and magazines out of the chair, and when I sat in it, I almost went on the floor. I don’t know that anybody’d been in that chair in years other than the stuff he’d piled there. He sat on a little daybed right across from me. So he talked about Washington and Lee and how he loved it and so forth, and that’s when our relationship began. Warren: What was he like? Whitehead: Well, he really seemed to be completely out of place in those surroundings. He was dressed in a very nice pinstripe, he had on a white starched shirt, and he had a silk tie with a diamond stickpin, and all around was this old faded wallpaper that was peeling off the walls, no item that had been touched to clean or to dust in years, and so crowded that you could not move. Yet he spoke with a very soft Southern accent he’d never lost, but continually talked about his wonderful years at Washington and Lee. In fact, Mr. Mattingly and Mr. Gilliam, who was the dean then, both said to me, "Jim, you’re on a wild goose chase. Euchlin Reeves will never do anything worthwhile for Washington and Lee." They remembered him as a student in the law school, and he didn’t have a dime when he was here. He was a college Joe if there was ever was one. But that day he was a scholar. Warren: Let me switch tapes quickly.