Wilson interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Wilson: We had to go before the planning commission and Frank can fill out the details about conditional-use permits and all of the legal entanglements. These houses had all been grandfathered into their purposes in the community of Lexington. What the city fathers discovered when we were proposing to do ten million dollars worth of renovations, which turned out to be closer to thirteen, [was] that they might have an opportunity to undo all of these conditional-use permits and to insist upon a new order of behavior. They were going to become deans of students for us, the city council, and would withdraw the permits, you see. They were grandfathered and permanent the way they were now, in these derelict houses. We were going to invest, on average, $750,000 in each of these houses to bring them up to standard, put house mothers in them, create house corporations that actually functioned and have a more active Interfraternity Council and all that. We were going to do all that, but they were going to say, "If we find five months downstream that there's been a noise violation in House A, then we will withdraw the permit for group non- familial individuals living together." I've forgotten how that reads. "Then we withdraw that, and they can no longer be, in effect, a fraternity house." I said, "Are you telling me that you're asking me, or endorsing my investment of thirteen million dollars of the university's money, and maybe I've got seventeen non- useful houses six months from now because somebody called in a noise violation at Pi K A at twelve o'clock? You're mad." Anyway, I stood before the Planning Commission at one point. There was all this noise about whether or not they were going to endorse this. I finally got up and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's become very clear to me that you prefer what we now have to what we might achieve, and I'm going to go away from this meeting and withdraw this petition before you, so that you will no longer have to worry about it. You can have what you have, and we'll make do some way." I also said, "I find it absolutely astonishing that a responsible body of city government would turn down an opportunity to see thirteen million dollars worth of renovations take place in the most squalid corner of the city, but that's your affair." I was that angry what was going on. Because they couldn't touch the grandfathered. I could have left them to go to hell in a handbasket and they could never have touched them, except if the police touched them every time they do misbehave. 13 So that was a bit of a struggle, and Frank was beside himself with my lack of patience at that point, because he had pretty good working relationships with the city, and I had sort of undone those in about ten minutes, but I was beside myself that we'd gone to all that we'd gone through. So anyway, we got by that. They quickly changed their minds about it. Warren: So what happened? What was their response when you did that? Wilson: Well, they decided that it would be possible to not change the grandfathered character of these permits and to let us go forward with the renovations. We were observing all the building codes, obviously. Warren: Let's take a pause. [Tape recorder turned off.] During our break we've been talking about how the student body has really changed. Of course, I'm very prejudiced where I'm coming from, but I've always made the assumption that the introduction of women has made a big difference in the university, and you were very much a part of that process. Can we talk about that, how that came to be, the drama of it? I'm sure it was dramatic. Wilson: Well, it was near the end, and there were a few moments out on the alumni circuit when it was dramatic, I suppose, or at least trying. Warren: What do you mean, the alumni circuit? Tell me what that means. Wilson: This whole process involved several stages of consideration, obviously, and action. I think I told you earlier on that when I started to come to Washington and Lee in the fall of '82, I came weekly to talk with faculty, chiefly faculty, one on one, no major meetings but just individual conversations, the burden of which was to say, "Okay, I want to come to know you and your work and what interests you have intellectually and what courses you teach and your general perceptions of the state of the university and what we might do to enhance your work or remove impediments to make it better, your work with students." I will never forget, there was Harlan Beckley, but I hadn't singled out Harlan over anybody else at that point. Harlan was one who echoed a theme that was widely sounded in those conversations when he pushed a book across the table toward me and said, "This is [Friedrich] Schleiermacher, whom I'm accustomed to teaching in the advanced courses in the religion department, and I fear that the bottom third of my classes are no longer capable of understanding Schleiermacher. And when that happens, my interest in remaining at Washington and Lee will be very seriously damaged." So it became known as "the soggy bottom third." We still had bright young people around, many attractive, and I'm proud of them. When you talk about declining standards, people tend to think you're talking about the whole group. Well, you are in a 14 way, because the average board scores drop very, very significantly over the years, ten to fifteen years. But there were still bright, able kids in every class. Then there were what the faculty perceived was a growing number of kids who were not intellectually acute, who were not terribly interested in, enjoyed W&L and wanted a degree as just kind of a passport. So it became quickly clear to me that improving the quality of the student body was number one, and no one felt that more strongly than the dean of admissions, Bill Hartog, who himself had only come three or four years before and had some sense of the whole, obviously. So anyway, that was all part of the process that continued into the spring of '83, winter and spring of '83, when I was in residence and I was much more intensely involved, able to perceive things myself rather than strictly through the eyes of the faculty. By the spring of '83, I was emboldened enough to address the alumni at their annual reunion time in May in the chapel, and this was a speech that was largely reproduced in the alumni magazine in subsequent months. It in effect said that coeducation was something that this institution had to take a serious look at and re- examine, because, and then I cited a number of reasons, all mainly to do with academic achievement. Anyway, almost no one noticed. No one in the chapel said, "Wait a minute," or buzzed outside. I don't even recall that the alumni magazine had a big impact on people. I don't mean that they don't read it. But by that fall, which is only nine months after I arrived, but really fourteen months after I started thinking seriously about Washington and Lee, I went to the board and said, "You must study this question. I don't want the faculty to do it. I don't want the administration to do it. I would like the trustees to lead this study." Because there had been a study in '69, mainly a faculty study, quite thorough, and it came out with the recommendation to change, which the board didn't accept. And then in '74 or '75, midway through the campaign that Bob Huntley was so ably running, there was another pass at it, but it wasn't more than that. It didn't even disturb the surface of the lake. And then the fall of '83 was it. The trustees guardedly agreed to do this, using the standing committee structure of the board as the instrumentality. We, of course, helped with studies and data and white papers and so on. That went on, then, through '83-84, and then it was very widely known in the alumni body, because we, against my judgment, but very strongly supported by Farris and, I suppose, by Brian (I think Brian was there by then), that we should have an alumni survey of attitudes toward coeducation. I said, "It will be misunderstood if we 15 send this to sixteen thousand alumni. They'll think they're voting, and we'll have a referendum and it won't come out very well." "No, we're going to have a scientific slant on this, and we'll get an outside firm," which, you know, hire an outside firm for large sums of money to come in, and then they have to ask you what questions they should ask, struck me as—but anyway, we did it in the spirit of trying to say, "This is an open process. Nobody's trying to hide anything from anybody." And so in that sense it probably was ultimately sensible to do. One of the questions was, if Washington and Lee was to face a significant decline in its academic reputation, would you then support, if it had the promise of correcting that, coeducation? And seventy percent or something said yes, if the academic standards were at stake. All the rest of them were very clearly opposed to coeducation, the undergraduates. We had the law school experience of seven or eight or ten years, whatever it was. At any rate, the student body were opposed, and that was interesting because I was having dinners with seniors all through that spring, twenty-five at a time, and I would go around the table with them and say, "Tell me what's good about Washington and Lee and what's bad about Washington and Lee, and you tell me also what are you attitudes about women at Washington and Lee." I would have almost no one stand and say, "Well, I really think women should be admitted here. It would make life a lot more pleasant for everybody, etc., etc., and probably improve the student body." One kid, to my astonishment, actually said, "I didn't know it was an all-male place 'til I arrived. I went to the chapel for the freshman class meeting, and I looked around and to my astonishment there wasn't a single women in the class." He said, "The catalog was full of pictures of women, and I had never visited. It never occurred to me that it was an all-male place." [Laughter] But the next day after one of these dinners, I would have one or two come by and say, "You know, I didn't speak up last night, but I wanted you to know that I think, and a lot of my friends think also, that this isn't quite as open and shut a case as some of the people you heard last night." See, what I learned was, the students were imprisoned in loyalty. If they stood up and said fundamental things of this sort should take place, they were in effect saying, "There's something wrong here, and it needs fixing, and this would be a way to try to fix it." And they didn't want to say that, especially in front of each other. But they made it clear to me, a little note sometimes. At one stage, I asked the faculty to write to me, in a personal way, their attitude about this prospect, and I had over 100 replies. I think the faculty, if you took the physical 16 education coaches and so on out and the librarians who have faculty rank, put them to one side, the faculty, with the law school, might have numbered 120, 130. So we had almost all the faculty. I separated the responses from faculty who were also alumni, and there were many, twenty or twenty-five alumni who had gone off and taken their Ph.D.s and come back, people like Sidney Coulling and Jay Cook and Steve Stephenson and a number of other people like that, so that the board would have this notebook of letters which separated the regular faculty—not regular, but the faculty who were not undergraduates of Washington and Lee—from these others. I said, "These others I want you to pay special attention to, because they knew the institution you knew. And now they've watched it over these years, and the faculty." And that was terribly helpful. Warren: What response did you get from the faculty? Wilson: Oh, it was ninety-plus percent saying this should happen, this is very important that it should happen. I couldn't have won this. I couldn't have survived, I'll put it that way, the coed debate, if I hadn't had the faculty. I mean, I didn't have the alumni. I nominally didn't have the students. I really needed some support somewhere, and the faculty was clearly an important part of that. I took the staff up on the mountain to Skylark, too, by the way, the administrative staff. We had a retreat up there in the summer of '83, when I said, "Am I stepping into a great chasm here by even asking for the study to go forward?" Everyone up there, which included graduates of Washington and Lee, like Lew John and Farris Hotchkiss and—I'm trying to think who they all were. I think Bill McHenry might have been then athletic director up there. There were ten or twelve people I was meeting with, and only Bill Washburn said no, and he was accurately reflecting his alumni constituency, because he was the director of alumni programs then, or whatever we called it. Bill McHenry was wishy-washy. I wouldn't put it that way in any article. But I think he'd rather things remained the way they were, but if we decided, then, of course, in earnest, they would go forward with women's programs, which they clearly did. So I had a lot of support at home. Now, going out on the road was very different. When we went out to speak to alumni clubs, it was the first time they'd seen me, a lot of them, and here I am talking about coeducation and the study going forward. At the Congressional Country Club up in Washington, I remember a terrible evening. Alumni were actually quarreling with each other out in the audience. I was speaking, and maybe somebody raised his hand and I recognized him. He nominally addressed me, but he was answered by somebody else out 17 there. Holy tamale, it was really not very pleasant, you know, because their feelings were so sharp. Farris and I touched down in Shreveport, Louisiana, for a meeting there. Farris learned over just as we were ready to come to the gate and he said, "You know, John, this may be the toughest alumni meeting you will ever address. They are very conservative people here, and they're not at all sympathetic with the introduction of women." I said, "Why are you telling me this? I can't avoid the meeting. It's too late." [Laughter] So I went down to the whatever country club to meet with the Shreveport alumni. "Dr. Wilson, we're so pleased to have you in Shreveport. We do look forward to coming to know you better." The next person, "Dr. Wilson, how can we welcome you more warmly than we have?" Then they go to Farris, "What in the hell is he up to?" But then I sat down at the head table, and I sat next to a charming lady whose husband was presiding. He was president of the local club. Fireson [phonetic] is his last name. She's Ivy. I can't think of this guy's first name. But anyway, I know him very well and I know Ivy very well. [Unclear], deep, rich Southern accent. I said, "Ivy, where did you go to college?" at one point in the conversation. "Oh, Dr. Wilson," she said, "I went to Sewanee." I said, "You went to Sewanee! Why, you must have been one of the early coed classes at Sewanee." "I was in the very first coed class at Sewanee." I said, "You were! Well, tell me, how did you make that decision?" "Oh, Dr. Wilson," she said, "my brothers went to Sewanee, my daddy went to Sewanee, and my granddaddy helped found Sewanee. I found it a great privilege that they opened the doors finally to permit women in the family to enjoy that same tradition." I thought, "This is an easy situation." Part of what made this all come about as reasonably as it did was that people discovered that they had daughters, and they hadn't thought of it that way before. One of the trustees, when we sat there on Bastille Day and were about to vote, Jim Ballengee said, "I'm going to go all the way around the table one more time and everyone is going to speak his mind and his heart on this subject, and then we will go back around and actually cast a vote." So he started down. One gentleman said, "You know, I didn't sleep a wink all last night. I paced the floor." 18 "Yes, I was below you. I heard you." Another one stood up and said, "You know, the worst day in my life was the day I suddenly realized that, by policy, my daughters were not going to be permitted to share in what I had so much enjoyed myself, but my sons declined to do so because they did not wish to go to a single-sex college." I said two things before the vote. I said to the board, "I am 51 years old. I am able. I'm not worried about my future. I will try to work your will, whichever it is, but I'm perfectly well aware that it may not be possible for me to be very effective if this vote should be turned down. But I don't want you to worry about that. Take me out of this vote. No votes aye because you don't want to isolate me or appear to repudiate me. That would be the worst possible thing. Vote the issue. Don't vote me. I can survive, whether here or whether somewhere else." "Secondly, let's agree—" And I hadn't thought this through, nor had I politicked this. You can ask any trustee then sitting if I ever called and said, "How do you feel about this? Will you vote on Saturday next, etc.?" I had no idea in many, many of these cases. I knew who was opposed from correspondence and earlier conversations in board meetings and so on. But the [unclear], a lot of them, kept their views to themselves until they finally had to make the decision. The second thing I said is, "Let's not decide a matter of this moment to the whole community at Washington and Lee by a simple majority. I don't think that would be fair." One who was opposed said, "What do you have in mind, John? Two-thirds?" I thought, "Uh-oh. He's counting." [Laughter] I haven't; he has. I said, "Well, I don't know. That sounds reasonable to me." Then another trustee said, "But we have a bylaw that says that whenever we have a quorum, a simple majority prevails and does the work of the board. How are we going to get around that?" Jim Ballengee said, "I think those of us who vote aye, who vote yes, and find ourselves with a simple majority will agree beforehand to change our vote in a subsequent vote so we can avoid the problem." There's one more point worth mentioning, and that is that there were two trustees who weren't able to be there, one because of illness, Alzheimer's disease, and one because he was in Ireland, where he had a summer home, Hal Clarke from Atlanta, and Hal wanted to vote from Ireland by telephone. Al, from Lexington, North Carolina, Al—it'll come. His wife wanted him to vote. She represented him as keenly interested in this and would feel awful if he couldn't participate. This is confidential. His son called me in the meantime and said, "If you let 19 my father vote, you're crazy, because he hasn't had any capacity to think seriously about this question in the last several years." Warren: This is the man with Alzheimer's? Wilson: Yes. I said, "Well, it's better to let him vote, even though they're both negative votes." I knew they were both "no" votes. So we started out with two no's by telephone. Then we started around. Right on my left, there were two no's out of the first three. I thought it was a dead deal, I really honestly did at that point. But counting the two in absentia votes, there were seven negatives and seventeen positives, so we just made a two-thirds standard. I give Jim Ballengee a lot of credit for the way that whole business was managed, the study. I give Edgar Shannon a lot of credit the way he managed the Academic Affairs Committee as chairman, and a lot of the questions there, admission, student quality, course enrollment by sex, and things of that sort had to be thrashed out. We studied Princeton and Franklin Marshall and other places to see if enrollment in economics stayed the same as a percentage or whether they changed, things of that sort. He managed all that. Of course, the University of Virginia admitted women to the undergraduate program in 1970, I think, and Edgar was president still at that time, so he was very helpful. There were a lot of helpful people around that table. It was a heartfelt and deeply emotional meeting. Then we went over to the commerce school for a press conference after we had voted aye and were going forward, and the chief opponent, in the sense of having the most strongly held views and also being as well prepared and thoughtful as he could possibly be on the subject, was Chris Compton, Virginia's Supreme Court justice. Chris came over and sat at the table with Jim Ballengee and with me as the press began to ask questions, and he said, "I frankly acknowledge that I opposed this motion and I voted against it, but there will be no member of this board that will ardently support it and will work to make it successful than will I." That started the healing process a little bit. Warren: That story gives me chills just hearing it. Wilson: But, you see, we didn't know also how many women there would be who would be interested. Warren: What kind of response did you get? Wilson: Well, the first year, in '85, we had 750 or so applications from women, and they were strong. They were from Washington and Lee people. We wanted one hundred women students the first year. The second year it went to nine hundred-and-some; the third year it went to twelve hundred-and-some; the fourth year, fifteen hundred-and- 20 some. I mean, the applications just kept coming, and they turned out to be from the same background, sometimes the same families, really, of our young men. The first class was outstanding, the class of '89. They were superb the way they didn't come in and say, "Wait a minute," you know. They went along. They had a patience. They kind of turned their backs on the more outrageous "no Marthas" kind of attitude that some of the fraternities had, some of the fraternities, for example. And their function, too, their nature, when they reflect a kind of superficial masculine macho attitude about things, they also have a capacity to continue these attitudes from one generation to another, so it takes longer than four years to sort of change the system. It takes them seven to eight years to start flushing out the memory of "the way it used to be." "How do you know?" "When I was a freshman, my senior brother was the last non-coed class, and he told me." [Laughter] But anyway, there were some fraternities who would not invite Washington and Lee women to social nights, for example, for a while. It didn't last long. They would sort of aggressively announce that they were roadrunners, they went been down the road for their social life. Women were welcomed from Hollins and Sweet Briar and Mary Baldwin. But our gals, they were so bright, so good-looking, so attractive, they blew that off without any problem, as they say. Warren: I'm interested in this idea that the first year you wanted a hundred. There was a set number for each year? Wilson: No. The board said, "John, what do you anticipate the enrollment pattern change?" We didn't really talk too much about this in Academic Affairs Committee, but we did some. I said, "I don't know how many applications we're going to have. I don't know what the quality of the applications will be, comparatively or absolutely. I do know that after ten years, Princeton is still at sixty-six percent male applications, thirty-five percent female, and [unclear] is sixty-forty and somebody else is 57-43 after ten or twelve years. So I said, "I would think we'll be doing well if we got to five hundred women." We had 1,350 men. I said, "My proposal would be, let's reduce 1,350 to 1,000 and raise from zero to five hundred the number of women in ten years' time. If we can do that, that would be a good achievement. Then we'll make our changes in dormitories and things in an evolutionary fashion." Warren: What were those changes? What had to be done to make ready for this? Wilson: Very little, very little. I mean, it was amazing how little there was. Major physical renovation was in the gymnasium locker room. We had to partition, of course, 21 down the middle so we had equal number of lockers on each—well, actually not equal because there were more men than women anticipated, and that cost some money. But I got a check from a member of the class of 1915 called Will Smith—1915. He was in his nineties, in other words. And he just sent a check. He didn't send a letter. On the memo line of the check it said, "To help with the girls," and it was fifty thousand bucks from Ardmore, Oklahoma. I went out to see Will Smith, obviously, and thank him and come to know him a little bit, and he said, "You know, I came to Virginia. My father—all of us here were in Oklahoma territory." It wasn't even a state then. "He bundled us on a train when our education time came, and we all went out east to Richmond. I got off the train at Richmond with my brothers and sisters. We were in homemade clothes. There weren't any stores." But the father was in cattle and later in oil, and he was a successful man. But nonetheless, that was the condition of things. He said, "I went to Randolph-Macon Academy up here at Front Royal for three or four years, and then I came to Washington and Lee, and it was the best four years of my life, 1911 to 1915, with one exception: there was no opportunity to meet wholesome young women." I've never forgotten that phrase—wholesome young women. So he said, "I'm very pleased about that, finally after all these years seeing that corrected, and I hope you can use that fifty thousand [dollars]." I used that to change the gym room. He was a jock, too. He was a little guy, but he— Warren: That's a wonderful story. Wilson: Yeah, it is a great story. Warren: I'll be real surprised if that doesn't make it into the book. That's a wonderful story. Wilson: Will Smith didn't live much longer than that, but he did have a chance to have an impact. Then the other things, in the dormitories we had to change rest rooms from one sex to another, but that's a relatively simple thing to do, especially if you don't take the plumbing out, you just cover them with vanities. You make urinals—this is against the law, of course. You just build a plywood vanity over the plumbing. They're still there. The major thing in terms of change was programmatic in athletic. We had to start out and create, as it turned out, nine or ten varsity teams in a relatively short period of time. These young women who arrived in the class of '89, there were only one hundred of them, and they wanted a soccer team, immediately. The athletic people said, "You can't do that. It takes thirty to thirty-five people to make a squad so you can play against each other and have a few substitutes. That would be a third of your class." 22 They said, "We'll get a third of our class." They must have dragooned these poor young ladies who'd never seen a soccer ball to get out. It was just remarkable how that whole success story on the athletic side has been just superb, our tennis team and our soccer team. Warren: Tell me about it. Wilson: Well, it's all there in the record. You can look at it. But the parity of esteem and the parity in terms of success of our athletic teams. Cross-country, I think of Josephine and all those gals. The tennis team was third in the nation last year. Swimming is outstanding. They get along well. They travel together. I give Page Remillard a lot of credit for the way he's kept the men's and women's programs in parity. And Jan has been a wonderful addition, Jan Hathorn, with both her lacrosse and soccer teams, which had a lot of success. I mean, I'm talking now not simply about wins and losses, but that's one measurement, but also the spirit and the morale. You know, there's one thing about athletic teams that most people don't stop to think about, and that is that as a freshman class arrives, there is a need to socialize then into the community and to connect. That's one of the rationalizations for Greek systems, that you pledge and you get to know upperclassmen in a number of houses when you're rushing or whatever you go through. And then you join a house, after the nonsense, you're immediately a part of the community of all four classes, plus alumni. You have an instant connection. Well, athletic team works exactly the same way, but without all the nonsense, all the rushing and Hell Week and whatever, all that stuff that VMI's now learned to do without. Neither has a Greek system house. But the athletic team admits that freshman into a community of people with shared interests, and they travel together and they play together and they turn out to be very close with each other. That's been a great help. Warren: I'd like to turn to another subject. I had the pleasure the other night of attending the Christmas concert at the Lenfest Center, and I know that that happened during your administration, too. Tell me about the Lenfest Center. Why was that important and how did it come to be? Wilson: I believe very strongly in the efficacy of the arts and the efficacy measured in— let me start again. The question is, how do you develop powers of empathy? How do you cultivate the emotional side of human personality in constructive ways? How do you teach compassion? I don't mean to make this sound as stilted as I'm sure it's beginning to sound. But when I was a young man, I would sit at home listening to either—because my mother was an opera person—Texaco Opera on Saturday afternoons on the radio or we had records, 23 and music was very much a part of my—and sometimes you'd sit there and almost weep with the joy of it. It's a powerful language. It's difficult to talk about because it can't communicate in quite the same way as verbal forms do, poetry or prose. I've always thrilled, is the right word, to language. I remember Manley Hopkins, the first time I read his poetry as a kid, I remember actually physically feeling this emotion. The music does that, too. I'm known mostly in Lexington as a Mahler nut. In fact, the board, one of the great gifts I got when I retired, Anne and I were sent to Amsterdam to hear Mahler's Second Symphony which was being played, because the Second is especially moving, an especially wonderful piece of music, in my opinion. Anyway, I put that tape in the car when I'm by myself and turn the volume up and listen to that last movement, and I find myself weeping, driving down the road. Washington and Lee—and this is true of a lot of all-male places—had a very modest—Rob Stewart was the first appointment in music. And I've talked about music here, but theater has a parallel place in the moral instruction of the young. Rob Stewart was the first appointment in music, and we didn't have very much. Of course, since that time, Gordon Spice is on board and there was a man called Cook who taught piano. That was about it. In theater, Al was there, of course. I think Tom Ziegler was there. But at any rate, the music was performed in Lee Chapel, which acoustically is very nice, every other way awful, especially for a large group. You can't get a group on that little platform. And the theater was done in the Troubadour, and some remarkable things were done there, but you could only exit the stage one side, and it seated a hundred, if you were lucky, and it had a stage [the size] of a thimble. How they did as well as they did, I'll never know. In the seventies—Frank can tell you about this—there was a strong feeling that the arts had to be regenerated and a physical environment had to be created for it. Bob Huntley actually had it on his list of things that should be done in that seventies campaign, which turned out to be a sixty-seven million dollar campaign, but they never got to it. So I inherited what, in fact, turned easily to be something that I was totally enthusiastic about anyway—the obligation to provide a suitable place for the arts at Washington and Lee. We had on the planning board, as it were, a 300-seat theater for drama, nothing for music, and that was one of the difficult negotiating points with Al. I wanted the auditorium larger for musical events. There was a good argument advanced that you'd spoil a theater if you try to make it multipurpose and that they didn't want more than three hundred seats because they wanted a play to run for several nights and we would exhaust an audience. 24 Warren: In Lexington. Wilson: With 485 seats. So anyway, to make a long story short, we had to negotiate all that. I said, in effect, to myself and to Al, I guess, and to Rob Stewart and Gordon that we would only have once chance to do this. We wouldn't have a chance to do two theaters. Warren: Good point. Wilson: Not in the foreseeable future, anyway. So they could work out a way to share these spaces, experimental theater in a large auditorium. So we started out, really, before the campaign to raise the money for this, and we asked key people to contribute to it. I remember sitting with Christolph and Polly Keller down in Louisiana, and they gave eight hundred thousand dollars, for example. Then the wonderful story about Gerry himself coming up for his '53 reunion. Warren: Let's switch the tape to get that.