Wilson interview [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is tape two with John Wilson. Warren: Gerry Lenfest came by for his—I think it was thirty-fifth reunion, class of '53. It must have been '88. Frank Parsons was asked to have dinner with the class. You know, at reunion time all the classes are having banquets at the same time, and so we split ourselves out, and Frank had the assignment. He mentioned in passing, I think, at the class of '53 that we had a project under planning, but we didn't have it fully funded yet, and that we wouldn't be able to go forward until the funding were visible. Afterward, he [Gerry Lenfest] said to Frank, "Frank, what are you short?" Frank said, "Well, it looks like as much as three million dollars." He said, "Why don't you ask the president to come up to Philadelphia as soon as he can and we can talk about it." So Farris and I got in our own little car not very long after that and met with Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest at a restaurant in downtown Philadelphia. Gerry said, "Look, I think we ought to get the business part of this over with before we have lunch, because this is a wonderful restaurant and I want you to enjoy this lunch. I understand you have a three million dollar shortfall in the funds that you have committed to this project." It was a ten million dollar project. I said, "Yes, sir, and we just can't go forward with that kind of gap." He said, "Marguerite, what do you think?" She said, "Gerry, it's your money. You do with it what you want." Can you imagine Marguerite, wonderful gal. "You do with it whatever you want." He said, "Okay, I'll donate three million. Now let's have lunch." [Laughter] 25 I said, "You sure know how to make a guy relax," instead of having to sit there and worry the whole lunch through. That was a successful building design, by the way. Way, way back, Bob Huntley had appointed a San Antonio firm to design this thing, because a San Antonio alumnus had said, "If you hire Ford Powell Carson, I'll pay the architect's fee to work up some idea." This is a three hundred-seat theater. Well, they had a building designed to fit onto that lot with the fly loft on the corner. In other words, you had nothing but sheer brick. You know, as you walk along the creek and look up, that would have been on the corner. It also incorporated the old building as a lobby, the railroad station building. It all stood on this side of the railroad track embankment, this side meaning toward the town side. It's a small building, but a huge great fly loft. Meanwhile, Gaines Hall was being designed, so we asked Eddie Smith of Marcellus Wright Cox & Smith to take a look at this building that we all thought was wrong. Eddie started to look at the whole—I said, "I want this to be a main intersection of the university, a new entryway, as it were, and we'll take the curse off the Warner Center." I asked to get as much greenery going up it as we possibly can all the time. Gaines Hall sits where a gas station used to be, you may remember, and a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Across the street were abandoned oil and gas tanks. I mean, oil tanks, I guess they were, great big Exxon tanks sitting out front. I said, "Let's try to permanentize this whole entryway. I also want an announcement that this is the university, so I'd like to see some signs, Washington and Lee University, 1749, etc." That didn't come out quite the way I wanted it. We had the two lines, the Lenfest Center line and the Warner Center line, where the trees were planted profusely on that side hall. I wanted to see green there, spotlights. Anyway, we got most of it done. Then [unclear] had this—what are you going to call it? I'd better be careful. I can't think of anybody anymore. Fred— Warren: Fred Cox? Wilson: No, Fred Hadsel. Fred's wife. Winifred, Winifred Hadsel didn't think much of the building. She called it neo-something or other. We wanted very much to get a touch of the colonnade in it, and that's why we have the cupola and the columns. I said, "I want this to be a gatehouse. I don't want it to be a rotunda. We're not taking on Charlottesville. This is going to be an Anglo-Saxon thing, a gatehouse. I don't want a rotunda, a Roman thing." So when Lenfest came along, I said, "Eddie, reach across the street and pick up some elements here and work with Ford Carson (I've forgotten the architect's name now, 26 funny, a few years have passed) to eke out another focal point, entryway." That's going to be repeated, by the way, on the tennis pavilion underway at the moment. And then he did some very nice things there architecturally. I mean, these people came up with the idea of using the old railroad right-of-ways, the crosswalk, and then to have that non-functional entryway, but it does distribute crowds up and down and faculty on the second floor. I give Frank a lot of credit for whatever he said about the arts, but Gerry's just spontaneous generosity. He added two more million to that before it was over to help endow it. Warren: One of the things I was very impressed with at the Christmas concert was that the place was packed. Wilson: Oh, it's always packed. Warren: It was full, and I just thought that was wonderful. They weren't familiar faces, and I know a lot of people in town. There just seemed to be all kinds of people there. Wilson: Well, that Christmas concert is a very popular one, but it never really filled in Lee Chapel, never. We had a lot of nice things go on in Lee Chapel that no one came to. It's hard to get to, to park, and the seating was very uncomfortable. And if you had a chorus of any size, you couldn't put them on the stage, and you had platforms that extended over the first two rows, the seats there. It was acoustically pretty good. I was a little fearful in my heart of hearts that we'd build a wonderful new performing arts center, but that some music faculty member will say, "I prefer Lee Chapel for the acoustics. I don't give a damn whether anybody's comfortable or anybody comes." I could just see that purist view. But we got some good acoustics by luck in Lenfest. If we hadn't, I suspect we would have had a real problem. Of course, the theaters have [done] some wonderful things there, too. In the large building, too. I thought that "The Skin of our Teeth," the Wilder thing a few years ago, was really first-rate. And then "Evita" was beyond belief. You didn't see "Evita." Warren: No, I wasn't here. That's quite something to take on. Wilson: Oh, gosh. We had people from Hollywood here, alums, writers and producers, and they said this is clearly a professional level. Before they left, last May they did a salute to us in the Lenfest Center, and they brought back people who had performed in these outstanding things in Lenfest since it was created. They had a scene from "Evita," in effect, musically reproduced. It was just wonderful. There have been some great, great things that have combined both music and theater, and theater by itself alone, that just are memorable, and it's brought town and university together. 27 See, the tennis pavilion will do the same thing. People don't realize that. But here at VPI, they've got six indoor courts. I'm a key member of this community in terms of belonging to the VPI Tennis Club, or whatever they call it. You pay X amount of dollars per term to belong to the club and then you pay court time. We're grateful to have the chance to do that. That's going to happen at Washington and Lee, I'm sure. It will be something that the townsfolk will—the varsity will use it in the late afternoon and on weekends when they have matches and so on or when visitors are coming down and you can't play outside. There will be a lot of student use and there will be a lot of town use of that facility. That will be another plus. Warren: What about the relationship between the university and the town? Wilson: I suppose we should say the city. Warren: The city. Wilson: I think that Buddy has been really good. Warren: Buddy Derrick, the mayor. Wilson: Yeah. He's a lovely person. Before, Charles Phillips was mayor for twelve or fourteen years, you know, and was a key member of our faculty. He was, of course, the facilitator when it came to town-gown relationships. I think David Howison has been good, and he created, with the town manager, a forum for monthly meetings between officers of the city and officers and students of the university. Our relationship with Chief [of police] Beard has been good, and David has done a lot with Mike and others to increase the mutual confidence in how things will interact. You have two thousand young people, 1,625 of whom are undergraduates, and there's an awful lot of energy and there's an awful lot of parking congestion and things of that sort that people resent, and everybody takes turns saying at vacation time, "This is the new Lexington. What a wonderful thing. There aren't any students around." The merchants know better. In fact, I once, talking to Martha Lou Derrick, said, "Martha Lou, what percentage of your business would you attribute to Washington and Lee? A third?" "Oh," she said, "it would be more than that." I have no idea what it was, but it was more than a third. Most people realize that, first of all, the students, though they will put a strain on day-to-day life in the city, are key financial or economic powers of the community's success. The two institutions create a wonderful resource for the community to enjoy, and I think most people appreciate that. Why did I move to Blacksburg? I needed to leave Lexington because I needed to give room to John to flourish, one. And two, I came to Blacksburg because it's a 28 university town. We wanted to live in a small town, which would be unbearable if it weren't a university town. There would be no music, there would be no theater, there would be no lectures coming from abroad, as it were. There would be no athletic events to attend. I mean, the quality of life that an institution of higher learning gives not only to itself, but also to the surrounding populations, is really very, very remarkable. I think some people sort of take it for granted in Lexington, but that's inevitable. I felt sometimes that we were underappreciated and that VMI got far too much credit. They commandeered a platoon to go over to Buena Vista to help mop out after one of the floods, you know. The newspapers were full of it. And yet our kids were doing some good things, too. We never seemed to get credit for anything but the Saturday night rumble. But that's kind of because I was sensitive about it. Warren: I don't want to bring up a sore subject, but speaking of Saturday night rumbles, there's one story that Frank asked me to get your point of view on. I wish we'd done this back when we were talking about these things, because we've been talking about such pleasant things now. He said that there was a bottle-throwing incident, and that's all I needed to say to you, that you would know exactly what I was referring to. What happened there? Wilson: This was a very great disappointment to me because it came right in the wake of our renovation of two of our houses, SAE and Phi Si next to it. On that little stretch, you have also Pi Phi down at the corner. I can never keep them straight, Pi Phi, SAE, and Phi Si. Warren: I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't keep them all straight. Wilson: Kappa Sig had a little white house in there which had become the Outing Club center now. There used to be a fair amount of antagonism that would arise. Warren: Where is this? Wilson: On Washington Street. Keep going right up Washington Street toward the shopping area up there. Past the police station on your left, there are these big houses. SAE is the white one, and next to it is a lovely brick house with a curved entryway. The staircase curves up to the door. Warren: This is near city hall? Wilson: Yes. We just finished SAE, and that was a very expensive renovation, one of the most expensive, nine hundred-and-some thousand. Actually, it touched a million, but the alums kicked in for a grand piano or something. I think we could say honestly it was 999 or something. Anyway, and Phi Si was not done yet. A house mother had moved into an apartment in SAE on the Phi Si side of the house, and SAE kid—he turned out to be a 29 really nice boy—came home, probably with a few beers too many in his system, but he just had an instinct to reach down and throw a bottle through the window of the Phi Si house. It shattered glass across the room. There was a party going on, but it was all over the house. There wasn't any specific—nobody was hurt. Two or three were made angry. And so these two guys came out and started to rain bottles on the SAE house, and one of them went right through the window of the housemother's apartment living room, which must have terrorized her. I don't mean frightened her. I mean, what would you think? You're a sixty-five or seventy-year-old house mother, newly appointed to SAE, newly renovated house, and somebody throws a bottle. It's a felony. You throw a projectile through a window, after dark especially, an occupied thing. Anyway, the next few days were taken up with the worst bit of stonewalling I've ever encountered. No one in either house would say, "We'll take care of it. We're paying for the damages." That was the traditional way for fraternities to fix these things, "We're going to pay for the window." I was beside myself with the prospect of these guys thinking there was nothing exceptional about this kind of behavior and that it was something you could fix up just because they both had enough money to fix it up. They wouldn't tell us who was involved. They just said, "This is something we can to leave to the fraternity system." I said, "I'm not leaving it to the fraternity system." I called in Murph. I said, "Murph, I want you to find out who these three people were." About ten minutes later, he came back with their names. So I said, "I want them to be brought in here serially. I don't want them to come at once. I don't want them to have an opportunity to talk to each other. So you get one." He took one off the baseball field—he was practicing—and brought him to me. I simply said, "Did you or did you not throw a bottle through the so-and-so?" "Yes, sir, I did." I said, "Go over there to my telephone on the desk, dial 1, your father's area code number and his office number, and tell him on the telephone that you've just been suspended from the university for the rest of the year by the president and that he is here if you want to talk with him." The kid went over, dialed 1, dialed the area code. He put it back down and he said, "Couldn't we talk about this a little bit more?" I'm making a point here, and that is that we often overlook the powerful influence that parents can have. They're very rarely brought into these things, and I know it's gauche to do that. But I thought it wouldn't be bad to have the parents aware of what was happening. 30 The next kid who came in called his home, and unfortunately his mother wasn't there and he told his sister that he was in deep trouble at the university, and she just alarmed the mother something awful. That backfired. At any rate, we suspended them for the remainder of that semester, so they lost the semester's work. Students were outraged, fraternity students, which consisted of hundreds. I mean, 550 showed up at Lee Chapel, hanging over the edges of the balcony to talk with me about this. The high-minded theme, of course, was that I had circumvented the judicial system that was in place and that if I had wanted to do so, why didn't I call this to the attention of the judicial board of the Interfraternity Council. It was a little hard to stand up and say, "Well, that has never worked. It is a buffer. It is a protective device to keep the import and significance of these acts from ever having to be encountered." Anyway, it was a very uncomfortable evening in the chapel as I tried to explain to these young people that we were not going to tolerate things like that and that I had a responsibility that superseded any of the other and that there was a clause somewhere in the constitution of the university that said in the event of a significant threat to the welfare of the institution, the president could suspend or expel, and that I thought it was that serious. Well, that didn't go down well. I knew they had to have a kind of cathartic evening, and so I just sort of steeled myself to absorb such animosity as there was in the building. One of them was especially a vituperative type up here on the left, and he asked all kinds of aggressive questions. I found out it was Mason Pope, who was one of the best running backs that we'd ever had around there. I couldn't see who he was, or I wouldn't have recognized him anyway. I called Mason in the next day. I said, "Come on down. I'll talk to you." And we had a wonderful hour and a half. He was very candid, and he hadn't relaxed his view, but we had an opportunity to exchange views, somewhat less pressured. Of course, I told him I admired his play on the field, and I was very pleased to get to know him a little bit better. I didn't have any of this stuff hanging on the walls of my office, you can be sure. My wife did all this stuff. But anyway, he found out that I wasn't quite the ogre that he had worked it out that I probably was. Interestingly enough, years later I'm writing letters of recommendation for Mason. He's doing very well in New York in the financial business in a brokerage house. But anyway, that was one of those things. In the front row of that Lee Chapel event were the officers of the two houses involved, plus the IFC and the Greek, and, you know, I just didn't feel they had got it, that 31 they hadn't really picked up on what was happening. They were going to whitewash this thing, and the arrogance of saying it's none of my business, in effect, who did it, we'll handle that, was almost too much to bear. The faculty, without my ever even raising the matter in the faculty meeting, somebody came in with a resolution, "We totally support you," and everybody passed it unanimously. Warren: Did you see this as a threat to the whole renaissance program? Wilson: I did. I thought it would the start of an unraveling of the whole investment, the whole community, right back to business as usual, except you had a lady in there you'd appointed to help set a tone and a style, had her assaulted in that indirect way. She could have been sitting there. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference. Warren: Was that the end of serious problems? Did anything else occur? Wilson: Nothing like that. This breaking windows thing just made me sick. I'm from a very modest family background. My father was a blue-collar sort of guy who worked in the machine tool and die thing near the auto industry in Michigan. We didn't have much. But, my gosh, the idea of these people wasting the world's goods. I would come on a Monday and I would see our B&G guys, who don't have much in the world, and gals, cleaning up after. There would be broken windows in the dormitory. They would come back from the fraternities, having destroyed the house all night, and then knock out a few windows in the dormitory. The windows they knocked out were always in the public sector, the staircases, not their own rooms. So then they would plead, if you ever found out who did it, they would plead alcohol; they had been too drunk to govern their own behavior. But they weren't. I said, "You weren't drunk enough not to make the distinction between a public and a private space in the dormitory. Don't give me that." This would sicken me on Sunday morning when I would walk around there and I'd look up and see Graham-Lees windows out from people coming back from an orgy. That's too strong a term, but unregulated party. During this whole period, we went from 18 years old to 21 years old. That was not— Warren: Tell me about that. When did that happen? I've been trying to track that down. Wilson: I wouldn't trust my memory. It would be around the time the pavilion was built, because we built the pavilion. We thought we'll help ease the strain on the fraternities by having an on-campus place where we can have parties and we can govern the awful possibility of high school kids coming in. They were going into the fraternity houses and drinking. Grain alcohol was the drink of preference, and high school girls, sixteen-year- olds, it didn't matter. We would have more control over it. We no sooner built the pavilion than the laws of the state of Virginia changed to twenty-one, and for a while there we thought, "Gosh, we've got a white elephant," albeit 32 not a major facility. We could use it athletically, we could use it for other purposes, but it was a place that they didn't want to go to socialize because three-fourths of them couldn't have anything to drink there, and the ABC had rules about that. If the audience could be predicted to be less than half eligible to drink, than you couldn't have alcohol at all and things of that sort. So it was around the time the pavilion was built, I'd say '85, '86. Warren: One thing that I have been interested in, in studying the student handbooks, there comes a time, right about that time, where a very definitive policy on alcohol suddenly appears. Prior to that, there had been a policy on drugs, and it was as if alcohol was not part of the scene. I mean, it just wasn't addressed. And then suddenly there was this very long involved policy on alcohol. Where does a policy like that come from? Wilson: There were a number of—Lew John probably served in the deanship until about '89. I think David came '89 or '90, somewhere there. Lew made the case to me, as did many professional people across the country, that alcohol was a more serious problem than drugs. I said, "You guys are all saying that only because you're scared of drugs, just as I am." It's far more comforting to say something familiar like alcohol is the major problem. Forget cocaine, which none of us knew anything about from our own experience and so on. But Lew had a very strong perception that alcohol was our number-one problem. We had an agency, something like the University Health Committee, which now David has, which promulgates proposed policy on a whole number of fronts, but certainly alcohol abuse is one such. There's just simply been an awful lot of national attention paid to this in the last few years. Harvard did a big study and the University of Michigan has counterstudies going on, and everybody's taking the pulse of what turns out to be a study of binge drinking, bingeing or whatever the participial form would be. On the board side, there never was a standing committee on campus life, another change we made. We created a standing committee on campus life, and they heard every need from the dean of students and from student leaders on a whole range of things, fraternities and athletics and social life and so on. That's been helpful. Tom Touchton, again, was very strongly favorable toward strengthening our stated policy with respect to alcohol. He chaired that committee for a while. Warren: Did establishing that policy make a difference? Wilson: Well, no. You know, who reads them? The official documents of the university, maybe before you come here you— Warren: I may be the only one who's read all of them. 33 Wilson: The student handbook may be read by freshmen, but they don't consult it every year after they get here. But insofar as it helps you in the steps that you take in the daily administration of the affairs of the institution, well, we've got a policy. The administration, after all, must implement the policies of the board. So that's helpful. And I am very sure that David has pointed it out many times to student leaders. I think it was the last year I was there, we had a meeting in 114 in the Student Center, whatever you call it, Evans. Not Evans, but whatever the rest of that is called. Anyway, he had the dean of students' staff there. He had the infirmary director there, and she was very effective, by the way. And students who were involved. And there was a discussion about the threat to this generation, not just ours, that alcohol represented, and he asked me to say a few words that night, which I did. So you had a policy that served there as a backstop or as a reflection what it is you try to do in day-to-day life. You have in David, too—I mean, I don't want to say anything negative about Lew's time, but he was dean for nearly twenty years. This is off the record, but Danny Murphy was the associate in his office at that time for Greek affairs, fraternity concerns. Danny hadn't been in any of these houses ever. I said, "Danny, I don't understand. I want to have meetings with the officers of all the houses, and I want you to come with me when I go down and talk about the management of these houses or what their budget looks like, how they go about pledging. I want to know everything I can know about." He said, "I've never been in these houses." I said, "What prompted you to decide not to do that?" He said, "Because I'm on the Student Judicial Committee (or whatever it is, some group that finally adjudicates individual infractions), I felt it would be wrong to get to know them too well because I may have to judge them." I said, "What do fathers do? You know them and you love them, but you also discipline them, and I don't see a contradiction in that role." There were things like that students had fallen into. It was easier not to go down there and face this stuff. But anyway, yeah, the policy helps and reflects the board's concern. The board is the ultimate authority for all the things that matter at the institution. It doesn't exercise that authority, except through the administration and the faculty, ninety-nine percent of the time. The faculty have significant delegated powers when it comes to student life at Washington and Lee. Warren: Is that unusual? Wilson: Well, it may be true at other places, but it's never exercised. The more the faculty can forget about student life, the happier they are in most places. Warren: But that's not true at Washington and Lee? 34 Wilson: No, I don't think it is. You've got faculty involved in what used to be the Confidential Review Committee, which is now called something else. It handles confidential matters like sexual assault and sexual misbehavior. What is it called? They changed its name the last year or so. I've just flushed my mind of all those things. Warren: That's happening with all those things that occasionally people call me from the Archives and ask me a question, and I say, "I'm sorry, it's all been replaced with Washington and Lee stuff." I don't remember any of that anymore. Wilson: The faculty recognized that the intellectual life of the place can't go on oblivious to all the other compartments of life that have an impact on it. So I think we are far more seriously involved in these matters than is true most places. Warren: You have had a really remarkable time at that university, and I'm very touched to hear you still very much use the first person plural. You may physically be removed from it, but emotionally you're obviously still very much there. Wilson: Well, that's true. In spite of some of the difficulties, it really was the happiest twelve and a half years of my career. Anne became very fond of the students at Washington and Lee, and she knew more of them than I did, she really did. We weren't great entertainers. We had our special occasions and our special events and our friends, but she knew especially what I felt what also played to my own interest, but I was going to say I watched them perform on the athletic field or on the courts and I watched them in music and the theater and I watched the student government leadership develop and play the hand occasionally. But I've never been to a student's party except for an hour in fancy dress every year, and I could have done more, I'm quite sure, to come to know the students better. I just got a copy of the class of 1994 Annual Fund Committee letter, a newsletter of some sort. It was wonderful. I looked down on the list of people. Sylvia has just had a baby and so on. There were so many I didn't know and I'm really sorry. Some I did, of course, know pretty well. So I've always regretted not coming to know the students better, but you can't do everything. Finally you have to say, "Well, I'll give my time and attention to this." I did enjoy watching them play and watching them perform. It is a lovely place. I think it is a remarkable place. I was talking with some VPI people the other day at a luncheon. No, I'm sorry, some Hollins people the other night. I met with the chairman of the board and a couple of trustees at Hollins. This is the day Maggie announced her decision to go to St. Mary's. They said, "What do you think about this? Do you still love Hollins?" [Whispering] I never loved Hollins. I was on the board and I served Hollins faithfully for a while as a trustee and chaired the search committee for the presidency and 35 some other things, not for Maggie, but for an earlier president, Paula Brownlee. I resigned from the board when I accepted the Washington and Lee position, because I knew there would be conflicts of interest in fund-raising and other events. But anyway, I said, "You know, there's no faculty I've ever worked with, at Wells or at Hollins (I didn't work directly with them, but as a trustee), even at VPI, I've never met a faculty as civil as this faculty. They don't need to score points off each other. They're not trying to show off in faculty meetings by showing how clever and witty they are, and never at the expensive of somebody else. If they disagree with a position, they will say it with the utmost respect, or they'll keep quiet if they don't know how to do it and maybe take it up in another way in another form." I said, "It's very unusual." I said, "Hollins faculty, frankly, though I'd never sat with them in a faculty meeting as president or anything like that, but I did have intercourse with them as a member of the board and on a committee on conferences I used to talk to faculty directly and so on, and I think they're spoiled. They're quite good, I'm sure, in their fields and everything, but I think they decided that maybe they're better than the place they're now serving. There's nothing worse than that." He said, "Well, through the grace of God I [unclear]." So that made life at Washington and Lee very special, to have a faculty so supportive. Another thing I found out was the Hollins faculty are up in arms about reorientation of a building on the front of the campus in the gateway. I said, "You know, that never came up at Washington and Lee. I had my sector of responsibility, not officially demarcated, but clearly understood that I could build a little building out at the B&G complex up on the hill there for fifty thousand dollars a metal building, and nobody said, 'Why are you spending the university's money to build a B&G building?' or 'Why did you build that pavilion?' or 'Why are you building a two million dollar tennis court?'" There was a trust there. "We look after our part. You don't come in and tell us how to teach Biology 101 and we'll let you spend too much money in renovating the locker room over at the stadium or whatever." Nobody ever said, "Let's have a committee on the budget." Oh, my God, that would be terrible. To try to educate a constantly changing committee of faculty on the intricacies of the budget, one; two, [it would] take the fun away from the job. It's the only fun we have, honestly, is being able to see something accomplished, which usually means trying to allocate some resources. The real development of the arts, beyond the Lenfest Center, comes in the budget, how much more money we now spend to bring visiting groups in than we used to spend. Of course, just to sustain more faculty or adjunct 36 teachers of instruments over there [unclear]. To get the program out on that little celebration for Anne and for me last May, they say, "Here's what we were. Here's what we are now." That, frankly, is the fun of it, to see something grow and develop. If I had to work that through a committee—I mean, committees are good places to obfuscate where responsibility lies. I recognize the importance of them. Warren: There are a lot of committees at Washington and Lee. Wilson: Yeah, but they're not impediments to major forward movements from time to time, thank God. I had that kind of liberty. Well, I took it. I think I had it. I never was questioned about that. You know, Mr. Duchossois called or had his person call and say, "John, I want to give a million dollars to the campaign, but I want it to be in honor of you and Anne, and you are to select whatever you want to do with it." I felt like a millionaire for a week. I called Barbara Brown and I said, "Barbara, how much are you spending on English history and literature acquisitions a year? Would a million dollars endow that, fifty thousand, say, income?" She gave me some numbers, and then I said, "Well, Oxford Cambridge Press, what do they cost a year?" They're so damned expensive. Then I thought about some other things that we needed to have done, the Computer Center endowment, things for the campaign. I thought, "No. What I really would like and what Anne would really like is an indoor tennis court." I'll never forget our 1988 national championship team having to play the finals up in Staunton in an indoor three-court setup, because it was raining, that had, of course, private bookings. Washington and Lee had to go in and say, "We want to buy up the time of all of these folks who ordinarily play on Thursday and Friday afternoons." And a foursome, ladies, said, "We don't choose to give that up. We are going to play. We always play at three o'clock on Thursday." So here the national championship, Division 3 National Championship, being played out with two matches going full ball on one and three, and the ladies on two were patting the ball back and forth for an hour and a half. And there was a spectator prospect of a tiny little lobby with one window that looked at onto the number-two court. You could see just barely peripherally in. I mean, I went home. I didn't stay. It wasn't possible to watch it.