JEFFERSON DAVIS FUTCH III

                                           August 19, 1996

                                          Mame Warren,
                                             interviewer

 Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the 19th of August, 1996, and I'm very
 happy to be with Jefferson Davis Futch III, in Lexington, Virginia. Did you want to
 start right off, that you had something you wanted to say?
 Futch: We can start with one little tip I want to give you. If you' re interested in
 World War II photographs of people connected with W&L, I want to call your
 attention to Milton Colvin, who was in combat in World War II. His life was risked
· in Yugoslavia on a mission that I understand was very ironical, but he obviously
 survived. His wife was a German citizen at that time, who spent the war in
 Heidelberg, because I suppose they were hoping it wouldn't be bombed. That's the
 way it worked out, because the Americans had designated Heidelberg as one of their
 future headquarters. So the Americans did not want to set up their headquarters in a
 ruined town, and so Mrs. Colvin has told me about constantly diving into air raid
 shelters. But the American bombers always went on elsewhere.

          Immediately after the war, he married her. So there may be some interesting
 stories there. But he undoubtedly has photos of him with other-conceivably with
 W &L guys. He was a faculty child. His father taught in the law school before the
 Second World War. So he could well have met some W&L boys in Europe in 1944-
 45.
 Warren: That's a great tip. Thank you.

                                                                                                                     1
Futch: I did want to mention what has got to be a photo collection of Dr. and Mrs.
Colvin.
Warren: That's a great idea. I will follow through on that.
Futch: John M. Gunn was in the Second World War, the newly-he's semi-retired.
I started to say newly retired; he's semi-retired. And he very may well have met
some W&L grads or guys who had interrupted their education in that war.

         Likewise, a man who lives in the town now, Dean Finny [phonetic], who was
in the class of 1945-now, I suppose that implies that he entered in '41, and perhaps
his education was interrupted by military service. If you get in touch with Dean
Finny, he might have some photos of that period, maybe overseas or maybe in this
country, perhaps at a training camp in the United States. Maybe some W&L guys
were photographed in front of a barracks at Fort Dix or someplace like that.

         So those are some men from the World War II period who are still living.
Don't tell them I said they're still living, but I think all three of them may have
some photos.
Warren: All right. I'll follow through on that.
Futch: But I need to mention that.
Warren: I know from your interview with Richard [Weaver] that you arrived here
in 1962.
Futch: Only yesterday. That's right.
Warren: Yes. Take me back to Washington and Lee in 1962. What was the campus
like?
Futch: Well, of course, in many ways it was physically as it is now with the trees
and the white columns and the red bricks, all of which dazzled both my parents and
me. My parents were extremely anxious that I teach here, and I thought the red
bricks and the white columns and the trees are nice, and then I saw all these young
men dressed like young bankers in coats and ties, not usually suits, but a sports

                                                                                                                            2
jacket that didn't match the trousers, but nice shirts and ties and cuffs showing and
all of that. And I thought, "Wunderbar! This is heaven on Earth." So it was what
was called conventional dress, the coat and tie routine. It was that more than
anything else that made me fall in love with the place. And, of course, I came to
love the white columns, the red bricks, and the trees as well, but it was the
extremely decorous appearance of the student body, and, along with that, their
politeness, beautiful manners, obviously kids who'd been brought up very, very
nicely. I simply fell in love with the place instantaneously. It was one time when I
did not buck my parents' wishes. I said, "Absolutely. If they'll offer me a job, I'll be
happy to come here." So the job was quickly offered, and all three of us were very
happy.
Warren: So were you instantly welcomed in? What was the social scene in
Lexington in the early '60s?
Futch: Oh, the faculty social scene-as we called it, the cocktail circuit-I gather that
this may have disappeared by now, but how can I put this politely and discreetly?
The faculty was deeply into liquid refreshment. Every afternoon at 5:00 or 5:30,
usually at faculty homes, very seldom administration homes, and also the homes
of-oh, yes. I'm glad you asked this. The old dowagers of Lexington, though I
suppose a dowager refers to a married lady of stately grandeur and advanced years,
some of these ladies, such as Miss Eleanor Gadsden, the late Eleanor Portia Gadsden,
were unmarried ladies. And I don't know what title is given to a lady of extremely
advanced years never married.

         But, of course, Mrs. Francis P. Gaines was a widow after 1963 and was a
dowager, and there was a Mary Tucker who was a dowager, a widow. And Miss
Gadsden, aforementioned, was unmarried. These ladies were very much a part of
the cocktail circuit, along with faculty members. And somebody called the faculty

                                                                                                                          3
social life a floating cocktail party because it was virtually every afternoon at
somebody or other's home, and a good deal of fermented potations were taken.

         I remember being very amused that all of these stately, dignified professors
and their wives just got soused virtually every evening. So there was a lot of that,
and I think in the 1990s' atmosphere of puritan disapproval of this and that,
cigarettes and booze and whatnot, I think that this must have slowed down or
maybe evaporated altogether.

         One odd thing that happened quite recently is that a man who was a part-time
teacher here and part-time teacher at VMI throughout all of the 1960s and who left
in the '60s-pardon me, Christmas of '69-and worked in the Library of Congress for
something like twenty-five years, all of the '70s, all of the '80s, and first half of the
'90s, had now come back here for his retirement. And he thinks that the-how shall
we say-the rather exuberant cocktail party life of the '60s is still here, and he is
going to plunge back into this pool of alcohol, this great swimming pool of alcohol,
of Lexington high society, the blending of Lexington society and faculty society. And
I don't think it's going to happen. I think he's going to end up listening to compact
disks at home, listening to Mozart quartets, because the whole tone of faculty life, I
sense, has become very serious, very lacking in hedonism nowadays. I think that the
socializing and the gossip and the boozing has either disappeared or been down-
scaled very dramatically in the last thirty-some years.

         After 1970, I sort of drifted into increasing reclusiveness, because one was
expected to reciprocate, and the requirement of reciprocity, or the understood-it
wasn't a stated requirement, but the implied requirement of reciprocity did not
apply to bachelors, young bachelor professors, who lived in rented rooms, as I did
when I first came here. It was understood that in a rented room one can't have
fifteen or twenty cocktail party guests.

                                                                                                                                   4
         But after I got a fairly big apartment in 1970, I sort of sensed that the cocktail
circuit would be pleased if I would entertain them on the basis of reciprocity, and I
just was too lazy to do that. That's a lot of washing of glasses and plates. So I very
gradually eased myself out of that. But certainly in the '60s, the social scene, 5:30
p.m., was extremely active and would greatly delight today's Lexington police
department because, of course, all these drunks were driving home through the
streets of Little Arcadia here, undisturbed by the cops, because the gendarmes would
have said in the 1960s that it wasn't nice to arrest the old Professor So-and-so and his
wife. So the obsession with drunken driving that we have now, or the phobia about
drunken driving, of course, didn't exist then. So these people could sort of weave
through the streets of Lexington in their 1965 gas guzzlers without any anxiety about
the police consequences. So in that respect, as in many others, it was a very, very
different scene at that time.

         Of course, these people were extremely gracious, and the scene was very
pleasant, but I will say it became quite repetitive. There was a lady here in town
whose father was president of the university just after the turn of the century, and
she was an unmarried lady of great wealth who was one of the queens of the cocktail
party circuit. I remember once somebody gave a party that was so big, it was on the
second floor of the Robert E. Lee Hotel, today known as the Welfare Arms, but it was
the R.E. Lee Hotel in those days. And there was a second floor ballroom or banquet
room or so with a little terrace looking out over Main Street. I met this lady at a
cocktail party circa 1970, and she was throbbing with excitement and said, "Oh, isn't
this thrilling?" meaning for us all to be together.

         I thought, "Madam, you have been guzzling with these same people for the
last forty or fifty years. How exciting can it be for you?" But I think she was quite
sincere. I think she was thrilled to be reunited with the gossip buddies and booze
flowing freely.

                                                                                                                    5
         So it was a scene that we wouldn't find today, I think, among the faculty. Of
course, the grand old ladies have died off now. Les grandes dames are now in
Paradise, and the elderly ladies of Lexington society, I don't think hobnob as
obsessively with the faculty.
Warren: I'm very sorry to have missed those ladies. I really would have liked to
have interviewed them. When I saw that-was it Mary Monroe Penick died?
Futch: Mary Monroe Penick died about what, a year or two ago?
Warren: Yes. And I said, "Oh, I missed that one."
Futch: Oh, she was one. Now, I'll tell you something that you can't put in the book,
but I'll tell you a very funny story. When I came here, Professor Crenshaw was the
head of the History Department, and he arranged for me, I guess through the
registrar's office, he got a list of ladies who had rented rooms. Of course, I couldn't
afford an apartment, let alone to buy a house. Professor Pemberton, certainly he
bought a house as soon as he arrived here or within a year. So I had to find a rented
room, hopefully with a private bath, which I did find, for, I think, thirty-five dollars
a month in a private home of a married couple.

         But Dr. Crenshaw provided me with a list of landladies of Lexington, elderly
ladies, widows and spinsters of very advanced age, such as Mrs. Gravit [phonetic],
who rented rooms out. My mother and I divided up the list, and my mother went to
Miss Gadsden's house. Miss Gadsden says, "Oh, I don't think that your son would be
happy here. There's no private bath. He would have to share a bath with a student,
and I don't think a faculty member would wish to share a bath with undergrads."
Well, she would have said "undergraduates." So that, of course, did not lead to a
rental arrangement.

         But Miss Mary Monroe Penick's name was on my list, my mother and I
splitting the list up. And so I followed this to the address 104 White Street, and
when I got there, having never set foot on White Street or in Lexington before, Miss

                                                                                                                    6
Penick was down on her hands and knees pulling weeds out of a stone retaining
wall that kept her front lawn in place. She was pulling the weeds, and I said, I
thought rather reasonably, I said, "Excuse me. Would you be Miss Mary Monroe
Penick?"

         And she looked up at me with a characteristically feisty look and said, "And
just who do I look like to you, the old colored mammy?"

         So I was a bit flustered. I was sort of, "Madam, certainly not." So she was a
character and very sarcastic, as you can imagine, and she would have been a great
interview.

         Was I going to mention somebody else to you who would have some-yes,
somebody who might have photos of Miss Gadsden, maybe a student in Miss
Gadsden's house in 1920, Miss Louise P. Moore of Lexington high society, who's a
lawyer in town.
Warren: I need to talk to her.
Futch: Absolutely you do, because she is the closest living relative of the Gadsden
ladies who rented to students for decades and decades and decades. Miss Eleanor
Gadsden. They were twins, the Gadsden sisters.
Warren: How do you spell Gadsden?
Futch: G-A-D-S-D-E-N. They were related to the man who made the Gadsden
Purchase before the Civil War, 1853, that sliver of land we bought from Mexico.
After having ripped off a good deal of land from Mexico, we bought a little bit more
to make southern Arizona or something. I don't teach American history. I don't
have to know that. But the Gadsdens were old Southern bluebloods, the daughters
of General Lee's artillery chief, the Reverend William Nelson Pendleton, a timid
general known as Granny Pendleton, married-Granny Pendleton's daughter
married a young man, a student or a brand-new alumnus named Gadsden, who
lived just long enough to become the father of the twins in 1886 and then died, so

                                                                                                                                7
that the Widow Gadsden brought the twins back to her, the widow's, hometown,
Lexington, from South Carolina, where the twins were born.

         So one of the twins lived ninety-eight and a half years, died in December of
'84, the twin that I knew, and the other twin daughter died in 1961, about a year and
a half before I arrived in Lexington, in January of '61. They are buried closer to
Stonewall Jackson's grave than anybody in the cemetery is buried close to Stonewall
Jackson. So Miss Gadsden died in, as I said, in December of 1984 at ninety-eight and
eight months, I think, born in April of '86.

         And so the nearest relative, to my knowledge, is Louise P. Moore, and any
photos that were in that house, I assume have passed to Miss Moore.
Warren: Good. I will check on that.
Futch: And there may well be photos of the Gadsden ladies with some students, the
Gadsden twins with some students, in the 1920s, perhaps.
Warren: Well, their names have come up, so I would very much like to find them.
Futch: They were identical. I'm told they were identical twins. Miss Eleanor, whom
I knew, had worked in the W&L library for many years. Miss Anzolette. The other
one, Anzolette, A-N-Z-0-L-E-T-T-E, Miss Anzolette Gadsden, worked in the VMI
library. And if a W&L student or VMI cadet would go to the desk of either library
and ask for a certain book, the two sisters, who were librarians, might say to the
student or to the cadet, "Well, we don't have that book." They had that very grand
way of talking. "We don't have that book, but if you go to the other library on the
next-door campus, the book is in their collection, and you will find it there." And so
the student or the cadet would go to the other campus and find, seemingly, the
identical woman, because they were identical twins, and they would wonder how
this lady had managed to get so quickly from one campus to the other to be at the
desk.

                                                                                                                   8
         So the Gadsden twins were great town characters, and they remember the
daughters of Lee, the last two surviving daughters of Lee, Mary and Mildred,
because the Lee daughters frequented the Gadsden house, the Pines, that Dean
Bezanson had, until I think he sold it a month or two ago, this summer perhaps,
called the Pines at the corner of Lee Avenue and-is it Preston Street? Right across
from the Phi Gamma House. The house still has the same exterior appearance as it
had throughout this century. The inside, I'm told, was greatly and very necessarily
rehabbed in the late 1980s, because the bricks and the wood and the mortar and all of
those things were crumbling. A faculty wife, Nancy Roosevelt Taylor, sank a great
deal of money into the rehabbing of that house. But Louise Moore can give you the
history of the house.
Warren: All right. I'll talk to her.
Futch: And the Gadsden ladies, as I say, were the landladies of endless years of W&L
students, and there may be photographs.
Warren: Okay. I'll follow through on that one.

         Now, a while ago you mentioned a theme that I really am fascinated in
pursuing and I've gotten a lot of interesting commentary on, the idea of
conventional dress.
Futch: Oh, yes. Yes. That's why I'm wearing a tie today, in memory of it.
Warren: But you have witnessed so much of what has happened to conventional
dress.
Futch: Yeah. Very depressing. Very, very sad.
Warren: Can you tell me what you've seen in your years here?
Futch: Well, of course, they now look like kids who have summer jobs at the beach,
except in the dead of winter. It's just very, very sad that the administration of the
mid 1960s did not insist on the preservation of conventional dress. What happened
was that around '66, a student body president was elected in the spirit of '60s'

                                                                                                                            9
rebelliousness, who got rid of the enforcement committee. There was a committee,
sort of named in Orwellian fashion, the Assimilation Committee. The Assimilation
Committee imposed fines on boys who would have dared, if any did dare, to show
up, I think in town as well as on the campus, without a tie or without a proper shirt.
I don't know how often these fines were levied, because it was absolutely
understood that conventional dress was required, and it was hardly a rebellious
student body.

         But when this kid was elected student body president approximately in '66, he
got rid of the committee and sent a signal that he was against conventional dress,
because the rebelliousness at Berkeley and Columbia University and places like that
became an inspiration to students who liked to pose as radicals. So the signal was
sent from the Student Executive Committee, or at many schools I guess it's called
the Student Council, that conventional dress is neither important nor desirable.

         But habit is a powerful thing. ·So for the rest of the '60s, the decline of
conventional dress was very gradual, and only a very tiny handful of kids would
depart from the tradition, and most of them sympathized, of course, with the
tradition and had no wish to depart from it.

         I remember around '67 or '68, there was some kid sunbathing in a bikini on
the lawn directly before the front door of the president's house, of the Lee House,
and I recall exactly who it was. He has now, I'm told, become a great conservative,
but he was doing that in order to make a point, wearing not much more than a fig
leaf on some spring day, I guess possibly September, but more likely a spring day.
And that was a fairly dramatic revolt against conventional dress. But the others, of
course, stuck with it until, I would think, if I can get this down right, the freshman
class that entered in '69, I believe, was the one that-I don't think in any concerted
action, I think it was just a zeitgeist and what they saw on TV, with ragged protestors
at Berkeley and other places, other campuses around the country, I believe it was the

                                                                                                                 10
freshman class of '69 that deliberately, though spontaneously, went to the dogs as far
as dress was concerned and, of course, drugs too.

         It was in that four-year period of '69 to '73 that saw the end of conventional
dress, though through the rest of the seventies, if you look at the yearbooks, you'll
see that when they posed for their senior photographs, that most of them, even if
they had long hair like a biblical apostles, as a number did, most of them would don
a coat and tie for their senior photos, and when their mom and dad back home said,
"You be very certain to have a coat and tie. We want to show your grandmother a
nice photo in your senior yearbook." So on the rare occasions when they were
photographed for the yearbook, the big majority did have a coat and tie, though they
would go through the graduation line very often in sandals or less on their feet.

         Sometimes in the graduation line in the '70s and later, you would see a kid
who was obviously wearing a polo shirt-or what are they called nowadays-a T-
shirt under the black robe.

         But at any rate, getting back to the chronology, I would say '69 to '73 was the
time when a sort of sartorial revolt broke out. The behavior continued to be very
polite. They showed their good upbringing in their courtesy, their personal courtesy.
But the question that you asked had to do with conventional dress, and I would say
that it was at that point that it ended.

         I continued to ask, obviously knowing that no administration would back me
up, I couldn't order or demand or require, but I continued to ask for conventional
dress throughout the '70s, and they went along with that, and kids who didn't
approve or who didn't want to do that wouldn't sign up for my classes, which was
fine, fewer papers to grade. So that was not a problem for me.

         But in the '80s, what happened was, again with beautiful personal manners
and deportment, they began wearing cruddy clothes, and eventually, by the end of
the '80s, would wear T-shirts with neckties. And of course, a necktie on a T-shirt

                                                                                                                              11
looks grotesque and silly and particularly when they would wear this shirt every
forty-eight hours, if it was a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class, a necktie that they
loosened to the point where it could be put on over their heads without having to-
it was never completely untied. It just looked like sort of a sailor's or enlisted Navy
man's tie that is knotted sort of halfway down his chest.

         And so at that point I quit talking about it, because I thought a T-shirt without
a necktie looks better than a T-shirt with a half-tied necktie. So it was useless to
insist on that. But I've always said if-when I become president of the university-
not if, when-I will reintroduce conventional dress, and coat and tie, or jacket and
tie, will be required.
Warren: Now, I found recently a photograph of some fellows standing out on the
Colonnade, and two of them are wearing shorts, and I think they were wearing like
an oxford shirt with a tie.
Futch: There was a lot of that.
Warren: And I looked at that, and I said, "I wonder if they just came from Dave
Futch's class? Would that be a reasonable assumption to make?
Futch: In the seventies and '80s, that was a very reasonable assumption, but I would
say more in the seventies, because I think they began wearing something less than
oxford shirts, little sport shirts or something that were not really meant for a
necktie, or T-shirts.
Warren: Did you stand alone in this stand?
Futch: Oh, yes.
Warren: Were you the only person who felt this way?
Futch: Yes. Well, I don't know how the others felt, of course, but I think American
men are extremely wimpy, and the other faculty members didn't-don't use the
word "wimpy," please, in the book. But I think that the other faculty members,

                                                                                                                     12
whatever they felt, I think they just said, "Well, we'll surrender to the zeitgeist." So
I was the only one who insisted on it.

         I was told-students have to tell one professor what other faculty members
say. They carry tales back and forth, which is quite useful. Very interesting, in fact.
They told me that other professors referred to me as a mental case. So some of the
other faculty members were very annoyed because I was implicitly criticizing them
for not doing the same, and I really don't know what the sentiments of the entire
faculty were, but I was the only professor who insisted on this as long as I could.
Warren: It seemed to me that it would be very flattering that if the students never
wore ties any other time but they just wear them to your class-
Futch: Oh, it was.
Warren: -that it would be flattering for them to sign up for your class, knowing
that that was the price.
Futch: You're exactly right. I was very complimented that they did that, and it gave
me a good feeling throughout, I guess, all of the '70s when they did that. When they
began doing it with T-shirts, however, in the '80s, I was less flattered. But when they
would wear the proper kind of shirt with a tie, I was quite pleased, so that's a
perceptive thing for you to say. I was delighted.
Warren: Well, I've talked with several people who've been your students, and
you're very well thought of.
Futch: Well, I'm thankful to be told that.
Warren: One person who particularly impressed me was Gene Perry. Do you
remember Gene Perry?
Futch: Spelled-
Warren: Eugene Perry. P-E-R-R-Y.
Futch: Yes. Yes, I do remember him.
Warren: He really thought a lot of you.

                                                                                                                   13
Futch: Really? Well, I'm complimented. If you meet him again, give him my good
wishes, please.
Warren: I was interested in that.
Futch: Yes. I'm delighted and very complimented to hear that also. I do remember
him.
Warren: It was a long time ago.
Futch: Oh, yes. He was '70s maybe, 1970s?
Warren: Early '70s.
Futch: Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of Commodore Perry, Admiral Perry, who
became Admiral Perry. Yes, I do remember Gene Perry. Well, if you encounter him,
I send him my warm greetings.
Warren: Good. Okay. ·
Futch: A very nice young man.
Warren: Now, speaking of your fellow faculty members-
Futch: Oh, dear.
Warren: You mentioned someone a while ago. I feel like I'm tiptoeing. I'm sort of
tiptoeing. I can hardly say I'm filling his shoes.
Futch: Boatwright?
Warren: No, no, no, no, no. Ollinger Crenshaw.
Futch: Oh, one of my great-
Warren: I'm tiptoeing behind him.
Futch: Oh, yes. I thought you meant you were tiptoeing on thin ice.
Warren: No. No. No. I'm tiptoeing behind him.
Futch: Yes, as an historian. Yes.
Warren: Yes. Yes. I can hardly say I'm walking boldly in his shoes.
Futch: Well, you're unnecessarily modest.
Warren: Well, I feel like he's God around here.

                                                                                                                     14
Futch: It's a wonderful book. Well, he was God. You've read his book, of course.
Warren: Of course.
Futch: It's a wonderful book.
Warren: Of course. I take it off the shelf at least once a day.
Futch: Yeah. Well, he was one of my great heroes. You can't put this in your book,
of course, but I had the great pleasure of getting an expression of his esteem for me,
and he was not effusive at all. Verbally he never said, "I think you are fantastic," but
when that book was published in May of 1969, General Lee's College, I, of course,
asked him to-I think he gave me a copy, and I asked him to autograph that, and
what he wrote-it was out at the Keydet Gen~ral Restaurant at lunch, and he wrote
on the flyleaf, "To Dave Futch," such and such a date, May-I think May the 5th of
'69, and he said, "If I did nothing else for Washington and Lee, I brought Dave here,"
signed Ollinger Crenshaw, and I thought that was a marvelous thing for him to
write in the book. And that was ten months before he died. So I was grateful, and
later, ten months later, I was more grateful that before he died, he had something
nice to say to me. So needless to say, his and my good feelings were reciprocal.
Warren: Tell me about what that time was like when the book was published. Was
it a lot of hoopla here?
Futch: Yes, there was a lot of hoopla on campus. Indeed, yes. Sure. There was an
autograph party in the bookstore, of course, and people were delighted to get it.

         May I tell you something in confidence that will not appear in this book? He
said that it could have been published many, many years before it was, but there was
some material in it that would have annoyed some of the trustees, who were
mostly-well, I was going to say when they [unclear], they were mostly
curmudgeons at that time, and I think that although Dr. Crenshaw was a senior
professor and nothing would have happened to him, nothing bad would have
happened to him, there would apparently have been expressions of irritation from

                                                                                                                     15
some of the trustees about various details of this and that in the book, and that
accounted for the delay in the publication by many years. And he may have done
some polishing up. He wanted to wait for old Mr. So-and-so to die and old Mr. So-
and-so to die and another Mr. So-and-so to die, as they all did, accommodatingly. In
his lifetime, though only barely as I say, he did not live twelve months after the
book was published. So he undoubtedly did some little addition of this or that, but
the bulk of it was finished long before 1969, and he just wanted there to be nothing
but good vibes. He didn't want complaints and criticisms from the trustees about the
book.

         You'll notice it went up only to 1930, which meant that Taylor Sanders has a
running start. If his runs from 1930 to the year 2010 or something of that kind, then
that'll be a big piece of history. And in a way, Taylor is lucky to have a big piece of
history to deal with since Ollie Crenshaw stopped in 1930, but he felt that trustee
toes would be stepped on if he dealt with matters later than 1930. I mean, that was
not laziness on his part; that was a desire to avoid ruffled feathers.
Warren: What kind of issues do you think he didn't want to touch on?
Futch: Well, of course, coeducation and race never came up in those years, so I
don't really know exactly what they were.
Warren: He does mention right at the very end, he just sort of has a foot or an end
note where he talks about the first black students coming in.
Futch: Well, that was 1966, of course. But in a book that stops in 1930, that really is a
footnote.
Warren: Yeah, it really is very much an end note.
Futch: So what the issues were in the '30s and in the '40s that he didn't want to deal
with-remember, the book was in the making since the late '40s. And there was one
thing I heard. I don't know if I heard it from his lips, but I heard somewhere or
other that it was to have been published in 1949 for the two hundredth anniversary,

                                                                                                                   16
and yet it appeared twenty years later. So there were matters that I guess we would
call unimportant today, or uninteresting, perhaps, today, having to do with the '30s
and '40s that he didn't want to deal with at the expense of irritating trustees. But it
was interesting, I thought, or it is interesting, looking back on it, that some of these
people lived on, some of the trustees lived on into the '60s whom he did not want
to irritate.

         I mean, he had nothing to fear. He would not have been fired or anything
like that. I think he wanted-in fact, I know that he did not like unpleasantness, and
an unpleasant personal encounter would have been very distressing to him. He was
somebody who liked personal relations to run very smoothly and all other relations
to run very smoothly. I think that a man who was so diplomatic, who was such a
master of euphemisms, wanted, above all, tranquillity. So we might be surprised
today to know how trifling from our vantage point something in the '30s or '40s was
that he did not want to have caused trouble in the '60s.
Warren: What was he like as a person?
Futch: Extremely affable, very convivial, very chatty, very conversational. He was a
repository of anecdotes from the past, from the 1920s. He arrived here as a freshman
in 1922. So he remembered all sorts of campus characters who had, of course, died
off by the time I got here, as recently as '62. If you include his student and faculty
years, he was here for forty-eight years, 1922 to 1970.

         So an enormous number of characters had come and gone, such as De la
Warre Benjamin Easter of the French Department, whose name you could never
forget. Professor Easter apparently was an old sourpuss of the '20s and '30s on the
faculty, and he spelled his name, the state of Delaware but in the eighteenth century
way, Lord De la Warre. So if you look in an old Calyx you will see this little
sourpuss, De la Warre Benjamin Easter spelled in that way, not spelled like the state
of Delaware today.

                                                                                                                       17
        And, of course, Professor Leyburn, who was Dr. Crenshaw's great bete noire. I
guess in the 250th anniversary book you can't point to this, but Professor Crenshaw
and Dr. Leyburn were bitter, bitter enemies for reasons that went back, again, to the
time before I came here. Dr. Leyburn came in '47, I think. Ollie Crenshaw, of course,
had been on the faculty for something like twenty years at that time and had
another twenty-two years to go. I'm sure one of the distressing things in Dr.
Crenshaw's life was that Leyburn was still around when he died. He would have
been happy to see Leyburn head off to West Virginia. I think Leyburn had originally,
when he retired in '72, headed off to some family acres in West VA, purportedly the
world's biggest watercress farm, and Ollie Crenshaw would have been very pleased
to see the east end of Leyburn on a horse going west, to West Virginia, because no
love was lost there at all.
Warren: What were the issues between them?
Futch: I think, for one thing, he regarded Leyburn as a pompous and intellectually
pretentious sort of character who was by no means-for example, in the cocktail
circuit, one cannot imagine Leyburn relaxing at a cocktail party, exchanging gossip
with the old dowagers of town society or with anybody else. Leyburn had a very
structured sort of life, as you've probably heard. Between the hours of whatever it
was, 5:00 to 6:00, he would be playing Beethoven's sonatas, and between 6:00 and 7:00
he would be dining, with his servant bringing the various courses to his solitary
table or where he ate, at the table where he ate in solitary splendor like the Pope.
Popes, until very recently, ate alone. It was a tradition. I think only in the last twenty
or thirty years have Popes begun eating with other people. So Leyburn, although
purportedly a Presbyterian, was very papal in his aloofness and his sort of majestic
isolation.
Warren: You, of course, knew Leyburn.
Futch: Slightly. No one knew Leyburn very well. I knew of-

                                                                                                                      18
Warren: What do you mean by that?
Futch: Because he was a very unsociable sort of character, and if you passed him
along the Colonnade, he would nod sort of like a Prussian general and almost
inaudibly say, "Good morning," "Good afternoon," something like that. The idea of
a conversation with Leyburn is almost a contradiction in terms.

         Dr. Crenshaw, who was so convivial and so chatty and so loved talking to
people generally about light topics, not about politics or religion or atheism, nothing
heavy was to Dr. Crenshaw's taste, always what old Ms. So-and-so said in 1920 when
thus and such a person arrived in Lexington, the chronicles of the town, he greatly
enjoyed, in a somewhat condescending way. I mean, he realized that we were all
frogs living in a very tiny pond. And so I think for a man who came from the
suburbs of Atlanta, if I'm not mistaken, West Point, Georgia, that's where he was
born, I believe, I think he knew that Lexington was a sort of a-what can one say?-
an elegant little backwater, something like that. And so he greatly enjoyed anecdotes
from the history of the upperclass of the town. He took no interest in the rednecks
and in the lower classes at all, none. But what old Ms. So-and-so, Confederate
granddaughter or Confederate granddaughter, perhaps, had to say to a VMI cadet
when a cadet made a faux pas, a conversational boo-boo or faux pas, and said so-and-
so to old Ms. So-and-so, that she came back with a snappy retort that annihilated a
cadet forty years earlier, that was the kind of thing that he liked. If Leyburn had
discussed anything at all conversationally-do you need to change the tape?
Warren: Yes, but go ahead, just finish off.
Futch: If Leyburn had indulged in a conversation, it would be about the formation
of the Greek personality and the fact that the ancient Greeks had attached great
importance to this or that personal trait and we must attempt to emulate the best of
classical civilization. Dr. Crenshaw would have said, "Please, this is the cocktail
hour. Must we talk about the Greek personality?"

                                                                                                                  19
Warren: We're going to turn the tape over.
[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Futch: They were like men who came not only from different planets but different
galaxies. Leyburn was so serious, so intense. Ollie Crenshaw suspected that Leyburn
was a Yale atheist, but in this town there was no place for overt atheism, and the
only way to plug into the town, to acquire respectability-and I've got to tell you a
funny story about this also-was to be either "Presby" or "Episcy," one or the other.
And so Leyburn hooked up with the Presbyterian Church upon arriving here, and
Dr. Crenshaw was absolutely convinced that a man who had taught sociology at Yale
for twenty years was an atheist, and that the sincerity of Leyburn's Presbyterian
attachment was completely phony, that there wasn't a single sincere fiber in
Leyburn's body, first of all, and in his religious affiliation as well. Not that Ollie
Crenshaw was religious. I suspect that he wasn't because of various sarcastic little
remarks he made just fleetingly, but I think the Crenshaws may have gone to
church once a year, to the Episcy Church, just to put the tiniest pinch of incense on
the altar, the tiniest possible pinch of incense.

         But Leyburn was more assiduous in going to the Presby temple, and Leyburn's
only friend, and it must have been a somewhat aloof and rather stuffy friendship, if
the word "friendship" fits, was a retired Presbyterian minister who lived in the
town and who was pretty icy himself, I gather. These two icebergs would
occasionally visit and perhaps have tea or coffee-no, no, not coffee; that's too low
class-tea together. It was always a picture that sort of amused me, Leyburn and the
Reverend So-and-so, lived here in the town, these two cold, cold, cold fish.
Thinking that they were friends was sort of strange, because Leyburn, it's hard to
imagine Leyburn-Leyburn, actually, I think, was probably a space alien, and the
idea of his being friends with any earthling, any mortal on this planet, is an
impossibility.

                                                                                                                        20
         I'll admit my view of Leyburn is greatly colored by one lunch conversation
after another, day after day and year after year, with Dr. Crenshaw, for whom hatred
of Leyburn was oxygen. And I will say I've never heard or seen anything in Leyburn
that contradicts what Dr. Crenshaw said. Everything he said was consistent with
what I could observe and pick up from other people. I don't know that Leyburn was
an evil man. I think he was just devoid of emotions and the psychological structure
of an earthling, I mean, earth-born inhabitant. So a lot of Ollie Crenshaw's
conversation was about this arch, archenemy of his. Obviously you can't put this in
the book, because that would not be consistent with a pleasant portrait of the school.
Warren: No, but it's very interesting to know that dynamic.
Futch: Yeah. I think it is interesting for you, the writer, I assume the chief or the
only writer of the book, for you to know this, that these two men who were born
very close together, one in '02-Leyburn was born in '02 and Ollie Crenshaw in '04,
so they were closely-what's the word-contemporary and coeval. I guess an old
person and a newborn baby can be coeval. They're living briefly in the same time.
But at any rate, these two guys hated each other.
Warren: That's interesting that you're bringing up this theme of people being in the
same place at the same time, because one of the things-I'm going to jump here.
Futch: Yeah. Go ahead.
Warren: Two of the interviews that I've done recently were with people who
attended Washington and Lee in the years 1969 to '74, so they were both here at the
same time. One of them led the traditional Washington and Lee life, and the other
one got involved in the alternative life style that was here at that time.
Futch: Doug Harwood would be such a one, for example.
Warren: Well, that's not who I'm talking about, but, yes, he would be.
Futch: He was very alternative.
Warren: He would. He still is.

                                                                                                                       21
Warren: He was highly alternative.
Warren: He still is.
Futch: And still is. Yes.
Warren: It was fascinating to me, because it was like these two people were talking
about entirely different places, and yet they were talking about the same place at the
same time. I'm fascinated by that time period here, because I think it's an
extraordinary time here, and I mean that in the sense of it being extra-ordinary. It
was not a normal time, and yet-
Futch: Oh, that's right.
Warren: -it was a very dramatic and historical time. And you were here.
Futch: Oh, yes.
Warren: What was your experience, especially of what went on here in May of
1970?
Futch: Oh, yeah. Well, I can say something about that. My feeling was that a surface
minority of the students, a small number, wanted to reenact what they saw on TV at
other campuses. I think very few, if any, were genuine radicals. The faculty, on the
other hand, included a few such as Mario Pellicciaro. Excuse me. Mario is still here.
This is a man who left after about three years. And you may have heard-what was
his name? Henry Sloss, S-L-0-S-S. Have you heard about him?
Warren: Just people who were here then have mentioned his name.
Futch: Okay. He was in the English Department, and you can easily check this out in
the catalog, circa 1968, 1972 perhaps, a rather short time. But he, I think, took the
whole radical peacenik thing very seriously, hated traditionalism in every form, as
Professor Boatwright did, although the Boatwright story is one I knew a great deal
better, if only because he was here a long time, and Sloss was here very briefly. But
those two men, I think, wanted to see every tradition in capitalism, sexual
relationships, every single tradition of society ripped up and reshaped in a Utopian

                                                                                                       22
way. I am told that Henry's-I, of course, have no personal knowledge of this-that
Henry Sloss' leaving the faculty was a matter of departmental trauma in the early
'70s and that the reverberations of his departure affected his department for many,
many years, personal relations within the department. But the extraordinary
radicalism of Henry Sloss was probably the most significant influence on the
campus in May of 1970. He had been here a very short time then, and he was
destined to remain a very short time after that period.

         But there was no student radicalism to speak of, quantitatively, and it was
significant that one of the rumors of Kent-Cambodia week, which I guess-ten days,
the first ten days of May of 1970-I've always thought it was significant that the most
interesting rumor was that radicals from UVA, which would have sounded like a
contradiction in terms a couple years earlier, but it's a bigger school, so there were
probably more, maybe not in percentages, but there were probably more radicals in
absolute terms at UVA than here, that they were going to come down to W&L and
vandalize the property, Lee Chapel and other places here, to let Richard Nixon and
whoever-Melvin Laird, I guess, was Secretary of Defense and John Mitchell the
Attorney General, these hate objects of the radicals of that day, let them know how
mad the students were, and to my knowledge, no UVA radical has ever set foot in
Lexington. But it was as though the rumormongers in May 1970 here were saying
there aren't enough radicals here to accomplish anything, and therefore this
network of peaceniks with, presumably, a foothold at UVA would send somebody
here to stir up the pot at W&L in the absence of indigenous radicals at W&L. And, of
course, no property was vandalized at W&L. I don't recall whether any was at UVA
or not. But the radical impulse was extremely weak overall, though there may have
been one or two virulent characters, and certainly Henry Sloss was probably a
mental case.

                                                                                                                 23
         For one thing, Henry Sloss and his wife both came from rich families, and so
they had no reason to worry about job security, for example. If he made his
colleagues or made the administration angry, it didn't matter, because they were
both rolling in money, and what happened was that when Henry Sloss lost his job a
few years later, he and his wife moved to Italy and bought a villa or some sort of
house in Tuscany and lived sort of like Victorian English people who had so-called
private incomes in 1850 living in Italy. So I guess it's easy and fun to play-act at
radicalism if one has two big financial cushions to fall back on, his family and her
family.

         At any rate, the decision-one of the decisions-I guess the only memorable
decision made was in May of 1970. There were two faculty meetings held in Reid
Hall, which was not the usual place for faculty meetings. I don't know why a
different building was used, but there were two nighttime faculty meetings held in
addition to the regular monthly one in May of '70 to deal with the supposed
explosive mood of the students, and the decision that came out of all this was that
any student who was in a moral tizzy about the invasion of Cambodia and the
shooting by the National Guardsmen at Kent State, any student who was
emotionally or morally furious about this-Italians have a word, sconvolto,
meaning overturned or turned upside down-about this could postpone the final
exams, which were coming up, of course, at the end of May, could postpone the
exams until no later than September the 30th, could take them any time at the
beginning of the next academic year, which, when you look back on it, was not a
very wise idea because people forget things, students forget material that they were
supposed to have learned in one semester, they forget the material by the end of the
summer vacation, all the beach fun and games.

         So this academically was not a very wise idea, and I don't know how many or
how few students accepted this arrangement, but some did, and during final exam

                                                                                                                            24
period left town, and a number of very conservative students, very conservative
students told me that instead of taking final exams, they were going to leave and
take the final exams in September. And I said, "Well, you're free to do that according
to the faculty decision, but it seems academically unwise." I said, "So if you're
leaving town, where are you going?"

         They said, "Oh, Virginia Beach."
         And I said, "Virginia Beach? You're not going protest the war at Virginia
beach, are you?"
         He said, "No. We're going to enjoy the swimming and drink beer and look
for girls at Virginia Beach." And so their postponing the exams had nothing so do
with war protesting or moral indignation against anything. They just wanted to hit
the beach a few days earlier than they otherwise would have, maybe a week earlier.
         So the radical impulse here was very weak overall, but Henry Sloss and a
very tiny handful of students-there was a boy named Jeffrey Gingold, G-I-N-G-0-L-
D, whose name you'll find, I'm sure, in the alumni roster and I'm told is still living
out in the Pacific Northwest. So he was sort of a radical wannabe and play-acted at
revolution, and Henry Sloss was play-acting or maybe more. Maybe he was a rebel, I
don't know. But there was this one nutty student and one nutty professor and, I
think, very few others.
Warren: One person I interviewed from that time period sent me an amazing
making body of material that was published at that time on mimeograph machines,
it looks like.
Futch: Oh, that may well be.
Warren: And there were probably 300 pieces of paper.
Futch: But a very small handful of people can do that.

                                                                                                                  25
Warren: Well, yeah, but they were all published within ten or twelve days. I don't
know that that happened at other campuses. I was just impressed. It seemed like a
lot was put out.
Futch: I would imagine. Now, the stuff may have disappeared that was at Columbia
and Kent State and Berkeley, but I'm sure that if we had kids using a mimeograph
machine, that a lot of campuses must have had it, because this campus was one of
the least fiery, or what would you say-hysterical-at the time. So I would think
that maybe five or six students in the space of ten to twelve days could grind out
news releases.
Warren: Did you attend that faculty meeting?
Futch: Oh, yes. There were, I believe, two extra faculty meetings in addition to the
normal one. The regularly scheduled faculty meeting is the first Monday of a
month, so that maybe that was May 3rd. I'm sorry, I don't have a calendar here. So
that was May 3rd. Then there was another one set on May the 7th and then another
one on May the 10th.
Warren: And what was the mood in those meetings?
Futch: I would say surprisingly calm. The conversation didn't drag. I didn't say
anything. Of course, I'd known for all these years that a conservative's opinions
would be discounted instantly. So I have never spoken at a faculty meeting in
twenty-in what-thirty-four years now. But I had the feeling that everybody-
what am I trying to say? Every minute of the faculty meeting was taken up with
contributions, but, I mean, there was never a time when the president said, "Do we
have any other comments? Does anybody else want to say anything?" Somebody's
hand was always up, but it seemed to me that the mood was not hysterical. It was
polite, and I guess some people spoke with a certain intensity. It was not like the
French Revolution. Those demented assemblies of the French Revolution were
quite volatile. It wasn't like that.

                                                                                                         26
Warren: Was your sense that the faculty was more or less or equally radical, than
the students? Was it just one or two members of the faculty?
Futch: I think very few faculty members were radical. There was a man who is now
still living, in his nineties, who was probably an outgoing department head at the
time, who had sort of a fixation on the Russian Revolution. He remembered the
Russian Revolution. If he's in his nineties now, of course, he remembers the
Russian Revolution as a teenager, and he never fell out of love with the Bolshevik
Revolution of November 1917. Students told me that he wanted the American
students to create sort of a hammer-and-sickle revolution in this country, but he's so
much older. I mean, he lived in Paris in the 1920s and used to see Gertrude Stein
and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald walking the streets of the Latin Quarter. So he
was a faculty member at the time, though on the verge of retirement, I think, and
was sort of an armchair radical screwball. And then Henry Sloss, this very young
man, probably in his-I think not over thirty at the time, probably, who was a
radical. But I think most of the professors were sort of worshippers of FDR and JFK,
and so that meant that they were armchair liberals and theoretical leftists, but they
weren't one to go out on the barricades at all. So it was a faculty whose radicalism
was limited to cocktail parties, praise of LBJ's legislation, that sort of thing.
Warren: You touched on this a little bit with Richard, but I'd like to pursue what I
think is just a really interesting dichotomy that goes on at this school, that the
faculty seems to be liberal and the student body is so conservative.
Futch: Oh, yeah. There's no doubt of that.
Warren: How does that work? Why does it work so well here?
Futch: Because people are polite. If the student body came, or if the faculty maybe
came from a different socioeconomic background, there might be rudeness and
shouts and insults, but I think that, whether by design or by happenstance, so many
of the people come from similar backgrounds that politeness is a virtue that has

                                                                                                                27
been respected here for a very long time, and I think maybe some of the people who
come here from more humble backgrounds quickly realize that politeness is a
cardinal-maybe the cardinal-virtue here, and they quickly get with the program.
Rudeness and confrontation-confrontationalism-does that word exist? Rudeness
and confrontations are not part of the picture here, and so that's how it gets along.
The political differences are extremely deep between left-wing faculty, who are the
majority, of course, and the right-wing students, who are the majority.
Warren: When you arrived in 1962, the faculty was liberal then?
Futch: Yes, oh, yes. Now, of course, you understand that in 1962 the definition of
liberal was very different, because the Kennedys were just taking hold at that time.
And so leftism in 1962 was defined as Roosevelt, Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and
JFK. We look back on JFK as being a conservative in some ways because of his tax
reduction and his confronting the Soviets, his risking war in Cuba over the missiles.
So now, thirty-some years later, JFK looks conservative, but he was regarded as a big
liberal at that time. So that was what liberalism was at the time.
Warren: And at that time he was embraced by the faculty, but not the student body?
Futch: Oh, that's right. And I'll tell you another story in a moment along this very
line, so remind me. The students hated JFK because he was perceived-the
Democrats were perceived as liberals at that time. The faculty, of course, bought into
the New York Times-Arthur Schlesinger cult of worshipping JFK even before he
was assassinated. They liked the idea of Camelot and this young couple, handsome
Jack and lovely Jackie, who incarnated the hopes of a new generation. Remember he
used the metaphor in his inaugural speech about passing the torch. The old tired,
bald-headed, white-fringed, white-haired Eisenhower generation was tottering off
into decrepitude, and the young, vigorous, World War II generation of JFK were
coming on, and the faculty just ate that up. I very quickly realized that I had better
not say a word about politics at these many faculty cocktail parties when I arrived

                                                                                                                 28
here, and, of course, kept very quiet and entered eagerly into conversations that had
to do with Lexington and W&L and kept very quiet when the Kennedys or, later,
LBJ came into the conversation. So the faculty was very politicized and liberal,
according to the definition of liberal in the early '60s.
Warren: One of the first people I interviewed was Charley McDowell.
Futch: Oh, a big liberal.
Warren: Yeah. And I got the impression from him that his parents were considered
really radical back in the '30s.
Futch: Especially his father.
Warren: So somewhere in there the faculty changed.
Futch: Well, yeah. I would imagine the faculty did change in the'40s and '50s, but,
see, I wasn't here in the '40s and '50s. The only access that I have to the change in the
faculty is what Ollinger Crenshaw told me at lunch, because we had lunch four days
out of five.
Warren: So would Ollie Crenshaw have been a liberal?
Futch: No. Not at all. Now you have just hit on an interesting point, and again, I
don't know whether you can put this in the book. Ollie was an old Harry Byrd
Democrat. You know the history of Virginia politics.
Warren: Yes.
Futch: So Harry Byrd, Sr., was an extremely important figure in the political life of
the'40s, '50s, and '60s. But, of course, by the '60s, by the time I arrived, Harry Byrd,
Sr., was elderly. He had a stroke about 1964, '65, and his son, who was equally
conservative, took over that seat. But the son did not have a forceful personality,
and the Voting Rights Act of '65 prevented the son from taking hold of the state of
Virginia in the same way that the father had done. Now, this is not irrelevant to the
Lexington-faculty scene. Harry Byrd's position, of course, depended on white
supremacy in Virginia, and that was a major part, along with not showing up any

                                                                                                               29
state debt. Those were major components of the Democratic ascendancy in Virginia
as it was understood in the '40s, '50s, and the early '60s.

         But there was another element in the Virginia Democratic party that never
took hold in those days, but W&L for some reason was very attached to this, and it
was called the Francis P. Miller-Francis the male spelling, masculine spelling, F-R-
A-N-C-I-S. Francis Pickens Miller was an alumnus of about 1910 or 1920, who was
an advocate of racial equality and, of course, was a deadly enemy of Harry Byrd, Sr.,
the senator, who was senator for many, many, many years. And Francis Miller ran
against the Byrd machine for-and we'll get back to Ollie Crenshaw. I haven't
forgotten your question. The Francis Miller faction of the party, they couldn't defeat
Harry Byrd, but they administered pinpricks for a senatorial election here, a
gubernatorial election there. The cream of Lexington society was hooked up, for
some reason, with the Francis P. Miller liberal brand of, at that time, unsuccessful
intraparty rivalry with Harry Byrd. And so if one wanted to go to Lexington cocktail
parties with the Penicks and the Paxtons, one would, of course, supposedly be on the
Francis P. Miller and the anti-Harry Byrd wavelength.

         Ollie Crenshaw, however, did want to go to cocktail parties, but he did not in
any way sympathize with that faction at all. He was absolutely a conservative, an
old-line Southern Democrat conservative of a very old vintage. But if he had said
that at the cocktail parties, the invitations would have dried up. So this is what I
meant by saying that he was a master of diplomacy and euphemism and
circumlocutions and elliptical speech. And so it must have been an amazing
performance for decades for him to be accepted as a Lexington Democrat while he
was, deep down, a conservative Harry Byrd Democrat during all of those years. And
that was done by talking about old Miss So-and-so, who said the funniest thing back
in 1918, and on and on like that. And so Ollie Crenshaw was an ardent conservative.

                                                                                                                 30
         Leyburn, for example was a great apostle of racial liberalism in the '40s and
'SOs, and Ollie very discreetly made-if he were living, I wouldn't be telling you this,
and I trust this won't be in the book at all, but he was not sympathetic to that stance.
And so just for a record that may be unsealed a hundred years from now, that was
one of the problems between Ollie and Leyburn, and I doubt if they ever discussed it,
because, as I say, Ollie Crenshaw was not into confrontations and quarrels and
arguments. But at these lunches with me he made it clear, though in a rather
oblique way, nonetheless clear that he disliked everything about Leyburn,
everything. If you had asked him to say something good about Leyburn, he would
say, "Well, he dresses nicely." That would have been it. "The white hair is
becoming," perhaps. So Ollie Crenshaw was a-it's no wonder he taught U.S.
diplomatic history in the courses, because he himself was an extremely skillful
diplomat, and, of course, he continued with the cocktail circuit 'til the week he died.
His son is still living. That's another reason I don't want anything said or printed.
Warren: I understand.
Futch: And his son is not old either. His son was born when Ollie was no kid.
Warren: I hope that this book will be inclusive but discreet.
Futch: Yes. Discretion is extremely important. I emphasize that I'm a great fan of
Ollie. He treated me like a son. It was as though I had two fathers, the one in
Baltimore and the one here. And I knew him for seven-no, for eight years, because
I first met him in April of '62 during an interview, and he lived until March of '70.
So for one month less than eight years, I knew him very well, and he opened up
increasingly to me as the years passed.
Warren: Let's stay with speaking of academic things. Richard said I should ask you
about-
Futch: A very nice boy.
Warren: -the H train.

                                                                                                                       31
Futch: The H train?
Warren: The H train. The history train? That that's apparently a term that the
students use.
Futch: Not around me.
Warren: That you can take the H train around the world by taking different courses
about different kinds of history.
Futch: They never-
Warren: All right. Well, then I won't expect you to tell me about that.
Futch: Oh, no. The students are very-something like that makes me think that
they are more discreet than I realize.
Warren: No, I don't think it's anything critical, not remotely.
Futch: Oh, I thought this was something negative.
Warren: No, no, no. Oh, no.
Futch: Oh, well, good. If it's favorable, I'm happy.
Warren: Oh, no, no. You could take the H train and see the world through-
Futch: And see the world?
Warren: -through your history courses.
Futch: Oh, well, good. Well, that's fine.
Warren: I think that's he was saying.
Futch: I'm glad to hear that, but it's a brand-new term to me.
Warren: That's one of the interesting things, speaking to someone as young as
Richard. He thinks that the way it's been for the last four years is the way it's always
been.
Futch: Oh, no. Well, yeah. You and I know different. He's a nice kid. He's extremely
smart and pleasant. He's a sphinx, though. You never know what he's thinking. He
has a deadpan way about him.
Warren: He does.

                                                                                                                              32
Futch: And I sometimes look at him and wonder what's going on behind that face,
behind the mask.
Warren: I think it's his journalism background. He keeps that blank look.
Futch: Maybe is something that they are trained or that they learn to pick up.
Warren: I think so.
Futch: But I'm very fond of him. He's always been very polite and nice, easy to talk
to for me.
Warren: I think so, too. So how about this great legacy of students that you have
taught through the years? Have you kept up with people?
Futch: Oh, with many, many of them, yes, going back into the '60s, very much so.
Warren: Tell me about that. How do you keep up with them?
Futch: Correspondence on a manual typewriter. I couldn't begin to deal with a
computer. I would probably have to be institutionalized if I were put in a room with
a computer. So I have a whole bunch of manual typewriters, which, by the way, are
still being manufactured, I'm told from missionaries who go to jungles, and they
can't plug a manual typewriter into a palm tree. So that's how I keep up with them.
I'm not a telephone buff at all, because it's very time-consuming. I've found that
very few people will talk for ten or fifteen minutes and hang up. So my telephone
contact with alumni is extremely rare, but I'm very glad to write letters and love
getting letters from alumni. And that's how it's done. It's a very 1930s' way to keep
up with people.
Warren: Well, it's nice to know. You know, I often worry that those personal
records, there just aren't going to be many of them from this time period because
we're all doing e-mail and telephone.
Futch: Well, I don't doe-Mail. And I will say that I keep the letters of all of the
wittiest students or alumni-alumni, I should say. So that is going to be quite
something, if I leave those letters behind.

                                                                                                                   33
Warren: Well, I certainly hope you will.
Futch: I don't have any plan to destroy them, but certainly I would have to be six
feet under before a lot of them are read, but, yeah, I have a great number of personal
letters, and I'm making an effort now as I go through the debris that I live in. I
always call my house the harbor bottom. I'm trying to put them all in one place, and
I have some big stacks of correspondence, and I guess I will make these letters
available to somebody, but I do not have any intention to burn them, as when
Queen Victoria died, one of her daughters, Anticordia [phonetic], spent ten years
burning papers. I guess the most interesting things are the ones that got burned. A
huge lot is left, but they burned goodness knows what for ten years. Princess Beatrice
and Lord Isher [phonetic] did the burning.
Warren: They weren't historians, obviously.
Futch: They were not. So I don't have any plan at all to do that, but I do keep up
with the-getting back to your question-with considerable numbers of students,
those who write letters. There are those who are not fond of writing letters. There
are some with whom I've fallen out of touch because they are strictly electronic
young men, and I'm absolutely terrified by anything having to do with electronics,
and I tell people that, for me, technology is whatever existed in 1940, and, thank
heaven, manual typewriters did. The technology of my elementary school days will
be quite sufficient.
Warren: So what else do you want to talk about? What haven't we talked about?
Futch: Oh, what haven't we talked about?
Warren: We talked about a lot of interesting things before we turned the tape
recorder on.
Futch: Yes, indeed. Indeed we did. I wondered if there was anybody I want to put
you in touch with. In fact, I am going to contact a few people and say, "Would you be

                                                                                                                  34
willing to talk to Mame Warren about So-and-so, either on tape or otherwise,
perhaps?"
Warren: That would be wonderful.
Futch: I will be glad to do that. Photographs. I will rack my brain to come up with
somebody who might have pictures. Now, there's a professor who may or may not
be mentally able to help you now. He graduated in 1923, taught math here, living
here in the town, incidentally. He taught here, I guess, from the '20s until he retired.
He was born, when? 1900, I guess. Winter Roysten. Do you know that name?
Warren: I've heard the name. Do you know what kind of condition he's in?
Futch: I do not know, but I'm sure you can find out from the Math Department. He
lives on the street next to my street. I think it's called Edmondson Avenue, here in
Lexington. R-0-Y-S-T-O-N-, or T-E-N, I forget. He and his wife live in a house that I
sometimes drive by, and they are in their nineties now. Of course, I don't know
whether he was born in 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, but he graduated in '23. He might
have some photos, possibly. A very, very nice man, and he and his wife were
driving their car around until even their late eighties, and I assume they're still
living in that house. I'm sure that the senior-level math teachers could tell you
whether either one of the Roystens is in a position to talk about the 1920s with you.
Warren: I sure would like to find somebody who can talk about that. I'd like to find
out about bathtub gin around here.
Futch: Oh, well, Ollie Crenshaw told a story about the bathtub gin. He said that if a
student would stand on the corner of Main and Washington Streets, where Grand
Piano now is, that, as he put it, a black young man would-and sort of, if one stood
there and sort of gazed around at the sky, a black young man would figure out what
the W&L student wanted and would appear within a few minutes and say,
"Anything I can do for you today?" And you'd say, "Well, yeah. I sure would like to
have a gallon of this or that." And he'd say, "Well, if you want to go in the

                                                                                                         35
drugstore and have a soda, I'll be back in about half an hour," and you would make
the arrangement right there on the street corner. Now, whether the delivery was
made on the street corner, who knows? I suppose very few blacks had automobiles
in the 1920s, so it must have been within walking distance.

         But he said that bathtub gin was very-well, I don't know that Ollie
Crenshaw ever used a word like "bathtub gin," but he would have said illegal
products were easily gotten in the 1920s.

         He also told me another funny story that you might want to have. Are we
still on tape here?
Warren: Yes.
Futch: He laughed and laughed over the fact that the president of the university in
the 1920s unwittingly perjured himself before a congressional committee, because a
committee of the House or the Senate held hearings on the effectiveness of
Prohibition, and that President Henry Louis Smith of W&L was an ardent
prohibitionist, believed in it very sincerely, and went up to Capitol Hill to testify
before such and such a committee that Prohibition was working fine. He said, "I am
the president of a school for young men, and I can personally assure you that
Prohibition is absolutely successful in Lexington and on our campus." Ollie
Crenshaw said that it was like a sieve, and that getting booze was the easiest thing in
the world, and the president lived, as faculty members usually do live, unaware of
how the students are living, that the president was just oblivious-or as they say
today, clueless-and assured under oath to senators or representatives that
Prohibition was completely successful here in Lexington, and it was anything but.

         So that is an Ollie Crenshaw story that he told with great peals of laughter. He
was anything but a Prohibitionist. I've always said that Ollie Crenshaw looked like
the type who ought to be sitting in a white suit on the verandah of a white-

                                                                                                               36
columned mansion with a mint julep in one hand, or maybe in both hands. He
enjoyed the product of fermentation very much.
Warren: I don't have any pictures of Crenshaw. I would love to have a photograph.
Futch: I'm sure in any Calyx you ought to be able to find one.
Warren: Right, but I'm talking about that kind of picture of him sitting back with a
mint julep.
Futch: Oh, no. No, I'm sure there are no pictures of him. I thought you meant just
any photo. No. I wish he had posed for that, but I think he took the university and
the professorship so seriously that he would never have posed humorously for such
a picture. No. I misunderstood your point.

         What else? Mr. [Earl Stansbury] Mattingly, the treasurer. There was another
enemy of Ollie Crenshaw. Do you want to hear about Mr. Mattingly?
Warren: Well, sure. We're just about at the end of the tape.
Futch: Well, you want to meet another day?
Warren: We can continue on.
Futch: You have another tape?
Warren: Do I have another tape?
Futch: Yeah. Yeah. I should have known.
Warren: Of course, I have another tape.
Futch: Yeah. Well, by all means.
Warren: All right. I'm going to put in a new tape.
[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]
Warren: This is Mame Warren. This is tape two with Jefferson Davis Futch III, on
August 19th, 1996. Actually, I guess it's tape three, if we count Richard's.
Futch: Yeah. This is the third tape this summer, but the second tape today.

         I wanted to say something about a great campus character. In fact, I want to
say something about his cremation and the disposal of his remains. Mr. Earl

                                                                                                                37
Stansbury Mattingly, who was the registrar as an undergrad, if you can imagine an
undergrad finding time also to be registrar, and then he did get his degree very
belatedly and continued being registrar until 1940, and then he became treasurer
from'40 until the mid 1960s. If I recollect correctly, he died the week of Christmas
and New Year's of '66, but because he had no family, was unmarried, he lived a
tennis ball's throw from the campus, he lived in what I think is now called the
International House next door to what was the Sigma Chi house and is now Brian
Shaw's P.R. office, Mr. Mattingly's life revolved entirely around the school, and he
was undistracted by family, friends, or hobbies, as far as anyone knows. He was
born-as Ollie Crenshaw, one of his great detractors, used to call him and turned his
birthdate into a nickname, "Old 8/28/88," August 28th, 1888.

         Because of lack of money, Mr. Mattingly entered W&L, I believe, in 1916 at
the age of twenty-seven. He was born on a farm in D.C., if you can imagine a farm in
the District of Columbia, on the site of the subsequent Walter Reed Hospital, Army
Hospital, way out towards Georgia Avenue at 16th Street on one side, and I guess
Georgia Avenue is the other side. So E. S. Mattingly, who would wind up rather
affluent, came here as a poor boy of twenty-seven, a freshman, twenty-seven years
old, in 1915, which was not unusual in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
It did happen. He was so academically, shall we say, challenged that he couldn't
graduate-I guess low grades and so forth-until 1925. Ollie said that the
graduation-and they were classmates. Of course, Ollie, of course, graduated at age
twenty-one in 1925. He graduated on time. Maybe he entered a year late. See, Ollie
was an undergrad for only three years and got his degree 1922 to '25. But at any rate,
he and Mattingly, who was then going on thirty-seven, when he got his bachelor's
degree, graduated simultaneously, the same ceremony in Lee Chapel where the
graduations were held in the 1920s. Ollie said a sarcastic round of cheers went up

                                                                                                                 38
when Mattingly was given his diploma, as though to say, "You dumbbell, we knew
you might make it, but here you've actually made it."

         So Mattingly had already been appointed registrar during his undergrad years
because he was in his thirties at that time. He turned thirty in the year 1918. And so
he got his degree after being the registrar, which, today, is inconceivable, obviously.
But during those years when he was a student, apparently the faculty had said, "You
nitwit, I'm giving you a D just to get you out of the course," and the professors
apparently had been very impolite and sarcastic in their treatment of Mattingly. But
once he got his degree and went on being administrator after that, he did not hide
his hatred for the faculty, and the faculty members, for example, who were very
poorly paid in the 1920s and '30s, would run out of money before the end of the
month and would come to Mattingly, this young man who they had been insulting
for his academic shortcomings not so many years before. The roles were reversed
now, and faculty members had to sit in his office with him, of course, behind his
desk and on the twenty-fifth of the month say, "Well, I would like an advance of
next month's paycheck because we don't get paid until the thirty-first of the month,
and could you find it in your heart to do this?"

        Mattingly would give them sort of Calvin Coolidge-style lectures. "If you
would handle your money more responsibly, you wouldn't be put in a position like
this. Certainly I should think that a man of fifty years old with a doctorate of
philosophy would be able to budget his funds for a thirty-day period in order to get
through the month, at least that." And so he took great delight in humiliating
faculty members who, in some cases, had been embarrassing him once upon a time.

         While Ollie was never in that position-Ollie did not come from a poverty-
stricken family by any means-Mattingly would sort of pinprick the faculty in other
ways, turning off lights. Apparently Mattingly would roam the buildings late at
night, having nothing else to do, and if Ollie Crenshaw were working in his office

                                                                                                                  39
and were leaving at 10 p.m. in Washington Hall, where his office was, and not turn
off a hallway light, Mattingly might catch him at it and say, "Do you think this
school has a $10 million endowment? It would certainly help if members of the
faculty would turn off hall lights at this hour of the night." So Mattingly went out
of his way to be unpleasant to faculty members, according to Ollie Crenshaw.

         To me, as a young faculty member, he was certainly polite. Maybe it was
because he did not equate the youngest of the faculty with his persecutors of once
upon a time. He was always very nice to me in a rather businesslike way, but he
wasn't unpleasant, certainly, at all and once even took me to dinner, which
apparently was like Jack Benny taking someone to dinner. In the first year or two I
was there, I didn't have a car, for a number of years, and so Mattingly pulled up
alongside me when I was walking on Jefferson Street toward my rented room, the
house where I rented a room, in this great long Cadillac or whatever he had. It
looked like a White House limousine, and I think it was the mark.of success for a
boy who had arrived in humble circumstances in 1915. And now it was almost half
a century later, and he had a very fancy long black car, and it pulled up alongside
me. For a moment I didn't know who it was at first, and the window was
automatically taken down, from the driver's seat, I'm sure, and I gathered somebody
was trying to get my attention, so I looked in. It was Mr. Mattingly. He said, "Get in,"
rather brusquely, like that, and I, of course, obeyed, and he said, "Have you had
dinner yet?"

         I said, "Well, no, actually, Mr. Mattingly, I haven't had dinner yet."
         He said, "I'll take you to dinner." So he was good-hearted. Late in life,
perhaps, he was good-hearted, but there were many stories about other good-
heartedness in the '30s and '40s and '50s, that if he became aware that an undergrad
was hurting for money, the family perhaps was not rich to begin with or there was a
family illness that had cut into the wealth of the family, Mattingly would either

                                                                                                                 40
anonymously or in absolute confidence give the boy tuition money. Many kids
graduated in the middle of the century and before the middle of the century because
of Mr. Mattingly's anonymous generosity. So in spite of the fact that he came across
as a very terse Calvin-Coolidge-like, austere character, he very much had his good
side, and I thought being invited to eat with this man of proverbial rigor and
severity was a compliment. I was very pleased at that. And he continued until his
death-well, he did not have a long nursing-home illness. He died after a rather
short illness, maybe a week.
Warren: And you wanted to tell me about his cremation.
Futch: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. I was told at the time that there was a city law that cremated
remains could not be disposed of on lawns or in parks or in gardens or flower beds
or anyplace like that, and yet Mr. Mattingly, I found out many years later, or some
years later, had expressed a desire to be cremated and to have his ashes scattered on
the lawn in front of Washington Hall. When I came back from Christmas holiday in
the December of '66, came back, I guess, in the first days of-January, I learned Mr.
Mattingly had died a week earlier. So I asked a question about, "Well, was he buried
in Stonewall Jackson Cemetery?" and was told, no, he was cremated. I said, "Well, I
guess his ashes are there."

         Someone said, "I don't think so."
         People began talking in sort of, again, circumlocutious ways about the ashes,
and I eventually found out, though not easily and not quickly, that the ashes were
illegally scattered on the grass in front of Washington Hall, city law or no city law,
and there are thus now the remains-the ashes, remains, of at least two faculty
members there.
         Did Richard tell you the other story about the professor whose ashes were put
there?
Warren: I've heard that.

                                                                                                                   41
Futch: Fifteen years later, the young man who committed suicide.
Warren: Yes. I've heard that one.
Futch: And I think on New Year's Day of '81, if I-or am I deceived? Maybe it was
New Year's Day of '82 that he committed suicide, but we have in the soil of the front
lawn-
Warren: No wonder the grass is so green.
Futch: Yes, indeed. These two loyal-they loved the school so much that they both
requested this, and, of course, by the time the younger man was put in the lawn,
apparently the city law had either become a dead letter or had been repealed, but in
the 1960s it was still a delicate matter to deposit Mr. Mattingly's remains in the
wintertime grass.
Warren: You made a mention a while ago about turning off lights late at night. I
understand there's quite a lot of activity on this campus late at night, that faculty
members keep late office hours and-
Futch: I know of one faculty member. I don't know of many or of two, even, but I
know of one faculty member who is, like me, a bachelor and keeps hours into the
wee hours of morning, as I do at home. But I don't want to particularly run into the
night watchman at 2 a.m., but there is one of the professors who is here now and
has been here for many years who is said to be a late-night creature on campus, yes.
Warren: And you keep office hours at home?
Futch: No, no, no.
Warren: Oh, you keep late hours at home.
Futch: I grade exams into the wee hours at my house but not in the office. No. I
keep normal office hours, the same daytime office hours that other people keep.
And I don't know why, some little intuition told me that hanging around campus
in the wee hours of the night is not a standard thing for professors to do, so I don't
do it. No, I don't have students at my house. But my house looks like a landfill or,

                                                                                                                           42
as I say, the wreckage of the Titanic, or now the wreckage of TWA. So I can't have
any visitors in my house ever, but I have office hours in the daytime.

          However, your question was about this person who has office hours in
literally in the middle of the night, and I think when he's not having office hours,
he's grading exams or planning a lecture, something like that. I don't say he has
students coming in every night.
Warren: So this is only one person.
Futch: Only one person, yes.
Warren: I got the impression there was a beehive of activity around in the night.
Futch: Well, there may be, but I know of only one person who does this, sort of an
eccentric, beloved but eccentric person who has these very late hours. But I have
never done that, and I don't know of any others who had office hours late at night.
Most Americans, I guess, are TV zealots, and most people want to be at home
watching the tube at night. So I would be surprised.

         I have heard, with regard to the fact that I'd be very surprised, I have heard
that amorous students are often aprowl in various buildings in the wee hours for
reasons having little to do with scholarship, for reasons having nothing to do with
scholarship, but that has nothing to do with the faculty, I trust.
Warren: I've seen signs to that effect.
Futch: Oh, yes. Student hanky-panky is reportedly quite active.
Warren: Do you have any good stories about that?
Futch: I don't know any. Students are very discreet about their personal lives with
faculty members, and it's very probable that I know kids who've misbehaved in
campus buildings in the wee hours, but, of course, they wouldn't tell faculty
members that. So I can only imagine and envy them very much. When I was a
student, I was a goody-goody and lived in the same town, always went home on the
bus to my parents, and I never misbehaved. But, of course, these kids' parents are a

                                                                                                                  43
long way off, and I can well imagine that students take advantage of empty buildings
after 1 a.m.
Warren: Are there any other stories you'd like to tell? What do you want to be
remembered for here at Washington and Lee?
Futch: For longevity. [Laughter]
Warren: Well said.
Futch: Thank you. I don't know, other than for having an extremely long career, I
would like to be remembered for keeping the kids awake and alert in class.
Warren: What classes do you really enjoy teaching?
Futch: Well, I guess Venice and the papacy most, ~hich are spring semester courses,
because Venice is a city that I came to love by roaming through it, street by street and
alley by alley, in my youth, and the papacy because there is no institution more-
what shall we say-more heavily chronicled with scandal than the papacy. So when
you have a combination of scandal and art, it's a wonderful recipe. So while I know
that you can't refer in your book to the scandal-ridden nature of papal history, that's
what I enjoy about it. I suppose in a book, if this is quoted at all, you would say that
the artistic history of Rome and the role of the Popes as the greatest art patrons of
Western civilization, that I enjoy that, but, entre nous, the Popes were just wild
men in the bygone times, less in the twentieth century and in the nineteenth
century pretty bland, also. But that's a wonderful course. I don't know if the students
think it's wonderful. I enjoy teaching it. And, as I say, Venice is a city I fell in love
with from photographs when I was in high school and then was lucky enough to get
stationed there in the Army, stationed on the mainland right outside of Venice. So
every weekend for two years I went to Venice.
Warren: Oh, aren't you lucky.
Futch: Yeah. How about that? It was an incredible break. Some people get stationed
on Korean hilltops waiting for the North Koreans to come back, and I got stationed

                                                                                                     44
next door to Venice. It was a quick train ride to the city, and I learned the ins and
outs of Venice and its history and its architecture and art collections and so forth
very thoroughly. So I have never gotten bored and have never fallen out of love
with Venice. So it's a wonderful course to teach.
Warren: So do you think your teaching style has changed through the years?
Futch: Only in one respect. Off-colored anecdotes cannot be told in a coed class. I
don't think otherwise it's changed. There were many more off-color anecdotes prior
to 1985. I guess I didn't have any female freshman at that time, because I don't think
I taught freshmen in '85, because there was a period when freshman history
enrollments may have been down. I taught the freshmen and sophomores early in
my career, then there was a period when they said, "Well, we can get other people to
do it. You don't have to." And then the enrollments may have picked up, because
I've been teaching freshmen again in the last six or seven or eight years. I forget
what. You'll be glad to know-everyone will be glad to know I don't keep a diary so I
don't know exactly when. So I don't think I had any female freshmen at that time.
But in a mixed class one can't tell smutty stories. But that's the only change I have
made.
Warren: So why are you depriving the girls of your best stories?
Futch: Oh, because I don't want a young lady to go to-my bride-who-never-was,
that hyphenated lady, to say, "He told a story about Marie Antoinette and So-and-
so," or, "He told a story about Queen Victoria's daughter-in-law who did this and
that." And I can be in deep doo-doo, as George Bush would say, deep do-doo. So, of
course, that's a case where I would have to be very careful. One never knows when
somebody might take offense at something.
Warren: And male students never took offense at anything?
Futch: Oh, no. Well, who knows? Maybe they did. Maybe the Sunday school type of
male student just didn't take my courses.

                                                                                                                 45
Warren: One thing I was impressed by was I interviewed-and you can stop me if
I'm going over the line of what we said we wouldn't talk about, but I interviewed
some of the first women students who went through here. Of course, this is ten
years ago. But I was really struck at how similar they seem to be to the guys who go
here, that they seem to be the same kinds of people.
Futch: Yes. Yes, that's very true. Many people have remarked on the same thing,
and, of course, a lot of the faculty members h9-ve been unhappy about that because
they wanted female students who would be male-haters and say, "Men are all brutes
and rapists and monsters and devils and patriarchal oppressors," and, of course, the
young ladies who have been here the last ten years very seldom, if ever, say that
kind of a thing. They will say, "I'm not a feminist." And you are exactly right. You
are very perceptive, as always, to say that. So this is not an imaginary similarity at
all. I fully agree with you on that. So, of course, I've had a number of them in my
class and had no problems at all. But I still can't tell an off-color story in class because
there could be just one person, one female student who's on a different wavelength,
and there would be "H" to pay if I told a story. I mean, there are many stories, not
about Queen Victoria, I hasten to add, but say the wife of George IV was a
nymphomaniac, but if I said in class that Queen Caroline was a nymphomaniac,
somebody might go to the hyphenated-my hyphenated future bride and say, "He
was holding a woman, a female in history, up to ridicule." So I can't. There's no
way I can run that kind of risk. So I simply say that George IV and his wife were both
morally dubious and that each one was a great cross that the other had to carry,
something of that sort, and just sort of pass quickly over anything else, or just
mention George IV alone. And, of course, about him, he was a sex athlete,
increasingly fat as the years went by. He was not a Brad Pitt. But, of course, I can say
anything of the male characters. The male scandalous characters of history are
seldom the problem. But one has to tailor-the French called it chronique de

                                                                                                               46
scandal. One has to tailor that a little more carefully now, but otherwise, getting back
to your original question, I think my teaching is the same, essentially the same as it
always was.

         I'm inspired in that respect by a philosophy professor I had over forty years
ago at Johns Hopkins who was a very entertaining professor, and he is my
unacknowledged model, long dead, of course, now. But he was a very delightful
lecturer, and I remember him better than anybody else in my undergrad days, and
he's the one I have attempted, with who knows what success, to emulate, Professor
George Boaz [phonetic] of the Philosophy Department. Nobody fell asleep in his
class.
Warren: Well, I don't think they do in yours either.
Futch: Thank you. My goal is not to have them fall asleep.
Warren: Well, let me ask you about-you know, I was here before and I've come
back. Certainly what I witnessed in the late '70s when I was here, I was not in the
classroom, but I was in Lexington, and I did not see a lot of gentlemanly behavior in
the late '70s around here.
Futch: You mean at night, or out on the town, or on campus or what?
Warren: I mean walking by Red Square on a Wednesday night.
Futch: Drunk? Were they drunk?
Warren: Oh, drunk and just-
Futch: Relieving themselves on the sidewalk, something like that?
Warren: Very unruly behavior out at night.
Futch: Breaking glass at automobile tires?
Warren: Yeah, all that kind of thing. Very loud music all the time. And I wasn't
necessarily an older person who would be offended by this.
Futch: You were a mere high school maiden at that time. [Laughter]

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Warren: Not quite. I wish, but not quite. But from what I understand, part of the
reason why coeducation was brought here was because the academic standards had
been lowered, that the students who were coming through here weren't quite as
good. Did you experience that?
Futch: No, I did not experience that. I think that a lot of the defenders of
coeducation wanted to make it appear that they were academic deadheads,
dunderheads. Deadhead, I guess, has another meaning now. Dunderheads. And
there may have been some dunderheads here at the time, but there also were in the
'60s, I guarantee you, and some of the brightest kids that I know here in the late '70s.
So I think that a somewhat distorted picture is deliberately painted of that period in
order to give alumni and trustees at the time a reason to go coed. It has always been
a suspicion of mine-obviously I can't prove this or footnote this, because faculty
members just don't talk to me much-that there could have been a lowering of the
quality of high school kids who were let in here. I mean, history is not a tough
subject to teach. Maybe if I taught math or physics, it would have been a little more
noticeable. But the material of history is so familiar to start with, and it's easy to
read, and it's not like physics or calculus or computers.

         I heard somebody say this once, and I have never forgotten it, that they
deliberately let in some high school boneheads in,order to be able to tell the trustees,
"We are facing a crisis of the quality of kids who are coming here, and we will
eventually have nothing but morons here."

         The trustees said, "Oh, dear. We don't want that to happen. What's the
solution?"

         The administration said, "Well, admitting female students would probably
change things very much."

         The trustees said, "Well, we don't much want to do that."

                                                                                                                 48
         The admissions people said, "Well, it's that or simply apes and gorillas will be
here, just people with no IQs at all, no detectable IQs, will be the students ten years
from now."

         The trustees said, "Oh, we don't want that to happen either."
         And something of this sort may well have happened, and I'm convinced that
it did happen, but I cannot possibly prove that. The ones that I got in that period
seemed to be perfectly okay, and if anybody looks at the alumni magazine and looks
at the graduates of 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, that you'll see they're having very
successful careers. And it has been said also that there's no A, you know, the letter
grade A, in the word "success," and that it is quite easy to be academically weak and
still run a company or found a company or step into Dad's shoes and take over the
family business quite successfully.
         So if the graduates of the late '70s and early '80s had turned into BV derelicts,
then I would say, "Uh-huh, yeah, there was really something wrong with the quality
because these guys are all sort of leaning on buildings in BV," which is not the case.
And so I'm very skeptical about the academic assertions that are made and the
reasons for any academic falling-off in that period.
         Now, as for their wild behavior, I think that has something to do with the fact
that the Student Control Committee or whatever that took care of disciplinary
problems might have been very lax, and what John D. Wilson did was to set up a
fraternity system that is very, very tightly managed so that the vandalizing of
fraternity houses and destruction of furniture, the breaking of glass windows and
things like that, there is such a tight rein on the fraternities that wild behavior
comes at a cost, that if a wild fraternity party takes place and the frat house is
damaged by hurling full bottles of whiskey against the wall or the door or
something like that, there is an immediate financial penalty, because a penalty is

                                                                                                         49
assessed, and Mom and Dad will find that monthly bill for fraternity dues is doubled
or is increased in some way.
Warren: I need to turn the tape over.
[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Warren: I hope I'm not overstepping the bounds of this subject, because I'm really
glad to get your perspective on that, because I feel awkward, because I've heard so
often that party line that things were going academically badly, and we've had about
a ten-year span of alumni who are really being run down by that.
Futch: Yes. Very much, yes. I would be furious if I were one of those alumni.
Warren: So I'm glad to have a perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily
agree or disagree. You know, I mean, I don't take any position on it at all.
Futch: You were out of town during so much out of town.
Warren: Well, and I also just don't take any position. I'm here gathering
information, but I think it's important to get the other point of view.
Futch: I am convinced that there is something haywire about that. Now I'll tell you
another thing. This cannot be in the book, obviously. I think that the previous
president, the president previous to the current one, was very anxious to be credited
with creating a new school, as he called it in a faculty meeting of September of '84
"The new Washington and Lee," and that-if you quote me on this, I am dead
meat-that he wanted an enormous amount of credit for being the refounder of the
school, and therefore, that assertion and claim could be best supported by saying the
school had become a garbage pail of derelicts, that these guys were drunken morons,
that they had IQs in the double digits, they were nothing but disgusting inebriates.
And that party line was hammered away-I'm told behind closed doors it was
hammered away at and hammered away at and hammered away at and that we now
have a school of kids who talk about nothing but Plato and Aristotle in their free

                                                                                                                50
time, in their off-duty-I started to say off-duty time-which, of course, is very far
from the truth.

         As far as alcoholism is concerned, alcoholic revelry, which I don't doubt
existed in the late '70s-of course, I didn't live downtown so I can well imagine
what you saw on the street those Friday and Saturday nights perhaps, or on some
other night, but I didn't see that with my own eyes because, of course, I don't-I
guess professors are well advised not to roam around on the streets at 11:00 o'clock
on Friday and Saturday nights.

         But when I was hired here in '62, one of my grandmothers was still living,
and so I told her with some degree of pride that I had been offered a job at W&L.
This was in May of 1962. I was offered the job in April, in April of '62. And so I said
to her that this job offer had come along, I'd accepted and would be going down
there, down to Lexington in September from Baltimore, and my grandmother's only
comment was-she was about seventy-eight years old at the time-she said, "Don't
the boys down at Washington and Lee drink a lot?"

         And I evaded that by saying, "Do you think I would take a job at a place where
the boys drink a lot?" But obviously she had heard other elderly ladies whose
grandsons had come down here as students, she had heard scuttlebutt from the
elderly ladies of that day. So this alcoholic reputation of the school, I think, goes back
to the 1920s, if not earlier, and I doubt if it was earlier, because the South was so
poverty-stricken after the Civil War that I don't think it was a playboy school before
World War I. But with the gradual return of prosperity to some places in the South
after the First World War, I think the South was fifty years getting over the Civil
War and the impoverishment that came from that, but by the 1920s and '30s, W&L
was in jeopardy of becoming a playboy school, and wealthy families from Atlanta
and New Orleans and places like that had kids here.

                                                                                                                   51
         So I think that that reputation does not particularly belong or uniquely belong
to the 1970s but that the party line, as you rightly call it, of the '80s and now the
nineties was that the school had become simply a pit of disgraceful "alkies" and that
the changes that were made in the 1980s corrected that. And I think also probably
that the admissions office was told to be on the lookout for high-schoolers, for
twelfth graders who have been sort of-how can one say-goody-goodys, sort of the
editors of the high school literary magazine if the high school had a literary
magazine, editor of the high school newspaper, the kids in high school who were
the least likely to be hell-raisers and the most likely to be bookworms from their
possibly junior, certainly senior high school years, and that a kid who was editor of
the high school poetry mag was much less likely to be hurling bottles of whiskey or
burning piles of furniture in college.

         There probably has been some toning down of that, not on the basis of grades
only, but on the basis of kids who were very quiet. I mean, I was a high school
goody-goody. I never got drunk. I never vandalized anything, was always in the
bosom of Mom and Pop's nest, and I think that is, ironically, the kind of kid that I
was in the 1940s is the kind that they began to recruit more carefully in the latter
half of the 1980s, the goody-goodies who were-please don't use it in the book-the
goody-goodies who were the least likely to misbehave.

         For example, there was a case around 1990 or so when the SAEs and the Phi
Psis, who were great rivals, the Phi Psis being mostly Northerners, the SAEs being
mostly Southerners, and they have hated each other for decades, and their houses
are very close together, and there was some incident, I guess in 1990, when one of
them threw a soft-drink bottle, or more likely a booze bottle, through the window of
the next-door house, and then the other guys reciprocated, and several windows
were broken after the Fraternity Renaissance or at the climactic moment of the
Fraternity Renaissance.

                                                                                                               52
         The president of the university in 1990 was very, very angry about this, and
summoned the offenders from the two houses, not necessarily together, but some of
the offenders who had broken the windows to his office for a tongue-lashing and
said that they were bringing the violence of the Bronx in New York to Lexington,
and they were suspended from school for either a semester or a year or something of
that sort and were told as they left his office, these kids, of course, told their friends
who told me that he said as they left, "I hope you enjoy bagging groceries for the
next year," or the next semester, whatever it was. "You're fit only for that." So kids
who would likely break windows would have been laughed off as just typical W&L
guys in the '70s and '60s and '50s and '40s and '30s and '20s, but by 1990, kids who
deliberately broke windows were equated with vandals in the Bronx, and so that had
nothing to do with academics. That just had to do with self-control and the way kids
spent their leisure time. He was extremely determined to exclude these roughnecks
and-what would you say-kids who behaved in trashy ways, whether from rich or
poor backgrounds. Of course, rich kids can be very bad vandals.

         He was determined to put a stop to that and to make sure that not only were
they academically motivated, but also they would behave like good little boys and, of
course, hoped, as often happens, that the academic motivation and behaving like
good little boys go together. Of course there are kids who are good little boys who
don't have any candle-power mentally and, of course, can't be good students,
however motivated they might be, and then there are kids who are very bright and
can do quite well academically, but are crazy hell-raisers in their free time.
Warren: Have you seen a change in your students academically in recent years?
Futch: No, not academically. Not academically. I think I've detected kids who are
less likely to break windows and less likely to smash up a car while drunk and less
likely to run up on a sidewalk and hit a fence or something like that. I think there is
less of that. But as for academics, no. For one thing, the high schools, I think, do

                                                                                                              53
increasingly bad jobs with the teaching of English, and one thing I look for is good
English, spelling, syntax, use of the right word in the right context, and, if anything,
that is worse now than the 1960s or no better, certainly. And I don't think they're
getting stupider at all. I think that the high schools are just getting-and maybe the
prep schools, are getting worse and worse and worse. A lot of these kids don't come
from public high schools.

         So, no, I don't see any improvement in performance or any noticeable decline
other than spelling, spelling mistakes that didn't happen in the 1960s happen now,
and the running together of words that didn't happen thirty years ago happens now.
But that's not an intellectual decline. That is a matter of very poor high school
preparation. So !don't think that the intellectual caliber of the place is any different
from what it was thirty years ago, certainly no worse, but very dubious that it's any
better.

         But the politeness is still there. That also is the same as the 1960s. I'm very
grateful for that. Of course, good manners are extremely important in getting
through life, and somebody who comes across as polite and friendly will go far . It's
hard to mess up one's life with a reputation of politeness and friendliness, and these
kids have been brought up in the right way, and they are polite and friendly and,
therefore, a joy to deal with. So that is something, thank goodness, that hasn't
changed.

         But I think, getting back to what you said about the female students being so
similar to the male students in the last ten years or eleven years, I think some of the
faculty crazies were hoping that nasty females would arrived, and to my great
delight, nice females have arrived. So another case where some of the faculty
members have been disappointed, just as some were disappointed that a revolution
didn't break out during Cambodia Week twenty-six years ago.

                                                                                                                                54
Warren: I feel like I've taken a lot of your afternoon. Is there anything more you
would like to say? Is there anything you want to summarize?
Futch: Not that I can think of. No. Not really.
Warren: I feel like Richard got so many really wonderful stories from you.
Futch: On tape, now, you mean.
Warren: Yes. I have had great delight in sharing the Barry Goldwater story, and I
will never walk through those boxwoods without thinking of Barry Goldwater.
[Laughter]
Futch: Yes. Well, where the boxwoods come to a right angle. I pointed that out to
some people yesterday afternoon and showed them the spot, and one of their kids-
they were some people who were in town to usher their boy into VMI for his rat
year, and these people also had a relative who went to W&L a very few years ago,
and we were standing at the end of our discussion up in front of Lee Chapel. We
met late in the afternoon, so Lee Chapel was closed, but then we went down to the
parking lot, and I said, "Oh, by the way, this is where Barry Goldwater did this," and
it was a mother and father and three boys, three sons. And they giggled and chortled
at this. So yeah, that is a true story, the Barry Goldwater story.

         Now, if you want to do this again in a week or two weeks or three weeks, I'm
available.
Warren: All right.
Futch: If you think of some more questions, and I will certainly be on the lookout
in my house for more things like the graduation. But as I say, there's an 1880 one.
That's 1870, but there's another one someplace in the house, and I've got to find it. If
I find any photos, I will certainly let you know.
Warren: Okay. I'm real interested in finding those.
Futch: Yeah. I will be glad to be helpful any way I can, and I'm so hard to get in
touch with. Drop me a line in the U.S. mail if you want to-

                                                                                                       55
Warren: That's what I understand, that's the way.
Futch: Yeah. Yeah. Thirty-two cents will do it.
Warren: How about campus mail? Do you read campus mail?
Futch: Sometimes.
Warren: I've got to pay if I want to contact you?
Futch: Well, I'll reimburse you, because I realize I'm very hard to get at. But
sometimes I will pick up campus mail, and somebody will be with me as I go into
the office, I'll lay the campus mail down and be talking to someone, and then that
gets forgotten.
Warren: So best to write you at home?
Futch: Oh, yes. I'm alone when I get the mail at home.
Warren: Okay.
Futch: Because there's never anybody in the house.
Warren: All right. Well, shall we wind this up?
Futch: Okay. We can wind it up, and I appreciate all of your attentiveness.
Warren: Thank you.
Futch: You're most welcome.
[End of interview]

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