Dobyns interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: So I also saw in the Calyx that you were in Troubadours.
Dobyns: Yeah. I don't know why. I did a lot of plays for the Troubadours. I did
summer stock one summer at Colonial Williamsburg in the Common Glory. When was
that? ‘55. And I did male roles at a lot of the women's colleges. I enjoyed it
enormously. To be crude about it, it's a great way to meet attractive young women,
which I think was my true motivation, but what the heck.
Warren: Who ran Troubadours then?
Dobyns: I have no idea.
Warren: Were there no professors who were important to you outside of journalism?
Dobyns: Nope.
Warren: Nobody stands out?
Dobyns: Some I enjoyed. We had Dr. Shelly [phonetic], who taught ancient Greek, and
was one of the more delightful men I've ever known in my entire life with his wild,

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crazy sense of humor, but I only took that for one year to replace a math course. No,
the rest of the people were perfectly nice and, Lord knows, better than competent, but
basically I was here for journalism and that's what I studied. I took the minimum
number of nonrequired courses. Any free period I had, I'd put a journalism course in.
Warren: So you felt, when you got out there in the real world, that you were well
prepared?
Dobyns: Oh, yeah. And let's see, I knew journalism. I knew Civil War history. I knew
freshman geology. Had not studied economics at all, which made it hysterically funny
when I started specializing in economics in 1980. A good background in history. Never
studied political science. Never studied commerce of any kind. Didn't study math.
Never took science courses beyond freshman geology, which was all doable in those
day. I'm not sure you could do it anymore, I'll have to ask and find out.
Warren: And you were in ROTC?
Dobyns: ROTC, yeah. It would have been silly for me not to be. I mean, I'd already
knew it, and ROTC paid $27.00 a month to juniors and seniors, so you did two years for
free, and then you started getting paid, and that means one more source of income for
me and no work of any kind, because I'd been doing this stuff for nine years. I would
go in class and sort of sleep and answer the questions when asked, and collect my
$27.00, and go teach other kids to march, because they didn't know how, and I did, and
it was really fairly simple. And then I was commissioned a second lieutenant to and
did two years and one month in the Army, and got out, and went back to work.
Warren: Did a lot of people participate in ROTC?
Dobyns: Yeah. It was a reasonably large organization. You've got remember the
Korean War Armistice was in ‘53. There was no guarantee that was going to hold.
We'd been in war from ‘39 to ‘45, World War II had gone on, we joined in '41. In ‘50 to
‘53, the Korean War, we figured for sure there was going to be another one, and if you
had to go, you might as well go as an officer, and you could go to the Officers' Club,

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and not have to be going around in the mud and the muck all the time, and that was the
motivation for that. If you had to go, go as something. Then they had so many second
lieutenants right after that, because they began to demobilize the Korean War troops,
that Jerry Hopkins, my roommate, did six months in U.S. Army Intelligence and that
satisfied his requirement for his two years of service.

         They needed an information specialist, and I were one, so I got to go to the
Mojave Desert at California, after my training at Fort Knox. One thousand square miles
of desert, the largest military post in the free world, and had 1,100 people in the
permanent party, and an Officers' Club built of native stone by Italian stone masons
who were prisoners of war, and held in the desert during World War II, and the
commanding general's home was built the same way. They were the only permanent
buildings on the post. I lived in—my wife and I and two children, lived in a migrant
worker's federal housing shed that had been transported over land from the San
Fernando Valley on the back of a flatbed truck, and put down on four concrete feet that
had been poured into the sand. It was twenty feet by twelve feet, two eight-by-twelve
rooms on either end, and a little living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom. The
bathroom was two feet by four feet in the middle.
Warren: Kind of moved around carefully.
Dobyns: Well, if you sat on the toilet, you couldn't close the door. We bathed our two
kids by putting a galvanized tub in the shower, and then filling it with water, and then
putting the kids in the galvanized tub, no bathtub, I mean, clearly two-by-four, no
bathtub.
Warren: Speaking of living conditions, where did you live when you were here?
Dobyns: Freshman dorm. Mrs. Davis' rooming house, which was then on South Main
Street. I have on idea what it is now, although I did notice there's some rooming houses
still out there. And then the fraternity house junior and senior year. The senior year,

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because I was the president, I got to pick my own room, which, of course, I took the
biggest room.
Warren: So you lived in a rooming house. What does that mean, that she'd rent out?
Dobyns: She rented out rooms. And Jake Lemon [phonetic] and I lived on the third
floor, and we shared a bathroom. Jake was good to have around. He was a returning
Air Force vet, dead serious about getting his education, because he had seen what the
world gave you if you only had a high school diploma, and he wanted more than that.
So he was damn good for study habits, because on Saturday night you could count on
Jake for anything you wanted to go do, but Sunday through Friday, he was going to
study. So you just got in the habit, because if you made noise, Jake was bigger than me,
and would come over and persuade me that I wanted to stop doing that. So I just
studied, and typed, and did papers and beat stories and things.
Warren: Did you have any relationships with law students? You were typing their
papers.
Dobyns: Only typing their papers.
Warren: Did you socialize with them at all?
Dobyns: No, they weren't going to socialize with an undergraduate. I was a
convenient secretary that they paid money to, to do their bidding. They had no desire
to socialize with me, nor I with them.

         Charley McDowell's father was a professor in those days, and he'd just written a
book about Kentucky, as I remember, and he was a lot of fun. But I met him because of
Charley, not because of me.
Warren: You weren't classmates with Charley.
Dobyns: Oh, God, no. But because of the Barkley thing, when he wrote the column, he
stayed in touch with me then. Quite often, when I go to Washington, I call, and see if he
wants to go have a drink. If he's not tied up, he will. I love him because he's got the
world's funniest voice.

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Warren: [Laughter] He does, doesn't he. He's one of the first interviews I did. I was
just totally charmed by him.
Dobyns: He's just wonderful, and he just doesn't care. [Mimicking McDowell's voice]
Warren: Yeah, he's a classic, and I don't know anybody else in Rockbridge County who
sounds like him. I don't know where that accent came from.
Dobyns: Nor do I. The only other person I know who came close was a guy named
John Patterson, who was at WBBJ, and later was the assistant dean of the Graduate
School of Journalism at Columbia, and a winner of the CBS Fellowship. But he was this
brilliant reporter on television, with a voice very close to Charley's, smart enough to
know that he had a very short and limited career if he stayed on the air, and that he'd
better do something else. But a great reporter, really good reporter.
Warren: So did you form friendships with people in Lexington?
Dobyns: Yeah. Kitty Bishop was the actress, she's still here, and she and Lamar Bishop,
her husband. I got to know Kitty first and got to know Lamar, and he ran the foot-long
hot dog place and the beer place on Main Street near the Lyric Theater. It's not there
anymore. But if you look at the Lyric Theater, to the left, there was a parking lot, and
the next building was the foot-long hot dog joint, and then next door to that, his father's
beer hall. It had been one building, and they put a partition down the middle so that
the foot-long hot dog joint was about seven feet wide and so was the beer hall. Lamar,
unless he has died, because I haven't heard from him in years, eventually bred quarter
horses, did very well at it. He won a lot of championships. I'd go hang out when I
could at the foot-long hot dog joint. I had my first-ever raw oyster there.
Warren: At a hot dog joint?
Dobyns: Yeah, Lamar liked them, so he got some, and he said “Come on, we'll have a
beer and some oysters.”

         And I said, “What are oysters?” You know, this is from a kid who was born on
the Chesapeake Bay, but I didn't go up there. He said, “It won't kill ya.” If you stop

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and look at the things, they really are disgusting-looking. Who was it that said it was a
brave man who first ate an oyster, and I knew exactly what he was talking about. Put
some lemon juice and some Tabasco, and then you just—he said, "For God's sake, don't
chew."
Warren: Just swallow. [Laughter]
Dobyns: It was good. I liked it, beer and oysters. I guess he was the only person in
town I knew, other than Matthew Paxton and his father, but they were my boss and the
owner. They were not going to socialize with the hired help. And the other time I was
working, so I never got to meet many people. If they weren't in my sort of limited little
sphere, I wasn't out wondering around.

         I knew Doc from Doc's Corner Store, but that was because he'd run into me. We
had this little traffic accident that was Doc's fault, so he was nice to me after that. And I
knew Jabbo, just because you couldn't be here and not know Jabbo. He sold all the kegs
that were sold in town.
Warren: I want to know more about Jabbo.
Dobyns: Huge fat man with glasses. He sat on a stool in his joint and sold draft beer at
the bar and kegs for weekend parties.
Warren: Was Jabbo black or was Jabbo white?
Dobyns: White. There were no black people in Lexington in those days. I don't think I
ever saw one, certainly not as merchants.
Warren: Who made your bed in the fraternity house?
Dobyns: Me. We had a black chef. And Mrs. Jordan, who was our—I think they're
called housemothers, or whatever they are called, fraternity mothers, spent two years in
despair, because he said the only way he knew how to cook was with lard. He didn't
know how to use butter or anything that was lower oil that might actually be
moderately healthy, so everything was cooked in lard, because that was the only way
he knew how to cook. But he was very good, and he could turn out the right number of

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dinners very, very quickly. So Mrs. Jordan could just stay in despair, because we
couldn't replace him.

         We had a cleaning service. Of course, they came when I was in school, but Jerry
and I made our own beds, because we locked our door when we left. We owned
typewriters, a valuable commodity in 1957, ’56–’57, and getting to be valuable now
because there are none of them.
Warren: So you locked your door?
Dobyns: Uh-huh.
Warren: Even with the Honor System?
Dobyns: The Honor System for a fraternity house in almost the last building, on what
we call, and what we called, North Roanoke, was not the safest place for material to be.
We weren't worried about students. But when people would come in from Roanoke
intent on doing harm, guess which was the first fraternity house? And we learned the
hard way that locking the door was a really swell idea. Otherwise, we'd just leave all
the typewriters in the journalism lab that was open twenty-four hours a day so people
could go there and type. I don't think they ever had any trouble, because there was
almost always somebody in there, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, because
we did the radio and news broadcast every night from there. I think it was just one a
day.

         That was the first time I ever broke up on the air, because Philippe Labro, for
reasons that I will never understand, had decided he wanted he wanted to do sports
one night. He was reporting on the score of the game that had been won by the
"Baltimore Oriol-es," and that's where I lost it. I just never got it back.
Warren: So were you and Philippe were buddies?
Dobyns: Yeah. We've seen each other a couple of times since then, usually at Tom
Riegel's house. Well, you were buddies with everybody who was in journalism school.

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There weren't that many of us. I mean, I had one class where there were just eight. The
ordinary class was no more than ten, just not that many people.

         Jeb Rosebrook, I don't know if he was a journalism major or just came over to
take the writing courses, but he's been in Hollywood for thirty years, knocking out film
scripts, so he must have learned something. I wonder if he took to motion picture and
television?
Warren: Well, you wouldn't know, would you. You weren't there.
Dobyns: I was there for a couple of classes. And then Jerry was in the class. John Ham,
who went on to—he's retired now, but spent, I've forgotten the name of it, but it's
someplace in New England. He started off as a history teacher at a rather posh boys'
school, which is now a boys' and girls' school, and got up to assistant headmaster and
loved it. The job was just wonderful for him. Never figured that one out.

         Carl Barnes wasn't a journalism student, but he took a couple of writing classes.
The last I heard of him, he was a professor at fine arts at Wayne State outside of Detroit.
And the other guys I just lost track of, except for Mike Murrell [phonetic], who was in
the class of ‘59. He's an actor and writer in Hollywood. He and Jeb, when Jerry lived
there, the three of them would get together quite often, and call and say, “Why don't
you fly out?”

         And I'd say, "For about three thousand dollars' worth of reasons. You guys get
in your cars and drive six miles, and you're all together, three thousand miles from me."
Jerry left there, and last I heard of him, he was living in Bangkok. A friend of mine was
the ambassador, so I got the two of them together. I doubt that they hit it off, because
the ambassador, who is now retired, I met him at the Paris Peace Talks in ‘72, Foreign
Service officer, very conservative and, as is required in an FSO, very correct, and Jerry is
not conservative and is not correct.
Warren: Well, that was probably a quick evening for them.

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         So through the years you've mentioned reunions. You've come back to
Washington and Lee?
Dobyns: I've come back to two of them.
Warren: Which ones?
Dobyns: Twenty-fifth and another, I can't remember whether it's thirty or thirty-five,
and obviously I will be in place for forty in May. No, I'm sorry, three of them. I came
back for my tenth.
Warren: Okay, that's what I wanted to know. It took ten years to get back?
Dobyns: Uh-huh.
Warren: And then it took another fifteen years to come back.
Dobyns: Yeah, because the tenth year I remembered why I hadn't come back for the
five. A goodly number of the people I went to school with were pretentious assholes,
and I couldn't see any real reason that I'd want to be with them. As years pass, you
both moderate your own opinion and they moderate some of their behavior, and it
becomes much more acceptable.
Warren: So by the twenty-fifth?
Dobyns: Perfectly reasonable people.
Warren: And what do you think they thought of you?
Dobyns: I don't know, never cared. I didn't care when I was here, and I don't care
now. I stopped caring about it. I stopped caring about what they were, because it
suddenly occurred to me that they were being perfectly happy, and I was making
myself upset. Really, it was terribly stupid, so I just stopped, and figured they could be
what they want to be, and I'll mind my own business. Talked to Tom and some of the
other people, Pax, until he died. I always go see Frank.
Warren: Which pleases him, no end.

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Dobyns: And Helen Watts. She was the secretary in the News Bureau when I was the
student assistant. She married Dr. Watts, and I can't remember his first name to save
my life.
Warren: Bill Watts?
Dobyns: Bill Watts, yeah. I can't see them because they are gone to Turkey. I hope
they'll be back sometime during the year, but I always try to find them. Until Lamar
and Kitty Bishop split up, I always tried to find them. I still look up Kitty, but Lamar is
somewhere.
Warren: So the twenty-fifth reunion, what do you think of that whole reunion process
here?
Dobyns: I don't know. I've never known that it did a whole heck of a lot of good, but it
seems to, so obviously I'm wrong. For some reason I've never really enjoyed looking
back at things. I'm much more interested in what's going to happen than what had
already happened. I guess it's part of being a reporter. That story's done, time to move
on to the next story. They're fun, I mean in their own limited way. If you said would
you like to come to a reunion every year, the answer would be, “Hell, no, not under any
circumstance.” But occasionally they're fun.
Warren: And now you're back as a professor.
Dobyns: Uh-huh.
Warren: How's that?
Dobyns: You mean, how did it come about, or how is it so far? Well, it came about
because in ‘93-‘94, I was invited to be a visiting professor at Jacksonville State
University in Alabama, but visiting there meant really visiting. You went in for four,
five days a month. I worked with kids in writing, communication, and things like that.
Worked with the college administration on quality management systems, and I enjoyed
it, I liked it.

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         And then a young writer, a female, who was my second son's girlfriend for a
couple of years, and I stayed in touch with her because we both write, heard that
Washington and Lee was looking for a one-year professor. She heard it from a guy at
the University of South Carolina when she was looking for something. So she called
and said, “Your alma mater needs a professor. Why don't you call.”

         So I came up to see Ham Smith, and it worked out. It's sort of semi-funny
because it's a print professorship for one year, and while my background is principally
in broadcasting, it didn't scare me, because I've written two books and magazine articles
and newspaper stories, and I figured I could get by that, no matter what. Read the
textbook the night before they do, and I'm one up, and I've got experience. So far, it's
worked out fine. I got to create one course on my own, because the two that I needed to
teach for Brian Richardson when he was at Oxford, his third course was one he created
on his own, as I understand. I put together a long-form reporting class to show you
how to write books, magazine articles, television news magazine programs, and
television documentaries. I've got eight very bright students in that one. They keep
asking questions, and I'm not really sure about the answers, but I've got them fooled so
far.

         And there's a basic writing class, that is simply a matter of making them write
over and over and over again, and helping them, showing them how they've made
mistakes. And then a beats class, the old beats reporting class that I was in, where you
go out and cover the city, county, government, the cops, courts, the stuff you cover.
And then I, in effect, become the managing editor, and just keep them on track, and
make them turn it in on time.

         There's a student editor who works with them as the assignment editor, because
she's taking editing class with Ham Smith. It's fun so far. I haven't gotten in much
social life, because I'm trying to get moved into my apartment and get set up. Tim and
Mary Lee Hickman [phonetic], he runs the production studio here in town, he used to

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work for me as a cameraman in Portsmouth in the sixties, so we've been together a
couple of times. Sunday I'm going hiking with him and his wife, because I enjoy hiking.
I guess that's it. I really haven't done much yet.

         Had one club meeting. What's it called? That Club, twenty-some professors and
other people, basically professors. They meet once a month and present papers on
subjects that they do not teach, so they have to go out and do research and do that stuff.
The one last Monday night was a chapter from Tom Riegel's memoirs, when he first got
to Paris. Really very interesting, because it's back in the twenties. Stuff I never knew
before. I imagine I will get into the social life sooner or later.
Warren: It's a pretty social town.
Dobyns: It seems to be. I am, as usual, working on forty-seven things simultaneously,
so I don't know how much of it I'll be able to get into, but I will find time to do some of
it.
Warren: Well, shall we round off this interview?
Dobyns: Why not.
Warren: Any final things you want to say?
Dobyns: No, I didn't particularly want to say those, but you asked the questions, and
so I answered them.
Warren: You were very kind to put up with my questions.
Dobyns: Oh, I don't mind that. I've made a living all my life asking questions. I can
hardly claim to be above it now.
Warren: Well, thank you, Lloyd, I appreciate it.
Dobyns: You're quite welcome.
[End of Interview]

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