Farris Hotchkiss

                                         April 21, 2009
                                                 —

                                        Mame Warren,
                                           interviewer

Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is April 21, 2009. I’m at Washington and Lee University
with my good friend Farris Hotchkiss, and I’m going to move my microphone up a little. Farris,
you go back a long way here at Washington and Lee. You came back as a professional. We
covered your student years very well in our previous interview, but you came back as a
professional in 1966, I think.
Hotchkiss: Correct.
Warren: What I’d like to know is: who were mentors to you when you came back? Who took
you under his or her wing and helped you feel what it was like to be here as a professional, as
opposed to as a student?
Hotchkiss: Well, I was lucky to have four mentors. I came back, Mame, in a flurry of idealism.
I really thought that I wanted to leave the business world, which was crass and profit-driven, and
do something that was more lasting in its value. Frank Gilliam, at the time, was the dean of
students and the director of admissions all rolled into one. I had been a volunteer in Atlanta on
these college nights and he called me up one time and he said, “Farris, would you ever think
about the possibility of coming back to Washington and Lee on the staff?” I said, “Gee, Dean
Gilliam, I don’t think so, but maybe.” About six months later he called up and he said, “Lew
John”—who was my classmate who had already returned—“is going to get his PhD. He’ll be
away for two years. If you’d like to find out whether perhaps a career in higher education would
be preferable, I can offer you Lew’s job for two years. But after two years, I can’t tell you what
would happen.”
Warren: What was Lew’s position?
Hotchkiss: Lew was, and I became, the assistant dean of students, the assistant director of
admissions, the director of student financial aid, and the director of what we call placement,

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which was the effort of matching prospective employers with our graduating seniors. It was four
things. It was a very interesting mix. During the fall you’d be busiest with the admissions part of
it, and then in the winter you’d be busiest with the student financial aid part of it, and in the
spring you’d be busiest with the placement part of it. But in 1968, Bob Huntley became president
and Bob realized Washington and Lee had no formal, deliberate fundraising effort activity.
Warren: Before we go there, though, I’d like to know what you think Frank Gilliam saw in
you. Of all the graduates of Washington and Lee, why do you think he picked you?
Hotchkiss: Mame, I don’t know. I think part of it was friendship, although I don’t think he or
anyone else would bring anyone to Washington and Lee purely because of friendship. When I
was a student, I loved Dean Gilliam and sought him out a lot, as did Lew John. Both of us were
similar in that respect. Dean Gilliam, for instance, wanted to have a group of students organized
to do volunteer work for the school on campus. At his request and with his guidance, I put
together what was called the Student Service Society. It was a group of students who helped with
the admissions process and really helped him with a lot of the things that he was concerned with,
so I think it was probably those activities in the years that I was here as a student. But you asked
about mentors, and one of them was Frank Gilliam.

         The second one when I got back was Bob Huntley. Bob was not the president yet. He was
the dean of the law school and I had utterly nothing whatsoever to do with the law school in a
formal sort of way. But I got to know Bob and, from the moment I met him, enjoyed him a great
deal. Bob was and is such a bright guy that some of his advice about Washington and Lee’s
affairs in general, particularly that part that I didn’t at the time know that I was going to grow
into, that is, the Board of Trustees, I would hear Bob offer his very candid opinion about the fact
that our board was very small and very old. So he was the second one.

         The third one was Jim Whitehead. Jim was the treasurer at the time. Sort of in ways that
you never can put your finger on why people are attracted to each other, I got to know Jim
reasonably well partly because, about that time, the Reeves Collection of porcelain arrived in
something like 230 barrels of filthy dirty porcelain. Judy [Hotchkiss] and I volunteered to help
Jim and Celeste [Whitehead] at night wash this junk. We spent hours and hours and hours in a
rubber-lined sink washing dirty porcelain, so I got to have his advice. Jim’s again, I’d say, just
like Bob Huntley, a very wonderful, very bright, very creative person. He, too,was a mentor to
me.

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Warren: Were you there when the paintings were uncrated?
Hotchkiss: Oh yes. I was in Providence [Rhode Island, where the Reeveses lived]. Jim and I
had gone up to Providence. I guess it was maybe Jim’s third or maybe even fourth trip, but I
went up there with him once because I think he wanted someone else on this campus to have
knowledge of the physical setup in Providence of these two houses, one of them bricked up and
left alone and unplugged because it had become so full of porcelain you couldn’t move in it, and
the little one next door that was still operative as a house. There wasn’t any other particularly
good reason why I would have gone to Providence with Jim, but I did. Those people would be
my mentors.

         I should include Fred Cole, who was the president when I came back, but Dr. Cole was
not the kind of person who spent a great deal of time, I think, with anyone. I don’t say that in a
critical way. He was busy. I think he had a lot that he wanted to accomplish at Washington and
Lee because Francis Pendleton Gaines, whom everyone adored, had really not paid much
attention to the internal operating parts of this school for the last, say, ten to twelve years of his
presidency. Fred knew there had to be a lot done and he did it. When he realized that he had done
pretty much all that he could do internally, he then, I think, sensed that the next job really was an
external job and that wasn’t his cup of tea.
Warren: “External” meaning?
Hotchkiss: Alumni, fundraising, communications, all the sorts of things that you do out on the
hustings.
Warren: Tell me more about Fred Cole. What were the internal things he was addressing?
Hotchkiss: What he was addressing I think, Mame, primarily was the quality of the teaching at
Washington and Lee. Fred Cole came to us from Tulane and before that from Duke. I think I’m
right about that. I know I’m right about Tulane, but I think Duke before that. He was more of a
dean orientation than, I think, a presidential orientation. I think he saw here at Washington and
Lee a faculty that had great potential but had, frankly, become sort of lazy. There wasn’t anyone
leading them academically. If you were a professor here at Washington and Lee, if you had
enough get-up-and-go on your own to do research and to delve more fully into your field, that
was fine, but no one was going to require that of you or particularly make you do it as a, let’s
say, as a way to promote yourself.

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         I couldn’t tell you, Mame, the particulars, but I think Dr. Cole also wanted some of the
requirements in the curriculum changed, distribution requirements, things of that nature. I have a
vague recollection that the absolute standard freshman requirements were reordered while he was
president so you didn’t have to take the five things that you had to take until he came. I think he
thought that there ought to be a little more latitude in those early years. In other words if you’re a
freshman, when I was there when you were a freshman, if you had wanted to take economics
101, that a freshman is fully capable of taking intellectually, you couldn’t because it wasn’t
available to freshmen. Dr. Cole began the process of freeing up more of what the university had
to offer to students earlier in their careers.
Warren: What’s the distinction you’re making when you say he was more of a dean than a
president?
Hotchkiss: Well, a president has to be, in addition to an academically minded person, that
person has to be a financially minded person. He also has to be—and this is not a derogatory
term—he has to be a promoter. He has to help boost the university’s reputation and help boost its
appeal. And he has to ask for gifts.

         Francis Pendleton Gaines was a master of the latter. I mean Dr. Gaines, particularly with
women, was just able to raise as much money as he ever tried to raise. Unfortunately, in a way,
he ran into two ladies who both thought he was absolutely the best thing they had ever known in
life and gave him easily so much money that he didn’t then really try to widen that circle as
much as he could have, Mrs. [Letitia Arthur Kelly] Evans being one and Mrs. [Alfred I.] duPont
the other. Dr. Gaines would get near the end of the year—as I understand it, Mame; now, I
couldn’t swear this is the case—and he would see where we stood with the budget and how
frankly short it was going to be, and he’d just tell Mrs. duPont that, this year, we’re going to
need a check for so much. Mrs. Evans, as you know, when she died, she left Washington and Lee
as one of the permanent beneficiaries of her estate. It was for many years and still may be our
largest endowment.
Warren: Really?
Hotchkiss: It technically is what’s called an endowment held by others; that is to say, we don’t
manage it. It’s managed by what is now SunTrust Bank in Atlanta, Georgia, because it was a
Coca-Cola–related endowment. It may still be the largest single corpus that serves us, although

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Rupert Johnson’s … well, probably even bigger than Rupert’s now because as large as $100
million is, I think Mrs. Evans’s may have been even larger than that.

         Anyway, Dr. Cole was just more oriented toward the scholarly, contemplative,
academically engineered life than either the world of finance or the world outside the garden
wall, so to speak.
Warren: Did he interact with alumni at all?
Hotchkiss: Not much, nor did anyone, Mame. It’s hard to exaggerate the aura of Francis
Pendleton Gaines. I mean this guy was a demigod. He really was. The university was so centered
in him, he was so beloved, and he had been here so long. Lord, he’d been the president since I
think the middle ’30s or something like that.
Warren: Twenty-nine years.
Hotchkiss: Twenty-nine years. I mean, this was Washington, Lee, and Gaines University and
there just wasn’t much effort made, frankly.

         That doesn’t mean there was nothing going on. Cy Young was our alumni secretary for
many years, a famous athlete and a much beloved and popular man, but basically what that
amounted to was to organize homecomings and reunions, which are very important. Nor did the
university really have the financial resources to jump on airplanes and fly all over the United
States. Our alumni had already spread themselves out over the entire country. For a school our
size, even during the Gaines years and the early Cole and Huntley years, to have the geographic
spread we had was remarkable. Still is, but even more so. We were so much smaller. We were
only about eleven hundred students, about half the size approximately that we are now.

         So, those were the mentors in my early days and there’s yet one more. When Bob asked
me to shift from these four activities that I had come originally to work on, admissions and
student affairs and that kind of thing, and do instead our development and fundraising work, we
had a wonderful fellow named Bob Nelson, who was not a Washington and Lee person; he was a
professional development consultant because none of us knew much or anything about collegiate
development work. Bob was not only a mentor; he was a teacher, not only to me but to Bob
Huntley and others as well.
Warren: If he was a consultant, was he consulting with other schools around the country too?
Hotchkiss: Oh yes. Oh sure. Yes.

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Warren: This is something that had occurred to me as I’ve been preparing to meet with you. It
seems like Washington and Lee was the same as many other places: that development was really
just becoming a concept in higher education. Am I right about that?
Hotchkiss: You’re exactly right.
Warren: So where did somebody like Bob Nelson come up with creating his business?
Hotchkiss: Well, some of your bigger places had gotten into it. Bob, for instance, had
become—let me think about it. I’m very bad on dates, but that was 1970 about when he came
into our life roughly, maybe ’69 or ’70. He had already been for a number of years the vice
president for whatever they called it—let’s call it development—at Illinois Institute of
Technology.
Warren: So he was at that university?
Hotchkiss: Before he became a consultant.
Warren: Before, I see. Okay.
Hotchkiss: He had already done that, which is simply to say that Illinois Institute of Technology
[had] got into the development business quite a long time.

         Believe it or not, Washington and Lee University hired a development director in the
early to mid-’50s and he stayed here for about three years. The story I heard was is that, number
one, he was very good at it. He would have positioned Washington and Lee very nicely in this,
as you just said, this relatively new field. But he wanted to have the title of vice president and Dr.
Gaines said, “We don’t have vice presidents at Washington and Lee University,” so he left. Don
Miller, or whatever his name was [Donald E. Smith, development officer, 1956-57], left. We
went back to scratch again. Then Jim Whitehead came to help us finish a relatively modest
campaign that was supposed to wind up in 1961, I think it was.
Warren: Was that the bicentennial campaign”
Hotchkiss: No. No, that was back in 1949.
Warren: Yes, and that didn’t do very well.
Hotchkiss: And that didn’t do well. It seemed to have met its goal, thanks again to Mrs. duPont
and Mrs. Evans. No, this was a campaign to build what was the new physics building that was
built near Howe Hall, the chemistry building—now they’re all one piece—and also to improve
the facilities in the journalism school. I think it was like a $2-million campaign, something like
that. Jim Whitehead had been the director of the New York State Foundation for Independent

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Colleges, like we have one of the same sort of thing here in Virginia [Virginia Foundation for
Independent Colleges]. But Jim hadn’t been here long when Dr. Cole moved him really more
into being an assistant to the president and was grooming him to be the next treasurer because a
wonderfully colorful man, named Earl Mattingly, who had been the treasurer just about as long
as Dr. Gaines had been the president, was nearing retirement. So Jim became the treasurer in ’68
or ’69.
Warren: I found a reference that there was a 1966 self-study and that it was out of that self-
study that they realized—whoever “they” were at that point, I guess Fred Cole and the trustees—
realized that they needed to establish a development office.
Hotchkiss: I think that’s quite right.
Warren: But then you had President Cole resigning. Now, one more thing I would like to talk
about before we let Fred Cole go, my understanding is that one of his major accomplishments
here was to get the board to agree that we would welcome black students, that we really didn’t
have a policy against integration.
Hotchkiss: Right.
Warren: Were you at all involved at that point with the board? Would you have been a witness
to that?
Hotchkiss: No. You’re exactly right, Mame, but that happened in the early’60s. I’d say ’62, ’63,
somewhere like that.
Warren: Right, that happened before you came back.
Hotchkiss: I remember Dean Gilliam coming to Atlanta on one of his admissions trips, telling
me that Washington and Lee would be even-handed in admitting blacks. It was a big deal. That
was a very difficult step for Washington and Lee to make.
Warren: Tell me what you mean.
Hotchkiss: I guess, just to be blunt, there was a residual prejudice in the South and we were
very much more southern then than we are now. There were a lot of people who frankly just
didn’t want blacks mixing in with these white students of ours. The South was still largely
segregated back then. Brown v. Board of Education had been history. It [Brown v. Board of
Education] had been long before—the Supreme Court decision [in 1954]—but the South still
was basically segregated. It certainly was segregated, in my opinion, emotionally if not de facto.
Here’s this small, very wonderful, congenial, upper-crust college that just found the thought of

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having blacks here perhaps intellectually acceptable but not really something they particularly
wanted to do. It didn’t happen here except in a token kind of way for quite a while. It wasn’t an
overnight result in that area. But you’re right. I had forgotten that. That certainly would have
occurred during Fred Cole’s [presidency]. Dr. Gaines stepped down, I believe, in ’59.
Warren: Yes.
Hotchkiss: Fred would have been there, yes.

         Our board, Mame, back then, was again a very southern board, very aristocratic, very old;
I mean chronologically old. At that time you had life tenure on the board; you could stay as long
as you wanted to stay on the board. One of the very first things Bob Huntley did when he became
president was to introduce term memberships and a mandatory retirement age. It was not, shall
we say, the most broadminded of groups of men. We had had only one woman elected to the
Board of Trustees and, as you might guess, that was Mrs. duPont. I don’t think she ever came to
a meeting, or if she did, it was only one or two. We were a very male place.
Warren: Well, that’s certainly true. I know that. I’m going to pause for a moment.

         Okay, we are back and we’re about to let Fred Cole go. When he left—I couldn’t tell—
was it pretty abrupt that he left and went to Washington? Was he asked to leave? I know he went
to the library association or something.
Hotchkiss: He went to the Council on Library Resources.
Warren: That’s it.
Hotchkiss: Mame, I don’t think … Well, first of all, let me say I don’t really know because I
was a very junior part of the machinery back then. He had been on the board of the Council on
Library Resources and I think the library world was one that interested him a great deal. To the
best of my knowledge, when they, the council, needed a new president, they asked him to do it
and he said yes. I’m pretty confident that it was entirely his own decision but I really don’t know.
Warren: Bill Pusey took over briefly as interim president.
Hotchkiss: Right.
Warren: You haven’t mentioned him. Did you have any particular rapport with him?
Hotchkiss: I knew Bill in later years. I knew him hardly at all at that time. Again, I was a
newcomer. I wasn’t on the academic side and Bill was a professor of German. He and Fred Cole
were similar, really. That is to say Fred Cole was similar to Bill because Bill was a consummate
academician. That was his passion in life. He loved to teach and be dean at the same time. I

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couldn’t tell you particularly how well he handled the year that he was the acting president,
although as far as I know, he handled it perfectly okay.

         A funny story that came out of that was that Bill Pusey just hated any kind of machinery.
Anything that whirred or clicked he didn’t like. At the time, Washington and Lee had an alumnus
who was a Lincoln dealer, and he saw to it that every three or four years the university was given
a new Lincoln automobile to be the president’s car. So, lo and behold, this new car shows up on
campus and it was one of the first automobiles that when you opened the door, the light came on,
and when you closed the door, the light didn’t go off right away. Bill would stand there beside
the car and look through the windows to be sure the light went off, because he was afraid that if
it didn’t go off, the battery would run down. Finally he got tired of that, so he just took the bulb
out of the dome light. That’s got nothing to do with anything, but he was a delightful man, Bill
Pusey, just a great guy.

         He was a great hiker. He didn’t look like he was particularly strong physically but he
would go on these long hikes around here on the mountain trails. He and a wonderful fellow
named [Romulus] Rom Weatherman, who was the editor of our magazine, I think they called
themselves the Fox Stick Society or something of that nature. Great guys, both of them [were]
wonderful people.
Warren: I remember Rom well.
Hotchkiss: Rom was in a class by himself.
Warren: Tell me what you mean.
Hotchkiss: First of all, Rom was a very able person. He was doing the work of four people—
more than four now—because everything that moved that had anything to do with publication
here, whether it was the magazine or an admissions folder or anything at all, Rom had to do. He
was the only show in town. During his time, we did seek some help—speaking of Baltimore, not
that we were—from a designer up there whose name I don’t remember. He began giving us some
graphic layout help for the magazine. I remember he thought, this guy did, that since we were an
all-male school, that the only two colors that we could really use for men were brown and
orange. We couldn’t use any pastels or any bright colors. I just wish I could remember his name.
He was a nice guy.

         Anyway, Rom did all this with such an open heart. Like you, Mame, he loved to talk with
people. He loved to know what they thought. He loved to try to interpret what they thought.

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Unfortunately, he suffered from depression, very serious depression attacks. Then, poor guy, he
came down with cancer and didn’t stay with us nearly as long as all of us would have liked.
Warren: Yes, he went way too young in my memory.
Hotchkiss: Oh, absolutely.
Warren: Another event, speaking of publications, that was happening right along this same
time, and I’m curious to hear what happened on campus in relation to it, is [Ollinger] Ollie
Crenshaw was finally publishing his book right about the same time. Tell me about that. Was
that important? Was that a help to you in development because by that time you were getting into
that?
Hotchkiss: No, that wasn’t a help to me in development. It’s interesting that this is a topic
because—well, I’ll start at the beginning. As I understand it, and again this may not be quite
correct, but as I understand it, that book was supposed to be published as part of the bicentennial
in 1949 and it wasn’t. It wasn’t published in 1954 or 1956 or 1957, and finally, somewhere in the
very early ’60s—
Warren: No. It came out in 1969.
Hotchkiss: ’69, okay, in the late ’60s.
Warren: Twenty years late.
Hotchkiss: It was twenty years late and half of it is down there in the archives that had to be cut
out. No, it wasn’t of any real help and it was not a particularly—well, here, it didn’t have nearly
the life and the support and the enthusiasm that Come Cheer [for Washington and Lee, the book
published to commemorate the university’s 250th anniversary] did. They just didn’t even
compare. The fact is, though, and the reason why this is interesting, is that I was for two years
the chairman of what’s called the George Washington Society. That’s a group of former
members of our boards. We, the society, have told Washington and Lee University that the
society will stand behind the financial needs of publishing a sequel or a continuation of General
Lee’s College, of Ollie’s book. The Board of Trustees would very much like that to happen but it
seems to just be on the shelf somewhere, not making any progress. General Lee’s College, as
you know, ends in the relatively early years of Gaines’ presidency.
Warren: It does indeed.
Hotchkiss: There’s huge chunks of very important history that if it isn’t gotten down fairly
soon, institutional memory is not going to last long enough for it to happen. The idea, or I should

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say the hope, is that we’ll have a continuation of it. We will see. The people who have probably
the greatest store of that kind of knowledge are a couple of professors on campus.
Warren: Who would that be?
Hotchkiss: It would be Taylor Sanders and Holt Merchant, but neither of them seems
particularly inclined to take on that chore. Speaking only for myself and for no one else, with no
authority whatsoever, what I am trying to make happen is to see if I can find an editor, a writer,
who would get the information from Taylor and Holt and from the archives and whatnot, but do
the writing of the book. I’ll tell you, if it doesn’t happen soon it’s not going to happen. It needs to
be a serious book. It’s a text book.
Warren: It’s not Come Cheer [which is generously illustrated].
Hotchkiss: It’s not Come Cheer. It’s a different product. Our provost, June Aprille—I always
have a hard time coming up with her last name—but June Aprille is in charge of it. Have you
met her?
Warren: Yes, I had lunch with her and Ken a couple of years ago.
Hotchkiss: She’s been given the baton and the money’s not a problem. The George Washington
Society will come up with the money. It’s just that we need the writer.

         So, there’s General Lee’s College. But, no, it didn’t make much of a splash. Although,
boy, I’ll tell you now, if you want a copy it is a collector’s item almost.
Warren: I have one sitting on my desk, thank you.
Hotchkiss: They’re hard to get.
Warren: I agree. I’m very happy to have one. It was a little water-damaged, I think, when Brian
Shaw gave it to me but I was glad to have it.

         I think it’s time for us to invite Bob Huntley to be president and talk about what
happened after that.
Hotchkiss: What happened after that was just, I think, one of the more remarkable things that
any school could have happen to it—in a good way. Bob, I think, was thirty-eight years old. He
had practiced law, not terribly long, with a firm in Alexandria, the senior partner of which wound
up on our Board of Trustees, a man named Waller Dudley, whose son, Beau Dudley, is now our
director of alumni programs. Bob had come back to be a law professor; had very quickly,
because of his incredible brilliance, risen in the professoriate to the top of the deck and then
became the dean; and, simultaneously, was the secretary to the board.

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         The story, Mame—again, this may be apocryphal—but the story is that Bob was meeting
with the committee of the board that was concerned with finding a new president for Washington
and Lee. The story is that when Bob had to excuse himself at one point to go to the bathroom or
make a phone call or whatever, the people in the room said, “You know, I think the person who
ought to be the next president of the university has been sitting with us all along.” I couldn’t tell
you exactly how quickly. I can’t be positive that occurred. But in relatively short order, it was
announced that Bob would be the next president.
Warren: It was a very short time.
Hotchkiss: It didn’t take long and Bob hit the presidency just with a bang. He was young. He
was attractive. He had gotten to know a lot of alumni. Bob was the class of ’50. Then he’d gone
into the navy and he’d come back to go into law school, so he had really been with Washington
and Lee from 1946 until the late’50s in a fairly continuous way. He knew a lot of our alumni
because of his own personal presence on campus as an alumnus.

         Bob, rather immediately, knew three things: number one, that Washington and Lee was
grossly underfinanced. We were really limping along for all those years with Mrs. duPont
picking up the red ink. That had not—let’s see. That had pretty well stopped. Yes, that had
stopped. I can’t remember when it stopped but it stopped sometime in the late’50s. We hadn’t
had that for a while. Mrs. Evans had died, though, by then and we were getting some money, but
we were poor. We were really poor. We didn’t look that way, we didn’t act that way, but we
really were.
Warren: How did the place keep functioning?
Hotchkiss: Just barely. It functioned in a very, as some would say, a very Presbyterian way:
very, very tightfisted, very plain, no frills, just the basics. John Wilson used to regale our alumni
in some of his talks when he’d say, “The model for teaching is to have a student on one end of a
log and a professor on the other. That’s all you need.” You don’t need all the rest that comes
along with it.

         Anyway, Bob knew we were poor. We really were poor. There’s no other way to put it
than that. Bob knew that we were nevertheless remarkably good in the quality of our faculty
although, as I said, that faculty hadn’t really been pushed to produce much until Fred Cole came.
Bob knew that more attention to that had to be paid. Third, Bob saw our physical plant was just
awful. I remember Bob saying that he just thought it was remarkable that any young man looking

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at Washington and Lee, if they came for a campus visit, would want to come to school here
because we were downright down in the heels and we didn’t have much of anything in the way
of facilities. The very first thing that Bob decided we absolutely had to have was a much better
gymnasium. Old Doremus Gymnasium was nothing more than that old cavity over there. The
third thing that Bob realized was that none of this was going to happen if we didn’t get to work
in what is generally called development.

         I had been in the publishing business, in sales in the publishing business, which had
comparatively little to do with collegiate development work but at least it had some similarity.
Bob asked if I would stop doing what I was doing and take on the development thing as Frank
Parsons’ partner. Frank was the director of development—I think he had that title—and I was the
other guy in development.
Warren: Explain to me how that worked, that you two worked together.
Hotchkiss: I hadn’t gotten to know Frank terribly well. Frank was then as he always stayed,
until he retired, a person who had so many different talents. He could do so many different
things. That being the case, people would always be getting a piece of Frank to do this or do that,
and so it was very difficult for Frank, I think, to become kind of a channeled specialist in any one
area. To whatever extent he was, it was basically with Rom Weatherman in communications.
That was his main focus.

         Bob asked Frank to get into the development business because, once again, Frank had
been here for a long time. In the late ’60s, Frank had already been here a long time. He knew
probably more about Washington and Lee than anyone else. He probably knew more about
Washington and Lee than even Bob knew in terms of what made this place tick or what made it
not tick. I think Bob saw that as kind of a natural way to begin. What happened was, to a certain
extent, what I said happened with Jim Whitehead. That is, Frank’s catholic knowledge of what
goes on here and his many talents began making Frank much more appealing to Bob as an
assistant to the president than a person who was a director of development.

         By that time, before that change was made, before it was formalized, Frank and I had
gone out to Denver to a conference that in those days was called the American Alumni Council.
In those days, that was the organization that people in development work or alumni work or
communications work belonged. Frank and I went out there to a place named Loretta Heights
College, a small Roman Catholic college out there. Simply, that’s just where it was located. We

                                                                                                                   13
ran into this fellow whose name was Bob Nelson. We just thought Bob was great and he thought
we were great. Frank and I came back to Lexington and told Bob Huntley that we really needed
somebody to help us because none of us really knew quite what we ought to be doing. So
Washington and Lee retained Bob Nelson and Bob, as I said earlier, was certainly one of my
mentors, certainly the most important mentor I had professionally, in development work
specifically.
Warren: What guidance did he give you? Why was he so valuable to you?
Hotchkiss: Bob, first of all, as any good consultant in development work does, he first looked at
leadership. If an institution is going to raise money, it needs three things. Number one, it needs a
case. It needs to have a legitimate, appealing reason for asking people to give it money. Number
two, it has to have a group of people who are committed enough to the school, and what its needs
are, and are skillful enough in the way they can sit down with prospective donors and talk to
them about the school’s needs. They need to be educated and trained in order to do that. So that’s
one thing Bob Nelson does and did. He’s still a consultant today as far as I know. Third, you’ve
got to have a board of trustees that is fully and completely in tune with raising money and seeing
their responsibility in that area. We had none of that, just none of it. It sounds so obvious and so
simple now, but Bob had to sit down with Bob Huntley and Frank and me and we went to school
with Bob Nelson being our teacher, so to speak.

         Then Bob Nelson said, “One of the things that you obviously don’t have that you’ve got
to have is some sort of research capability. You’ve got to figure out who has the money. There’s
no point on calling on Harry and George if they aren’t able to help you. You’ve got to
differentiate.” So Bob Nelson found a wonderful man named George Messly, one of the most
fascinating guys, an Australian, who I think when he came to help us just on a very part-time
basis, I think George was already in his mid-80s. He was just the salt of the earth, one of these
dear, sweet, capable, committed, giving kinds of people. He was more like a minister than a
development person.

         Mame, we didn’t know how to research. We didn’t know there was a thing called the
Foundation Library that had all the information you could ever want to have on every foundation
in the United States and who all their trustees are and where they had been making their gifts.
We didn’t know that there are ways that you can set up regional groups of your alumni, who can
take lists of the alumni who live in that area and, if you’ve got a group of ten people and they go

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over these lists and if six people continue to identify Mame Warren as someone who can afford
to make a generous gift to Washington and Lee, there must be some truth to that. I mean we just
didn’t know anything about that. It seems now, as I’ve said, so simple and so obvious but we had
to have someone to lead us, lead the horse to water.

         Not long after Bob Nelson worked with us, Bob Huntley said, “Look, Frank, you be my
assistant. We’re going to build a gymnasium. We’re going to do a lot of things. I need help in
those areas.” That really began Frank’s virtual career as an architect. Frank knows as much about
building as most architects do. I went down the other side of the path in development work.
Warren: I’m curious. How long was Bob here?
Hotchkiss: As president?
Warren: No, no, Bob Nelson here giving his tutorial. Was it a matter of days or weeks or
months?
Hotchkiss: He would come usually and spend like two or three days with us about every other
month, roughly.
Warren: For some years?
Hotchkiss: Yes, until I’m going to say the latter’70s. It was six, seven years or so, far less
frequent visits near the end. Bob Nelson was—is—the kind of person—I keep trying to put him
in the past but I think he’s still very much alive and probably still doing the work he does—he
had a talent to challenge you. He had the talent to say, “Why haven’t you figured out by now that
this person or this opportunity is one that you should pursue? You’ve just frankly been sitting
around on your duff and you need to get up and get going.” He would say that to anyone. The
first couple of times that Bob Nelson asked for the privilege of addressing our Board of Trustees,
we thought that would be a perfectly pleasant thing to do. But Bob got up in front of the
Washington and Lee University Board, and for all intents and purposes, told them that they were
just lazy beyond belief and that if they had any care for this university, they had better get with it
or else. And got away with it. He could insult people without somehow or other severing the tie.
Warren: Do you remember your first board meeting? Can you remember the first time you
went in to see the board? Who were they? What were they like?
Hotchkiss: Mame, they were a group of giants. Washington and Lee had a small board on
which sat the most successful real estate developer in the southwestern United States, John
Stemmons; probably one of the preeminent federal judges in the United States, John Minor

                                                                                                                   15
Wisdom; a member of the Supreme Court, Louis Powell; the head of the nation’s largest
commercial shipping line, Joe Lykes; the head of a giant paper manufacturing company in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Jack Warner; the head of the National Bank of Georgia, Joe Bierney; the
dean of the graduate school of theology at Union Theological Seminary, John Newton Thomas;
and people like that. The fact is that these were really giants.
Warren: And Bob [Nelson] came in and told them they were lazy?
Hotchkiss: They were lazy.
Warren: What was their reaction?
Hotchkiss: Well, they didn’t like that. In fact, as I recall, Louis Powell—I mean this is a
Supreme Court justice—stood up, got up out of his chair and stood up, and said that he resented
what Nelson had said and called it, as I recall, effrontery or something of that nature. But you see
the thing that wasn’t happening is, you had all this power that would dutifully come to meetings
and make decisions about faculty salaries and that kind of thing, then go home and show up
again for the next meeting and were otherwise what you might think of as underemployed. With
that kind of power, they should have already begun wearing out some shoe leather and ringing
some doorbells. Bob Nelson, Bob Huntley, and maybe I, to some extent, had to turn that ship
around. It’s sort of the analogy that’s used, you can’t turn a freighter around but so quickly. It
takes a while. And it took a while because they didn’t like that message. When we put together,
soon after I became the director of development and soon after Bob [Huntley] had his feet
squarely on the ground, we initiated what then [was] and still is a pretty ambitious campaign that
ran throughout the ’70s successfully.
Warren: Before we get into that campaign, I’m going to take a break. [This and subsequent
breaks indicate the beginning of a new recording track.]

         All right, the campaign of the ’70s. Did that one have a name other than the campaign?
Hotchkiss: We really had a catchy name for it. It was called the campaign for Washington and
Lee.
Warren: Well, if it worked …
Hotchkiss: Yes, it worked.
Warren: That’s the important thing. This was the ’70s. You’ve got a riled-up Board of
Trustees. There were other changes going on with the board. You talked about term limits. Did
the size of the board change, do you remember?

                                                                                                                   16
Hotchkiss: Oh yes, everything changed, Mame. I can’t exactly remember the numbers but, as I
recall, the board was like twelve [members], when Bob became president, or so. It was enlarged
to, say, sixteen, eighteen, something like that. And [they initiated a] seventy-year age limit
[when] you had to go off, the inability to serve more than two consecutive terms, and committee
structure. The other board just always basically acted as a committee of the whole because it was
so small. Those kinds of changes.
Warren: Were those helpful changes, and what kind of reaction was there?
Hotchkiss: Oh, absolutely helpful and the reaction was good. As long as the board was not told
that it was lazy, they were pretty happy. I might be being a little hard on them even though they
really were not working very hard. The fact is, these were all very capable, worldly people who
were on other boards and they knew that this new design and their being challenged, again to use
that terminology, to work harder for Washington and Lee was appropriate. They would have
expected those who were in corporate America for their boards to do the same. Mame, very few
people like to raise money. I do understand it but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The fact is
that they were being pushed, among other things, to get out there and rattle their tin cups, and
that was a little bit beneath their dignity to a certain extent.
Warren: How did you get them stimulated to do what needed to be done?
Hotchkiss: First of all, by having Bob Huntley as the president. A lot of leadership results from
people just wanting to please and perform for somebody, and Bob has that God-given talent that
people just want to do it for Bob. They want Bob to be pleased with what they do. They don’t
want him to be displeased with what they don’t do.
Warren: Does that include Farris Hotchkiss?
Hotchkiss: Yes, of course. Absolutely. You just wanted to stand high in Bob’s estimation and
you wanted to produce. Part of it was that leadership magic that’s very hard to define. As they
say, some people have it and some people don’t. Number two, Bob laid out, with the board’s
participation, a lot of things that he and they wanted to see happen: a new gymnasium, a new
library, a new commerce school building, and more endowment for student aid. Even the most
reluctant person insofar as fundraising is concerned knew none of this was going to happen if we
didn’t raise the money.

         What we did, in addition to a good deal of persuasion, conversation, counseling, and
dreaming, we knew we didn’t have a staff because I was the only person there and we knew that

                                                                                                                   17
if we got into a campaign that we had to get help somewhere, so Bob Nelson, as I think I
mentioned—yes, I know I did—found us this wonderful Australian guy, George Messly, who
helped us learn how to research. He also found a fellow who was retiring from Lake Forest
College up in Illinois, whose name was Sandy Dowdy, to come down and do our annual fund
work. Up until the time that these changes were made, the annual fund was called the Alumni
Fund and it was run, basically, by the alumni secretary. To modernize it and whatnot, it needed
to be a much more embracing effort. So I was there, George Messly came and went, and Sandy
Dowdy was there running the annual fund, but we still didn’t have enough horsepower to address
the difficult geography that we had, and frankly, Mame, to address what became relatively
apparent early and that is we had a lot of potential out there. We really had a lot of wealthy
people in this family of ours.

         What we did was—and I still to this day just can hardly believe it worked—we went out
and asked what I think finally got to be about ten Washington and Lee alumni, strategically
located around the United States, if they would, in essence, step away from their ordinary jobs
and work for Washington and Lee instead, for free. I mean that sounds pretty preposterous. But
lo and behold, with the exception of two or three for whom we did have to pay something—not a
whole lot—they did this. These were lawyers who just stopped practicing law as completely as
they were. This was a fellow out in Dallas who was a homebuilder who just found time to stop
building his houses as rapidly as he had been. This was a fellow in New York who had been a
vice president of American Express who was getting ready to retire and retired earlier than he
intended, and so on. We didn’t ask them to do this forever. This was only to be done for a couple
of years. In fact, I’m not even sure that it was two years. I think our request was only for a year.
Warren: Did you pinpoint specific people you went after?
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: These were not board members?
Hotchkiss: No. These were plain vanilla alumni. I found them sort of by gosh and by golly. The
board, for instance—I don’t want to paint this board as being a bunch of nonentities because it
certainly was not that—after we decided to try this, then they would think of someone like this
guy that I referred to as the homebuilder. John Stemmons, who was the big southwest U.S.
developer, knew of Upton Bell. That was the guy’s name. So John Stemmons called me up and
said, “Why don’t you get in touch with this alumnus named Upton Bell and see if he’d be willing

                                                                                                                   18
to do this?” I knew of a classmate of mine, whose name is Tom Branch, who was practicing law
in Atlanta. I knew that Tom was not terribly happy with his firm and was sort of thinking of
changing firms, so I thought maybe he’d be willing to do this in the interim. One thing leads to
another and, over time, we found enough people to do this.

         The thing is, Mame, they had a credential that they would not have had if they had really
been regular, full-time, salaried development officers. They could walk into your office and
represent themselves as a fellow alumnus who cared enough about Washington and Lee to leave
their job for a little while and devote, more or less, most of their time to the university to get this
first campaign, that we had put together semiprofessionally forever, accomplished. The appeal
that they brought with them encouraged people to respond favorably.
Warren: Were they operating as individuals or did you have a name for this gang?
Hotchkiss: We called them Development Associates. That was the name we gave them. The
way it worked is that I, by telephone, just as an example, by telephone and as a result of our
research and all the other, Upton Bell, who lived out in Texas, and I would decide there were a
dozen people we wanted to solicit for a gift. On the telephone we’d decide to ask Harry for ten
thousand dollars, and George for fifty, and Jim for a hundred. I would put together what we
called a proposal, which was a written document that asked them to consider a gift and told them
what was in the campaign, that kind of thing. Because Upton lived in Texas, he would make
these appointments over a three- or four-day period, five-day period. I would fly out to Texas
and he and I would make these calls together. He would know how to find the offices and how to
get to places that would have taken me twice as long. Those were the days before Google and
GPSs and all the rest. I was the guy from headquarters and he was the remarkably oriented,
bleeding-heart alumnus in Texas and we’d work together.
Warren: Sounds like a plan to me.
Hotchkiss: Well, it worked. It really worked, Mame. It really worked.
Warren: Is this a program that had a limited lifespan?
Hotchkiss: Oh yes. It only lasted for—the original group I think we only asked them to do it for
a year.
Warren: How many people are we talking about?
Hotchkiss: Starting off there were, let’s see, Upton Bell and Tom Branch and Jack DeJarnettte
and Clark Winter and Cal [Calvert G.] DeColigny. There were five originally. Some of them,

                                                                                                                   19
like Adrian Williamson, stayed on longer than a year. Some of them, like Tom Branch, had to go
back and get their job back on track. So some of them stayed for a year, some stayed for two. I
think the longest any of them stayed was three years. I think Adrian stayed for three years. But
when Tom Branch in Atlanta had to go back to his law practice, then I had to find someone to
take his place because we were nowhere near finished. By the time we were finished, I think
there had been ten of them, I believe, all told, who had done this. [Others, whom Hotchkiss
recalled later, were John Hollister and Bill Boardman.]
Warren: Has there ever been a reunion of these people?
Hotchkiss: Yes, we did. We had one. We finished that campaign in 1979 or so.
Warren: Yes, 1979.
Hotchkiss: Something like that, and we did. We had a very nice, fun time because we all really
had become dear friends. Adrian Williamson has died and Clark Winter has died, but the rest of
these people are still—Tom Branch became a trustee. To this day I keep up with them and see
them.
Warren: I think that there should be a gathering of them, lo these many years later, to just thank
them for all that they did back then.
Hotchkiss: Well, it was good. Of course by the time we were in our next campaign in the ’80s,
then we had people who did that as full-time, salaried, residential people. But you know, Mame,
that is, I guess, what you really want, to have the full-time, paid, residential people. But in a way,
those people don’t really have this special feature that that original group had.
Warren: That’s what I mean. They could come in and really inspire.
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: I think there ought to be a roundup of whoever’s left to rekindle. I like that idea.

         I found references to a whole bunch of different organizations, groups, that you seem to
be the godfather of many of them. There was something called the Achievement Council and
they were trustees, but I only found a couple of references to that.
Hotchkiss: One of the things that you realize is that a board of trustees is simply not going to be
100 percent comfortable with fundraising. You’d like it to be so but it isn’t. What you usually do
is you usually put together another group that theoretically is committed to fundraising and is
comfortable doing it and give it a name. We called it the Achievement Council. On it can be
some trustees but on it are also some alumni or parents or others who you think can be helpful to

                                                                                                                   20
you as volunteers. For the most part, they don’t do what you might call the heavy lifting. One of
the phrases that is used in fundraising that I’ve always disliked but I’ve never found a better one,
you have a process that’s called cultivation and these people can be very helpful in that stage.
Whereas some folks either don’t want to or are not very good at asking Mame Warren for a gift
of a hundred thousand dollars, but on the other hand, they’re quite comfortable meeting you for
lunch and just telling you what’s going on at Washington and Lee and what the university’s
needs are, as long as they don’t have to ask you for money. The Achievement Council was used
for that kind of thing.

         On the flip side, the Achievement Council also, and groups like it, can be very helpful in
what we call stewardship, which means you’ve been cultivated. You’ve been solicited. You’ve
made your gift. The campaign’s over, but here comes someone who wants to thank you again for
what you’ve done, tell you what has happened, what’s the result of your gift and the gifts of
others. Again, a group like the Achievement Council can do that kind of thing as well.
Warren: Help me understand the distinction you’re making between cultivation and
stewardship. Cultivation is before the ask, stewardship is after the ask, and you were the ask?
Hotchkiss: The ask ideally was usually me and one of these Development Associates—again,
we’re talking about the ’70s—or me and one of the trustees or, if it was a really big-deal
prospect, it would be Bob Huntley and I. Bob and I made many, many trips.

         One of them, Mame, that was so funny was when Bob and I went up and solicited John
Warner, who at the time was the secretary of the navy, for a gift which he kind of made. I won’t
prolong this but Bob and I had driven up in the car and, at the end of our conversation with John,
he pops up—he, John, pops up—and says, “Oh, I’ve got to be at the State Department at 0400”
or something like that. He said, “Bob, you ride with me so we can talk a little bit more and,
Farris, you can pick up Bob at the State Department.” So he’s gone. All of a sudden, he
evaporates. Down the hall they go, Bob Huntley and John Warner with a marine or someone like
that. They go blasting off through Washington’s traffic in a black limo with flags flying or
something of that sort, and here comes Farris in the university’s car, completely unable to keep
up with them because I had to stop at stoplights and things like that. I get to the State Department
and when I got there—we never have figured out exactly what [happened]—but Bob, for some
reason or another, thought that I was going to wait and pick him up at the Pentagon. So he was
plunked back in the limousine and taken back to the Pentagon while I was at the State

                                                                                                                   21
Department trying to find him. Finally, Bob decided he really had misremembered and so he got
back in the limousine at the Pentagon to come back to the State Department, where he assumed I
was waiting for him, while at the same time, I had decided Bob must be back at the Pentagon. To
bring this story to an end, we wind up at the Pentagon and this huge female marine sergeant
grabbed my arm and she said, “Hotchkiss, you’re not going anywhere. You stand here and we’ll
bring Mr. Huntley here.” And they did.
Warren: Oh, that’s funny.
Hotchkiss: Bob and I, when we left the Pentagon, we were so completely hilarious, this whole
thing had been such a Mutt-and-Jeff act, that we got lost in Arlington [National] Cemetery. We
couldn’t find our way out of the cemetery forever.
Warren: But did the secretary of the navy come through for you?
Hotchkiss: Yes, he did.
Warren: All right.
Hotchkiss: Well, he did. He did. Yes, he did. It was a little bit different because it didn’t really
come out of his pocket. He had been married to [Constance] Connie Mellon, Paul Mellon’s
daughter I guess she was, and so what he did is he got us a gift from the Mellon Foundation. But
yes, he came through.
Warren: That will do. That will do.
Hotchkiss: Yes, it worked.
Warren: I’ll bet you have lots of stories and I’ll bet these stories just go on.
Hotchkiss: We have some funny ones. We really do.
Warren: One of the big things that happened that I’d love to hear the background story on is
Sidney and Frances Lewis. What I was trying to figure out, it looks like Sydney became a trustee
and then very quickly the gift came. But which came first and how did Sydney become a trustee?
Was that part of doing the research and realizing that he was a good potential?
Hotchkiss: Yes. Back to research for a moment, we were aware that Sydney was the head of
this new company, Best Products, that was a completely new idea in the way to sell merchandise.
We knew that it was a very successful company and that Sydney had become quite wealthy, but
Sydney and Frances spent every spare moment and, it seemed, every spare dollar in the arts.
Their specialty was to buy paintings, particularly paintings or sculpture from young artists whom
they thought had promise.

                                                                                                                   22
         This may be not exactly chronologically correct, Mame, but in the meantime Washington
and Lee owned what we call Col Alto. Do you remember Col Alto [Governor James McDowell’s
home in Lexington, built in 1827]?
Warren: I do.
Hotchkiss: We owned that then, number one. Number two, we had received by that time our
[Reeves Collection of] porcelain and Col Alto was vacant and really down at the heels. There
was a sort of a thought that if we could gin up a half a million dollars somehow or other that we
could turn Col Alto into a museum. At the same time, Bob Huntley looked down the road here at
duPont [Hall], that’s the building at the very end [of the back campus] that had an extremely
inadequate, for then, art gallery and an inadequate place for studio work, not only painting but
music and all the rest. We put two and two together and got five. Actually, we put two and two
together and got three, thinking that obviously the Lewises would be interested in making a gift
for the arts. About that time they had a secondary offering of their stock, which was a perfect
success, and they became even wealthier. Bob went to Richmond—oh, I don’t know, Mame. He
went to Richmond and got to know them—no request for a gift yet, but got to know them—and
asked them if they would like to come to Lexington to see what we had in mind for the college.

         In the meantime we had hired an architect. The architect had designed the law school and
had actually had a model built of the law school. At that time, my office was over in what we call
the Lee-Jackson House. In there was a little room—still is a little room but it had to get rebuilt—
in the Lee-Jackson House, where we just kind of kept things and at that time the model was in
that room. Okay, so here come Frances and Sydney Lewis to Lexington and we show them
duPont and we show them the art studio and the gallery and the music. We take them to Col Alto
and we show them where we were storing toilets and things like that instead of using the
building for anything useful and … the arts, the arts, the arts.

         We all came back to the development office and Bob said to Sydney and Frances, “Oh,
by the way, we have a model for a new law school building. Do you want to see it?” They said,
“Yes, we’ll look at it,” so we walk through my office into the little room in the back and there
was this model. The Lewises stayed around a while and we chatted and they left. Well, what we
didn’t know was is that somewhere between Lexington and Richmond, on what was then U.S.
250 before the interstate, Sydney said to Frances, “You know, Frances, if we wanted to, we
could give Washington and Lee a new law school,” and so they decided more or less, spur of the

                                                                                                                   23
moment, in the car to do that. The next thing we knew, their lawyer called Bob Huntley and
asked if he could come up for a meeting with him and walked into Bob’s office and said,
“President Huntley, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis would like to make a gift to Washington and Lee of the
new law school building, plus an endowment to support legal research.”

         Now somewhere in that mix, Mame, and I don’t exactly know where it fits, but
somewhere in that mix Bob asked Roy Steinheimer, who was the dean of the law school, to go to
Richmond and meet the Lewises. I guess that happened maybe after the lawyer told them what
the Lewises were interested in. I mean the lawyer didn’t show up with a check in his hand, so I
think that’s what happened. I think he said they wanted to and the natural thing was to have the
dean of the law school go down there and talk. Just about that time, I think before the gift was
actually made, Bob asked Sydney if he would like to be on the board and Sydney said yes.
Warren: Yes, he was a trustee before the gift was announced.
Hotchkiss: Right, right.
Warren: But not very [much before]. That’s why I was curious.
Hotchkiss: It almost was simultaneous.
Warren: When you get word of a gift like that, how is that handled? Do you keep it under
wraps for a while until the optimum moment? Tell me about the logistics of keeping quiet about
it.
Hotchkiss: You do what you said. You decide that you obviously neither want nor are able to
keep it a secret for long because regardless of how confidential you think it is, it won’t stay that
way. You plan some announcement that is appropriate to the magnitude of the gift. I don’t quite
remember the ceremony but I think we waited, Mame, to when the board met next in Lexington.
I think we had at the board dinner that night, which was usually a Friday night, invited other
people whom we had identified as being interested in the law school, plus I guess the law school
faculty, which in those days was small, and made the announcement.

         I remember being worried that when this big gift—I mean a $9-million gift back then was
a big gift—I remember worrying that people might think, oh well, Washington and Lee has got a
bunch of fat cats around, because we already had gotten the Warner gift for what we call the
Warner Center, and that it would disincline other alumni to put their shoulder to wheel thinking
they don’t need to do that because these bigger guys, the Mellons and the Warners and the
Lewises, were going to take care of it. Mame, I don’t remember exactly what we decided but we

                                                                                                                   24
came up with some way to keep the heat under the pot. I think we came up with some kind of a
challenge or something like that to keep other people engaged.
Warren: Again, you had all these different programs going, all happening about the same time.
There was something called the Robert E. Lee Associates. There was the Generals Council.
What else? Of course, the annual fund was going on. Were these various groups part of that?
Hotchkiss: The Robert E. Lee Associates was our attempt to identify people and thank people
who made a gift of a thousand dollars or more to the annual fund. At the time that we created
that inducement, if you want to think of it that way—and it really was an inducement—I think
that year we had something like thirteen gifts of a thousand dollars or more for the annual fund.
It wasn’t long before the Robert E. Lee Associates atmosphere boosted that number to I can’t
remember what it is but it tripled and quadrupled very quickly.
Warren: What do you mean, the atmosphere?
Hotchkiss: Well, to rub elbows we’d have these elegant, elegant dinners, black-tie dinners, to
which we’d invite the people who had made gifts at that level. There was sort of a panache of
being in that circle of people who were similarly generous to you. We gave the Robert E. Lee
Associate group special attention. We would write them a letter semi-annually or quarterly and
bring them up to date on what was going on. They would get invitations to things on campus that
were interesting. Most all of that was very effective for only a limited length of time. What is
that play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? We finally got so many Lee Associates it became
clumsy. We got so many Lee Associates we found that what was happening was is that it was
kind of a core group in the Lee Associates who tended to come back for the black-tie dinners but
no one else did. After a while we decided that it really had seen its day. At which time we
created the Generals Council, which carried the level of gifts higher, because we realized that a
thousand dollars was no longer anywhere near the maximum that some people could afford.

         Williams College, that I have always held up as a real example that I emulated in
development work, they didn’t do any of this stuff. They thought all that Lee Associates-
Generals Council stuff was just tacky and ridiculous. They achieved perfectly without doing any
of it. Well, we weren’t Williams. Many people do like to be recognized for what they do. If you
go to a symphony or an opera or anything like that, and you see people sit down with the
program for the evening, they will invariably turn to the back and look at the donor list. It’s just
human nature. So we have stuck with [it]. We still do. It’s morphed now into something called

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the President’s Society or something like that that recognizes gifts. There aren’t many of them
but we get gifts for the annual fund now of fifty thousand dollars. Our annual fund now is nearly
a $7-million fund, which is just remarkable.
Warren: How important do you think that ambiance [is] that is here, the black-tie ambiance, if
you will? It certainly starts in student days. Is that part of what development is doing, is keeping
that feeling of being special—and elegance—going?
Hotchkiss: I don’t think as much as it used to be. What I mean by that is, I think that the world
of philanthropy has expanded to such an extent that it’s very hard to do anything in the
philanthropic package in the way of recognition, like black-tie dinners, like lapel pins, like
plaques on the wall, all that kind of stuff, that hasn’t gotten kind of worn. There’s no real special
aspect to it. I don’t know what Johns Hopkins does but I imagine they could hang a plaque off of
every tree if they wanted.

         What we have to concentrate on here is not so much the plaque or the black tie, but the
friendship and the Honor System and the integrity of this place. That is far more legitimate to
begin with and now much more effective than labeling gifts based on their dollar amount. Don’t
misunderstand me. We still try very hard to recognize gifts appropriately, but it is no longer the
attraction. The attraction is really much more now the good that gifts will do, the need that needs
to be met, and the natural association with your fellows who have done similar things that you
have done, both in your own career—you know, successful lawyers with successful doctors—or
someone like a wonderful female alumna of Washington and Lee University who, for years, has
been the legal counsel for an Indian nation out West, just the antithesis of the big money. Her
achievement is nevertheless recognized. Berthenia Crocker I think is her name. Washington and
Lee really does develop lifetime friendships and lifetime ties that support this place
atmospherically.

         Mame, the thing that worries me is that we could lose that. The reason why I say that is
that it’s a bit of a conundrum; that is, this school is reaching for the stars now academically. We
really are. In doing that, we are developing a competitiveness, a stretch for higher attainments for
research grants of the sort we didn’t used to get, and for brighter, and brighter, and brighter
students. Somehow in that mix I worry that we might lose our congenial, collegial history. Our
behavior could change. I don’t think it has yet. It doesn’t seem to. We’re sort of getting to be,
more and more, kind of a little Harvard or a little Hopkins with a lot of the same trappings but

                                                                                                                   26
trying to keep it wrapped in a smaller package. Our tuition is increasing a lot. A parent this year
will probably write a check to Washington and Lee University for not much less than fifty
thousand dollars.
Warren: Boy, times have changed.
Hotchkiss: Times have changed. So here comes all this money and it means you can afford to
do things. It means you can afford to hire more people who are specialists. (I’m glad this isn’t
going anywhere.) We never had a provost, never needed a provost. Now we’ve got a provost and
I think three assistant provosts. They’re wonderful people and they’re doing important, good
work. It’s just that what worries me is that someday someone may say, “You know what? A time
ago, banks decided that bank A really had enough what they call back-room support to run a
bank twice the size. Without having to add to the number of people in the back room, they could
have twice as many depositors.” I worry that someday someone may say, “You know, with the
provosts we have, and the number of deans we have, and the army we have over here in student
affairs, and the army we have in placement, and so on and so forth, we really could have twice as
many students without having to enlarge that infrastructure at all.” Mame, I’m not saying for a
moment that that’s on anyone’s mind now necessarily, but it’s just one of the things that worry
me about Washington and Lee. I can see where we could kind of lose …

         We, in my opinion, became exposed to that possibility when a wonderfully brilliant man
was here for three years, Tom Burish, probably I would say one of the foremost educators in the
United States, a truly brilliant man. But he wasn’t suited to this kind of place and, as much as I
admire him, I think if he had stayed he might well have ruined Washington and Lee. I’m so
happy that Notre Dame wanted him and that’s where he is. He’s the highest-ranking lay Roman
Catholic educator in the world. He’s capable of that and that’s where he ought to be. I don’t
know how we got on this subject, but anyway …
Warren: From black tie. We got a long way from black tie.
Hotchkiss: Yes. Anyway, there you are.
Warren: We could go fifteen or twenty different ways here. I’m going to pause for a moment.

         Farris, I apologize [for a problem with the recorder]. Can we start again talking about the
Monday lunch bunch?
Hotchkiss: The Monday lunch bunch was created by Bob [Huntley] and it was a gathering of all
the people who reported to him: the deans, the director of admission, the alumni secretary, the

                                                                                                                   27
director of development, all of those people. The purpose of it was to bring these people together
for basically two purposes: one, for Bob to seek from them their input on anything he wanted
them to think about, suggest, or to enable them to ask for advice or to make announcements for
things in their own areas. We would meet every Monday for lunch.

         The wonderful thing about Bob and part of what I have always regarded as part of the
Huntley magic was that there were some times when Bob would just come in there and you
would know that that just wasn’t going to be a very serious lunch that day. Bob was and still is a
great storyteller. He would have been on a trip and he’d regale us with some story that would be
interesting—and I think Bob would sometimes gussy it up a little bit to make it even more
interesting—and we would sit around and just be good friends. It was very atmospheric. It was
the kind of atmosphere that I said awhile back, if the tape recorded it, that I was worried that we
might lose, this feeling of closeness and personal attachment one to another. Every president
who’s followed Bob has had the same organization, sometimes at lunch, sometimes at breakfast,
but never again was there quite the feeling of camaraderie, of personal attachment, as there was
in the Huntley years. Bob just had that ability. John Wilson would fascinate us with his thoughts.
John just would come in to some of these Monday lunches with the most remarkably inventive
things that he wanted to share with us. He would come in with his Irish history that he adored
and just, again, fascinate us with something he had read or whatnot. As wonderful as that was, it
still didn’t have the glue that Bob had.
Warren: Has it always been on Mondays?
Hotchkiss: I don’t know what Ken [Washington and Lee President Kenneth Patrick Ruscio]
does now, so I’m not sure. It was always on Mondays up until the time Ken became president but
I’m not sure what he does. It’s not any longer called the Monday lunch bunch or the Monday
breakfast bunch. It has a formal name now.
Warren: Oh, how boring.
Hotchkiss: I think it’s like the president’s cabinet or the senior something or other.
Warren: Ah, well, it’s the twenty-first century.
Hotchkiss: Yes. Labels, labels, labels.
Warren: We all have to sound like grownups.
Hotchkiss: Yes.

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Warren: I just remember hearing about the Monday lunch bunch and it sounded both like fun
and where the action really was.
Hotchkiss: Oh, it really was. It’s the perfectly logical thing to do. It brings together,
theoretically, the people who collectively have their hands on the throttle.
Warren: Is this something that happens at most universities or is this something that Bob
Huntley came up with?
Hotchkiss: Mame, I haven’t the slightest idea. When he began doing it back in the ’70s, I don’t
know. My guess is that it was not unique. My guess is that it was done [elsewhere].

         Bob was a member, or I might say Washington and Lee was a member, of a group of
other liberal arts colleges that met. They had a name like the Learned Seven or some such. The
presidents of these places would get together; for instance, Washington and Lee would once in a
while host the gathering at Skylark [Farm]. (There’s another wonderful gift story.) I’m sure
that’s some of what Middlebury, Williams, Amherst, Grinnell, Rhodes—anyway, schools like
us—were doing. Where that [idea] came from I’m not sure but it sure was nice while it lasted.
Warren: Let’s talk about Skylark.
Hotchkiss: I put Skylark in the same category or a similar category to the Lewis’s gift. The
Lewis’s gift for the law school was, basically, not solicited. The minute there was the possibility,
we really rolled up our sleeves and got to work and made sure that it happened, but it was really
the Lewis’s idea. Skylark was absolutely no one’s idea but Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Cheek.

         Leslie Cheek was the heir to the Maxwell House coffee fortune from Nashville,
Tennessee, and Mary Tyler, his wife, was probably as elegant a woman as I have ever known in
my life. They had created over a number of years— it was hard to do—they had created this
place that we know as Skylark Farm. The reason that it took so long is that they had to piece
together the land, and the people up on those ridges who own land don’t let go of it very easily.
They finally got it pieced together [and] it’s about three hundred and fifty acres, roughly. Leslie
was a Yale-educated architect even though professionally he was the head of the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. They had designed this absolutely gorgeous big house that
was going to sit atop the highest part of the land on the Blue Ridge overlooking the valley. They
had designed three little support houses that I think you’ve seen.

         About that time, Mrs. Cheek had breast cancer, I believe. I think I’m right about that.
Once again, I might be wrong. [She] survived it quite well and lived for many, many, many

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happy years afterwards. But Mr. Cheek, Leslie Cheek, unfortunately, became ill with a disease
that I don’t think was Parkinson’s but was similar to it. They decided that if they could not enjoy
Skylark in good health, they simply didn’t want it, number one. Number two, they did not want it
to be in the hands of any governmental organization. They wanted it to stay in private hands.
Number three, as you know, Mrs. Cheek’s father, Douglas Southall Freeman, was George
Washington’s and Robert E. Lee’s biographer. So even though they had no connection with
Washington and Lee at all, nor did he, here we sat, private, with the right name. They decided
that we would be the kind of organization to have it.

         Very similar to the lawyer showing up in Bob Huntley’s office representing the Lewises,
another lawyer, I think, telephoned Bob Huntley—I don’t think he actually physically showed
up—and asked Bob Huntley if he would come up to Skylark to meet Mr. and Mrs. Cheek, which
Bob obviously did. They told Bob that they were thinking about giving it to Washington and
Lee.

         Here comes Monday lunch. We show up at Monday lunch and Bob sits down and starts
telling us about there’s this place on the Blue Ridge that is glorious—Skylark—and he described
it to us physically. Then he dropped this bombshell in saying, “And by the way, Mr. and Mrs.
Leslie Cheek, who own it, are thinking about giving it to Washington and Lee. What do you
think? Should we accept it?” The answer was yes, but it was yes with care, because we had
accepted another gift in the past—Col Alto—that I referred to a minute ago, that had gone bad.
Bob wanted to be sure that if for any reason Washington and Lee ever either didn’t want or
couldn’t afford Skylark, that we wouldn’t be hamstrung. There were other details too that needed
to be worked out.

         I’ll never forget as long as I live: Bob and I went up to Skylark—this is after he had
already been there and after all these negotiations had taken place, I think mostly by telephone,
with the lawyer. Bob and I got up to Skylark—you’ve been there?
Warren: Oh yes.
Hotchkiss: We pulled in that little courtyard, knocked on the door, and Leslie Cheek opens the
door and he says to us, “Well, hello. I’m so glad you’re there. Would you mind waiting a little
while? I need to brush my teeth.” With that, he closes the door. So there are Bob and I, standing
on one foot and then the other out there in the little courtyard. We walked around a little bit and
looked at the fountain, saw the goldfish in there, and after a very short time the door opens again

                                                                                                                   30
and Leslie says, “Will you come in?” We came in, we sat down, and we sat at the table. There
was a table at the end of that living room in that house. He said one of the most profound things
that I keep turning over in my mind. He said, “We don’t want Skylark to be in the hands of
anyone who can simply afford it.” Think about that. “We don’t want someone who just has a lot
of money to have Skylark. We want Skylark to be in the hands of people who will use it
creatively and we think that Washington and Lee University will use it creatively,” as we always
have. “We want to make the gift to the university in memory of Douglas Southall Freeman, but
we want no publicity. We don’t want this to result in headlines or anything at all. We’re not
saying you have to keep it a secret, but we don’t want you to trumpet it from the treetops.” And
the rest has been history.
Warren: Lovely history.
Hotchkiss: With one little additional thing and that is that about I’m going to say five years
after they gave it to us—here’s stewardship. I would go to Richmond periodically to have kind of
a Richmond day and I’d see a number of people. Not every time but I would often go by and see
the Cheeks just to keep our good relationship going. They had gotten to know me, and Leslie
called me up one day and he said, “Farris, I have been thinking that that lower house isn’t big
enough for you all to use it for meetings, and there isn’t enough room down there for overnights.
We would like to enlarge it.”

         Washington and Lee wasn’t all that interested in it being enlarged. I mean we weren’t
opposed to it but it wasn’t a gleam in our eye necessarily. We knew that doing it was going to be
expensive and we were a little nervous that somehow or other, because he hadn’t said so, that he
was going to pay for the whole thing. But he then made it clear that he was going to pay for the
whole thing. In a wonderful way, because as I’ve said he was a Yale-educated architect and by
that time his Parkinson’s was fairly advanced, he designed, literally designed [with] pencil and
paper, the enlargement of that lower house, the bigger conference room and the dormitories
downstairs. It was truly a gift to us and intellectually it was a gift to him because it gave him a
project to work on. He didn’t live much longer than when it was done. So that was the Skylark
story.
Warren: I remember Mary Tyler [Cheek] coming and speaking for Lee’s birthday one year.
Hotchkiss: Wasn’t that beautiful?

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Warren: I quoted it at the beginning of the book [Come Cheer for Washington and Lee]. It was
so beautiful.
Hotchkiss: She was exquisite.
Warren: She really was.
Hotchkiss: She and our professor Sidney Coulling had that similar elegance. In addition to their
storehouse of knowledge, they had a way of articulating it that was just incredible. Sid still does.
Warren: He does indeed. And Mary Tyler’s no longer with us?
Hotchkiss: Mary Tyler’s no longer with us. They’re both dead.

         Mame, let me interject, if we’re staying a little bit chronological, we need to rewind here.
At my time at Washington and Lee the high points for me included something we haven’t
mentioned. That was when we were declared a national historic landmark. That was something
that we wanted to achieve and it wasn’t easy. Just being old wasn’t good enough. You had to be
old and distinguished and you had to have some reasonably important architectural attribute.
Your friend Bob Keefe [who worked in the W&L communications office in the 1970s] and I put
together this presentation for the Department of the Interior—I believe that’s right—that both in
text and in photography gave the history of the Colonnade and Lee Chapel and presented it to the
under-, under-, undersecretary of something or other.

         I’ll never forget, again, as long as I live, I was for some reason over in Charlottesville. I
think I’d taken Judy [Hotchkiss] over there for a doctor’s appointment or something. Anyway, I
had some W&L mail that I hadn’t opened yet. I was sitting in the car, I think, waiting for Judy to
come out of her appointment and opened this letter from the Department of the Interior, which
just very plainly and with no preamble whatsoever said, “We are pleased to tell you that
Washington and Lee University has been declared a national historic landmark.” That was so
thrilling. It was just incredibly thrilling.

         Back to your question about announcing a gift, we wanted to make that as proud and as
distinguished an announcement as we could. What we did in essence is we put together an event
that physically looked a lot like our graduation exercises that we had out in front of the Lee-
Jackson House and the highest-ranking man from the Department of the Interior who was
apropos or appropriate to this kind of thing came down and made an address. We had the Board
of Trustees there and we made as much hoopla as we could, and then the plaque was affixed to
the front of Washington Hall. That was a wonderful day. It really was.

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Warren: That’s quite an achievement.
Hotchkiss: Yes, it really was.
Warren: Coming from Annapolis, I know that’s quite an achievement.
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: Now, the Ford Foundation had been solicited for preserving the Colonnade. Is that
right?
Hotchkiss: No, the Ford Motor Company.
Warren: I’m sorry.
Hotchkiss: Not the Ford Foundation. They became interested in doing something. You know,
Mame, it’s often been said, and I guess I should say thank goodness, that there really isn’t
anything such as corporate philanthropy. It’s really corporate public relations that causes them to
do things. Now that may sound like an ungrateful thing to say, but the fact of the matter is that
the Ford Motor Company wanted to do something that they thought would be pleasing to their
southern dealers. They looked around and decided that it would be nice if they were instrumental
in doing something for Robert E. Lee’s memory. I don’t know exactly how it went but somehow
or other—this was during Dr. Cole’s time—somehow or other they came to know that there was
this Lee Chapel on our campus that was in need of being physically rehabbed and that’s what
they did. They made a gift, I think in 1961 I think it was, to redo the Lee Chapel.
Warren: I found some reference to proposals to I thought it was the Ford Foundation for
restoration of the Colonnade that got turned down.
Hotchkiss: Well, I’m sure it did because they don’t do that.
Warren: Yes.
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: Okay. Now the other gift that I’ve never heard the story about quite how it happened
was, how did Jack Warner get on board for the Warner Center?
Hotchkiss: That was probably the most ordinary of the gifts, appreciated certainly, but that was
really, Mame, basically nothing more than having this guy who owned all of Alabama sitting
there and a person who was then, and during his students days, and still is today, quite an athlete.
He just seemed to be made in heaven for athletics and a larger gymnasium. I didn’t have any part
of that whatsoever. Bob Huntley went down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and said, “Jack, we need a
new, larger gymnasium,” and Jack said, “Here’s a gift.” Now he didn’t make a gift large enough

                                                                                                                   33
to pay for the whole thing but it was the dominant gift. Washington and Lee’s rule of thumb is
that we are willing to name a building for a gift that is at least a half of its value, and so that’s
how that happened. Of course we didn’t want to do anything to lose the Doremus name, for
obvious reasons, so that’s why we have the Doremus Gymnasium and the Warner Center, which
sounds like a kind of a semiduplicitous thing but it really wasn’t. It’s a way you can do
sometimes. You can wrap a building that already has pieces in it that are named for other people.
Warren: Oh yes. You can name just about anything these days.
Hotchkiss: You can. You can.
Warren: I’ve seen that. There’s one more thing I’d like to talk about before we take a break. I
found lots of references, and I know this happens on a regular basis: what’s the purpose and were
you involved in self-studies?
Hotchkiss: I wasn’t much involved in self-studies. The self-study is a requirement of the
Southern Association of Colleges and Universities for your accreditation. Every ten years you
have to conduct what is called a self-study, which is a massive examination of everything that
you are doing and everything that you would like to do, compiled in a thing that’s about the size
of a New York city telephone book that has sections in it: student life, academic affairs,
development, financial management, governance, et cetera. You have to do that every ten years
to, hopefully, have your accreditation renewed, so it’s a reaccreditation exercise.
Warren: But that would not really be a development [issue]. You wouldn’t have been
particularly involved in that. That’s more a faculty and administrative [concern]?
Hotchkiss: Actually, Mame, you kind of put together a machinery for the self-study process,
essentially a steering group. When I got here in ’66, the self-study that was due about then had
been finished, basically. Then came ’76. I was involved in that self-study only with respect to
that part that had to do with development, as I was in ’86. [Laughs.] I don’t know what happened
to ’96.
Warren: We were getting ready to party [for the 250th anniversary].
Hotchkiss: The thing is: a self-study, if it’s a good one, causes you to think about what you’d
like to achieve and what you need to achieve that, so a lot of campaigns and a lot of campus
plans and blueprints and all of that kind of thing spring from a self-study. When you contemplate
your navel for a while and you finally decide there are some things you want to do …
Warren: It seems like a useful exercise.

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Hotchkiss: Yes, it is. It’s useful and it’s mandatory. Even if you don’t want to do it, you’ve got
to do it anyway.
Warren: I just remembered there’s one more thing that I can’t believe we haven’t brought up
under Bob Huntley’s period, and it goes on in both directions, I think. It’s the Virginia
Foundation for Independent Colleges and our good friend Lea Booth.
Hotchkiss: Yes. Let’s pick that up after lunch.
Warren: All right, let’s do that.
[Pause]
Warren: We’ve had a lovely lunch and we’ve got the [recording] machine running fine. I had
just asked you about our old buddy Lea Booth and the Virginia Foundation for Independent
Colleges. Tell me about how important that organization was or wasn’t.
Hotchkiss: It was not, Mame, of great importance. It was simply the idea that if you—it was
sort of the fundraising theory of one-stop shopping. If you could ask twenty-five or thirty
corporations for a gift in one fell swoop that would suit those corporations better than having
development officers from the twelve private colleges that made up the Virginia Foundation
calling on these people individually.

         The way it worked is that there were twelve private liberal arts colleges that made up the
Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges. The presidents of those colleges agreed that they
would provide I think it was five days or so, something like that, five days of their time asking
corporations in the state of Virginia, or elsewhere where it made sense, to make a gift for the
Virginia Foundation. Then all of those gifts, once pooled, would be distributed to the twelve
members, the twelve colleges.
Warren: Equally?
Hotchkiss: No. Now this may not be quite right. Bob Huntley will know a whole lot more about
this than I do. I think the way it worked is that 60 percent of the pot was divided equally and 40
percent was divided per capita based on enrollment. Maybe I have that switched. It may have
been the other way around, but one section was per institution, one was per capita.

         I said a minute ago that there are some people who just by being who they are, people
want to perform for them. They want to be approved of by [them]. Lea Booth would just get
these executives—I mean you’re talking about the heads of the biggest corporations in
Virginia—he got The Homestead to agree to let these people come once a year for a VFIC

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meeting. They would just look forward to that and have a great time and then during the year
very dutifully make their rounds.

         Having said all that, in my later years, with John Elrod particularly, John began thinking
that five days out of his life really didn’t produce for Washington and Lee as much money as it
should. If he spent those same five days with some of our own individual prospects it would have
done Washington and Lee more good. I told John that I wasn’t sure he was right about that. First
of all, technically and numerically maybe so, but there’s a real benefit for any corporate
community to think highly of and approve of the educational institutions in their state. Sure, this
was a fundraising, moneymaking exercise, but at the same time it was a very good
communications tool that informed corporate Virginia what was going on in the private
institutions in the state.
Warren: How much of its success was because of Lea Booth and his personality?
Hotchkiss: Oh, I’d say 80 percent. It was born by Lea. He birthed it and he was it. There were
successors during Lea’s lifetime who did adequate administrative jobs but they just didn’t have
the pizzazz.
Warren: So by the time John Elrod was working with them it wasn’t Lea Booth anymore.
Hotchkiss: No, it wasn’t.
Warren: Perhaps he had a point.
Hotchkiss: By the time John Elrod rolled around, it was probably the third successor to Lea
Booth. Lea died not all that long ago.
Warren: I saw that in the magazine.
Hotchkiss: Yes, yes. Great guy.
Warren: He was, but what a character.
Hotchkiss: Oh yes, and he adored this school. He adored Washington and Lee.
Warren: And he wrote great letters.
Hotchkiss: Yes, he did.
Warren: Oh my God, I remember coming across things, publicity that he did, when I was doing
Come Cheer. He was a nutcase. I enjoyed his stuff so much. Frank would come up with things
from the files, the Lea Booth file.
Hotchkiss: I don’t know what Frank, by the way, has done with his files but there’s a treasure
trove right there.

                                                                                                                   36
Warren: Yes sir. I plan to talk to him about it.
Hotchkiss: There’s an enormous amount of material there.
Warren: And who knows where they are now.
Hotchkiss: And who knows, that’s right.
Warren: I didn’t see them [in Special Collections] but I may not have been looking in the right
aisle.

         Another character that came in toward the end of Bob Huntley’s period is [Richard B.]
Dick Sessoms. He’s not a Washington and Lee man but he sure became one. Tell me how he fit
into the cast of characters.
Hotchkiss: Dick was in the class of 1956 at Hampden-Sydney [College] and had the good
fortune of marrying the daughter of the chair of our department of French at Washington and
Lee, Fran Drake’s daughter, Sally [Drake]. When Dick graduated from Hampden-Sydney, I
don’t know whether he and Sally wanted to live in Lexington, if that’s what did it, but whether it
did or whether it didn’t, Dick’s first job was to be a sportswriter for VMI [Virginia Military
Institute]. He did that for not many years but several.

         Then, and I don’t know how this happened, Mame, but then somehow or other someone
found out about him and asked him to come to Williamsburg to be basically their public
information officer in Williamsburg. He soon sort of combined with that a lot of event planning
in Williamsburg as well. As Dick said, he ushered in the crowned heads of practically every
place on earth. In those days, the routine was that if you were the president of Norway or Sweden
and you were coming to the United States, you would come first to Williamsburg to spend a
night or two, maybe, to kind of get your clock adjusted so that you didn’t jump in the deep end in
Washington the instant you touched down. So all of them would come to Williamsburg and
ushering them in and out was part of Dick’s job.

         He tired of that after quite a long time and about that time Lea Booth was looking for a
number-two person for the VFIC I think with the, and again, I don’t know whether what I’m
about to say is correct or not, but I suppose with the implication that that person would probably
take over Lea’s job someday. That appealed to Dick and he came to Lynchburg and did that for,
oh, I don’t know, Mame, a while, seven years, eight years, something like that. It just didn’t
work very well. I think that’s all I’ll say about that. It just didn’t click. In the meantime, Bob
Huntley, who had been very active in the VFIC, got to know Dick. Bob told me that if I was

                                                                                                                   37
interested in getting someone over here to add to our development staff, because we were still
pretty slim, that Dick might be a good person. So long story made short, that’s what happened.

         Dick came over and was in the development office for three years, four years maybe, no
longer than that, when we needed to get a new alumni secretary, a new director of alumni affairs.
There’s a slight difference between those two titles. Particularly there’s a difference if the person
who takes that job is not an alumnus. Dick was just made for that. I can’t think of anyone who
could have been a more perfect alumni person than Dick. The fact that he was a Hampden-
Sydney alumnus made utterly no difference at all. It was entirely invisible insofar as 99.9 percent
of our alumni are concerned. Dick did that so successfully, particularly during the coeducation
years and the years immediately following the enrollment of women. Dick went way out of his
way from day one to get to know our women students. We used to kid him that that was really
what he’d been waiting for all along. As they graduated, he’d keep up with them and make sure
that they were being welcomed into the alumni associations in the cities where they lived. Just a
wonderful guy. But even being as successful as he was, he wanted out of that after a while. Then
he came over again, for the second time, to the development office and was there in what we call
capital gifts, which are your gifts for scholarships and endowment and that kind of thing, until he
retired.
Warren: What’s the distinction you’re saying between the alumni director and the alumni
secretary?
Hotchkiss: It’s essentially semantics and that is a person who is an alumni secretary is usually
an alumnus or an alumna. I don’t know why, just that sort of seems to be the connotation of that.
If you hear that Mame is the alumni secretary, you normally just assume that you must be a
graduate of that school. Whereas if your title is a director of alumni affairs or a director of
alumni activities, again for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, there isn’t that same nuance.
It’s completely unimportant.
Warren: But you’re right. That assumption is a reasonable one.
Hotchkiss: Beau Dudley, who is very definitely an alumnus, a double-degree holder, he did not
want his title to be alumni secretary. He wanted it to be director of alumni affairs. In fact, in his
case it’s executive director of alumni affairs. Again, what is it lawyers say sometimes, a
distinction without a difference?

                                                                                                                   38
Warren: So, there’s comes a time when Bob Huntley decides enough is enough. How was that
news greeted? Tell me about that transition.
Hotchkiss: The news I think was greeted with genuine regret but complete understanding. I
think even people who aren’t all that savvy about higher education realize that college presidents
can’t stay in that slot forever. It’s not because they are too old or anything. It just is after a while
they and their institutions need a fresh person at the helm. Bob was president, I think, for
fourteen years. I think that’s right. I remember when he was telling us that he was going to retire,
he said, “It’s not that I don’t have any new answers, it’s that there are no new questions.”

         He announced to the board. It took them by surprise. I guess it took even the rector of the
board by surprise. When Bob sat down with the board as a whole and told them that he had
decided to retire, I think they were quite surprised and quite sorry, but quite understanding. It
was a little unusual in that what Bob was leaving here to do. He stepped down as president, went
back to the law school, taught for a year—I think I’m right about that. Yes, taught for a year—
and then became the president of Best Products, the Lewis’s company in Richmond. A lot of
people didn’t understand that. They had a hard time quite getting Bob the college president, the
law school dean, the law professor, as the head of a merchandising company. As was no surprise
to anyone, Bob did as well doing that as he had done being a college president. He just is a man
of tremendous ability.

         Then the search was made for his replacement and Bob had already found his
replacement, as far as he was concerned. By that time Bob had come to know John Wilson and
thought he was just great. He thought John Wilson was just great. I don’t even know, Mame,
how much of a search the board conducted. If there was anything wrong with Bob’s presidency,
and I’m not saying this was wrong, unlike any president since perhaps [Francis Pendleton]
Gaines and [Robert E.] Lee, Bob really was able to pretty well steer the board. I don’t think Bob
ever felt that the board was his boss. If anything, my view is it was sort of the opposite, and boss
is a bad term, but I think Bob felt he was basically in charge. I do not know how the conversation
went but in my imagination, my presumption is that Bob told the search committee of the board,
“You guys really don’t need to look around. There’s this wonderful man named John Wilson.
You ought to go get John and that’s that.” And that was that.
Warren: How did you know that Bob Huntley and John Wilson had a relationship?

                                                                                                                   39
Hotchkiss: One of the real pleasures in my life while Bob was president, and particularly while
my office was over in the Lee-Jackson House, is that on Bob’s way to work in the morning he
would often stop off at the Lee-Jackson House and we’d have a cup of coffee together and then
he’d go on down to Washington Hall. One day he came in, having just gotten back from a VFIC
meeting, and he said, “Farris, I’ve met the man who should be Washington and Lee’s next
president.” Now this was before Bob stepped down.

         The VFIC, which as I told you was entirely made up of private college members, but they
had asked John Wilson to come to address them on the topic of how state universities were
becoming more philanthropically active. For a long time state universities didn’t really work
terribly hard on philanthropy. The money came from the state, then there was this competition
set up. John had been the president of Wells College, private, and he was the executive vice
president of Virginia Tech, so he came and that’s where Bob … I don’t know if that’s the first
time Bob met him, but Bob came away so impressed with John that I think he pretty well had
that, as they say, wired, I believe.
Warren: Well, you just gave me a hot topic for my conversation with Bob on Thursday. I did
not know that connection.
Hotchkiss: It’ll be interesting to see what he says, but I remember. I can see it today. He came
in and there was a chair over in the corner of my office and he sat down. He said, “I think I just
met the man who ought to be Washington and Lee’s next president.”

         So John Wilson came. Gosh, that poor man had such an initial hard time in a kind of a
silly way. People would say, “Oh, Wilson came down in his John Deere?” Washington and Lee
for a while was just not entirely accepting of a man from Virginia Tech, this agricultural [and]
engineering school.
Warren: They didn’t know John Wilson very well.
Hotchkiss: They didn’t know because John was a, gosh, what a beautiful scholar. It didn’t last
long. One of John’s great strengths is that he has a marvelous ability to poke fun at himself.
When he understood what was going on, he used it. He didn’t try to run away from it. He used it.
He would say, “If I can just get that tractor in Traveller’s stable.” I remember one of the first
talks John made, he said, “You know, one of the nice things about where the Lee House is
located is that it’s not far from the thrift shop.” But John just won over—I have to be careful with
my timing—he won over the university’s family fairly quickly because he’s such a lovable guy.

                                                                                                                   40
Warren: But he had some tough things he took on.
Hotchkiss: I was going to say but that didn’t last long. Not through any lack of love, but here
came coeducation and everyone wondered whether John had come to Washington and Lee with
his mind made up that we should become coeducational. As far as I’m concerned, Mame, I can
sit here in this chair and say with all the confidence in the world that he did not come with his
mind made up. [When] he came here his attitude was, anyone who thought we should be
coeducational, prove it. Tell me why. The very first thing he did, almost the very first thing he
did in that respect, is he called together all of our alumni on the faculty and quizzed them about
coeducation and found out that our own alumni on the faculty—not a 100 percent but mostly—
thought we should become coeducational.
Warren: What an interesting approach.
Hotchkiss: Then he found, without any surprise at all, that the rest of the faculty, the nonalumni
faculty, also thought we ought to be coeducational.

         Then we either made a horrible mistake or did something very smart and I, to this day,
have never known the answer to that question. That is, we decided to ask the alumni. Where we
ran into trouble with that, where it was trouble, is that we were asking their opinion. We were not
asking for a vote. But many, many alumni took it as a vote and so for quite a while we had to
combat being told, “Well, 55 percent”—or 62 percent I think it was—“said that we should
remain all male, so what are you doing with the decision to become coeducational?”

         It was far more complex than that. That question was not asked in that simple form. The
question that was asked was, “What would be your preference?” where a majority did say keep it
all male. The next question was, “If it were necessary to maintain Washington and Lee’s
academic standards, would you then feel that we should remain all male?” or not quite worded
that way but that was the gist of it. Then that as I recall 62 percent, which isn’t an overwhelming
majority even so, dropped fairly quickly to right around fifty-fifty.

         It was one of these things, Mame, where we could have moved through it faster and,
looking back on it, that might have been the thing we should have done. Probably we could have
gotten away with a decision made much more quickly than it was made, instead of canvassing
the two parts of the faculty and asking the alumni. Then John did a fair amount of traveling
around; alumni organizations would want him to come and talk about coeducation.
Warren: Did you go along on those trips?

                                                                                                                   41
Hotchkiss: Almost all of them, yes.
Warren: What was it like, trying to talk with the alumni?
Hotchkiss: In most places you would find a very, very high degree of courtesy, people really,
really trying hard to be hospitable and courteous. But you could feel that under that veneer was a
fairly strong stream of I’m going to call it discomfort, not necessarily absolute disagreement but
kind of discomfort, you know, with every effort being made to mask that in most cases. We’d be
coming into places and I would be trying to brief John on some of the main people. I’d tell him,
“Well, so-and-so, I was talking to him on the phone the other day and, boy, he is absolutely
opposed to coeducation, so watch out,” and invariably when John came to that person to shake
his hand, there was no way you would ever guess that guy had that kind of an opinion. They
were just too courteous to say so, with some exceptions. There were, in almost every place we
went, there were usually one or two or three people who would vent their displeasure. In one
place, two guys got up and screamed at John and walked out, but it was just very few ever had
that kind of behavior.

         The board had this meeting, Mame, that just was unreal almost. They decided that they
had debated it long enough and we had asked enough people what they thought and it was time
to make a decision. They decided that the way they would make the decision was that, number
one, it had to be a supermajority and, number two, it was not going to be either a voice or a hand
vote. It was going to be a personal expression. We were down here at Northern Auditorium and
each trustee stood and stated his case. There were tears and there was—oh gosh, it was just as I
said. The tension in that room was just incredible. There were trustees who were pretty articulate
in what they thought. One of whom, for instance, was [Christian] Chris Compton, who was on
the state supreme court at that time, very opposed to coeducation, but having become a real
student of the question and, as a judge and as a lawyer would do, he laid out the case that he
thought ought to lead to a vote to not become coeducational. Other trustees just would stand up
and say, “I’m for it” or “I’m against it,” words like that. A trustee named [Thomas] Tom
Touchton—you remember Tom—Tom was so choked up he couldn’t talk. Tears were rolling
down his cheeks.

         The vote passed only by a margin of two, so it was not an overwhelming mandate. Of
course it was, again, a supermajority. It was a two-thirds vote. Right after it was over, John
Wilson as the president, and [James] Jim Ballengee as the rector of the board, and Chris

                                                                                                                   42
Compton as the loyal opposition got behind a table for a press conference and, from that moment
on, Chris Compton and most of our alumni fell in line and were good citizens of the decision.
There were some who weren’t but there were very few. The only person who was really big in
our pantheon who never changed his mind was this fellow John Stemmons in Dallas. But one by
one, slowly—it didn’t happen very quickly—over the years they said, “Yes, I understand now.”
Warren: One of the great thrills of my experience in doing the interviews for Come Cheer was
when Jack Warner said, “I was wrong.”
Hotchkiss: Yes, exactly. I know it, yes.
Warren: I really didn’t think I’d hear him say it but he said it in just that many words, “I was
wrong.”
Hotchkiss: Yes, he did. “I was wrong,” and he handed John Elrod a check for a million dollars
and said, “This is for the girls.” John Stemmons, with again impeccable courtesy, never changed
his mind. If ever it came up and he needed to say anything about it, which was not very often, he
would just very calmly say, “I think it was a mistake.” Period.
Warren: I’m going to pause just for a moment.

         Well, that was drama number one for John Wilson but then he got bored, I guess, very
quickly and moved on to the fraternities.
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: I’ll bet the alumni had a few things to say about that, too.
Hotchkiss: There was a president at Williams College whose name either is or was Jack
Sawyer. While he was the president of Williams they, too, made both a fraternity and a
coeducation decision during his presidency. John called him up and Jack Sawyer told John, he
said, “John, I’ve got to tell you, the decision on coeducation is a whole lot easier than the
decision on fraternities.” Now, Williams had made a decision to get rid of them. John had a
different opinion. John really believed that, in our case, it would be better to have good
fraternities, that that was a better decision, than to decide to do away with them. He, sort of as
the old saying goes, put our money where his mouth was.

         We hired architects to decide what needed to be done to these houses, not only to repair
them because many of them were pretty damaged, but also to make them a better configuration
anyway. We spent, I think, $13 and some-odd million on rehabbing them. Tom Touchton, the
same Tom Touchton who was so emotional about coeducation, was the trustee who was in

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charge of what we call the [Fraternity] Renaissance. When I say in charge, not really, because
the work was really controlled by Frank Parsons. Frank knows seventeen hundred times more
about the Fraternity Renaissance program than anyone else does, except maybe John Wilson. At
any rate, we got them all rehabbed [and] built two completely new ones.

         When that was over and the rules had been changed—the requirement that they have
house directors was put in place [and] alcohol consumption in the fraternity houses was
addressed—after all these things were done, we opened them for business on the new stance. I
mean they never were closed except literally while some construction was going on, one of the
houses would sort of have to see if the Phi Delts would let the Betas sleep in their house while
the Beta house was torn apart, and vice versa. We closed Henry Street, that’s the street that goes
between the Phi Delta house and the Sigma Nu house and, if you kept going, winds up in the
parking lot for Lee Chapel. We brought the whole university community together on Henry
Street and there were speeches and compliments and toasts and all the rest. We were off on a
new day.

         As it’s turned out, it hasn’t worked perfectly. There always has seemed to be some
houses that misbehaved. Property damage pretty well stopped though. Misbehavior was more to
do with alcohol abuse and that kind of thing rather than any physical damage. One reason being
that I think it’s every other week, I think I’m right, a member of our buildings and grounds
department shows up in each of the houses. If anything has been damaged or broken, it gets fixed
by our buildings and grounds people and the fraternity gets the bill. It’s a very hefty bill that they
must pay and if they don’t pay it, they don’t get their grades, so there’s pretty heavy-handed
oversight when it comes to physical property.
Warren: Why did it wait until John Wilson was here to take on coeducation and Fraternity
Renaissance?
Hotchkiss: I think the coeducation thing, Mame, was brought on by our increasing admissions
difficulty. It’s a good question.

         There were people who were vocal that we should be coeducational. There were faculty
who would say, “I can teach American history or I can teach chemistry better to a class that has
both men and women,” with that being more probably apropos to your social sciences and your
nontechnical courses. But there wasn’t any real fervor for it from that standpoint. There were
some people who just felt as a moral situation … My daughter, Julie, told me before the decision

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was made, she said, “You know, Dad, I’m qualified in every way to attend Washington and Lee
except that I just happen to be a girl. That’s just not fair.” So there was that body of thought but
it wasn’t powerful enough to bring it to a head.

         It seemed—well, it didn’t seem. It was a fact that for a number of years, while most all of
the formerly all-male colleges were becoming coeducational, that our admissions picture
remained reasonably good. But then it began to slip and it finally got to the point that caused us a
huge amount of communications problems. You’d have, say, a perfectly sufficient number of
applicants for the freshman class, so you would not be making known a decreasing number of
applicants. But the quality of the applicants was slipping.

         Number one, the first thing that happened was that let’s say five applicants who were
well qualified—good, good students—and they would be offered a place in the class. Out of the
five, only one of them decided to come because the other four decided I’d much rather go to a
coeducational school. That meant, okay, then you’ve got to slip into the next tier. In that tier
there’d be five guys who were not as well qualified, who were not being offered admission to
some of the better schools where they had applied, and we’d take them and they’d come. So the
whole thing declined. That’s what finally brought the pot to a boil.
Warren: Was this on Bob Huntley’s radar screen?
Hotchkiss: You know, it really didn’t—it had begun while Bob was president. You could trace
its genesis there. But it really didn’t get—it being this decline—it really didn’t get going, until
John Wilson had been here for about three years. He came in ’83. No, that’s not right either
because he came here in ’83.
Warren: He came in ’84 [sic, Hotchkiss is correct: Wilson came to W&L in 1983].
Hotchkiss: Was it’ 84?
Warren: Well, he was inaugurated in ’84.
Hotchkiss: Yes, that’s right. He was elected, okay, ’84, and we made the decision in—why am I
losing my dates?
Warren: The first women were here in the class of ’86.
Hotchkiss: ’89.
Warren: They came in ’86 so it was the class of ’89, yes. He [John Wilson] took it on right
away.

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Hotchkiss: Isn’t that funny. It was a shorter time than I had remembered. At any rate, it
obviously was evident on Bob’s watch and it may be you’ll have to ask Bob yourself why. A
number of people said, and I was one of them, that Bob could have taken care of this change
with much less hoo-ha than John Wilson.
Warren: I wondered about that.
Hotchkiss: Bob, again, was so powerful I think Bob could almost have said, “This is the way
it’s going to be,” and gotten away with it, but he didn’t. You’ll have to ask him.
Warren: I will.
Hotchkiss: Gosh, I’d forgotten it had happened that quickly.
Warren: It did. It did. It was pretty amazing how quickly he took it on.
Hotchkiss: And his inauguration was in ’84?
Warren: He was president from ’84 [sic, 1983] to ’95.

         Mr. Hotchkiss then moved up in the chain of command and probably just got another star
on his door or something, but he became a vice president and secretary of the board in 1987.
What did that mean?
Hotchkiss: Right, right. I guess what that meant was that I’d, by that time, worn out my
welcome and no one would let me talk to them any longer because they knew I was going to ask
them for money. I don’t know, Mame. John wanted some help with the board in terms of
organization and in terms of putting in place, for instance, this thing that I referred to at lunch
called the Trusteeship Committee. John also thought that in terms of representation—and I’ll try
to leave myself out of this in a personal kind of way—that a university these days needed some
people running around with the title of vice president, that in terms of sort of getting where you
wanted to get, you were more likely to get there if you were a vice president than if you were a
director of development. Thirdly, I think that I never really had the title of assistant to the
president but John wanted more of that kind of assistance as time went on. Frank was still here.
Frank was assistant to the president and Frank’s office adjoined John’s, but Frank was more and
more consumed by contractors and construction and the physical aspect of what we were doing.
So it just kind of seemed to flow that way, Mame. I don’t know.
Warren: Did Frank essentially put on a hard hat pretty much full time and then you slipped into
that position as assistant to the president?

                                                                                                                   46
Hotchkiss: Without it being called that and not that Frank had his hard hat on all the time, but
he had it on most of the time. He and John tended to strike sparks off of each other,
unfortunately.
Warren: Yes, they both acknowledge that.
Hotchkiss: I think they have a real affection for each other now, but there were times when they
were having just a hard time getting along. I guess that, too, was part of it.

         Our board was getting larger and I was spending more time orienting them. A board is
sort of good news, bad news. The good news is a board that becomes increasingly interested and
active. The bad news is they take and require a great deal more attention. There are more
answers that you’ve got to give. There are more arrangements you have to make.
Warren: What does it mean to be secretary of the Board of Trustees?
Hotchkiss: At Washington and Lee, from a legal standpoint, you are what’s called the secretary
of the university, which means if the sheriff comes up here and wants to serve papers on the
university, he serves them on the secretary. You are responsible for the records of the board. One
of these days if you read the minutes, you’ll see we went through a period of inarticulate
minutes. Those are the ones I wrote. I literally took the minutes. I arranged the board meetings
and did the agenda, right on down to ordering the hamburgers and the flowers and getting Joe
and Bill and Mary and Harry picked up at the airport. It was all of that kind of stuff. The title of
secretary, although it does have legal connotations, really had more to do with the person who
really served the board, a great, wonderful pleasure because our board is made up of just
unbelievably fine human beings. I don’t remember, even once, coming away from anything
having to do with the board where I thought a board member was petty or discourteous or overly
self-centered. It just didn’t happen. Once again, Mame, it’s because they’re all us. They’re not on
the board because they’re the head of Boeing or IBM. They’re on the board because they were
educated at Washington and Lee University or their children were. I think that makes the most
difference.
Warren: Well, they know what the program is. I remember when I first started meeting some of
the really big names, being intimidated, but that went away very, very quickly because they were
just delightful, interesting, and interested people.
Hotchkiss: Exactly. Unlike going all the way back to that board that Bob Nelson chastised, our
boards from the middle ’70s and on have been very engaged. A board member now really spends

                                                                                                                   47
a lot of time being a board member because, in addition to the meetings of the board itself, [there
are] committee meetings in between and just hard work that they do in all sorts of different ways.
Warren: How do they have the time and continue to run their business or whatever it is they do
out in the real world?
Hotchkiss: Most of them have gotten to that point where what they do for their businesses or
professions is paramount, even more important than the board, but it doesn’t take up all their
time. I remember one person said, “The mark of a real executive is someone who has a couple of
really good ideas each day and otherwise plays golf.”
Warren: I haven’t gotten there yet, Farris.
Hotchkiss: Let other people work out those ideas. You set them on the track and let others
worry the details.
Warren: How about the trustees emeriti? Are they welcome to continue to come to board
meetings?
Hotchkiss: Oh, absolutely.
Warren: My sense when I was looking at the minutes was that there were a lot of people who’d
come who really weren’t on the board anymore, but they were there.
Hotchkiss: Every emeritus board member is invited to come to the board meetings. They are
sent all of the paper that a board member is sent. They get all the reports. It’s a genuine invitation
to come.

         At the same time, many years ago, we put together this thing that we touched on once
before called the George Washington Society that seemed, at the time, to be a good idea,
thinking that board members would like to come back when there isn’t a board meeting, when
they’re here just simply for pleasure, for no other reason, and with some entertainment. That idea
was accurate for a very short time. It just hasn’t really been particularly important for the past
several years.
Warren: So you’re saying that the Washington Society has petered out?
Hotchkiss: Well, I would say it is just not as active as I wish that it were. I think it has just
become not as necessary. I think members of the boards—it’s not just the trustees. It’s the
Alumni Board and the Law Council—those who are interested in continuing to come back to
campus come anyway. They just don’t need an organization to bring them here. On the other
hand, I say that, but every time we have a George Washington Society gathering, which is

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generally arranged to happen when something really interesting is going on, like Mock
Convention or something like that, fifty or sixty come back. It’s not that no one does but the
George Washington Society right now has 180-some-odd members. If all of them came back on
any given occasion, and since practically all of them are a twosome, you’d have 360 people.
Warren: They’d take over Lexington.
Hotchkiss: That’s right, yes.
Warren: One of the big gifts that happened during John Wilson’s time, I’ve heard John
Wilson’s version and I’ve heard Gerry [Lenfest’s] version, but I haven’t heard Farris’s version of
the Lenfest gift.
Hotchkiss: Oh, I wonder what they said. Well, here’s my version, Mame. Gerry, who’s in the
class of 1953, was back for his fortieth reunion, I guess; ’53–’93, yes, that’d be about right. He
was back, I think, for his fortieth reunion. Frank Parsons was asked to talk to the class about
what was in those days kind of a new campaign that hadn’t really been announced yet, but it sort
of had a leading edge, if you want to think of it that way, being the hope to build a performing
arts center. That was John Wilson’s passion. Music in that man’s life is just profound. Frank had
talked to the class and told them about our hope to build this performing arts center. After Frank
had finished and everyone was getting up and leaving, Gerry came up to Frank and said, “You
know, that’s an interesting thought. I might be able to be helpful.”

         Frank called me and said, “This guy Lenfest said he might be helpful,” and so I got
together with Frank and John and we decided it was serious enough. Back to research again, our
research on Gerry wasn’t quite as good as it should have been because it should have described
him as a wealthier man than we had him described as. But we decided that we’d follow up—we
being John and I would follow up—by going to Philadelphia. When I called Gerry to see if we
could make an appointment, it was so obvious that he really wanted us to do that. It wasn’t,
“Well, let me see if I can work you in” kind of business. It was like, “When can you get here?”

         It was so fun, Mame. Gerry’s office was in Pottstown, so he wanted us to meet him at his
lawyer’s office in downtown Philadelphia because it was much more convenient. John and I got
there and Gerry, as he usually is, was just a little bit late, not much, five minutes or ten. The law
firm had given us a conference room like this to meet in, and Gerry walks in with this blue blazer
on with the Washington and Lee crest on his pocket with a safety pin. When he walked the thing
flopped back and forth, the most absolutely unsophisticated thing you’ve ever seen in your life if

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you want to have a blue blazer with the university’s coat of arms. He knew he was going to meet
with John that day and he realized he had the coat of arms, which he probably wasn’t all that
interested in putting on the blazer, so he just put it on there with a safety pin.

         We sat down and John did his usual masterful job of explaining the need. John had more
than one way of explaining that, but one of the things that John would say that was so important,
I thought, we would often say that we really have lousy space for any student who wants to
practice music, whether it’s an instrument or singing. The art gallery is awful, et cetera. People
would say, “Well, how many music majors do you have?” or “How many art majors do you
have?” John’s reply was so important because he’d say, “We’re not concerned [with] that much.
I’m concerned about the chemistry major who needs the arts.” You could just see that kind of,
“Aha! I got it now.” Remember that ad Ford had, the little light would go on? Anyway, we had a
conversation like that.

         It was the funniest thing, Mame. I never will forget. I was sitting like in this chair and
Marguerite [Lenfest] was there and John was there and Gerry was here. Marguerite and John
began talking to each other. I don’t know why but something brought just the two of them
together. Gerry was sitting in this chair and he leans over like this and, [lowering his voice], he
said, “How much would it cost to name the building?” I about fell out of the chair. So I said,
“Gerry, it’s usually a half of the value of the building.” He said, “What is that?” and I said, “Four
and a half million.” He sat back in the chair. Marguerite and John finished talking and Gerry
turned to John—this says something about Gerry—he said, “Would you name the building for $3
million?” Here, $3 million! And here’s John, who’s got to answer that question. Well, John
didn’t have to. John could have said, “I’ll have to check with the board,” but he decided to
answer himself and he said yes. Gerry then said, the next words out of his mouth were, “Let’s go
to lunch.

         We go down to lunch to a restaurant I think named The Garden or something like that in
Philadelphia. We sit down at the luncheon table and Gerry orders a very, very nice, expensive
bottle of wine. The waiter comes, pours the wine, Gerry lifts his glass and asks a toast to
Washington and Lee. We sip our wine. He puts it down. Gerry turns to Marguerite and he says,
“Well, Marguerite, shall we do it?” Marguerite says, “It’s your money, Gerry” and that was it.

         As we built the building, some extras began showing up, all of which Gerry took care of
and added to his $3 million. By the time the building was really built, he had just about given us

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half, but not quite, but then he’s gone on from there and given us millions and millions and
millions of dollars more. But that was it.

         I think in my time, Mame, the most exciting things during my time were, first, Sydney
and Frances Lewis’s gift, second was the national historic landmark status, third was Gerry’s
gift, and I said there were four so there must be another one there somewhere. What was the
fourth?
Warren: You seemed excited about Skylark, but that was on a smaller scale.
Hotchkiss: That was not it. There’s a fourth one in there somewhere. Anyway, it makes no
difference.
Warren: [Ernest] Ernie Williams [II]?
Hotchkiss: No, not that either.
Warren: Couldn’t have been that exciting.
Hotchkiss: So that was the Lenfest story.
Warren: That pretty well fits in with the rest of it except I hadn’t heard [about] asking the
question of Farris. I hadn’t heard that part of it. That’s why I needed your side of it. My favorite
experience with the Lenfests was when—
Hotchkiss: Two hundred and fiftieth [anniversary of Washington and Lee]! I’m sorry. That was
my fourth one.
Warren: Well, I wondered about that.
Hotchkiss: That was my fourth one, yes.
Warren: The bicenquinquagenary.
Hotchkiss: Right.
Warren: When I went up to the Lenfests to do my interview with Gerry, he wanted me to meet
him at his office but he was having a dental emergency. When I got there, he wasn’t there. The
message was that I should go to the house and wait for him. When I got there, Marguerite
answered the door, she had an apron on, and she said, “Go make yourself at home in the living
room. He’ll be here soon. I’ve got to finish my ironing.” I just loved it that she does her own
ironing.
Hotchkiss: Yes, yes. These are billionaires. I think, Mame, that in good weather she hangs her
washing out on the line.
Warren: Well, I knew she and I got along fine because I do the same thing.

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Hotchkiss: One of the wonderful things about them is that after they became multibillionaires,
they decided that maybe they really did want a big house, sort of goes with being a billionaire.
So they had a big house designed and they looked at each other. They said, “This isn’t us,” and
they just stayed right where they are.
Warren: Well, where they are was a lovely house.
Hotchkiss: But not a mansion.
Warren: A modest house. It was great. I love telling people that story. They’re my kind of
people. I like them a lot.
Hotchkiss: They are great people. They are truly great.
Warren: So Frances Lewis became a trustee?
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: And we gradually started getting more women on the board, still not a lot.
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: What difference did that make, to have women on the board?
Hotchkiss: In a functional way, it made no difference at all because, once again, these women
were Washington and Lee women. Well, they’re not graduates, but Frances not only was the
spouse of an alumnus but the mother of an alumnus. Mame, I don’t know. I think the board felt
good about that. I think they felt that they were sort of becoming more modern, you know, and
more correct than they had been. They didn’t fawn over these women. They didn’t behave any
differently.

         The first woman who was elected to the board after Mrs. duPont, which was largely
symbolic, was a wonderful woman whose name was Teen Martin from down in the Northern
Neck of Virginia. They lived on the York River and her husband was an alumnus, James Bland
Martin. Boy, she was smart. Teen Martin had been the president of The Garden Clubs of
America, no small job, and she was just perfect. She joined the board as the only woman on the
board feeling absolutely on par with, equal to, all the men, and I think they felt the same way.
There was no hoopla or anything.

         Because the board had this desire to remain a family board, it was kind of hard to find
women to serve on the board. Many of the women were spouses of board members who were
being considered and those who were parents, we just didn’t really know them that well. A
mother of a student, you might know that mother a little bit, know who she is and the name, but

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you really haven’t come into particularly close contact. Whereas people who are spouses of
board members have been coming to meetings anyway, like Frances had. It was slow. It was
Teen Martin, who was the spouse of an alumnus, and then it was Frances, who was the wife of
Sydney. Then it was [Patricia] Pat Leggett, who was the spouse of a trustee. Their husbands
weren’t on the board when they came on. Then there was Chris Ball from Jacksonville, Florida,
whose husband is a trustee. Then I retired. There’s a woman on the board now whose last name
is Sylvester. I don’t remember her first name. Anyway, I don’t think it was much of a big deal.
Certainly it didn’t compare either with coeducation or the Fraternity Renaissance program.
Warren: No, hardly worth talking about compared to those.

         We need to finish up with John Wilson. Why do you think John decided to retire?
Hotchkiss: Tired. He was just tired. I think that he was tired for one known reason and one
unknown reason. I think he was tired because he had spent his entire life at the very top of the
educational institutions he served with great responsibility and great success. I think, Mame, that
unbeknownst to him his Parkinson’s [disease] was tuning up a little bit. I think it was showing up
with fatigue that he probably didn’t think was anything other than normal being tired. He just
wanted to retire. He had the ambition, at least he said he did, of writing a book. He wanted to do
a book on a man named O’Neil [phonetic], I think, an Irishman, whom John said was sort of the
Irish Robert E. Lee, who had taken part in their revolution over there. He bought lots of books to
research and whatnot. But it was sort of like air leaving a balloon. It just kind of deflated.
Warren: He had brought a lot of dramatic changes. Had that caused a lot of stress within the
board?
Hotchkiss: No. It caused some stress among the faculty because John would go to you as a
faculty member and he’d say, “Mame, your responsibility first and foremost is to teach. [It] is to
be behind this podium, in front of this blackboard, and teach a full load,” which at W&L was, I
think, two or three hours more than the average. Then he’d also look you in the eye and he’d say,
“But you also must remain a scholar. Washington and Lee University has a very liberal
sabbatical program and we do not have any summer activity. There’s no excuse for your saying
‘I don’t have time to research and to further my professional field.’” That came as a bit of a
shakeup to a lot of our faculty. They were good teachers but they really weren’t doing much
more than that. John would ask them, he’d say, “Show me what you’ve written lately.” “Well, I

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haven’t really written anything.” He got the point across pretty quickly that he expected both and
that really was not a message that a lot of our faculty wanted to hear, as you can imagine.
Warren: I can and now that I’m at Johns Hopkins I understand John’s point of view better than
I did before. I’m going to pause for a moment.

         We come to the time of the end of John Wilson and, in the meantime, John Wilson had
brought another John on campus. Let’s talk about John Elrod during the Wilson administration
and then the Elrod administration.
Hotchkiss: John Elrod came here from Iowa although he was a Georgian, [from the] state of
Georgia. [He] came in as dean of what in those days we called dean of the college, meaning that
his responsibility was totally undergraduate and sort of only that part of the college that was not
the commerce school, to put that kind of badly. John was quite a scholarly person himself. He
was a Kierkegaard specialist, loved to teach philosophy; his work was in what’s called the
philosophy of religion. Oh boy, you talk about interesting conversations. If you have any interest
in that kind of thing he was just fascinating.

         John was a hugely hard worker. I mean he would just work hard. He and John Wilson got
along perfectly. They were just hand in glove, so happy with each other. John Elrod began
responding and resonating to John Wilson’s academic leadership. If professor Smith wanted to
grouse about the president telling him he wasn’t writing enough, he better not try it out on John
Elrod, because John would send him right back where he came from. He was a great supporter of
John Wilson’s because he really agreed with John.

         He also was very, very ambitious for money to support [the faculty]. In other words, John
Elrod’s attitude was, “Look, if the faculty does what they really ought to be doing, they ought to
be seeking and getting some grants.” He was instrumental—well, he went beyond [that]. He
created the office of grant writing. That’s not its name. [It’s] institutional research or something
like that. It was an office that was set up specifically to assist faculty find resources to support
their work. Then the development office staff, when it was appropriate, would fall in line and
help raise money and do that kind of thing.

         John Elrod as dean was a very effective guy and after a while, after the ruffled feathers
over all this research business quieted down a bit, he was very popular with the faculty. He spent
a lot of time with the faculty. He and Mimi [Elrod] entertained a lot. John was quite athletic and
he’d go out over here and he’d play tennis and golf. Twice a week, he and several members of

                                                                                                                   54
the faculty would go running off on our cross-country course. He was just a wonderful man,
wonderful guy.

         When John Wilson decided to retire, John Elrod was automatically in the group of people
being considered for the presidency. But the board let it be known that it wasn’t a foregone
conclusion that John was going to get it. In fact, the board more or less implied that it might be
even a little more difficult for John Elrod because he had been here. Again, [it was] this kind of
thought that you hear so often in education and business, a fresh start, clichés like that, and that if
all you’re doing is continuing the same stuff, even if it’s good, it’s not healthy. Anyway, there
were three other very good candidates for the job and John Elrod got it nevertheless. He was
delighted and the university was delighted because, by that time, everyone was very comfortable
with John.

         Then John Elrod decided that we had some specific needs still remaining, even though
we’d been raising money as fast and hard as we could for a long time, and this building was one
of them.
Warren: This building being the Elrod Commons.
Hotchkiss: Being the Elrod Commons. John would say that what’s important in education is
conversation, that education is a conversation. He said, “There’s no place for that to occur
physically,” and he would kid the students, “The library isn’t the place for that. That doesn’t
mean that you can’t say a word in the library, but I want a place where you can get a cup of
coffee and put your feet up and talk to each other.” This building just became the apple of his
eye.

         Then he also realized that our journalism building, although it had been rehabbed in that
campaign that ended in 1960 or ’61, was really not up to snuff and that it needed to be reworked.
So this building and the journalism building and some more money for scholarships and money
to kind of rearrange and improve the commerce school—not a new building but an
improvement—and money to transform what had been the co-op into combination offices and
classrooms sort of became another campaign.
Warren: Are we talking about On the Shoulders of Giants campaign?
Hotchkiss: Oh, no no no. This is For the Rising Generation campaign.
Warren: That’s what I thought. We kind of skipped over On the Shoulders of Giants.

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Hotchkiss: On the Shoulders of Giants was Wilson. This was For the Rising Generation, which
was a quotation from Robert E. Lee.

         By that time we had a fully formed development staff and really knew how to do it. The
university and its staff and its Board of Trustees and everybody rolled up their sleeves and really
got to work. That campaign was successful, very successful, although it didn’t have in it any
absolutely blockbuster gift or gifts, like the Lewis gift or the Lenfest gift or the Warner gift. It
had a lot of very generous gifts but none of them were really extraordinary. John worked so hard
on that. He did so many of the solicitations himself. I was beginning to spend more and more
time with the board. We had a director of development, David [R.] Long, so we had these other
people.
Warren: I wanted to find that out. At this point you were just semi-involved with development.
Hotchkiss: Yes, I was sort of making this transition. I would say by that time, Mame, I was
spending about a third of my time on the Board of Trustees, about a third of my time being an
assistant to John, and about a third of my time with development. I don’t want this to sound like
it might but my development work was really only with our largest potential donors. I really tried
to focus mostly on million-dollar gifts and up.

         Everything was going smoothly when, one day, John Elrod came into my office and said,
“Farris, I have cancer,” and it was downhill from that point on. He tried so hard. I don’t know
anybody, Mame, who tried harder to be unaffected by that terrible disease. He wouldn’t even let
anyone drive him over to UVA to get his chemotherapy. He just would not give in. He really was
able to do most everything he needed to do, the most arduous of which for him was travel. But
he kept it up. He and I went all over the United States and he never flagged in that respect.
Warren: Did he ever consider resigning that you know of?
Hotchkiss: Yes. In June of 2001, as we had sort of done not every year but most years, we had
an end-of-the-academic-year retreat, which was kind of the Monday lunch group expanded with
more people, assistant deans and a number of people who didn’t report directly to the president.
We went up to Skylark and John announced at Skylark that he was going to stay in office for
another two years—I think that’s what he said, for another two years—but that he was going to
begin handing off to Larry Boetsch—you remember Larry?
Warren: Yes.

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Hotchkiss: He was going to begin handing off to Larry Boetsch some of the things that he was
doing as president. That was in mid-June of 2001. He died on July 28, 2001. Yes, he had thought
about that and had announced it to this group, but he was putting himself in a two-year frame and
didn’t even have two months to go.
Warren: Yes, cancer has its own agenda.
Hotchkiss: You know, technically he didn’t die of cancer. Technically, he died of heart failure
but that was probably brought on by all that chemotherapy and things.

         We really had to scramble. Number one, we really didn’t have a plan. It should have
occurred to us with a president with cancer that we ought to have an emergency plan, but we
really didn’t. We got one together pretty fast. The morning of John’s death, John Elrod
[question] and I and Brian Shaw began meeting twice a day, with Brian’s very valuable role
being communications because that was so important at that time. Yes, that’s right, because we
met in Brian’s office.

         Larry Boetsch automatically became the acting president. Our bylaws state that in the
absence of a president, the dean of the—I don’t know how it reads now because the titles have
all changed—but the dean becomes the acting president. Now I’m not so sure that the provost
wouldn’t. I’m not sure how that would work now. Anyway, Larry took over and Larry did a
good job being an interim president. He said, “You know, this isn’t really as difficult as being
dean” because there were far fewer people who reported to the president than all the faculty
running in and out of the dean’s office. Larry really very much wanted to be president. I don’t
know this for a fact, Mame, but my feeling was that the board said, Look, we elevated John
Elrod to the presidency and that worked fine, but to do that again would say to the world that
we’re not really serious about a search. We going to say we’re going to have a search, but we’re
really just going to promote from within. I think. Again, I wasn’t privy to that conversation.
That’s my hunch.
Warren: Were you not privy because you were no longer the secretary? Why would you not
have been privy? When there’s a presidential search, does the staff just stay out of it?
Hotchkiss: I was gone in six months so they were just getting the search machinery in gear. I
left at the end of the calendar year and they were getting the machinery—
Warren: The end of 2001?
Hotchkiss: One.

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Warren: After John Elrod had died.
Hotchkiss: Yes. They were getting the search machinery up and running in the fall, so they
really hadn’t started having conversations like that. Before, when I was fully secretary and all the
rest, I made all the arrangements but they insisted, and I guess it was probably good, that those
conversations, particularly the ones where they were interviewing, be completely a secret.

         I never will forget, I arranged them all in Charlotte and there were four candidates. Bill
Lemon was one of our trustees and I had driven Bill down to Charlotte from Roanoke. We were
coming back and I said, “You know, Bill, you could tell me what went on and it would never
leave this automobile, and Bill said, “No, we all agreed we’re not going to do that.” It’s probably
better.
Warren: You’re not like me. I say, “Don’t tell me. If I can’t speak about it, don’t tell me.”
Hotchkiss: Larry was a great guy; is still a great guy; didn’t get the presidency; was extremely
unhappy about that; became the provost, our first provost, with Tom Burish, with whom he did
not agree or get along.
Warren: So it was Burish who established the role of a provost at Washington and Lee?
Hotchkiss: Yes.
Warren: Do you have any idea why he thought W&L needed a provost?
Hotchkiss: I think he was used to that model and I don’t think he wanted that many people in to
his office. He basically fixed it so that all the academic people went to the provost and he only
dealt with like the financial and fundraising people. He asked my opinion whether he ought to
decouple the communications office from what we call the university relation’s umbrella, which
was fundraising, alumni affairs, and communications, and make it a separate office and a
separate report to him. I told him I didn’t think he should but he did anyway.
Warren: Is that when Brian Shaw and David Long had the big …
Hotchkiss: That happened just before that.
Warren: Tell me what happened there.
Hotchkiss: Mame, if I told you I’d have to kill you.
Warren: Okay, I appreciate that. That’s why I suggest that things be sealed, but if you think it’s
not an important story …
Hotchkiss: It wouldn’t be helpful.
Warren: Okay, I appreciate that.

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Hotchkiss: It wouldn’t be helpful. Anyway, Larry stayed as provost for a year. Then one of our
great supporters is the Johnson Foundation from New York.
Warren: I wanted to ask about that.
Hotchkiss: They are just wonderful people.
Warren: Tell me who the Johnson Foundation is.
Hotchkiss: It’s not one of the big ones. It’s not like Johnson & Johnson pharmaceuticals.
Christian Johnson was an industrialist and made a number of different products that had to do
with valves and ball bearings and couplings and all that kind of stuff. As I said, it’s not one of the
biggies. In fact it’s one of the smallies, really. But it’s big enough to be able to make gifts of
$50–$100,000, $200,000, $250,000, that kind of thing. They had made two gifts to us. One of
them was for the Johnson Theater over in Lenfest. Oh, footnote: The director of the Johnson
Foundation is a woman whose name is Julia Kidd, who’s married to our alumnus, Wilmot Kidd,
so there was that connection. They had already given us money for the Lenfest Center.

         Larry, when he was just the dean, before John Elrod died, wanted to get a foreign studies
program up and running. That isn’t quite right. It wasn’t foreign studies like students studying
abroad. It had something more to do with faculty, like maybe faculty being able to take their
sabbaticals abroad or something like that. Gosh, I don’t quite remember. Whatever it was, it was
something like that. Anyway, I took Larry up to New York and we had a meeting with Julie Kidd
and two things happened. Number one, she made the grant and number two, she just decided
Larry Boetsch was the neatest thing on earth.

         When he, I guess, either let her know or it was asked or it became evident or whatever
that he was not going to continue as provost, she wanted to get a small liberal arts college started
in Germany that would teach in English, where English was the language used to teach but
where the faculty and students would be from all over Europe. She asked Larry to head that up
for her, which he did for, I think, four years, and then has now come back and is now the director
of Washington and Lee’s foreign studies program, as it’s turned out. I don’t know how long
Larry will do that. I feel sorry for him because I think he really, really still would love to be the
president of this university but that’s not going to be. Nor is there any trouble along that line. I
wouldn’t be terribly surprised if some morning we wake up and see that he’s accepted the
presidency of some other place. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Warren: He looks the part.

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Hotchkiss: Oh, he does.
Warren: He looks the part, definitely.
Hotchkiss: And Elizabeth is so much of the part too. Just a lovely, marvelous person.
Warren: Yes, definitely.
Hotchkiss: So Washington and Lee now has its second, unless there’s a technical guy way back
yonder, our second alumnus president. I think that’s right.
Warren: Certainly Bob Huntley was the only one in the twentieth century.
Hotchkiss: There was somebody maybe who was nominally an alumnus, but I don’t think so.
Warren: I don’t think so. I know that they emphasized that it was in the twentieth century he
was the only one. We could get out a certain book and look it up, couldn’t we?
Hotchkiss: As you know, Ken had come back to W&L after having been a student here, after
doing his PhD at Syracuse.
Warren: We’re talking about Ken Ruscio?
Hotchkiss: Ken Ruscio. He came back to be a director of the freshman year and an assistant
professor, I guess it was initially, of politics, then became an associate professor of politics and
associate dean of the commerce school. Then the University of Richmond snagged him and
brought him down there to be dean of their Jepson School of Leadership Studies, where he was
for four years, and now he’s back here.
Warren: Did you see that kind of leadership quality in Ken Ruscio?
Hotchkiss: Oh yes, oh yes. Ken’s a different kind of leader. I think Ken is the kind of leader
that I’ve alluded to before for whom people want to do a good job. Ken’s not going to be a
pusher. He’s not a hale fellow, well met. He’s perfectly willing to go out and do wonderful work
and I think he has just a God-given talent and personality for that. He’s not a backslapper. He’s
quiet. He’s just an incredibly nice human being; he really is. And so is Kim [Ruscio].
Warren: Indeed. How important do you think it is that he left Washington and Lee and went to
Richmond to become an attractive candidate to the board?
Hotchkiss: It wouldn’t have happened had he not done that. Just for the same reason I think that
Larry wasn’t made president, I don’t think Ken would have been made president. His platform
would be an associate dean of the commerce school, probably, because Larry Peppers is still
very much here and I don’t think that leap would have worked. It was really very fortuitous that
he left. It really played to our advantage.

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Warren: From what I’ve learned about how the world of academia works, when I heard that
he’d been named, I said, “Oh, that’s why he went to Richmond. I’d wondered why he went to
Richmond and now I understand.”

         Now Farris, we have got to talk about this really important event that happened in the late
’90s. We had a major anniversary here. Let’s talk about the 250th. Why was that important to
celebrate it on the scale that we did?
Hotchkiss: Because we were two hundred and fifty years old! I think for three reasons, Mame,
and the first sounds maybe kind of fabricated but it’s not. We really wanted to be known
worldwide—certainly nationally if not worldwide—as this country’s ninth-oldest institution of
higher education. We’re in good, small company in that. The only guys who are older than we
are, frankly, are some of the most prestigious universities in the world and we wanted to be a part
of that fraternity. Secondly, we saw it as an incredible opportunity to cultivate a huge number of
people in all sorts of different ways, not only for fundraising but for leadership. You’ll remember
that one of the things we did was to create awards in each alumni chapter for leadership out of
that chapter. We thought that it was a marvelous opportunity, for our magazine and for Mame
Warren’s book and other things, to do a lot of publishing that we couldn’t or wouldn’t afford
otherwise. We just wouldn’t have spent that much money on them. The third reason we did it
was we saw it as a precursor to ongoing major financial needs that this university has. I never
have liked that terminology as a springboard for something, but [the anniversary was used] as an
introduction to our continuing to build this university’s strength financially and in other ways.

         I would say that we got perhaps a little more caught up in it than we originally intended.
It didn’t get, I would say, out of control but I think it got gilded more so than we had originally
thought it would.
Warren: It was quite an event, Farris.
Hotchkiss: It really was. It had so many different moving parts. It had your part [Come Cheer
for Washington and Lee]. It had the alumni meetings around the country part. It had the tent part
[the on-campus gala celebration of the 250th anniversary in June 2001, when the weather turned
unseasonably cold], a night I’ll never forget, not entirely in a pleasurable way.
Warren: And the London part.
Hotchkiss: And the trip part. No one, though, ever looked back on it and wished that we either
hadn’t done it or that we hadn’t done it as elaborately as we did. Much to the board’s credit, we

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spent more money than we were intending but never did they complain about that. They kind of
furrowed their brows and Larry Broomall, who was our treasurer at the time, cleared his throat
and raised his eyebrows a number of times, but essentially speaking they continued to support it.
It was a great event.

         My reference to the night was, we spent hours debating whether or not to air condition
the tents because they could become insufferably hot. We checked with the people who can do
that—you can do that—and we just decided it was beyond our financial ability to do it. Then lo
and behold, the night wound up being so darn cold.
Warren: That’s right. It was, wasn’t it?
Hotchkiss: Remember, it was freezing?
Warren: Yes.
Hotchkiss: In fact, it was so cold that people would go into the two restrooms because it was the
only warm place to be.
Warren: I’d forgotten. Oh yes, I had a shawl that I was shivering under.
Hotchkiss: Oh gosh, it was just as cold as it could be.
Warren: Well, don’t try to predict weather anytime.
Hotchkiss: But it was a great occasion. My most memorable single part of it was our Mount
Vernon dinner.
Warren: When you launched the …
Hotchkiss: When the university made a gift to Mount Vernon matching the gift that George
Washington had made to us.
Warren: That’s right. I remember that. That was just when I first was arriving and I didn’t
begin to understand. I remember everybody going off to that but I gradually said, “Oh, how
come I didn’t get invited to that?”
Hotchkiss: Well, you should have been.
Warren: Well, I was brand new then.
Hotchkiss: Mount Vernon that night was given to us as if it was our own house. Unbelievably,
Mame, we were walking around the house with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, and climbing up
the ladder into the cupola to see what it looks like up there. My Lord, I just couldn’t believe that
they were as generous with the privilege of being in that house as we were. Then we had this

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beautiful dinner out on the lawn overlooking the Potomac. Art Birney had bought all these
fireworks. Again, I can’t believe Mount Vernon let us set off all those fireworks.
Warren: Who was behind that? Who pulled off something like that?
Hotchkiss: The two guys who were kind of the idea men, the real geniuses behind it, were Dick
Sessoms and Jim Whitehead [former treasurer of the university and director of the Reeves
Center].
Warren: That’s what I thought.
Hotchkiss: Both Jim and Dick have this talent for drama. It’s just [like] your talent for doing
what you do, they have this talent. I guess you probably never knew this but Jim Whitehead, as
another example, his talent for drama was the night we dedicated the Lenfest Center. Jim decided
that what we would do that night for the guests for dinner was to duplicate Sardi’s, in the Lenfest
Center, complete with Mr. Sardi himself. [Laughter] He had the Sardi neon sign copied and set
up. It was incredible. That’s the kind of talent he has and Dick Sessoms has it as well.
Warren: I never saw anything done in a small way at Washington and Lee. I’m going to pause.
Hotchkiss: I was almost going to be very guilty of leaving out Rob Mish.
Warren: I was going to bring him up.
Hotchkiss: Rob also has talent like Dick and Jim do. He was the tent guy.
Warren: Yes, he certainly was. He popped up in lots of places throughout the 250th.
Hotchkiss: He is ever happy now.
Warren: Oh, at the Lenfest [as director of the Lenfest Center for the Performing Arts].
Hotchkiss: That’s an answer to his prayer.
Warren: Well, it was a sad way it happened but it was a wonderful solution to that issue.

         So, who is Rupert Johnson and were you involved in that? How long was that in the
making?
Hotchkiss: I guess I was because it was forever in the making. It took so long that I had to be, I
guess. No, I don’t guess. I was. You really don’t know who Rupert is?
Warren: I really don’t. I’ve been in Baltimore for quite a while, you know.
Hotchkiss: Well, Rupert’s in the class of 1962 and his father started a small company in
California, I’m going to say sometime in the early ’50s or so, called Franklin Resources. Franklin
Resources is essentially a mutual fund company with many different mutual funds that specialize
in certain kinds of investments. Fast-forward to the 1980s and by that time Franklin Resources

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had grown to be a very big company, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Rupert
Johnson by that time was a hundreds and hundreds of millionaire and was, along with his
stepbrother and an uncle, running Franklin Resources. Franklin Resources did an unusual thing
or does an unusual thing. They don’t have a president. They have what they call the office of the
president and in it are these three people.

         At any rate, his business prospered, particularly when it went through those go-go years
of the bull market. When 20002–2003 had rolled around, I was retired by then. Dennis [Cross]
had become the new head of development, although they call it advancement now, which I don’t
like. Dennis and Tom Burish began calling on our wealthiest alumni, one of whom obviously
was Rupert. We had been calling on Rupert for years. I would see Rupert usually in his office
about twice a year.
Warren: Where did he live?
Hotchkiss: In San Francisco. He always was extremely interested in anything going on at
Washington and Lee but he did not ever want to make a commitment. He didn’t want to make a
pledge. The last time that I met with him, we really were talking business. To show you how
things can change, I was asking him to consider a $10-million gift. He told me that he just did
not make pledges but he said, “Farris, I will tell you, though, that unless something very
untoward happens I will give Washington and Lee at least $1 million every year for the rest of
my life.” He was doing that and it was usually more than $1 million. It was usually like $1.2–
$1.3 or something like that.

         Then Dennis and Tom Burish began calling on him and somewhere during their time— I
don’t know, chicken or the egg, what came first—but this idea of this really revolutionary
endowed-scholarship program began to be discussed. I wasn’t in on those conversations but I
think they went on for three years, maybe, or so and culminated in his deciding to make this
$100-million gift for the Johnson scholarships, 80 percent for the Johnson scholarships, 10
percent for a professorship in something, and the other 10 percent for leadership studies, which I
never have quite understood academically but, nevertheless, more and more places … VMI has
just built this Taj Mahal over there for leadership studies.

         But Rupert, Mame, if you—not if. I hope someday you do meet him—you’d never in a
million years guess that he is who he is or has what he has. He’s just a remarkably humble,
easygoing, nice man. He was a confirmed bachelor and when he was fifty-two years old he

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married for the first time, a lovely, lovely woman who had six children. So Rupert has gone from
unmarried to having six children and I forget how many grandchildren, I mean zillions.
Warren: Oh, my gosh.
Hotchkiss: They’re wonderful people. His wife’s name is Maryellie and she is a Greek, Greek
family; she’s not Greek herself.

         Rupert really believes that scholarships ought to be awarded on need, but he doesn’t
believe in it so completely wholeheartedly that he doesn’t also see where some scholarships
ought to be awarded on merit. His program can encompass both kinds. I don’t know but I think
that, so far, most all of those who have received Johnson scholarships have some degree of need,
maybe all the way from extreme need to just modest need. But I do know of one instance where
the son of an extremely wealthy family also has one who absolutely does not need it for financial
reasons.
Warren: That’s one thing I would like to talk about. I know we’re getting close to when we
have to stop, but this sort of covers the whole of everybody’s career here. When I came to
Washington and Lee is the first time I ever heard the term legacy children. What does that mean
here at Washington and Lee? There are so many people who, generation after generation, come
here.
Hotchkiss: In a formal sense, Mame, it means that this student is essentially a son or a daughter
or, in most cases, a grandson or a granddaughter of an alumnus or, now, an alumna. What it
means in terms of function is that those—unless it’s been changed in the last year or two. The
last I knew of it sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of alumni—and I’m not
sure about the grandchildren but certainly the children—they are put in a separate pool to be
considered separately from the rest of the applicants, with the intention being that they be given
some degree of preference for admission. All things being equal, a boy or a girl who might be
admitted—it’s easier to say it backwards. A son or a daughter who might not be admitted under
regular decision, in the regular pool, might be admitted because they’re in the sons’ or daughters’
pool. The last I heard numerically was that the sons and daughters in the sons’ and daughters’
pool were admitted at not quite but almost twice the rate as the regular pool. In other words,
Mame, the last I heard, the sons’ and daughters’ pool, about 40 to 50 percent or so of them were
admitted whereas the other one it was about 28 percent, something like that.

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         Frankly, as you just said, because it is part of the biggest umbrella it recognizes family. It
doesn’t make this a club but it does say that there is the purpose and desire on the part of the
university to continue a family relationship. In my opinion, that affects our personality, the
atmosphere, the Honor System and, hopefully, the speaking tradition, and the things that are
difficult to exactly put your finger on, the loyalty and the warmth. I’m not saying we’re unique in
this but I bet there aren’t many others. I can’t tell you how many times during my years here the
phone would ring and on the other end of the line would be an alumnus who had a son or a
daughter who was sick in Phoenix and said, “Do you know a Washington and Lee alumnus who
could help in Phoenix?” The answer was always yes and the guy, whoever he was in Phoenix,
always helped.
Warren: Did what needed to be done.
Hotchkiss: You just could depend on it. More than once in a while I’ll travel and have on
something that identifies me as Washington and Lee, and you’ll hear someone in a restaurant
say, “Washington and Lee!”
Warren: I do it in Baltimore. I’ll see the belts a lot in Baltimore and I’ll walk up and say,
“W&L, W&L.” I was at a party not long ago and I introduced myself to a young woman and she
said, “You did Come Cheer. Oh, my God. I was in the class of ’96.” We had the most wonderful
conversation.
Hotchkiss: Isn’t that wonderful? I think doing what we do with sons and daughters of alumni
doesn’t guarantee anything, but I think if we were to stop it—
Warren: It would guarantee something.
Hotchkiss: It would guarantee something, yes, and I think it would hurt us. I don’t mean it
would hurt us just because there are some mad people out there, but I think it would really
eventually remove that repetitive personality.
Warren: And I think it’s a very important part of the personality of the place.
Hotchkiss: Yes, yes.
Warren: I don’t know why it works so well but it certainly does.
Hotchkiss: It’s so hard to deal with that. Personality is not a specific thing and you can’t
manipulate it. It’s either there or it’s not.

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Warren: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about just the concept of charisma and I think
Washington and Lee has charisma. It’s a kind of charisma and who can ever understand
charisma? It just is.
Hotchkiss: Yes, you’re right.
Warren: Farris, what haven’t we talked about that we should? I’ve got all kinds of things on my
list but I think we’ve hit the really important parts.
Hotchkiss: I guess we might have said in sort of a categorical way that one of the things that
makes this place so special is the several professors, over time, who were very much more
prominent in the way they dealt with students in a good way. I was just about to call them
characters and I guess that’s probably as good a label as any, like Jefferson Davis Futch and like
[Keith] Shillington and like Bill Janks and like Jim Leyburn and Ed Atwood. I don’t know,
Mame, where those kinds of people are these days. I say that not to mean that they aren’t there,
it’s just that I don’t know them. I hope that we’ll always have some characters on campus
because they lend so much to the general—here we go again—the general personality of the
place.

         Jefferson Davis Futsch, you’re bound to have met him—
Warren: Oh, of course.
Hotchkiss: I mean this guy is in a class by himself.
Warren: I was astonished to hear that he did retire and that somebody else, of course, had to go
in and clean out his office.
Hotchkiss: Which I would have thought would be an impossibility.
Warren: Exactly.
Hotchkiss: But that’s something we didn’t talk about. We didn’t really get over on the law
school side of the fence at all and there’s lots of athletics and things that we didn’t talk about at
all, although I’d say that those would kind of be the only two that are really big things that we
didn’t touch on.
Warren: Well, we talked about Roy Steinheimer, who was certainly a giant, but there have
been a bunch of other deans over there and some pretty interesting characters over there too.
Hotchkiss: Oh, you bet.
Warren: I think there’s an interesting story to be told about the loss of the law school on this
side of the campus.

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Hotchkiss: Yes, that’s right. First of all, it had to happen. It really was not debatable, only
maybe for a short time, but to build a building that would do what that building does, there
wasn’t any room for it so it had to go [across Woods Creek]. But when it went it did rob the
undergraduates, not the law students necessarily, but it did rob the undergraduates of the
influence of these older students that was really quite good.

         I can go back to my student days—this had stopped even before the law school moved—
where the law students took their meals in the fraternity houses. It was so good to have these
guys there who were three, four, five, six years older than the rest of us. We profited a great deal
from their presence. In a similar kind of way, without any law students on The Colonnade to
speak of, campus events probably have some law students in attendance. It’s hard to know. They
don’t look so much different. Most of them are not that much older although some of them are
way older. But I think we’re the losers in that equation, unfortunately.

         Efforts are made to draw people together. We spent a lot of money building this perfectly
delightful wooden walkway—
Warren: Oh, I love that bridge.
Hotchkiss: Down here partly to encourage the law students to come over and vice versa. Some
very formal efforts are made, a few at least in teaching, to have some teaching across the ravine
[Woods Creek]. I don’t know if people still call it the ravine or not but that’s what it used to be
called.

         The law school, it isn’t only that it is a graduate school. It’s that it requires of its students
virtual total immersion at least for the first year or two and they just don’t come out. Our
daughter went to law school here and she just spent her whole year in the building. I swear to
goodness, I wondered if she ever came out and slept. That got better as time went on. There’s
just a disconnect that is too bad. It’s not killing. It’s not awful.

         I think the law faculty is reasonably well acquainted with the undergraduate faculty and
vice versa. The law deans have certainly—here we go to our Monday lunch—the law deans have
always taken a very active conversational, at least, part in conversations about the undergraduate
school. I’m not so sure it’s that much the case vice versa, but it certainly is they’re a part of it,

         One of the things, Mame, that has changed over years is that not as many Washington
and Lee undergraduates either go to or get in our law school as used to be.
Warren: Yes, it used to be a steady stream.

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Hotchkiss: Well, it used to be you hardly didn’t even apply and that was not a good idea.
Warren: Well, that was Mrs. Mac [Mrs. Charles McDowell] taking care of everybody.
Hotchkiss: Exactly. That had to stop but nevertheless … Then there was the very, very popular
what was called the three-three plan where you could go to the law school, in essence, in your
senior undergraduate year and have the whole thing finished in six years. That is almost
nonexistent now. Anyway, the law school just is more so it’s own place. In terms of quality and
in terms of national prestige, our law school is arguably the most prestigious part of us in terms
of true distinction.
Warren: I think there’s a lot that’s distinctive about Washington and Lee, Farris.
Hotchkiss: Oh, there certainly is. There certainly is. You know, Mame, what I used to like to
say when I do little talks and things with alumni groups and others, one of the things that makes
us distinctive is that, unlike most of the more prominent places, we were not named honorifically
for these two men. We were named for them because they really took a direct hand in our,
number one, creation and, number two, our resurrection so to speak. They were right here.
They’re real and I think that has a lot to do with it. I think a lot of our students, they don’t get up
every morning wanting to read more about either [George] Washington or [Robert E.] Lee, but I
think that Washington and Lee’s presence, in kind of a spooky way, is around here as an
influence. I think the university would make a terrible mistake if we stop talking about
Washington and Lee. I don’t mean every time anyone gets on their feet, but I think that we need
to keep up that conversation and that memorial to them because, you know, like anything else,
it’ll get away from you and you may not any longer know its part of you.
Warren: I barely knew—I shouldn’t say barely knew—who Robert E. Lee was when I came
here. I certainly knew but I didn’t have the reverence for him that I very quickly got once I came
here.

         One of the things that I have been thrilled to see has happened is, have you seen the little
book Lee after Appomattox?
Hotchkiss: Yes, I have.
Warren: I didn’t know that existed when I was here, nor did [special collections libriarian]
Vaughan Stanley. Of course we had it here but nobody knew anything about it. I found it when I
was doing my paper on the speaking tradition.
Hotchkiss: Really?

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Warren: That’s where I discovered it, in the library at Johns Hopkins, and I used it a lot in my
paper and my article. Then I came back here when I was doing the research here and I said,
“Vaughan, do you know about this?” and I brought it in. Then suddenly, somebody had reprinted
it. I was so thrilled to see that it had gotten reprinted because it’s the only firsthand accounts of
Lee here and it’s the reminiscences of the students themselves. Unfortunately, it was fifty years
later [after Robert E. Lee died] but still, that’s the only thing we’ve really got.
Hotchkiss: You’ve read The Last Years? You’ve read that? What’s the guy’s name? I can’t
remember the author’s name. Lee’s last years, it’s a wonderful book although Holt Merchant
says it has some stuff in it that he doesn’t agree with. It’s all of Lee’s postwar years.
Warren: So it’s about his years here?
Hotchkiss: Yes. The other one that is, I found—I haven’t looked at it in a long, long, long, long
time—but there’s a little tiny book over in the library that I think the title is Washington’s
Philanthropy, that’s really good. It’s a little book. You can read it in an hour or two. It has our
story in it, of his decision to make the gift to us and it’s a wonderful little book.
Warren: Farris, this has been an honor.
Hotchkiss: Mame, now that I know that you are going to be a part of us, residentially if not in
other ways, we don’t need to call it quits.
Warren: Not at all. I’ve never called it quits with you but I think we better say it’s the end of
this interview because I know you wanted to be out of here at four o’clock. Thank you, Farris.

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