Robert E.R. Huntley

                               April 23, 2009
      [annotated by Robert E. R. Huntley in November 2009]

                                       —
                              Mame Warren,

                                 Interviewer

Warren: This is Mame Warren and today is April 23, 2009, and I am in Lexington,
Virginia at Washington and Lee University with Bob Huntley. And, sir, I’m interested in
why you needed to go back to Harvard to get a master of laws degree when you already
had a law degree.
Huntley: Well, in retrospect, I don’t know that I did need to. That’s a good question. It’s
hard for me to reconstruct what motivated me. I think I concluded that my teaching
career—and that’s the only career I had in mind—would be enhanced by some graduate
study at Harvard, Harvard being the imprimatur of quality in those days, less so, I think,
today. And I thought that my ability as a teacher would be improved by doing that. I
hadn’t been at it very long before I decided I’d made a mistake [Laughter]. It was largely
a waste of time, and a very expensive and troublesome waste of time.

         I had two children and no money. The grant I was given by Harvard—a so-called
teaching fellowship—I’ve forgotten the dollar amount now, but it covered the Harvard
fees and a trifle more. But my salary here was not continued, of course, so I had to
borrow all the money necessary to live on for that year. I lived out in Point of Pines at
Revere Beach: by no means the chosen address of the elite. I couldn’t afford to live in
Cambridge, certainly not in Boston.

         Point of Pines is a summer resort area on the edge of Revere Beach, and I found a
house out there. I left Evelyn [Huntley] here with the kids—and put a trailer on the back
of an old Ford Escort and dragged it to Cambridge over a three-day period. I put up in a
cheap motel and began searching for a place to live. It took me a week to find a place that

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was big enough for my family to be comfortable in, and cheap enough for me to afford.
That was a summer house—it was wintertime, of course—a summer house at Point of
Pines. It had been winterized. It was warm. It was a big house, comfortable. It turned out
to be a marvelous choice. So, that aspect of it was good. Then I had to commute to
Cambridge. We only had one car. I usually commuted by train; Evelyn kept the car.

         But, the experience with Harvard was of limited value. The teaching fellows—
that’s what I was called—were distinguished from the general mob only by the fact that
they were given offices in the stacks. I had an office in the stacks of that huge law library,
where they claim to have a million books and they’re all lost [Laughter]. In any event,
that was the only attribute of the fellowship that I remember. Otherwise, you simply took
courses that you chose to take—or audited courses that you chose to audit—that were
being taught to the run-of-the-mill Harvard LLB students, as they were in those days.
Most of that was—I already knew the stuff they were teaching. I didn’t learn much about
teaching technique.

         I did have one experience that sticks to me to this day, though, that may have
made the whole year worth it. There was a professor at Harvard in those days named Lon
Fuller. You probably don’t know that name, but he was Harvard’s leading professor of
jurisprudence. He’s dead now, but his work survives today as a leading American
jurisprude. I took a couple of courses under Fuller and wrote a significant paper for
Fuller. He had a significant influence on my thinking and my understanding of the law.
Warren: What was his field?
Huntley: He taught jurisprudence, contracts. His basic field was contracts, and his

specialty was jurisprudence: the philosophies of law. He was splendid, just splendid.

That was worth the trip, I guess. That’s probably more about that than you need to know.
Warren: No, I was fascinated to see that.
Huntley: We survived the year, though, and were glad to get back home.
Warren: Tell me about the law school at the time you were a faculty member. We talked
before more about when you were a student, so I’m interested in hearing more about
when you were a faculty member, who the characters were.
Huntley: Well, the characters hadn’t really changed since the time I was a student,
except I was now a colleague of theirs instead of a student of theirs. The characters were

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still Charlie [Charles] Light, Charley McDowell, Dean Skinny [Clayton] Williams, Bill
Ritz, Charles Laughlin. They were the principal characters. When I was a student, a man
named Ted Smedley was very good. Smedley had left and really it was his place that I
took when I came back to teach. The school had not changed much since the days when I
was a student, and didn’t change much until we moved into the new quarters and
enlarged it somewhat. But, it was a close-knit community.

         I would say the biggest difference contrasted with today was that the law students
were more nearly absorbed into the total student body than they are today. There was a
difference; there was a separation, but there were active overlaps between the activities of
the law students as law students and those of undergraduate students. I, for example, was
vice president of the student body while I was a law student. I was very active on the
Executive Committee. That could still happen, but I think it was a much closer—because
it was small. There were only one hundred law students? I’ve forgotten exactly. A
hundred, maybe a hundred and ten law students in Tucker Hall, which was small enough
not to permit much more than that.

         Admission to the law school was very easy; it was not very selective. I think I
may have told you the last interview—I don’t remember what I told you the last
interview—when I applied to law school—I got out of the Navy and decided to go to law
school. Evelyn decided she could go to work and support me going to law school. I
applied to Washington and Lee and Harvard, and was accepted by return mail by both
[Laughter]. No LSAT.
Warren: Oh my God.
Huntley: Getting into law school was just a matter of having a warm body and having
graduated from someplace else.
Warren: That was my impression in what I was reading about the law school.
Huntley: It was true. It wasn’t just true here; it was true anywhere. As I said, I was also
accepted to Harvard by return mail.
Warren: That’s exactly what my impression was in reading about the entire law
profession at that time.
Huntley: Yeah. But, it was true of college, generally. You could go to college—in 1946
when I went to college, I could have gone anywhere. It was not an issue of getting in; it

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was an issue of paying the tuition and just making a decision of where you wanted to go.
There was no—there was virtually no selectivity as far as admission to college was
concerned. There really wasn’t.
Warren: Let’s talk about that, about the bigger picture of higher education in America at
that time, and just the issues you’re talking about—less selectivity—because I’m sure
people today would find that hard to grasp.
Huntley: It’s true, though. It’s true. I certainly could have gone to any college I wanted
to go to, and others like me could have. It’s not because I was a superior student in high
school. I was probably slightly above average. I guess I was an A/B student. Now, in
those days, they did grade in high school, which they don’t do anymore [Laughter], so
being an A/B student today would really be bad. They did flunk people out of high school
in those days, you know. But, still it was certainly not a distinguished record. But the
issue of not being able to get into college never crossed my mind, nor the minds of any of
the people I knew.

         My classmates went to various schools all over the country: Princeton, Yale.
None went here except me. Many went to University of North Carolina; I was raised in
North Carolina. All of them got into schools they first applied to, every one of them. And
this was from a public high school. This wasn’t Choate or something. It was a two-
thousand person public high school in Winston-Salem. So, admission to college was an
easy matter.

         One of the results of that was, of course, that you had a larger [Huntely clarifies:
different] cross-section of society in college with you than you do today. There were two
reasons for that. One is the selectivity had not yet occurred. The colleges had not yet
filled with the post-war boom. The post-war boom, enhanced by the G.I. Bill is what
swelled the college enrollments to the enormous sizes we became accustomed to. It was
that swelling process during which selectivity began to occur. But the colleges were
bigger than they needed to be, as far as accommodating students was concerned, in 1946
so that they were looking to grow, not to become selective. They became selective as an
incident of the great stampede—that’s what it was—of people who formerly would not
have thought of going to college, who came out of the service with a free ride, so to
speak, and decided to go to college. That wave built—I don’t know for how long; I

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haven’t studied the demographic data. You probably have—but that wave built for a long
time, continued to swell. Selectivity was an incident of that, not an objective of that. We
refer to selectivity as if it were some sort of a scholarly achievement. It was a scholarly
accident from the factors that I just described.

         And now, of course, we’ve reached the point where essentially everyone goes to
college somewhere, some college, some kind of college—essentially everyone. Everyone
who can possibly stumble through the door goes to some kind of college. The variety of
colleges—that fact alone would tell you the variety among colleges is enormous. The
differences among them are enormous, and the selectivity is, of course, quite different
from one school to another.
Warren: One thing that was quite different when you came back as a faculty member is
that there was a new president at Washington and Lee.
Huntley: No, that’s not true. Dr. Gaines was still president when I came to teach.
Warren: Right. When you first arrived.
Huntley: It was he who hired me, and my first call when I got here was in his office.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Huntley: So Fred Cole was not yet here. I knew Gaines quite well. I was very, very fond
of him as a youngster. I probably told you this in the earlier interview. I don’t want to
repeat things, but I knew the Gaines family from my childhood. I was the same age as the
Gaines’s youngest son, Edwin. Dr. Gaines had been president of Wake Forest College—
as it was then—located then in Wake Forest, North Carolina, as I’m sure you know,
Mame. My father and mother—my mother was raised in the town of Wake Forest. Her
father was a trustee of Wake Forest College. Her grandfather had been a trustee. Her
uncle taught Greek and Latin there. Anyway, they were closely connected with the
college. My father was an alumnus of Wake Forest. My mother actually went there, too,
although it was not coeducational. She took classes there, which were subsequently
transferred to Meredith [College], so they permitted her—because of the extraordinary
connection, I think, of the family—to take classes at Wake Forest long before it was
coeducational.
Warren: And where did she transfer to?
Huntley: Meredith College in Raleigh, is where she graduated. Anyway, Gaines became

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president of Wake Forest College in, I would guess—I may have the year wrong—
probably 1925, thereabouts, ’24, ’2.5 [Gaines was president of Wake Forest 1927–1930.]
He was there for several years, and my family, who spent a lot of time in the town of
Wake Forest—they lived in Winston-Salem, but spent a lot of time in Wake Forest—
came to know the Gaines family. Mother came to know Mrs. Gaines—Sadie du
Vergne—and the children played together. So, we knew the Gaineses and saw them
occasionally—not often, but occasionally—over the intervening years.

         Then, when it came time to go to college, my brother—older than I—came here.
He didn’t apply anywhere else, came here, and four years later I came here, too. I knew
Gaines throughout my time. So, when I came here to teach, my first call was in his office.

         He was well past his best years, I’m sorry to say, by that time. He was still a
delightfully charming man, however. A dominant personality. Gaines entered a room, he
became the center of attention instantly, even if you didn’t know who he was. He walked
into a room of a hundred people, in a matter of fifteen minutes he would be the dominant
personality in the room, even if no one there had ever seen him or heard him before.
Extraordinary. The term now would be charisma: a term that had not been developed to
mean what it means now at that time. It was a term that had a specific meaning then and
now has a general meaning, but he had charisma.

         He stayed in the job too long. He stayed in the job twenty-five years, I guess. He
should have stayed fifteen.
Warren: It’s actually twenty-nine years.
Huntley: Twenty-nine. He should have stayed fifteen, which, incidentally, is where I
came up with the year fifteen. I came to the conclusion—I don’t have any hard data to
back this up—that fifteen was all a person ought to do in that kind of job. So, the school
suffered by reason of his extended tenure. It had suffered at other times in its history. It
suffered in the same way under [Robert E.] Lee’s son [G.W. Custis Lee], who remained
in office forever.
Warren: Indeed.
Huntley: And did nothing during most of that time. So, Dr. Gaines was not the first
example. So, it languished under Gaines for the latter part—not to say he didn’t do
anything for it in his latter years. He did. He had this great charisma, so he attracted

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attention. He was nationally known as a speaker. He really was; that wasn’t just
Washington and Lee hype. He was in demand everywhere as a speaker. The school’s
name became known in part through Gaines. In the war, he somehow negotiated this
[School of ] Special Services thing. It kept the school alive during the war and provided
employment for people like Agnes [Gilmore] and others who were around here, as well
as teachers. He negotiated that.

         He continued to earn throughout his entire time the devotion of the student body.
The students, with some exceptions, loved Gaines. He could command their attention and
their allegiance in, probably, a better way than anybody since. But, sadly, he had lost a lot
of his strength and should have left earlier.
Warren: So you were actually here on campus when he did leave.
Huntley: Yes.
Warren: Tell me about that transition, and why was it Fred Cole who was selected, do
you think?
Huntley: Well, I don’t really know the answer to that, Mame. I don’t know what the
process was. The board of trustees in that day was a—how would I characterize it? I
came to know this later. I didn’t know this at the time, but not long thereafter I knew this.
[The board of trustees] was moribund, with some exceptions. There were a couple of
trustees who were potent people: Chris Chenery—do you know who Chris Chenery was?
Warren: I don’t.
Huntley: Well, let’s see. He ran a huge gas company that connects gas from Texas to the
East Coast, but he’s probably better known as the breeder of Secretariat. Have you heard
of the horse?
Warren: I have indeed.
Huntley: Okay. I’m sorry, I guess he would be turning over in his grave to think that’s
the thing he’s most remembered for.
Warren: He’s probably used to it.
Huntley: He owned a huge breeding farm up here in Northern Virginia. Actually, down
in—yeah, Northern Virginia. Secretariat was his, and Riva Ridge, another Derby winner.
Chenery lived in New York City, was a Washington and Lee alumnus, and a man of
considerable wealth, but, more important than that, a man of considerable ability. So, he

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was an active and forceful person on the board, and was, I believe it to be true, the
chairman of the board committee that selected Cole. Cole thought that was the case. I
don’t know, in fact, whether it was or not. I never checked the record to see.

         Joseph Lykes Sr. was on the board. Later, Joseph Lykes Jr., also a good trustee.
Lykes Sr. would have been a good trustee, though I didn’t know him. I’m sure he was a
good trustee. A trustee, Homer Holt, was on the board, the governor—former governor—
of West Virginia: potent, bombastic, opinionated, but able. [Huntley later adds: Dr.
Huston St. Clair was a member; a wonderful man who was rector shortly before Cole left
and for my first few years. John Newton Thomas of Richmond, Virginia, Theological
Seminary as a very good man, later rector.] I may have overlooked some, but those would
have been among the dominant characters on the board. [Huntley adds: there were several
others who were nice men but not very effective, older.] I’d have to see a whole list to
make sure. I omitted some, but I’m guessing those are the ones who chose Cole. How
they chose him I just simply don’t know. There’s a rumor about that, not about how they
chose him, but about Cole’s response to it. You must have heard this story by now,
Mame.
Warren: I don’t know [if I know the story]; tell me.
Huntley: In Cole’s first faculty meeting when he came here as president—as you know, I
became devoted to Fred Cole—he said what a delight it was to be here at William and
Mary. [Laughter]
Warren: Yes, I have heard that story.
Huntley: [Frank] Parsons, the wag, claims to be 90 percent certain that he actually
thought William and Mary was where he’d come. I don’t think there’s any truth in that.
I’m pretty sure there’s no truth in that, but the faculty was not swept away by that. But,
he overcame that initial bad start, and the faculty became very fond of Cole. He was a
faculty’s president.
Warren: Tell me what you mean.
Huntley: Well, he identified with the faculty. I did, too, I think, because I came from it,
but he identified with the faculty in a way that Gaines had never done. They felt their
prerogatives, as well as their future prospects, were enhanced by Cole’s understanding of
their needs, and their desires, and their scholarship. He took what meager resources he

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was able to scrape together and attributed the lion’s share to faculty salary improvements,
neglecting everything else for that, as he had to. There was no money to devote to
anything. We can go into that later if you want to. But what money he could scrape
together or raise—there were several gifts made at that time where the donor allowed him
to spend the principal. He spent it for faculty salaries.

         I recall being called over to his home—invited over to his home—for an evening
one time in, probably, 1964 or 1965. I was a bit curious as to the group there. I knew
them all. They were all faculty. I was the only law faculty member. There were probably
seven or eight, maybe ten, undergraduate faculty members—the strongest faculty
members, I thought. I found out later that these were the ones that Cole had had—he’d
just gotten a gift from someone. I don’t recall who now—and had taken this and had
applied it to the salaries of these ten people, or twelve people, whatever it was. Small
number. He did that more than once. I don’t know how many times, because that would
be an interesting record to find. You could probably find that in his files. I don’t know
whether you could or not.

         Cole was very secretive, or private would be a better term to use. My guess is he
didn’t make records of all of this. I don’t know that, but my guess is he didn’t. Tina
[Ravenhorst, the president’s long-time secretary] would have known [Laughter]. Another
reason it’s too bad Tina’s gone.
Warren: Tina Ravenhorst is a lost resource.
Huntley: She would have known, but I don’t know how many times he did that. But, he
did it—the faculty knew he was scraping, doing everything he could do for them,
respecting their prerogatives, their position. I learned my understanding of the faculty’s
role from Cole, because that was always my approach to the faculty, which was never to
intrude on their domain. I never did, and he never did. They knew that he would not. So,
he was very popular. He was, unfortunately, not popular off the campus.
Warren: Tell me what you mean.
Huntley: Well, he just wasn’t popular in the literal sense of that term. People didn’t like
him. He was diffident, timid, which made him appear standoffish, made him appear
above the fray. He wasn’t, in fact. He didn’t think of himself as being above the fray, but
he didn’t know how to engage in the fray. He was not good at small talk. He was not

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much of a conversationalist at all, really. He didn’t converse freely on any topic. He kept
his own counsel. Is that the term that’s used to describe that? He was not folksy.

         He was never able to evoke the alumni devotion. He was never able to tap the
alumni devotion that was there. He couldn’t tap it, and he knew that. He knew that. He
was very cognizant of his own strengths and weaknesses. He knew he couldn’t do that.
He tried; he just couldn’t do it. He tried to cope by getting others on the faculty to go for
him or with him. They would gladly do that, but it’s not the same thing. The school as
Washington and Lee was in those days—I don’t know that any of this is true now,
incidentally. I just really don’t know.
Warren: Sure.
Huntley: I don’t know the Washington and Lee of today. I can’t tell you much about
that. But as Washington and Lee was in those days, the school was seen by the alumni as
very special. I think it still is. The president was seen as the successor to Gaines, and
Gaines was seen as the Second Coming by most of them. Cole couldn’t live up to that.
He couldn’t stand in the shadow of Gaines for an instant in terms of appeal to the alumni,
or to any group that he might be speaking to. Gaines, as a speaker, was absolutely
irresistible, even if he gave the same speech you’d heard ten times before.

         The faculty under Gaines—returning to that. I mean, I’m jumping around. You’ll
have to sort through these things the best way you can. The faculty under Gaines—and,
again, I was here as a student and as a faculty member under Gaines—Gaines would give
one of his speeches, and you could tell out of the first two words which speech it was
going to be. It used to irritate the hell out of the faculty, but despite that, they became
gripped. Despite the fact that they were fed up with Gaines—and they were fed up with
him—they would nevertheless sit enthralled, enthralled to hear Gaines give the same
speech they’d heard him give five times before. Incredible technique.
Warren: Well, I always loved that cartoon of General Lee up on his elbow, listening to
Gaines.
Huntley: That was drawn by John Chapman, a classmate of mine named John Chapman.
He’s a medical doctor out in Iowa now. That’s a detail you don’t need. But, Cole had
none of that, and the contrast with Gaines was so dramatic and so stark that Cole, I think,
felt embattled on that front, at least. From the first day, he just couldn’t cope with it.

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         The board of trustees—he couldn’t cope with the board. The board was hard to
cope with. Chris Chenery was fading out of the picture. Homer Holt had become the
dominant character on the board, and Homer Holt was—I mean, to call it by its right—
Homer Holt was a tough, mean son-of-a-bitch. Now, I say that with some affection. I
became somewhat devoted to Holt—I’ll give you that story if you want it—over time.
But he was a mean, tough son-of-a-bitch. If he was sitting right here, he would agree with
me. Cole couldn’t cope with that. Cole was genteel, and refined, and he couldn’t cope
with a mean, tough son-of-a-bitch like Homer Holt.

         The rest of the board was moribund. They were old: Dr. [Morrison] Hutcheson
and Mr. [James] Caskie. When Hutcheson retired as rector—he remained on the board,
you understand, but retired as rector because of age—they elected Caskie, who was
older! I mean by that they all don’t seem so old now, but they were, like, eighty. But they
weren’t as alert as I think I am at eighty. They were moribund, and Cole didn’t know
what to do about that. He couldn’t cope. He did, towards the end of his time, begin to
cope with that in ways we can go into, if you want to. Where do you want to go next?
Warren: I want to go all those directions. I’m fascinated that he didn’t work well with
the board, and yet, of course, it was the board who had selected him.
Huntley: Well, again, I think it was Chenery and Chenery faded out of the picture. Age
began to get him, and he couldn’t move much. His mind was okay, I think, but by the
time I became president, Chenery was out of the picture, although he was on the
committee that selected me. But, he was inactive. The elder Lykes had died, and the
younger Lykes hadn’t yet come on the board. And he was stuck with men like Caskie,
and Hutcheson, and, I don’t know, Joe Lanier, Joe Birnie, John Hendon. They were
simply not imaginative board members. They’re not bad men. I came to know all of them
very, very well, but they were not dynamic. [Huntley adds: About the time Cole quit, he
had succeeded in adding very able trustees John Stemmons, Lewis Powell, Joe Lykes Jr.,
and Ross Malone, all of whom I was lucky to inherit. Another trustee named Stuart
Buxton had been around a while but not very engaged; that changed; more later.] They
didn’t bring dynamism to the board and they were stuck in the mud in terms of any
movement of the school.

         They never gave any [Huntley clarifies: much] money. Generosity had never been

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a habit of the board. No one had ever cultivated generosity. Gaines had not cultivated
generosity on the part of the board. Gaines’s fundraising was limited. He receives lots of
credit for fundraising, but didn’t do much of it.
Warren: What do you think about the wisdom of Fred Cole spending the principal of
some of these gifts?
Huntley: Well, I did worse than that when I became president. I told you that in the first
interview. I, with the board’s permission, ran deficits for the first five years I was
president, which meant I spent—well, I didn’t spend endowment. I’m not going to be
sued—but I [[Huntley clarifies: spent] capitalized resources. I don’t think Fred had any
choice. He would have been better—between what and what are you asking me to
choose? Between doing nothing and doing that, then that was the right thing to do.
Between doing that and instead raising $10 million to capitalize it, that would have been
better, but he couldn’t do that. The faculty were loyal, and devoted to the institution, and
very—a tight-knit community then, and continued to be during the entire time I was here.
I don’t think it is now, though I don’t know that. They didn’t want to leave. They wanted
to stay here. We almost never lost anyone voluntarily, anyone who left without being
urged to leave in those days, despite low pay. But, you’ve got to live.

         I came back here—just to give you an example—I was practicing law in Northern
Virginia. This was 1957, ’58. I’d done well. Within a year, I’d done well. They were
offering me a substantial increase in salary. I think it would have gone to ten thousand
dollars. That was a lot of money then. I came back here to teach for forty-two hundred
[dollars]. You could live on that, but barely. Lived at the old farmhouse out here. Do you
know where Liberty Hall ruins are?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: I didn’t live in the ruins, but just two hundred yards north of the ruins is an old
red brick house. You ever seen that?
Warren: Is that where archaeology was based?
Huntley: Yes, right. Exactly. Well, that was not archaeology then. That was a red brick
house, and the school rented it to impoverished faculty members like me. I was on the
first floor, and somebody else was on the second floor of that ancient farmhouse, and
that’s where we lived my first year back as a faculty member. It was the best we could

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afford. They rented it to me—heaven knows how little they charged me. Probably almost
nothing. In any event…
Warren: Bob, I’m going to pause just for a moment.
Huntley: Sure.
[Begin Huntley 2]
Warren: Well, one of the important things that Frank always told me, and that I’ve
always thought of being connected with Fred Cole, and I wonder how that played with
the alumni’s affection or lack thereof is the issue of integration at Washington and Lee.
Huntley: Well, yeah. Are you [pointing to the recording machine] on again?
Warren: I am.
Huntley: Oh. Cole didn’t really reap any significant negative reaction about that, because
not much about that got done. I mean, there was no integration to speak of until after
Cole’s time. The first black student here came from St. Paul’s down in southeast
Virginia, a boy named Leslie Smith, whom I was instrumental in recruiting. He came
here to law school. That was probably two years before Fred Cole stepped down. I’m
guessing that was 1967, ’66. That was the first black student at Washington and Lee. We
may have gotten one black undergraduate while Cole was still president. I’ve forgotten.
But the significant influx of black students didn’t occur until I became president.
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: And we managed to get a fairly sizable number over a period of one or two
years. So, I don’t think Cole really reaped much. The Leslie Smith enrollment was not
heavily publicized. Washington and Lee didn’t heavily publicize it, certainly. I don’t
recall alumni reacting to Cole on that score. There were issues—there was an issue about
an invitation to Martin Luther King, an account I’d be glad to tell you about. You’ve
probably got enough accounts of that already.
Warren: I think we do have—
Huntley: The ones you do have are probably wrong, incidentally.
Warren: Well then let’s hear your version.
Huntley: Well, my version is the accurate version because I was the only one who was
there [Laughter]. But that, again, did not achieve currency with the alumni, I don’t think.
There was some newspaper publicity about the fact that the invitation was withdrawn.

                                                                                                                               13
There was virtually no publicity about the final resolution of the issue, which is what
Cole would have drawn negative reactions from alumni about, which was: that resulted in
the change of the board policy where the board leaves the invitations of the speakers to
the faculty. In fact, he was re-invited, but he didn’t come. That never received any
publicity, so I don’t think that resulted in any negative fallout for Cole.

         Cole just couldn’t connect with alumni. That’s the best way I can put it: he just
couldn’t connect with them. The old board members that I referred to, he couldn’t
connect with them. Now, the King issue may have affected that somewhat. I think the
lack of connection there had already occurred. But, Cole did take steps with regard to the
board. We were dealing with Cole, so let’s stick with that. He did take significant and
effective steps with regard to the board. I helped him do this, because he asked me to
come over and—I’ve forgotten what year this would have been, Mame, but it was
probably ’65 or something like that.
Warren: That you became secretary?
Huntley: And I was also legal advisor.
Warren: Yes, it was ’66 for secretary, and I didn’t—
Huntley: Well, I had been legal advisor some time.
Warren: Before that.
Huntley: Yeah, informally. I don’t even think I was ever named that. I just gave him—
Warren: I couldn’t find an exact date.
Huntley: Well, you wouldn’t. I don’t think you’d find it. I don’t think there was ever any
letter appointing me legal advisor; I simply was the one who got—I was the person
whom he called on for legal advice.
Warren: Why do you think that is?
Huntley: Why did he call on me?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: I don’t know.
Warren: He had a whole faculty. Why did he pick you?
Huntley: I have no idea, Mame. I don’t know. Maybe he called Skinny Williams or
Charlie Light, and said, “Which one of your young fellows can help me?” They both
thought highly of me. They may have named me. I don’t know. But he asked me to come

                                                                                                                               14
over and help. It wasn’t the legalistic society we live in now. We didn’t need a lawyer. I
was able to help out with the legal issues there were; they were handled very easily.
There were one or two sticky wickets, but I did that for him, and I did the job of
secretary. The main reason he wanted me as secretary was to cope with the board. That’s
what that was all about. He didn’t need me.
Warren: Tell me what that means: cope with the board.
Huntley: What it means? Establishing a relationship with the board that would get things
done. He came to the conclusion I could do that. As secretary, you see, I attended the
meetings. That’s the reason he wanted me as secretary, so I could be in the meetings. He
didn’t need a secretary. A secretary is someone to take notes. He wanted somebody in the
meeting whom he trusted, and whose judgment he could tap, and who could assist him in
causing things to happen on the board. That’s what he wanted me to do. He didn’t tell me
that, because Cole didn’t tell you anything like that, but that was self-evident to me. I did
that for a couple of years, I guess, and was able to help. One of the things we did during
that brief interim just before he stepped down. I don’t know exactly when it was, but we
restructured the board. I must tell you it’s hard for me to how much of this occurred just
before he left, and how much occurred just after he left.
Warren: There was a lot of flux then.
Huntley: Really, it’s hard for me to remember exactly when what occurred, but the
process of reforming the board had begun under Cole. It involved two main elements.
One was slightly enlarging it, though not a lot. We enlarged it to what would have been a
dozen, or something like that. A dozen or fifteen. [Huntley clarifies: people like
Stemmons, Powell, Malone joined the Board—mentioned in an earlier addendum] I’ve
forgotten which. Not big. Never wanted a big board. And, created terms. That is, prior to
that they all had life tenure. I mean, the board never changed except by death. We
changed that and put a retirement age on of seventy, which I now think to be too young
[Laughter]. [[Huntley adds: Powell and Malone were big helps in getting that done. Both
were former heads of the American Bar Association.]
Warren: Interesting how the perspective changes, isn’t it?
Huntley: Retirement age of seventy and put them on terms. Initially, I think, six-year
terms. That’s been modified since, but I’ve forgotten. Did the proper grandfathering and

                                                                                                                               15
so on so that the life tenure thing didn’t affect the present board members, although most
of them did resign when they reached seventy, or resigned then if they were already past
seventy.
Warren: They did do that.
Huntley: Most of them did, not all of them. Not all. Several did. Several did.
Warren: Tell me, Bob, though—
Huntley: That was a job getting that done.
Warren: That’s what my question is. How do you persuade people to fire themselves?
Huntley: You just sit down and talk to them, explain to them the reasons why it’s in the
school’s interest to have stability on the board. You need stability, you need continuity on
the one hand, but you also need new blood from time to time, and you’ve got to figure
out a structure that allows you to do both, and that almost necessarily entails a retirement
age of some sort—I’m not fixed on when that’s got to be—and terms, preferably longish
terms so you have continuity with a possibility of succession at least once, or even more.
But, at least it gives a stopping point at which board members can gracefully leave the
board if they wish to do so, whereas with life tenure, fixed tenure, a board member can’t
leave without seeming to abandon ship, even if he wants to.

         So, you simply explain to them. They’re all intelligent people. They understood it,
and most of the things they served on were not life tenure. They understood it. And we
grandfathered it so nobody was required to resign in order to implement to plan. Some
did, but they weren’t required to. I think some did. I think Caskie resigned. So, we got
that done. I wrote a new charter, new bylaws for the board, which were adopted in—I
don’t know what year that would have been, Mame. [19]67? ’66? I can’t remember. But,
that was before I became president. So, the restructuring occurred before I became
president.

         And then Cole was able to locate—even though he was not terribly effective with
alumni, he had spotted people out there that he wanted, with whom the school had
connections. Stemmons was one, John Stemmons from Dallas. Dalleas, as he would have
called it. And Joe Lykes Jr., whom, of course, he would have known through his father,
and Lewis Powell, and [Rosser Lynn] Ross Malone. Now, those were potent people.
Malone and Powell were two of the most potent people in the country. So, Cole solicited

                                                                                                                               16
them for board membership and got them elected. I think all those were elected while he
was still president. I feel sure they were. The overlap was so close that I—I think they
were all elected while he was still president.
Warren: Yes, it was in the process. All that was happening.
Huntley: It was happening. And I had been to see all those with him [Cole] or for him.
Warren: So you actually went with him to talk to them about joining the board.
Huntley: Yes, I did.
Warren: All right, persuade me to join the board.
Huntley: Well, I don’t know how I did that, but it wasn’t difficult. Again, Washington
and Lee—I don’t recall ever asking anyone to join the board who didn’t accept. They
were, in every case, delighted. It didn’t require persuasion. Now, we did try to make the
point—or Cole made it less emphatically than later on we made it—that the board was
expected to give. But, that was not a point of great emphasis at that time, and generosity
with the school was not listed as an attribute. If it had been, maybe that would have
turned some of them off. I don’t know, although some of them became very generous
givers. Stemmons and Lykes certainly gave generously. Powell gave less generously, but
Powell had less money; but he did make gifts. Malone made some generous gifts.
Anyway, they accepted with alacrity. They were delighted in every instance. It didn’t
require any persuasion. I don’t recall having to persuade them at all. I went with Cole
only because of Cole’s timidity.
Warren: No one ever accused you of that.
Huntley: No. Actually, no one ever accused Cole of it. You had to know Cole pretty well
to know that. People read that generally as something else, as distance or self-assuredness
or something. It wasn’t those things. He was self-assured; that is, he knew what he knew.
But, he was timid. Just a timid man. A difficult thing to overcome, I guess. I never knew.
[Laughter.] My guess is you don’t have much timidity either, Mame.
Warren: Well, I was probably fairly shy as a child, but I’ve gotten past that.
Huntley: So anyway, by the time I became president, the board had been—I forgot to
mention one board member who had been on for a good while who was effective: Huston
St. Clair was a good board member. And, Jack Thomas had come on the board—John
Newton Thomas—had come on the board probably in ’65 or so. He was a good board

                                                                                                                               17
member, but new and sort of floundering, sort of dominated by the [Homer] Rocky Holt,
Jimmy Caskie, Hutcheson phalanx of the board. So, they were in the background. But,
Huston was a good board member—potentially a good board member. He hadn’t really
been called on. Gaines didn’t call on the board, and didn’t make the board belly to the
bar, either in terms of giving or in terms of anything else.
Warren: There were a lot of things—
Huntley: Commonly under Gaines, and at first under Cole, you couldn’t even get a
quorum of the board together for the meeting. There wouldn’t be a quorum present for a
board meeting. We’d have to have a meeting of the executive committee. Excuse me. If
you look back, you’ll see lots of those meetings were executive committee meetings
those early years. You couldn’t get a quorum. That was the reason.
Warren: Well, they were all doddering and couldn’t get here.
Huntley: Well, or didn’t see any importance in it. Nothing happened when they came.
They were just rubber stamping a few routine things. Things rocked along.
Warren: Well, that didn’t last for long.
Huntley: No.
Warren: Things changed. There were a lot of other—there was so much happening
toward the end of Cole’s administration and the beginning of yours, and we’re touching
on the themes, but they also fit into what was going on in higher education everywhere.
One of those was the whole concept of development, the whole concept of needing to fill
the tills.
Huntley: Right.
Warren: And it was under Fred Cole that Farris was tapped.
Huntley: No, Farris was working in the admissions office.
Warren: Yes, but by 1968, he’s becoming the head of development. Are you the one—
Huntley: I’m the one who put him in that job, Mame.
Warren: Okay. Tell me—
Huntley: Did he tell you differently?
Warren: No, no, no. I knew it happened right at the same time.
Huntley: I’m the one who put him in the job of development director.
Warren: But there had been a self study in 1966.

                                                                                                                               18
Huntley: Yes. I was active in that, too.
Warren: So all of that’s kind of blending together. Tell me about—
Huntley: I was very active in the self-study, as was Frank. Frank was very active in that
self study. Farris would not have been active in that. I don’t recall much about the self-
study, specifically, but the impetus for development was revealed as part of that. The
financial needs of the school were so self-evident. You didn’t need a self-study to
determine that.
Warren: Well, one of the things—
Huntley: To put not too fine a point on it, the school was broke.
Warren: Tell me all about that.
Huntley: The financial data are there. You can get them down and look at them yourself.
The endowment was, what? Eighteen million? Sixteen million? Something like that? And
yielding not even enough to fill the head of a pin. The annual giving was way under a
hundred thousand [dollars]. I don’t know, like, fifty thousand, maybe? We commonly had
to borrow the faculty payroll in late summer from local banks to meet the payroll. The
cash flow was so weak that until the first tuition payments came, we couldn’t pay the
faculty. We’d go to local banks and borrow the money. So, the school was broke. The
fact that it was broke was not generally known, and that was good because people don’t
give to something that’s losing.

         The school was reputed—this was both a negative and a positive for the school—
it was reputed among people who knew it, and among some alumni—to be a wealthy
school. There was the image of Mrs. DuPont always bailing us out—they didn’t see it as
bailing us out—always providing the resources, which, of course, she didn’t do. She
made gifts, but if you go back and look at those numbers, they’re really sort of year-end
closing gifts. So, they sort of closed the deficit at the end of the year: fifty thousand here,
a hundred thousand, whatever. I don’t know what it amounted to over time the total that
she gave, but my guess is it wasn’t more than a couple of million, I don’t think. I bet it
wasn’t that. Which was a lot more money then than it is now, Mame. You need to bear in
mind. I mean, like, twenty times as much now as then. But, Gaines had allowed the
image to be polished that Washington and Lee had wealth, and the facts of the school’s
finances were not ever publicized: deep, dark secrets. So much so that when Fred Cole

                                                                                                                               19
became president, he couldn’t really find out the financial condition of the school.
         [Earl] Mattingly was the treasurer, and was highly secretive. There was a point in

time I helped Fred find out what the conditions were. What was endowment and what
wasn’t endowment was not self-evident. After I became president, we had to hire an
accountant to do a huge study of the endowment to see what was quasi-endowment, what
was real endowment. Nobody had ever done that. That’s not uncommon, incidentally.
That’s frequently not done until you need to know. We didn’t know how much money
there was, and Mattingly had money squirreled away in various accounts that Cole didn’t
even know about. Not very much money, I might add. A rainy day fund, you know, here
and there.

         So, the school was financially in trouble. Cole knew that. He wasn’t able to get
that point emphatically across to the board. They didn’t seem to really appreciate that. I
don’t recall exactly what kind of conversations he had with the board on that study, but
they had the figures to the extent that he had them. But, I don’t think it was widely
appreciated—I know it wasn’t widely appreciated how badly off the school was
financially. And, of course, the budget that Cole had built—the annual expenditure
budget for faculty salaries, and other things too, but faculty salaries—had to be
supported. You weren’t going to cut the salaries back again.

         Since the resources with which he covered those had not been capitalized—as I
told you earlier, they were principal expenditures, largely—the only alternative to
maintain those levels and to improve them until we could raise money was to spend
endowment [Huntley clarifies: actually quasi-endowment.] No other choice. We couldn’t
create money out of the trees. And that’s what we did, as the records would show. I guess
the records still show that we spent—ran six-figure deficits for several years, which was a
lot of money in those days—with the board’s full awareness of a budgeted deficit spent
out of quasi-endowment. So, where were we?
Warren: So, there was a clear need to start a development office.
Huntley: Yeah. The person who was hired by Cole as the development chief was Jim
Whitehead. Whitehead came here from the association of independent colleges in New
York State—whatever that’s called in New York—the New York equivalent of the
Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges. Jim was running that, and Cole hired

                                                                                                                               20
Whitehead to come here and head development. I don’t know the answer to this question:
how long Whitehead remained as development guy, but he phased pretty quickly into an
assistant to Mattingly, because I think Cole needed him there more than he—again, as I
told you, he couldn’t find out what the finances were. Mattingly didn’t tell him.
Mattingly saw himself as reporting to the board. He really did. He thought his duty was to
the board. The board was some amorphous being in the sky. He didn’t see himself as
working for the president.
Warren: And he was both secretary and treasurer.
Huntley: Yeah, he was. So, Cole put Whitehead in, I guess, for that reason. I don’t really
know this, now. This is speculation. Cole never told me this, and neither did Whitehead,
although you could certainly ask Whitehead. But Cole put him in there, I think, to
establish a foot in the door of the treasury, because all that was down there was Mr.
Mattingly and his bookkeeper named Andrew Varner, and Vernon Snyder, who was a
very competent financial guy, but had no role in financial decisions. That was it. He put
Whitehead in down there.

         Now, Whitehead was not trained in money management. He was not an
accountant, and not trained in financial structure, but Whitehead is bright and helped
Cole there. But, my point is he did not remain long in development. I say long; I don’t
know whether it was just a year or two. It wasn’t long. We didn’t raise any money. They
had one campaign and it fell short of that. It was a campaign for a couple of million and
they didn’t raise it. I’ve forgotten what it was—maybe two million—and they didn’t get
it. Well short of it. So, there was no development office when I became president. If there
was, I can’t think who it was.
Warren: No, they really had just established a need for it.
Huntley: You’ll find that Whitehead held that title when he first came, but not for long.
So, Farris—I put Farris in that position. I can’t tell you to save my life how I decided on
Farris. I just don’t know. But, I already knew that by the time I became president. I
already knew that. I don’t know how I knew that. Well see, I knew everybody.
Warren: You had a good gut feeling.
Huntley: Well, I knew everybody. I had a big advantage over—I knew everybody on the
campus. The campus was small in those days. You knew everybody, and the community

                                                                                                                               21
was close-knit. That’s the feature of the school that needs to be emphasized: it was a
close-knit, devoted community of faculty and the others—not just faculty—the staff, and
the grounds crew. It was a devoted group, loved the school, would do anything for it. It
was an extraordinary time to be here, a happy time to be here. These comments about the
finances make it sound like an unhappy place; it was not an unhappy place. It was an
extremely happy place. That’s why I was here. I didn’t have to be here. A happy place to
be, it really was. Actually, that was true the whole time I was here. It may well still be
true; I don’t have any way of knowing. But, it was a very happy place. The sense of
community was palpable, really. So, the financial plight of the school was not uppermost
in everybody’s mind. It’s not that everybody went around with a bleak aspect. They
didn’t. Things were going okay. People lived on what they made. They didn’t live
extravagantly, but don’t need to live extravagantly in Lexington.
Warren: No, you don’t. That’s part of its charm. I’m going to stop for a moment.
Huntley: So, it was not a great malaise settled over the school. Any implication of that
sort is simply incorrect.
Warren: I’m going to stop for just a moment.
[Begin Huntley 3]
Warren: Yes, that certainly was always—I’ve always been impressed by this as a very
happy place, although I came a little after. But, do tell me the story of—Fred Cole
resigned, and I’m curious about whether it was his choice to go. Was there any nudging
him out the door?
Huntley: Not that I know of. I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. I doubt if
there’s anybody alive who knows. I was as close to that situation as anybody could have
been. I saw Cole literally every day. I traveled with him. I was also teaching full time at
the law school, but I was young and had plenty of vinegar in those days. But, he didn’t
talk about those things with me. I don’t know. He told me he was leaving before he, in
fact, announced it, but not much before he announced it.
Warren: Did it take you by surprise?
Huntley: No, it did not. He said he thought the time had come for him to move on, that
he thought the school would benefit from other leadership. That’s about all he told me.
That he was pleased with the new blood on the board; he thought that was going to give a

                                                                                                                               22
new president a good start, and that the school needed new leadership.
Warren: And he had named you as dean.
Huntley: He named me the dean of the law school, or I was named as the dean of the law
school. He was president when I was named.
Warren: Yes. That was not Bill Pusey; that was Fred Cole.
Huntley: Yes, oh yes.
Warren: Okay.
Huntley: Pusey became acting president just in the fall of that year of ’68, ’67.
Warren: For about fifteen minutes.
Huntley: Yeah, for a while. Until Christmastime. Fred left at the end of the ’66/’67
academic year. I don’t know whether he left in June or July or August, but he left in the
middle of that year, in the summer. Pusey was appointed by the board as interim
president—acting—I’ve forgotten the term they used, but something—when Cole left. He
remained in that position until I became president at the first of the following year in the
winter, at the beginning of the second term of 1968 was when I assumed office. January
25, or February 2, or something. I’ve forgotten the exact date. The beginning of the
second term.

         Cole didn’t share with me his reasoning, but it didn’t surprise me, because of
course I could see the difficulties he was having and I couldn’t disagree with him. I didn’t
disagree with him. He didn’t ask my opinion, incidentally. He didn’t say, “What do you
think about this?” and I didn’t tell him what I thought about that. I said, “I understand.” I
did understand. I did ask him did he have ideas for his successor, and he said, no he
didn’t. He didn’t share that with me at all. If he had at that point thought of me—and I
think in retrospect that he had—I didn’t know it, nor suspect it, nor guess it. Nor did the
possibility that that would occur ever cross my mind. Not once crossed my mind. I was
very happy in the job I was doing. I came back here to teach with no intention of being an
administrator at all, and no desire to be an administrator. I became dean of the law
school. I was delighted with that because I knew the law school needed enormous—had
to take some enormous steps forward in the immediate future, or face disaster, and I
thought I could help lead it to do that. So, I was excited to have that position, and the
thought that I would move into the presidency really never crossed my mind, nor would I

                                                                                                                               23
have wanted it to cross my mind, nor did I want to do it when I was asked.
Warren: Tell me.
Huntley: I didn’t want to do it. I just explained to you I was doing the job I wanted to do.
What I really enjoyed doing more than anything else was teaching law. I was better at
that than anything else I ever tried. I knew that. You know, you know when you can do
things and when you can’t. I was good at that. As dean of the law school, I thought I
could serve a role that no one else was positioned to serve at that moment on the law
faculty, and I didn’t think we could attract someone else of the proper quality to get that
job done. So, I took that job because I thought maybe I could do it, and I sensed myself as
doing that for—see, I was a young man. I was only thirty-seven when I became dean of
the law school. Thirty-eight, thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. I turned thirty-eight that June. I
thought I would do that and in due course we’ll build this school up, strengthen the
faculty, and I could go back to teaching.

         You didn’t remain dean forever at Washington and Lee in those days. All
Washington and Lee deans were teachers in those days. All through my presidency, they
were all teachers. They were people who came out of the classroom and went back to the
classroom. Bill Pusey would be an example of that. They didn’t see themselves as
professional deans as now they do. The concept of a class of people known as college
administrators was not known here. And that was a good thing in my opinion.

         So, deans were not necessarily deans for a day, but they were deans for a period
of time, and then moved back to teaching in an institution that believed itself to be about
teaching. That’s what it was all about: teaching. That’s what people who worked here
wanted to do. So, to become a dean was a duty, not a joy. It was a duty. That’s the way it
was perceived by Pusey, and by all the fellows who served as dean here. So, that’s the
way I saw it.

         So, where do you want to go from there?
Warren: I want to know when you became—when you were named president, how did
you switch those gears? Did you turn to mentors? Did you have people who were
particularly important to you at that time?
Huntley: Well, the gears had already begun to switch. I mean, Cole had made the
changes I’ve mentioned on the board, the personnel changes. He had, to a degree,

                                                                                                                               24
positioned the board for the financial needs the school had. They hadn’t addressed them,
really, but he had positioned it. Don’t misread me by saying that I think Cole was in some
way negative. He was not. They knew what was going on to the degree he was capable of
telling them. He was a highly intelligent man.

         So, the gears that needed shifting, needed changing was developing a
methodology for raising money, analyzing what the need would be. Analyzing what the
need would be was less difficult than raising it, though, because while the analysis of the
long-term need is always complex, the need was so immediate that one didn’t need to do
a whole lot of painful analysis to decide what the hell it was. We did some analysis. We
did do analysis, but we had to establish our ability to raise money in big chunks over a
reasonable time period of five to ten years, had to get from here to there. Had to survive
from now ’til then. Fairly simple, really. Fairly simple to see what you’ve got to do. We
had to develop ways of telling people that message.

         The best way to tell that message was to tell it just like I just told you. I found that
to be the best way. I never described the school as broke. I was less candid with them
than I have been with you on that score, but I gave them the numbers from which they
could infer the school was broke. I never described it that way, but I made it clear to them
by giving them the numbers where we had to get, and what the issue of getting there was
going to be. I talked about that. The faculty knew. I told the faculty that. I kept the faculty
apprised of the school’s financial situation from the beginning, something that had not
occurred before. I informed them of the financial condition of the school, and did it in a
way that I told them I was sure we could overcome it, and this was what we had to do and
what we were doing.
Warren: Would you do that at faculty meetings?
Huntley: At faculty meetings, yes, but not for long. Very briefly. I would begin each
faculty meeting with a comment if I had any and didn’t always have them. Then I would
not say anything more. I would preside after that. Of course, I talked to the faculty whom
I know. The senior faculty knew, and the committees. The advisory committee is the
most important—was. I have to speak in the past tense. It may still be the most important
faculty committee, which advises the president. That’s what it’s advisory to. The
president who’s got any sense listens to it. The faculty who has any sense elects its best

                                                                                                                               25
people to it, and the faculty has sense. It always did elect its best people to it. The
advisory committee was also the committee that decides on faculty tenure, which, of
course, gives it a lot of importance. But that’s really not its most important function. Its
most important function is advisory to the president, and I used it for that purpose all the
time. I talked to the faculty advisory committee about lots of things. Not everything, but
lots of things.
Warren: Were those regularly scheduled meetings?
Huntley: Oh, yes. Met every week. If in need, more often than that. Long meetings. The
people elected to that committee were—the faculty repeated themselves on this and that
was good. Bill Jenks, Sid Coulling, Westbrook Barrit, Ed Hamer: those were regulars on
the committee, on the advisory committee.

         There was the faculty executive committee, which dealt with more mundane
things: student petitions and graduation issues and things of that sort. That was elected,
too, and that was usually also always a strong committee, but usually a slightly more
junior tier of faculty were elected to that. The faculty was extremely good at knowing
how to do that and doing that. The president played no role in that. I didn’t recommend
committee members or anything like that. Never. Never intruded on that committee of the
faculty. They knew that. They appreciated that. They really did appreciate that.
Warren: I have to say that one of the files I spent some time with was the remarkable,
truly remarkable letters of congratulations you got from members of the faculty when you
were named president. They were so heartfelt.
Huntley: They were.
Warren: And I know a lot of those people, and some of them were very moving. They
were not just rote letters.
Huntley: Well, the letters they wrote when I left were even more moving. I don’t know
whether they’re there or not. I may have those.
Warren: I’m not sure. I was concentrating on—
Huntley: The letters that the Jenkses and the Coullings and all wrote me when I left were
the ones I remembered most strongly. A letter that some twenty of them wrote just three
years ago about naming a building for me. You probably haven’t seen that letter.
Warren: I have not.

                                                                                                                               26
Huntley: Well, it’s not in the files. But that letter—I didn’t get that letter at the time, of
course. The president, then Burish, subsequently gave me a copy of it after the decision
had been made to name a building for me. He said, “I thought you ought to have a copy
of this.” I’ve got it if you want it.
Warren: I would love to see it, and I do think it should be in the files.
Huntley: I can still dig it up. And the letter that the faculty sent me when I stepped down,
which was drafted by Jim Starling, who was a senior member of the faculty. Starling was
another who was elected with some regularity to the advisory committee. He was head of
the biology department. When I stepped down, he was the senior member of the faculty,
so he signed the faculty statement to me when I quit, when I resigned. But, I wanted to
quit while I still had that. Plus, the fifteen-year number, as I’ve told you, was stuck in my
head from Gaines.
Warren: Well, we’ve got a lot to talk about before you resigned.
Huntley: Oh, I don’t know. Well, anyway, let’s see. But the faculty welcomed me as
president. I’ll tell you a little episode that they would all—most of them are dead now,
but the ones that were around, they would remember. In about 1965 or ’66, a queer little
episode occurred here, and you may not have stumbled on this. This is maybe worth
something to you. Do you think we can have any more coffee, though? They don’t have
coffee up here, do they? Do you have to send all the way to the bowels of the building to
get coffee?
Warren: No, we don’t. I’m going to stop.
[Begin Huntley 4]
Warren: All right. Here we are continuing after a nice, pleasant yak. Now, tell me:
You’re thirty-eight years old. You’re only eleven years away from being a student at
Washington and Lee—
Huntley: That’s true. Of course, I was an old student. I’d been out for four years between
my two student lives, my undergraduate and law careers. I was out for four years, three of
those in the Navy. But you’re right; only eleven years out of law school. So, what was
your question?
Warren: My question is: I’ve read the letters, so I know you were warmly embraced, but
how did that feel to you? Did it feel appropriate? Did it feel right?

                                                                                                                               27
Huntley: Yeah. Yes, it did, as best I can recall it. I am not, I should tell you, an
introspective person. I don’t recall ever doing any navel gazing, so I don’t know that I
can remember exactly how I felt. I certainly felt I could do the job. Well, I felt the job
needed doing. Put it this way: I knew the job needed doing; I didn’t see who else was
going to do it. It would be wrong for me to say I felt I could do the job. I felt I had a shot
at doing the job that made it worth trying, and I didn’t see any other choices. Filling the
position of president at Washington and Lee at that time would have been very difficult,
in my opinion.
Warren: Tell me why.
Huntley: Because of the financial condition of the school, and the lack of history in
terms of raising money, and the fact that the only little fundraising effort they’d made in
the recent past had failed. It would have been difficult. The relationships between the
outgoing president and the board were tense, which would not have made it easy. I think
they would have had trouble finding a president that was going to devote the energy
required, as well as have the knowledge of the place. I could hit the ground running.
Almost no one else could do that.

         I knew everybody on the campus: every groundskeeper, every faculty member,
every secretary. It wasn’t hard to do then, incidentally. I knew that I could, for at least a
reasonable period of time, command their allegiance—their support. I should say support.
I knew what their jobs were. I knew that most of them were competent to do their jobs. I
didn’t think it would require a great deal of internal direction. People in their jobs that
were making things happen were able to make those things happen. Buildings and
Grounds—now called Facilities Management—was well run under Pat Brady, and he had
good backup people in Jim Arthur and others. That’s a highly important function
frequently overlooked by administrators as being important, but if the facilities aren’t
maintained and the grounds aren’t kept, [there’s] a lot of trouble. That was well run.

         The financial end was the weak end. No one running the finances; there really
wasn’t. There was no handle on the financial situation. I thought I could learn how to do
that and could devote my energies to that effectively.

         The faculty: I had great confidence in the faculty and the faculty’s ability to run
their end of things. I think that confidence was justified. They were good. They didn’t

                                                                                                                               28
mind playing their governance role; they didn’t mind me playing mine. I didn’t intrude
on their domain and they didn’t intrude on mine. We had no clear definition of where
each one left off and the other took up, but we sort of sensed it. But the decisions about
expenditures, they knew I was going to make. I was an absolute dictator where financial
matters were concerned and they knew that. I think they thought that was necessary. So,
of course I could have squeezed this or that academic program if I had chosen, but I
didn’t do that, and they had enough confidence in me to know I wasn’t going to do that. I
wasn’t going to use the power of the purse to invade the domain of the faculty, and I
never did. They knew that. I shared with them each year what the financial budgetary
goals had to be for the succeeding year, the limits within which they had to operate. They
knew that when they began to make their budgets, began to submit to me their budgetary
requests. They lived within the dimensions that I was able to describe to them amazingly
well. They cared. So, I really didn’t have to negotiate very much. Very little negotiation.
Very little bargaining. I don’t recall any. There must have been some. I don’t remember
it. Very little negotiation going on, the old: you give me that; I’ll give you this. I don’t
remember that. I don’t think it happened much.

         So, yes, I thought I could be more effective than Cole had been in addressing that
kind of issue. And I had learned a lot from Cole by watching him. He was a superb
administrator, with the disadvantages—with the flaws that I’ve described, with the
weakness I’ve described. But I was devoted to Fred Cole, and I think he was to me.
Warren: Did you remain—did you continue to have interactions with him after he went
to Washington?
Huntley: I did. He became the head of the Council of Library Resources in Washington,
which is a sub-creature of the Ford Foundation, had been created by the Ford Foundation.
I guess it was funded by the Ford Foundation. I saw him many times in the three- or four-
or five-year period that followed that. Several times, anyway. Not many times, several
times.

         He never once proffered me advice after he stepped out as president, nor did I
ever ask him. I never asked his advice. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted it, but I didn’t
think he wanted to give it. We understood each other pretty well, so we never had any of
that exchange after he stepped out of the presidency. Didn’t have much of that exchange

                                                                                                                               29
before he stepped down. We just didn’t have that kind of relationship. As I’ve told you,
Cole was not a talker. He kept his own council. But, yes, I saw him. My dearest friend on
the faculty was a man named Ed Turner. Did you know Ed?
Warren: No, but I know the name.
Huntley: Ed was the head of the Department of Physics. Ed had been a classmate of
mine in undergraduate school here, had gone later to MIT and gotten his doctorate, and
was the head of the Department of Physics here, a wonderful person. He died of a variety
of Hodgkin’s—which could probably today be cured—about twenty-five years ago. But
he and I had done several things for Cole while Cole was president that bear on this issue
of the library resources issue. Cole liked Turner, too. Turner was one of Cole’s boys.

         He had asked Ed and me on two successive summers—Ed and I were hired by the
Ford Foundation—this was an amusing episode—for two summers to check up on grants
the Ford Foundation had made to libraries across the United States to enhance the
technological capacity of the libraries. Proposals had come in from everybody: the New
York Public Library, all the libraries in California. Everybody had made proposals to the
Ford Foundation. They granted lots of them. Millions of dollars’ worth of grants had been
made for library technology. This was before the magic of the digital age. It wasn’t here
yet. We were still dealing with microfilm, and microfiche, and film leaders, and so on.
There were aspirations in this director. Ed Turner predicted this would happen—the
physicist—he saw this coming, but it hadn’t come yet. We spent two summers. We were
sort of the hatchet men for the Ford Foundation. We were to go out to these places and
see what they had done with the money.
Warren: This was when Fred Cole was there, so it was after you were president?
Huntley: No, no. It was when he was president. He had a close relationship with the Ford
Foundation.
Warren: Then? Okay.
Huntley: While he was president of Washington and Lee, he had a close relationship
with the Ford Foundation, and with the Ford Motor Company, and some money came to
us from the Ford Foundation because of that relationship. So, it was while he was
president. His interest in library technology is why he ended up with the job at the
Council of Library Resources. But, he had a great interest in that and a great interest in

                                                                                                                               30
the Ford Foundation. He knew the people who ran the Ford Foundation. We were
introduced to them by him. I’ve forgotten who they were now.

         So, we were sent off as hatchet men to check up on—you can imagine how
popular we were with the recipients. Of course, they’d all submitted reports to the Ford
Foundation. We had those. We were sent in to see, as you say, what goes behind the
memo. We were supposed to go actually see what really did happen. We submitted
reports on every one of them, every grantee, and it was a dismal picture. Never had so
much money been wasted on so little as we proved had been the case with these grants.
As I said, we were not very popular, but we had a good time. Ed was the physicist. He
understood the technology of it. I was the—I don’t know what I was. But, anyway, we
had a good time doing that, and got to know Fred Cole pretty well during that period.

         And then we continued—Ed Turner and I both continued to see him occasionally,
after he went to Washington. Not regularly, but occasionally.
Warren: I wondered about Edgar Shannon. Had he become the head of UVA [the
University of Virginia] yet?
Huntley: It was about that time. I don’t remember when Edgar became president of
University of Virginia. I think he already was. I think he was by the mid-’60s.
Warren: I think he was dealing with the same problems you were.
Huntley: Certainly by ’70, but I think he became president in the mid-’60s.
Warren: I think so, too.
Huntley: He came on our board here while I was president. I asked him to come on this
board in the early ’70s.
Warren: What was your relationship with him?
Huntley: It was a good, a close relationship. It was not intimate. We hadn’t known each
other closely previously. He came on the board here, though, and we became very close
after that. He was a fine person, a wonderful person. He and his wife both. He was a very
good trustee to Washington and Lee.
Warren: I wondered, since the two of you were dealing with a lot of the same kinds of
issues, whether you commiserated over them.
Huntley: Sure, we did. I don’t recall specifically those conversations, but yeah, we did.
He was very helpful to me, very useful to me. Maybe I was to him. I don’t remember. I

                                                                                                                               31
had a good relationship with a number of the members of the board who were very, very
useful to me.

         The rector of the board when I became president was Huston St. Clair, whom I
mentioned earlier, getting up in years a bit. Had not been very active on the board, but
became active, very responsive to me. I was devoted to Huston. He was just a wonderful
person. He was a medical doctor, but had never practiced medicine, and ran the family
coal mining business out in West Virginia. A highly intelligent guy. Not the most
energetic person in the world, but a highly intelligent, likeable, lovable man. He remained
as rector for several years after I became president. I don’t know if it was two years,
maybe. Two or something like that. He was succeeded by Jack Thomas—John Newton
Thomas—who was a fine rector. He [was succeeded] by Ross Malone, who died,
unfortunately, of brain cancer only about a year into the job, and then Marshall Nuckols,
and then Jim Ballengee. Those are the five rectors when I was president. All good. So,
where were we?

         Yes, I felt I could do the job. I recall distinctly deciding—fretting—over whether
to take the job. But this wasn’t introspection about whether or not I could do it. I wasn’t
gazing at my navel to decide whether or not my psyche would survive. I didn’t want to do
the job. I was doing the job I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to be president. It wasn’t so
much that I decided I couldn’t do it, but I didn’t really want to do that. I would talk to
[my wife] Evelyn about this, and one other person: Bill Pusey. But this was during
Christmastime of 1967.

         Huston St. Clair contacted me in December. I don’t know the exact date.
December of ’67. I was on the search committee, by the way, the internal search
committee, the faculty search committee, as the dean of the law school. I was on that
committee and we were looking around for candidates. The candidate whom I favored
was Sam Spencer, who was president of Mary Baldwin [College], who I thought was
superlative and I still think was superlative. I don’t know whether we could have gotten
Sam or not. That I don’t know, but I would have tried. It was he whom I favored as a
candidate for the job, and I think he would have been good. He went on to be president of
Davidson [College], as I’m sure you know. Maybe you didn’t know. He left Mary
Baldwin. About a year after I became president, he became president of Davidson. We

                                                                                                                               32
came to be very close friends. Still do. We talked a lot about the jobs when he was at
Davidson and I was here. I would have liked to have seen him take this job, and he might
have taken it. I don’t know whether he would have or not.

         Anyway, Huston called—I don’t think he was asked, though it’s possible they
felt—the committee was sort of talking about this. Unbeknownst to me, the committee
met without me. I don’t know when they did this, whether any record exists of it. But,
they met without telling me they were meeting at some stage in November or December
and fashioned a communication with the board—with St. Clair—recommending that I be
considered. I don’t know what that communication looks like. I don’t know how it was
communicated, or who said what to whom, or whether any record exists of that. I don’t
know. But, there was some communication from the committee to the board, because the
board, of course, knew me in the capacity of secretary.

         I had been involved in some of the discussions with them about some of the
thorny issues, like the Martin Luther King issue, and one or two others, and the
integration issue, that is, admitting the first black law student. The first black student was
a law student. I had been active in those discussions with them one-on-one. I didn’t
discuss things with the board as a whole as secretary. Cole did that, but I would talk to
them one-on-one. They knew me in that way.

         So, anyway, somehow the word got to the rector that the committee thought the
board ought to consider me. St. Clair called me and told me that. I took, I believe, about
ten days to consider it. I discussed it intensely with Evelyn, who insisted it was entirely
my decision and she wasn’t going to attempt to influence me on the subject, and she
didn’t attempt to. I wanted her to, because I knew it was going to be a dreadful chore for
her—which it was—a chore she performed absolutely magnificently. She was the best
president’s wife the school has ever had. She was amazing. Anyway, she’s got to have
known it was going to involve that, but she didn’t voice any opinion about it except to tell
me I ought to do what I thought I ought to do. I ought to do what my conscience told me
to do. Never questioned my ability to do it, just shouldn’t do it or should do it if I thought
I should do it.

         I talked to Bill Pusey, who encouraged me to accept it. I told him I would not
consider it unless I knew for sure that he would remain as dean of the college, that I

                                                                                                                               33
wouldn’t consider it otherwise. He assured me that he would. We didn’t agree on a time
frame, but I said, “You’ve got to be willing to give me at least two years.” He didn’t want
to remain as dean. I want to explain that to you: deans wanted to teach in those days. He
wanted to go back and be head of the Department of German. But he promised me he
would remain at least a period of time—I think it was two years—if I would accept the
job. That was the only other person I talked to before calling St. Clair and telling him that
I would accept. That’s my recollection of it.
Warren: Charlie McDowell told me a story that I don’t know if it’s true.
Huntley: Young Charlie, yeah.
Warren: That you went down to his parents’ house.
Huntley: Yep.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Huntley: [Chuckling] Well, after I had told St. Clair I’d do it, and the board formally met
and extended the invitation, it hadn’t yet been announced. It was going to be announced,
like, the next day or a day or two later, so it wasn’t much premature. I had a habit of,
when I left the law school in the late afternoon, usually around five o’clock or so, I’d stop
by the McDowells’. I was very fond of the McDowells. I was fond of all those old law
faculty members. They were all like sort of fathers or uncles to me. Well, I stopped by the
McDowells’ and their habit at that time was to eat dinner at about 5:15 or so, the reason
for that being that Charlie drank too much. His doctor told him to cut back on drinking,
and he decided he needed to eat earlier if he—at least I think that was the reason.
Anyway, they ate about 5:15. He was fully retired. Catherine was still working, of course.
He was retired, but she was still working. They sat in the breakfast room in little wicker
chairs, I remember, at the little breakfast room table, eating their dinner. I always sat
down on the floor, the linoleum floor, with my back in a corner, and they’d pour me a
glass of bourbon. That’s all anybody drank in those days. They’d pour me a glass of
bourbon, and I sat there and drank the bourbon, and chatted with them for maybe fifteen,
twenty minutes. Not every day, but probably twice a week before going home and joining
Evelyn.

         So that day I sat down and then I said, “Well, y’all, I’ve got some news for you.”
They went on eating, and I said, “The board’s asked me to be president and I’ve

                                                                                                                               34
accepted.” They were completely silent. Catherine kept on eating and so did Charlie—old
Charlie, who I didn’t call Charlie, by the way. I called him Mr. McDowell. I didn’t call
her Catherine, either. He looked up and he said, “Catherine, get the president a chair.”
[Laughter]. That was the only comment.
Warren: That’s the same story Charlie told me.
Huntley: Never did they congratulate me, or say how good they thought it was. Never a
word of that, just: “Get the president a chair.” That’s a true story. It happened exactly that
way. They were characters.
Warren: Well, speaking of characters. One of the things that I remember learning about
when I first came here was hearing about this Monday lunch bunch. Tell me about why
that was important, and was that something that Cole had had, or was that something you
instituted?
Huntley: No, Cole didn’t do that. I just got together people who reported to me every
Monday for lunch. I didn’t think there was anything unusual about that. We took turns
reporting on things we thought were significant in the areas for which we were
responsible. Or, if I had particular things I wanted to report, I would tell them that. But,
generally, it was unstructured and people just shared with the group things that had
concerned them during the past week. [Huntley adds: More about the other administrators
under me: there was Ed Atwood, a fine economist who had served Fred Cole well as dean
of students, became dean of the commerce school for me; Lew John, a teacher of
business administration in the commerce school, became dean of students—these were
excellent at their jobs. I was lucky. And significantly Bill Watt of the chemistry
department followed Bill Pusey as dean of the college—he was excellent at his new job.]
Warren: Was this at Lee House?
Huntley: No, at the dining hall across from [Lee House, in] what was then the dining
hall—Evans Dining Hall—in room 114, which was sort of the meeting room in those
days.
Warren: Okay, so it was not with the students all around you.
Huntley: No, no students, just the people who reported to me. No students. We would sit
there [for] about an hour, no more than an hour and a half, certainly. Sometimes there
wasn’t much to say. That wasn’t the only time I met with the people who reported to me,

                                                                                                                               35
you understand. I saw them every week individually in addition to that. But, they were—
it was good. We had good times, good exchanges. It built a sense of cohesion among the
group.

         Everybody knew what everybody else was doing, so there were no mysteries
around the campus, I don’t think. Not many, anyway. There are always some, I guess.
But, it continued to be a happy place, and even when things went awry as they sometimes
did, people seemed to be able to cope with them. As I said, we had financial straights; we
were strained financially, but people learned how to live with that and as time went on,
that improved. It took a while for that momentum to develop because there had been no
history of—the habit of giving had not been developed, inculcated into the alumni
psyche. It was clear it had to be alumni. Studies revealed with self-study, or whatever the
foundation—I knew that wasn’t going to work. Washington and Lee has never been a
foundation darling. It was not the kind of school foundations like. I knew that.
Warren: Tell me why.
Huntley: Well, it’s not a research institution; it’s a teaching institution, and foundations
really don’t like teaching institutions. They say they do, but they don’t. I mean, we’ve
had some foundation support over time, but if you want to add it all up and compare it to
what’s come to us from alumni, it would be a scratch on the surface. So, I knew that the
kind of support the school had to have—the continuous, sustaining support—wasn’t
coming from foundations or corporations. That’s all there; you have to go after that, too,
but that’s not going to be the cake. That might be some of the icing, but it wasn’t going to
be the cake. That was perfectly clear to me, and, I think, to anybody who considered the
situation.

         We had to build on the devotion of alumni, which I knew was there, but had
simply not been tapped. They were really not aware that the need was acute. They really
weren’t. They had not been invited to share the burden, and they hadn’t shared it. The
board hadn’t been invited to share the burden, and they hadn’t shared it, with some
exceptions. So, nobody felt burdened, and had to be made to feel burdened in a way that
was going to tap their devotion rather than their despair.
Warren: So how did you all make that happen?
Huntley: We talked, we talked. We talked endlessly. Farris was just a workhorse, and

                                                                                                                               36
others, too. Farris was a workhorse, and he didn’t know what he was doing any more than
I did. He was new at it. He had never been in development. I guess we probably sent him
off to some schools. I don’t know whether we did or not. You’d have to ask him. I think
he learned most of what he learned by doing it.
Warren: He said there was a consultant who came here.
Huntley: There was. I’ll tell you about him. But most of what Farris did, he learned by
doing. He went out and saw people and talked to them one-on-one. Of course, Farris was
fully informed. There was no fact about the school that Farris didn’t know. Farris had
great judgment in terms of how to share information with other people. We didn’t have a
lot of deep, dark secrets, but didn’t want to go out and tell people: Look, the school’s
broke. You better bail us out before we fail. I mean, he knew better than to say that.
People don’t give to losing enterprises, you know. But he was able to convince them, and
I was able, convincingly, to tell them, to let them know that the school had the need for
their help, that we needed them. That if they loved this school and wanted to see it
prosper and be strong, they damn well better belly to the bar. I think we were able to say
that in just those words, convincingly.

         My credentials as an alumnus and a teacher were helpful, and Farris is also an
alumnus. At that time, that was really important. It might not have been important later
on—I don’t know—but it was important at that time. We were able to convince them. So,
it was mainly just hard work and shoe leather. I mean, I traveled at least—I’ll have to
look back at the records sometime. I would judge that I was probably away from here
traveling maybe 30, 35 percent of the time, Evelyn with me. She went with me most of
the time.
Warren: How did you know where to go and whom to talk with?
Huntley: Well, I knew a lot of alumni, of course. Bill Washburn, who was alumni
director, knew these people, was extremely helpful to me, went with me on many of these
trips. He set up the meetings, set up the meetings with alumni chapters, of course. Farris
by now had begun to know individual alumni, and the alumni chapter meetings,
Washburn usually went with me—Libby and Bill usually went with Evelyn and me to the
chapter meetings. So, chapter meetings everywhere. Sometimes we’d be on the road four
and five chapter meetings in a row, four and five nights. Four or five nights out of seven

                                                                                                                               37
we’d be—we’d go in a week and see five chapters, and speak at every one of them.
         My great story about that was that Libby and Evelyn and Bill and I were on our

way up in the elevator to the roof of some hotel somewhere—God knows where—for one
of these alumni chapter meetings in those years. I said, “Libby, when are you going to get
a new dress?” She said, “When you get a new joke.” [Laughter] She never wore the dress
again; I never told the joke again.
Warren: Oh, that is so funny.
Huntley: The speeches I gave were never with notes. I knew the story well enough not to
have to have notes, and it’s more convincing if you don’t talk from notes. So, I was able
to speak without notes and time it to just about the length of time that they had tolerance
for. I had the ability to judge that: to tell when people were listening and when they
weren’t, to quit before they did. My job is to talk, yours is to listen; I’m going to quit
before you do. You know? I was able to judge that pretty well, I think, and not to talk
past the sale. So, we did that.

         And, of course, it was a slow process. You didn’t get immediate results from
those kinds of things. No overnight revolutions were potentially going to happen. They
didn’t happen. Very slow build-up. This is one of the things I want to do is look back at
the exact financial track, but I can tell you it was slow. The Annual Fund—I’ll bet you
the Annual Fund wasn’t fifty thousand dollars—I feel sure it wasn’t. We built it, and built
it, and built it. We began programs like the Lee Associates program. I remember the year
we had three Lee Associates. Three people gave at the level of one thousand dollars a
year. Can you believe that? So, that grew.
Warren: That was a small party.
Huntley: Slowly, slowly grew, but it grew to where it was hundreds. The Annual Fund
built, and built, and built. Also, I was very active was the Virginia Foundation for
Independent Colleges. I was president of that a couple of times, and gave them over the
course of the school year something like ten days out of the school year to the VFIC.
Warren: So you were working with Lea Booth there?
Huntley: Of course.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Huntley: Lea was very close. I was very close to Lea, as close to Lea as anybody was.

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He was wonderful. He was an alumnus, too, of course. Lea and Mary Morris. Lea died
last year. Marry Morris is still there. I still chat with her occasionally. Lea was
spectacular. He was one-of-a-kind, literally one-of-a-kind, and put that organization on
the map. It was, in those years, very important to the schools.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: Because it was a much larger percentage of their assets than it is now. We
raised—I didn’t look at the numbers, but the percentage was so much higher than it is
now. The numbers, of course, have gone up, but they haven’t gone up by enough to— At
that point, if the VFIC distributed to us a hundred thousand dollars, let’s say; that was a
big pile of money. It really was. That’s about what they were distributing to us: maybe
seventy-five, eighty—I think it got up to a hundred and fifty. A fair amount of money. It
closed the gap for me a number of times, and if it did that for me, some of the other
schools were even more penurious than we were. So, it was very important to these
colleges in those days.

         There were just a dozen of us. As time went on, over my opposition, they
enlarged it, allowed—I mean, I was in favor of keeping it at a dozen, period, and if
people didn’t like it, let them lump it. I thought that money could be raised for those
dozen, and if the explanation was being: So, why can’t you take in everybody? I didn’t
have any trouble answering that. But, eventually the—over Lea’s opposition, too. Lea
didn’t like it. Eventually, they started letting one, two, or three others in. Of course that
dilutes the message, because of the average strength of the schools goes down, and
dilutes the money, obviously. But, it was very important to us in those early years, much
less so now. It still is a nice sum of money, of course. But I worked hard at that. So, it
was a matter of shoe leather, and the board finally got activated.

         An often-forgotten trustee who I would like to get into the record was Stuart
Buxton from Memphis, Tennessee. Stuart was quiet, self-effacing, and relatively
inarticulate. Could not speak on his feet. I never forgot. It was the Memphis chapter in
one of the early years, and Stuart’s job was to introduce me, and he couldn’t. He just
couldn’t stand and speak. Somebody else did it for him. It was an embarrassing moment
for him. Stuart—and his wife was named Floyd: delightful people. Stuart had been one of
the old dyed in the wool Washington and Lee people, but he came around on all the

                                                                                                                               39
issues and became a very staunch trustee, a very staunch supporter of the school and of
me.

         It was Stuart who took the first step to get the board off its rear end. He called a
special meeting. The meeting was being held at the Hotel Roanoke, instead of here for
convenience. I don’t recall the reason why we chose that, but the board didn’t have time
to get here or something. Maybe I chose it. I don’t remember. The board meeting was
being held there. It was the mid-winter board meeting, probably in 1970. It might have
been 1971. I don’t know. ’70, I would guess—’69, maybe. Maybe ’69. And Stuart got the
board together without my knowledge or presence, the kind of thing that development
officers are trying to get boards to do and they never do. This happened without my input
and without Farris’s input.

         It happened spontaneously—well, not spontaneously. It happened because Buxton
made it happen. He wasn’t rector, you understand. He got the rector to call a special
meeting. He said, “I want to talk.” I wasn’t there, but the rector—who was by then
probably Jack Thomas, or it may have been Huston. I don’t recall—told me what
happened. Stuart put his own money on the table and said, “I don’t want a single one
from this room to leave here before you at least tell me what you’re going to do, and if
it’s anything less than what I’ve just done, you ought to be ashamed,” or something. I
don’t know what he said. But, whatever he said, it was effective and the board began to
give after that. All of them gave as a result of his assertion. I think it must have been ’69.
Not huge sums, now. I’ve forgotten what the amount of money he put on the table was,
maybe only a hundred and fifty or something. A lot of money in those days. Not all of the
board could afford that, but they all could afford something significant. They all made
gifts.

         Another story, though, that predates that one—before my first board meeting—
first significant board meeting. There may have been a board meeting in January, right
when I was first president. The next one would have been in the spring, I suppose. Before
the spring meeting, then, I bestirred myself—I’m sure I consulted with Farris. I don’t
remember—to think what I could do to get this thing started. I ended up calling together
three alumni whom I happened to know—didn’t know well, but I knew they were loyal
and rich: Jack Warner—not Senator Warner, Jack Warner of Tuscaloosa—Tom Broadus

                                                                                                                               40
Sr. of Knoxville, and Tom Fuller of Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. I knew all of those people
slightly, not by any means well. I knew they were all rich; I knew they were all devoted
alumni.

         I got them to come together in my living room, in the den of the Lee House, and
told them I needed some money to go to the first board meeting with. I needed to get
things going. As I recall, I told them the amount of money. I think I did. I left there with
three hundred thousand dollars from these three guys. I think a hundred thousand from
each, unrestricted, just money. That was a lot of money then. Bear in mind, they tried to
raise $2 million and only raised about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Three
hundred thousand was a whale of a lot of money. I went to the first board meeting and
was able to announce that, and it really served to punctuate things. It made a big
difference. All three of those guys gave subsequently, also. Of course, Jack Warner gave
lots more, and Tom gave more—both of the Toms did. The two Toms were not nearly as
rich as Jack, but they were rich enough to do that. I knew they could afford that, and they
did it.

         A fourth guy, whom I contacted not long thereafter—I think probably still before
the first board meeting, certainly not long after the first one—to supplement that amount
was a guy named Reed Johnston, whose son Bill Johnston later became the head of the
New York Stock Exchange, and is around here now. Reed was Bill’s father, and was a
fifty-year specialist on the New York Stock Exchange. He had survived the ’29 crash as a
specialist, and had the gold pen and all that—senior. I knew Reed somehow. I can’t tell
you how I knew him. I’d met him somehow. I went to New York to see him. He came
down here occasionally. I knew of him. I went to New York, went by to see him at the
Stock Exchange. Got to see him.

         People would always see me. Alumni would always see the president of
Washington and Lee. He saw me and I asked him if he could help us financially, and he
gave us fifty thousand on that visit. Those were, again, big bucks at that time. I know that
very well. I was able to take that to the table to help balance the books. Again, not
restricted money. Money I spent. [Laughter]

         So, things got started that way: shoe leather, the generosity of a handful of people
who were asked to be generous, the intervention of board members like Stuart Buxton.

                                                                                                                               41
All those things worked together to begin the ball slowly gathering moss. Slow, and
sometimes we wondered if it was ever going to.

         But one of the things that’s potentially forgotten now: just a couple of weeks ago,
maybe a month ago, Ken Ruscio asked me to meet with the committee of the board—I’ve
forgotten what name—the campaign steering committee, or the campaign committee, or
the campaign-something—and share with them the conditions under which we raised
money in the ’70s, because he was disturbed that they were bleak about the state of the
economy: The economy is so bad, they can’t be as aggressive as we were. He wanted me
to help offset that attitude, and I did the best I could, because the conditions—your
memory of that era—you were just a student. You wouldn’t know, but you might want to
look at the financial data from that era sometime and compare them with those of today.
Warren: I’m enough of an historian to know.
Huntley: Well, let me just give you a few data, a few points.
Warren: Please.
Huntley: The decade of the ’70s began with the Dow Jones Industrial Average around
800. It closed the decade with the Dow Jones Industrial Average around 800. In the
meanwhile, it went down as low as 450. During the decade, and extending into ’82—I
was still president then—during the decade, unemployment went into the teens. The
teens, now. We talk about unemployment now; then, it was in the teens, like fourteen.
Interest rates got as high as 16 percent. That was the great Carterian stagflation, the
imbecile [President Jimmy] Carter. It didn’t help any.

         Anyway, these were not ideal times to raise money. There were no appreciating
gifts, because nothing had appreciated. There were very few appreciating gifts, I should
say. So, the giving that was done was given from where it hurt. It came out of the pile.
Not out of the excess, but out of the pile. People had to be invited to give when it hurt.
Now, happily, the years that followed—’82, ’83—the years of the burgeoning economy
and the huge enhancement in the value of the stock market, of course pushed the school’s
endowment to huge levels. But, we didn’t get any help from that, any help at all from the
stock market in terms of the endowment enhancement during those years. It all had to be
added. But, it didn’t occur to us that that was unusual. One point to be made: it didn’t
occur to us that was unusual. What was unusual was what followed.

                                                                                                                               42
         Things remained stable—the inflation rate and the employment rate certainly
seemed to be unusual, but the failure of the stock market to redeem your errors was not
seen to be unusual. The point is that the money we raised had to be money that came out
of somebody’s principal. So, it’s amazing to me we succeeded when I look back at those
numbers, but the devotion was there. We could tap it, and we did.
Warren: That was a brilliant idea on Ken’s part to have you come in now and tell those
stories.
Huntley: Well, they seemed to appreciate it. They kept me there for about an hour or
more than that. I expected it to take about fifteen minutes; they kept me there a good
while.
Warren: And they were probably very surprised by what you had to say.
Huntley: Well, apparently they were. They told me afterwards that it had been very
helpful to them. I hope that’s true.
Warren: And probably many of them were students at the time.
Huntley: Sure they were.
Warren: And had no idea what you were up against.
Huntley: Exactly. Exactly right. So, anyway, we did have—and you mentioned a
consultant. We’re going to go get some lunch, aren’t we?
Warren: I think it’s time for a lunch break.
Huntley: All right, we’ll come back to this after lunch.
Warren: Well done.
[Begin Huntley 5]
Huntley: I got to work in the morning, maybe eight o’clock in the morning, and on the
front doorstep of Washington Hall—do you know this story?
Warren: Tell me.
Huntley: —there was a box of ashes. A box of wood ash. So, not more than a few
minutes had passed before I got into my office. The librarian—Henry Coleman it was
then—he called me and said, “Bob, the mace is gone.” The mace, in those days, sat—the
library was where the commerce school is now [Huntley Hall], of course—the mace sat
in the reading room on a table on display. It just sat there. It wasn’t locked, or in a cage,
or anything. It just sat there. It had vanished. So, of course I was being invited to infer

                                                                                                                               43
that somebody had burned the mace and left the ashes on the doorstep. I was skeptical
about that. I had been around here a long time.

         The faculty was up in arms. They’d just been through the days of May [during the
Vietnam War protests of 1970] with the students; they were sick and tired of the damn
students. They were fed up with them. They’d put up with everything and tolerated
everything. When that happened we had a faculty meeting on the morning of
baccalaureate to approve degree candidates, a formality, largely, usually. They were up in
arms. Some of them rose and said, “Let’s just don’t graduate the little bastards. Let’s
don’t have a ceremony. We’ll give them the degrees; we won’t do anything illegal. We’ll
give them their degrees, but we won’t award them. We won’t do the ceremonial part.
Since they’ve destroyed our ceremonial part, we’ll destroy theirs.” So, they ranted and
raved like that for a while, but cooler heads prevailed. I didn’t say anything; I just
presided. Cooler heads prevailed, and no motions were actually made to eliminate
commencement ceremony. But we went through baccalaureate without the mace. The
faculty marshal had to process without the mace and all that.

         The next morning, when I got to work—in those days, my office wasn’t even
locked. The door to my office remained open; you could walk in, anybody could walk in.
Nobody ever did. The mace was lying across the arms of my desk chair when I got to
work the next morning. The Murph [Bob “Murph” Murray, the university’s first security
officer] role in that was the day the thing vanished, before it had been returned—I rarely
ever asked Murph questions. I let him volunteer if he wanted to. I didn’t ever quiz
Murph. But I said, “Murph, do you know about this mace thing? That’s a hell of a thing,
don’t you think?” “Yep.” That’s all he said: “Yep.” I said, “Well, it’s hard even to know
what to do.” He said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” That’s all he ever said. From
that moment to this, that’s all he ever said: “I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” I don’t
know what happened. I never asked him what happened, but apparently he knew, I guess.
Anyway, it was returned.
Warren: I’ll have to go back and look at my interview with Murph and see if he told
me—
Huntley: See if he told you. See if he knew. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he was just
guessing they would return it. I don’t know. He said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about

                                                                                                                               44
it.” That was a long conversation for Murph. He wasn’t chatty. Well, we were going to
talk about Parsons? Is that where we left off?
Warren: Let’s talk about Frank Parsons.
Huntley: Okay. Well, Frank was—is—was extremely talented, very bright. You know
that. He pretty well learns to do anything he puts his hands in, because he thinks of
himself primarily as a writer and an ex-journalist, and he is a writer. He can write; he
writes very well. Good mastery of the language, and he can put things into a succinct
form and all that. I didn’t use him as a writer very often; I wrote my own stuff. On
occasions he would do a letter for me, but mostly I did my own stuff: letters and other
stuff. But, he could write.

         But, he also could do other things. For example, at some stage in the evolution of
things during the ’70s, I reached the conclusion I wanted to borrow some—it became
possible to borrow money via public bond issues, tax-exempt bond issues. It hadn’t been
possible to do that before, but Virginia passed a law creating an authority that allowed
any [private] institutions like Washington and Lee to issue tax-exempt bonds. But the
process by which you got into position to do that was fairly complicated, and I wasn’t
about to pay fancy investment bankers to get that done, so I told Parsons to figure it out
and do it. That was the only instruction I gave him. He worked with Whitehead to the
degree he needed to to get the information he needed and figure out how to get it done
and do it.

         I had a friend down in Richmond running Virginia Electric Power Company
named Justin Moore. I knew a lot of people in the business world in those days and still
do. I called Justin and told him to make his treasurer available to Frank, if he would,
because they were issuing bonds all the time. Not tax-exempt bonds, but bonds. He said
he would. That helped that Frank was able to get access to a skilled mechanic of finance.

         Well, in a matter of six weeks, I guess, Frank had mastered it. He had other things
to do, too. He ran the [publications office]—[writer Bob] Keefe [’68] and [photographer]
Sally Mann and Rom [alumni magazine editor Romulus T.] Weatherman all reported to
Frank. He was beginning to phase into the planning role by that time. I had him doing
some planning activity by that time. But, he got that done and figured out how to do it. I
didn’t touch it. I didn’t have time to touch it. I didn’t hire anybody to touch it. I didn’t

                                                                                                                               45
hire any lawyers, either. He got it done, by Jove. The bonds were issued without a hitch.
We sold those bonds. Now, [there were] not many people around here to whom you
could assign something like that an expect it to get done.
Warren: I’ve never heard that story.
Huntley: He didn’t come back to me and ask me any questions about what to do or
anything. The next I heard of it, he was ready to go. So, he had talents, the ability to learn
anything he was told to do, or decided to do. Good writer, and a fine person, and
understood Washington and Lee inside out.

         Negatives—of which Frank knows. I’ve told Frank—he could not delegate
anything to anybody. He cannot supervise anybody. He is the world’s worst
administrator. If an administrator is someone who has to get people working for him to
do things and delegate things to them, Frank could not do that. He couldn’t even work a
secretary. He really couldn’t even successfully use a secretary. As I said, Weatherman
and Keefe and Sally reported to Frank, but not really. They really sort of operated almost
freelance. Frank was available sort of for advice, but he didn’t direct them.
Warren: Or a shoulder to cry on.
Huntley: A shoulder to cry on, but he didn’t direct them. He simply couldn’t administer
anything; he could not be an administrator. He just couldn’t do it. But, he had enormous
talents along the lines I just said. So, anything that came to hand that I couldn’t get done
myself, or didn’t have someone else to delegate it to, I gave to Frank. That could be
anything. It was in that sense that he was my assistant. He didn’t assist me with
everything. Things I didn’t need help on, I didn’t turn to him, but if I needed help, he
could always help on any subject. Just invaluable sort of person to have, a rare sort of
person to have. From his point of view, it was a rare place for him to land, because there
really are not many jobs Frank could have done for the reasons I just gave you. He
couldn’t delegate; he couldn’t administer—wouldn’t. I don’t know why I say he couldn’t;
he wouldn’t. He didn’t.

         He also was well known on campus and absorbed a lot of stuff that would have
otherwise hit me. People could always see me; my door was always open. People came to
see me with the weirdest things, but sometimes they felt they shouldn’t do that, or they
wanted to feel out in advance what the administrative position might be or something. So,

                                                                                                                               46
Frank got a lot of visits from people who might otherwise have come to see me. He didn’t
shield me because no one ever had trouble getting in my door, but if somebody wanted to
get some feedback on a particular idea, they might well go to Frank for feedback, which
he would give them. He wouldn’t by any means always tell me that about that. He had
very good judgment; he knew me well. He got pretty good at estimating what my reaction
to something would be. So, he received a lot of stuff from around the campus that
otherwise would have landed on my desk, and coped with it without it ever coming to my
attention. Yet, he didn’t shield me. He didn’t protect me. It was amazing, the ability.
Warren: Was he already in that position for Fred Cole?
Huntley: He was. He was. Fred—I don’t know how Fred used him. I guess he used him
as I did. I really don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think he used him quite as
extensively as I did. But there were many things going on that Frank was not involved in.
He couldn’t do everything. So, he wasn’t involved in everything, but he was—
Warren: What kinds of things would he not have been involved in?
Huntley: He wasn’t involved much with development. He wouldn’t have been involved
much with faculty issues. Most everything else he ended up touching.
Warren: One of the things that I remember about Frank when I was first knowing him, it
seemed like whenever there was something Sally [Mann] needed, or I was interested in
when I did the Michael Miley [Lexington photographer from 1865–1918] exhibit for—he
and [Professor of Art History] Pam Simpson brought me in to do a Michael Miley
exhibit—Frank had the most extraordinary collection of what I would call toys which he
had gotten with Washington and Lee’s money.
Huntley: That’s true. He did.
Warren: But they were just for Frank—or people Frank liked—to use.
Huntley: That’s true. That’s right. He did have a collection of toys. [Chuckles] Of
course, Frank knew the faculty well, all of them. They all knew him. So, it was a very
good interchange between him and members of the faculty. If members of the faculty
needed something and couldn’t find out how to get it, they’d come to Frank.
Warren: And he was always up-to-date on the latest of everything.
Huntley: That’s right. He was. He was a valuable resource for the whole campus. He was
just sort of a general resource.

                                                                                                                               47
Warren: I think the first personal computer I ever saw was on Frank’s desk.
Huntley: Could be. The first one on campus was Ed Turner’s, the that physicist I
mentioned, because he built his own.
Warren: Why am I not surprised?
Huntley: He really did. He started off with an analog computer, a primitive analog
computer, and ultimately before he died, Ed developed his own digital computer before
they were available commercially.
Warren: Fascinating.

         Now, did you get Frank involved with the capital programs?
Huntley: Yeah, I got him involved with the planning of facilities, and started getting him
to do that. Pretty soon, he began to do all that and supervise all that. He worked with the
architects. He worked with the—the superintendent of buildings and grounds—which
was what we called the facilities management guy in those days—was Pat Brady. You
knew him, or not?
Warren: Not well. He had retired by the time I got here.
Huntley: He was a marvelous person who had been here all his life. Also an alumnus. I
removed him from the position of superintendent of buildings and grounds and put him—
When we started the construction projects, we put him entirely as our guy on the
construction projects: clerk of the works, or whatever title they chose to give him. He was
the university’s guy on the project, interfacing with the contractor and the workforces. He
was wonderful at that. Frank’s interaction was mainly with the architects. So, Brady
interacted with the contractor, Frank with the architects and the planners. And Frank
involved himself in planning even before architects were hired, so he turned out he had a
knack for that. Pretty soon, I turned it all over to him.

         The person I put in [Pat] Brady’s place was Brady’s assistant, whose name was
Jim Arthur, who turned out to be better than Brady as a superintendent of buildings and
grounds. Brady was excellent, but Arthur was even better. He remained here until after I
had left—I’m glad to say—long after I had left.

         Let’s see, we haven’t said anything about Whitehead, who was sort of a—I
mentioned Bill Washburn. I’ll come back to him. Bill was marvelous as alumni secretary.
He had limitations. He was not a spellbinding speaker, though he could handle himself on

                                                                                                                               48
his feet. He was not tongue-tied. But he was devoted and hard working to a fault, and was
excellent in the job he was in as alumni secretary, which is now called something else:
director of alumni relations or something.

         Whitehead became treasurer after Mattingly; [he] was treasurer when I became
president. Hadn’t been at it very long, but he was treasurer when I became president.
Whitehead was not trained for that job, but he had an instinct for it, and it was always an
easy subject for me. Financial matters were not difficult for me to understand,
comprehend. Balance sheets, and operating statements, and so on have always been easy
for me interpret. So, I was able to help with the process directly with Jim. Between us, we
were able to work it out.

         But, Jim was wonderful during those years when the circumstances were so
straightened, almost no one could get what they wanted. And he was wonderful at telling
people no. People who needed this or that thing done for them, he was wonderful at
keeping them within their budgets, and explaining to them what could and what could not
be spent, and making them like it. He was very much beloved. The faculty loved him.
They didn’t see him as they saw Mr. Mattingly as a penurious old man; they saw him as
one of them. Not as a faculty member, to be sure, but he was on their side. He’d do the
best he could for them. So, he lacked the financial training that one would prefer to have
in the chief financial officer, but to make up for that, he had enormous empathy for the
people on the campus. He knew what the needs of the school were and what its shortages
were. We spent a lot of time with each other on finances to get them in order.

         I got the external accounting firm, which was, what? Peat-Marwick? Or KPMG.
Peat-Marwick, I guess—to give us a lot of time. I got them to make donations of their
time—they’re expensive—to do some special work for the school. You know, classifying
the endowment: that’s a big project.
Warren: What does that mean, classifying the endowment?
Huntley: Well, you’ve got to find out where it all came from so you can find out which
parts of it you can spend and which parts of it you can’t, which parts of it are quasi- and
board-designated endowment. It turns out that most endowments are board-designated
endowments, not designated by the donor, but by the board. Anything designated by the
board can be undesignated by the board. So quasi-endowment are funds operating as

                                                                                                                               49
endowment. Quasi-endowment—whatever you want to call it—are funds that can be
legally expended for any legitimate purpose of the university. Endowed funds, funds that
were restricted by the donor to endowment obviously can’t be. You need to know that.
You want to know which is which and how many of each you’ve got, if there is
restriction, what the restriction is. That wasn’t recorded in any coherent fashion, so we
had to get that done. I got them to do that for us for not very much money. Again, using
alumni relations to get that done. So, we got through the budgeting process all right, and
the management of the finances, and got the finances into a coherent form that could be
understood by anybody. We published the data. The data were known, which had not
happened before.
Warren: When you say it was published, it was published—
Huntley: In the alumni magazine.
Warren: In the magazine. I remember that issue.
Huntley: Summaries of it were.
Warren: Yes, and that was the first time that had happened.
Huntley: That’s right. So, Whitehead was an invaluable part of the team and, of course,
when it came to—what his real forte was something that he wasn’t really hired to do; it
was, like, special events and special relationships. Whitehead was marvelous at
developing special relationships with people who were exterior to the [Washington and
Lee] community, and developing their interest in the school, their interest in Washington
and Lee. And then planning special celebrations and special events, Whitehead could do
that better than anybody. He didn’t do it all the time, but from time to time he was called
on to do it and would do it beautifully.

         Of course, the Reeves Collection became his sort of avocation. And then
eventually, he was able to leave the treasurer’s position and sort of move into kind of—
the thing he really wanted to do was sort of to run those special collections and so on.
I’ve forgotten what year that happened. But he had already been treasurer for most of my
time as—practically all—Stewart Epley came in to replace him as treasurer in about—I
don’t know—1980, ’79? Something like that. But Jim moved into the special
collections—special projects area. He was an invaluable member of the team.

         Outside of the faculty, I guess it was Whitehead, Parsons, and Hotchkiss who had

                                                                                                                               50
major roles, different roles. All of them different. Interestingly enough, they didn’t
always get along with each other. I don’t want to overstate that. They got along socially
with each other, but I think it would be accurate to say that—I don’t think there were
jealousies between them or among them, but I was aware of the fact that there were
tensions between them. There were frequent overlaps among the things they had to do. I
think to some degree, Farris and Frank probably resented Whitehead’s free hand with
some of the things he did. They never told me that. I would guess that to some degree,
Jim and Farris felt that Frank was allowed to roam too freely into their territory, because I
gave him all kinds of things to do. And I would guess that both Frank and Jim, to some
degree, thought Farris was being given too much to do, that the development job was too
big a job for Farris. None of them ever told me that and I could be wrong about that. But,
even to the degree that’s true, if it was true at all, it didn’t impair their effectiveness. It
may have even sharpened their effectiveness.
Warren: That’s what I was just thinking.
Huntley: But it wasn’t something I planted. It wasn’t some kind of Machiavellian effort
to get maximum performance out of them. I don’t have any Machiavellian techniques that
I’m aware of. But, I believe it was true. And all three of them bemoaned—to the extent of
finding it humorous—Bill Washburn’s shortcomings, which, again, were mainly that he
just wasn’t skillful at articulating things and was hung up on detail. Those were also his
strengths, you see. So, they saw his strengths and they saw each other’s strengths. So, the
net result was good. They each knew the other was effective, and they each would pitch
in and help the other when needed. So, if there were tensions, they were not destructive
tensions.
Warren: There were a couple of other people I don’t think we should neglect in this
story of Washington Hall, and that’s Tina Ravenhorst and the amazing Rupert Latture.
Huntley: Oh, sure. Well, let’s talk about Rupert first. Rupert had been a less-than-fully
effective professor of political science. He was not especially revered as a teacher.
Always revered as a person and a man, but not as a scholar or teacher. I knew him when I
was a student. I didn’t take classes under him, but I know what his reputation with the
students was, and it was not good, not high. But, when he retired as a teacher—which I
guess he did at seventy. I don’t really recall—Fred Cole made him a sort of special

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assistant to the president.
Warren: A presence.
Huntley: Yeah. I think they may have even given him the title of Special Assistant to the
President. I’m not sure whether he did or not. But anyway, Fred did that instinctively
because he found out that Rupert Latture knew everything there was to know about
Washington and Lee and its history, and mainly about its people. Not the people who
worked here, but the people who had been—the alumni. He knew them all, They all knew
him. He knew them all well enough to be able to react with them. And, again, because of
Fred’s timidity and so on, he needed a person who could extend a glad hand in the office,
and that’s what Mr. Latture did. He sat in the outer office. You recall the little complex
we had.
Warren: Describe it to me.
Huntley: Well, there was an outer office about the size of this room, with some chairs
sitting—it’s a waiting room. And then there was a little desk, which is where Latture
hung out. And then inside that, there was a room about half the size of this where Tina
and her assistant—she eventually had an assistant named Mary Hartless [Woodson], who
now works—you know who Mary is. No longer Hartless; she’s married. Her married
name escapes me; it always does escape me.
Warren: Woodson.
Huntley: I still call her Hartless.
Warren: Woodson.
Huntley: Yeah, I know now. And then there was a little hallway, and then there was my
office. So, Latture sat in the outer office and I think he drove Tina crazy. She never told
me that, but I think he did. Got on her nerves, I should say. Didn’t drive her crazy;
obviously, she wasn’t crazy. But, he probably talked to her a lot while she was working.
But, he was invaluable. When I became president, he continued to serve the role that he’d
served for Fred Cole, although I would never have thought to ask him to do that, but he
was already doing it. I certainly wasn’t going to fire him from his almost non-hired role
anyway. But he was very effective at it. He would greet people as they came into the
office, introduce himself, and find out who they were if he didn’t already know, and
entertain them with stories about the school. And really would entertain them. They were

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always favorably impressed with him. He just sort of acted as the face of Washington and
Lee to strangers, especially. That was very helpful to us, I think. But he never got in the
way or blocked people or anything like that. So he had a second career after the age of
seventy—which I guess lasted for fifteen years or so—that was more successful than his
first. I recall him vividly.

         Tina, who was, of course, a highly skillful stenographer, but stenographers are
easy to come by. She was highly skilled with that, but she had all the skills, could type a
million miles a minute. She insisted on using antiquated typewriters. I finally managed to
get her to take an electric one way before the computer. No word processor ever made it
to Tina.
Warren: Did you dictate your letters?
Huntley: Most all of them. Or handwrote them. I hand-wrote a lot of stuff in those days.
Those handwritten notes exist somewhere. She may have kept them somewhere. I hand-
wrote all of my speeches, and she would type them from my hand. She could read my
handwriting; almost nobody else could. So, I handwrote notes sometimes, sometimes
right on the letter that I was answering. Sometimes just three or four words and Tina
would do the rest. Occasionally, I would just give it back to her and say, “Answer,” and
she would answer it for me, saying exactly what I would have said.
Warren: In your voice.
Huntley: Yes, in my voice, and return it to me. I didn’t do that terribly often. That was
not usual, but depending on how hurried I was—but she could do that. She could write—
whatever I gave her and said just: “Answer,” she would know what I meant.
Occasionally, I would change what she sent me back, but not often.
Warren: Did you inherit her from—
Huntley: From Fred Cole? I inherited her from Fred Cole, who inherited her from Frank
Gaines. She’d been with Gaines for several years. There was another woman whose name
escapes me, whom everybody knew who began with Gaines—I can’t think of her name.
Gosh, that’s sad—who was there when Tina began working. Tina began as an assistant to
this other person and then graduated to the top job by the time—she was Gaines’s sole
secretary for the last probably five years of his time, and was devoted to Gaines and to
Gaines’s family: his wife and children. And to Fred Cole. Absolutely devoted to Fred

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Cole. And I think she became devoted to me, and certainly each of us did, in turn, to her.
         But she had absolutely perfect judgment on the kinds of things that she faced. She

was able skillfully to divert traffic away from me, when I was doing something, without
offending anybody, without making them think the door was closed. She knew, of course,
obviously knew everybody on the campus, every faculty member, everybody. Most of the
students she knew at least by sight, many by name. She could find anything, of course,
for me. Anything that had ever happened in her time, she knew of and knew where the
data were on it. She knew where all the skeletons were buried. She was very, very bright.
Very quick, very bright. She could not have made a grammatical or structural error in the
English language if she tried. She was a perfect master of the language. She could spell
every word, make every sentence sing. She was really good.

         Now, she would never amend anything I wrote, which is not to say she always
approved of everything I wrote, but she didn’t see that as her job. She was not my writer;
she was not there to improve what I had written. I don’t recall her ever correcting
something I’d written. If I misspelled a word, she’d correct that, I’m sure. I don’t know
that I did, but if I did she would have corrected it. But she wouldn’t reconstruct a
sentence or recompose a thought if she could see that I had done that, unless I told her to.
If I told her to, she would do it and do it very well. So, she was a very valuable person to
have around.
Warren: What kind of hours did you have in Washington Hall?
Huntley: Well, I got there around eight o’clock and left there around five.
Warren: And Tina kept those kinds of hours?
Huntley: Yeah, she kept whatever hours I kept. She didn’t leave until I left. And
sometimes it wasn’t five. Sometimes it was six.
Warren: I remember her always being there.
Huntley: She didn’t leave while I was there. Now, sometimes I came in on weekends or
something and she wouldn’t come in. She would come in on weekends if I asked her to.
Sometimes I would. In fact, we worked on Saturday mornings when I first began.
Warren: There were Saturday classes.
Huntley: There were Saturday classes, but we came into work even after Saturday
classes were abolished. The office was open Saturday until midday. It may have been that

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way right through the time I was president. I don’t remember. I think maybe it was. So,
she would come in whenever I needed her, of course. To help her, I hired Mary Hartless
about, I guess, maybe five years before my retirement. Mary was untutored, but bright.
Tina taught her the English language, really. She learned quickly. She was a quick
learner. She’s gone on to hold a very important job over here now [publications director
in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs] She was an untutored little sort of
high school girl. I can’t remember how we found her, but Tina pretty soon discerned that
she was bright enough to be a keeper.
Warren: Yes, she’s definitely a keeper, all right.
Huntley: You can ask Mary about Tina. Tina was stern. Tina was firm, I should say.
Warren: Oh, I remember her presence. I’m going to stop for a moment.
Huntley: All right.
[Begin Huntley 6]
Warren: Well, you know, I think we ought to—you’ve given me wonderful character
studies there, but I think we ought to switch gears and talk about a pretty important event
that came about that I’m confused about the order in which it happened. At what point—
I’m sure it had been brewing for a while—but at what point did everybody decide that
getting a new law school building was a priority? Tell me that whole story.
Huntley: Okay. Well, before I do that—are you back on?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: Well, before I do that, let me move to my wife.
Warren: Oh, please.
Huntley: You really ought to interview her. Somebody ought to. It needs to be
remembered that we had no guesthouses in those days, and really no motels or hotels to
speak of, so that visiting guests of the university stayed with the president. The president
was the primary source of entertainment on the campus, not only for visiting guests, but
for everybody. That fell to Evelyn to do. She had never done anything like that. She also
had had—still has—boundless energy, which is a good thing.

         She had a housekeeper named Mrs. [Mary Lee] Tabbut, who just died about six
months ago. Mrs. Tabbut was a sweet person, but totally unable to do anything beyond
the most routine chores. She couldn’t, for example, wind a clock; literally did not have

                                                                                                                               55
the level of intelligence necessary to wind a clock—set a clock. But she was a sweet
person, and hardworking, and faithful. She was the housekeeper, which really meant that
Evelyn literally did not have any permanently assigned cook. If Evelyn wanted a meal
specially prepared, she had to find a local cook and hire her for the event. She knew all of
the local people who were capable of doing cooking, and she could usually get one, but
she often did it herself when she couldn’t.

         During the school year—as well as part of the off-season—but certainly during
the school year, we entertained for one reason or another in that house probably three
times a week. It was expected to be done right. It was done right.

         We didn’t even have a house that was furnished when I became president. The
house was not furnished from one presidency to the next in those days. There was one set
of dining room furniture in the house, and that was it. We had come from modest
circumstances of our own. We had hardly anything. So the house was just very sparsely
furnished when we first moved in. We let it be known—Whitehead was good at this, so
was Farris—let it be known to people around, alumni, and others that might have such
stuff—that we were in desperate need for stuff for the house. Before long, stuff started
coming in. They started making gifts. I guess Whitehead screened them, because it was
good stuff. Within a year, the place was pretty well furnished, and then, ultimately, it was
really well furnished with stuff that does belong to the school. It remains there now.

         So, she inherited a job where she was supposed to entertain two or three times a
week with no furniture. We didn’t even have the basic tools for entertainment: the place
settings, the silverware, the china, the epergne. We didn’t have any of that. Most of those
kinds of things she could borrow from faculty wives. That’s what she did; she borrowed
those things from faculty wives. That’s how close-knit the community was.

         Mary Hope Pusey—the Puseys had some money. They had inherited some money
the two of them from somewhere. I don’t know where from. But, Mary Hope was the
best entertainer in town. That’s Bill’s wife: Mary Hope Pusey. She offered to lend Evelyn
any and all of her stuff, fancy stuff with which you entertain. Buildings and grounds
[staff members] would go over to her place, and get it, bring it to Evelyn, and take it
back. Sadie du Vergne Gaines had stuff, and Evelyn was very close to the Gaineses, to
Sadie du Vergne and to him. They loved Evelyn; she loved Evelyn. She’d lend her

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anything.
         Those were two main sources of stuff to give parties with, but they had to be

borrowed every time and returned. And she had to find one of the two or three women in
town who could cook well, and tell them what to cook, and buy the food for them. She
bought the whiskey herself. She’d go down to the liquor store—Evelyn went to the liquor
store—and bought the liquor, and got the permit from the store to carry more than the
designated amount of liquor across town to Lee House. The liquor store in those days was
on Main Street, right across from the Post Office, right below the corner store. The next
door down was a liquor store.
Warren: Right. It was on Nelson Street.
Huntley: It was on the next block. Nelson Street, yeah.
Warren: It was on Nelson Street. I remember that.
Huntley: Corner of Nelson—yeah, okay. She would go down there and get the stuff, buy
the whiskey. If it was too much for her to carry, she’d call Pat Brady. He’d send a man
over to help carry the whiskey back from the liquor store to the Lee House. She
entertained beautifully. As I said, we had houseguests almost all the school term. Every
speaker, every drunken English poet, and whatever who came—ambassadors, senators,
presidential candidates.

         One of Evelyn’s favorite stories is I was out of town—she says I was always out
of town—I would out of town without her. She was frequently with me, but I was out of
town without her. The doorbell rang at about 9:30 in the morning. She was not even—she
usually was dressed, but not dressed to go out. She was dressed in, I don’t know, a
housedress or something. She goes to the door and there was a very familiar face at the
front door, a very familiar face, a man and a wife. It was George and Eleanor McGovern.
He was running for the presidency at that time, and he was there at the invitation of the
students to speak in Lee Chapel at 11:00 A.M. It was now 9:30.

         That kind of thing didn’t happen all the time. Evelyn didn’t even know about it. I
didn’t know about it. They hadn’t told me McGovern was coming. Usually they did tell
me those things. Usually they would tell me so they could stay at the Lee House. In this
case, they weren’t expecting McGovern to stay there, but they had told him to come to
Lee House, and that’s where they’d meet him. So, she recognized them, of course. He

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was then running for president. She recognized them, invited them in, and quickly
hustled—said, “Just a minute. I’ll get you a cup of coffee”—hustled back into the kitchen
and looked at the calendar of events which she had. Lo and behold, she saw on the
calendar of events that 11:00 A.M. speech in Lee Chapel by Senator McGovern. So she,
of course, pretended to have been aware of that all along, which she wasn’t, and scurried
around, and got herself dressed, and murmured the proper things, still waiting for the
students who were sponsoring him to show up, of course.

         Around 10:30, she thought it was time they began to move towards the chapel.
The guy was supposed to speak at eleven. She said, “Well, I think we better move on.
The students will show up any minute now.” She started out the door, and sure enough,
just about the time they got down there by McCormick Statue, the students interceded,
picked up McGovern, and went on their way. Meanwhile, all the way down there, Ed
Atwood, who lived in the house next door came out with June to attend this speech. He
said he was—she was giving him a brief history of Washington and Lee, and Ed said he
was never more instructed in his life than by Evelyn’s two-minute history of Washington
and Lee to George McGovern. So, that sort of thing wasn’t unusual.
Warren: That’s a great story.
Huntley: So, we had people in the house most of the time. Of course, we had three
daughters there. It really was like living over the store. Was it Prince Albert who said
living in Buckingham Palace was like living over the store? Well, it was like living over
the store. Frequently, we were relegated to the back of the house. We had three
daughters—three little girls—three daughters ranging in age from three to eight. The
house has a kind of rear end to it that’s kind of less stately than the front end. There are a
couple of rooms back there. There’s a little den back there we used as our family room. It
was not in the Lee House at all; it was in that annex. And a bedroom back there that the
two older girls slept in. Jane, the youngest, slept in the front hall in a little room about the
size of this alcove here. We’d always slept in the adjoining bedroom to that, but
sometimes we had so many houseguests we were squeezed out. But, there are four
bedrooms on the second floor, four major bedrooms. Usually we could accommodate the
houseguests comfortably without getting ourselves out of there, but you had to deal with
it every morning and every evening while they were there, which was tiresome, I’ll have

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to admit.
         But, Evelyn coped with all that magnificently. The faculty wives—the faculty

generally, not just the wives—would chip in to do anything they could do to make it
possible to have those events turn out successfully, and they always turned out
successfully. She entertained—and she hates doing that—but did it beautifully, and knew,
of course, all the faculty members and all the faculty members’ wives, so she could get
anything she needed from them. It’s an amazingly close community. The reason we
moved out of the Lee House was that, contrary to the—the popular view is we moved out
to shield the girls from the students. That’s a bunch of garbage. The students never
bothered the girls. They loved it. They loved living in the middle of the campus. But, it
was very hard to have a lot of private home life with houseguests every night.
Warren: How many years did you live in Lee House?
Huntley: I guess it was eight years. I think I moved out in ’76. I believe that’s right. We
bought a house that we’d always angled to own. It had been owned by the Glasgow
family. It’s over on the end of—its address is Ross Road, but it has no entry from Ross
Road. It sits on three acres of land right there by Waddell School. You’ve probably been
here all these years and never even seen it, which was its beauty. It’s on three acres in the
middle of town.
Warren: Wow.
Huntley: If you go up Ross Road, go out Ross Road, once you turn off of Jackson onto
Ross—you know how you do?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: If you look to your right just after you turn onto Ross Road, you’ll see sitting
back in the woods a sort of Tudor-style house.
Warren: Before you cross Woods Creek?
Huntley: Just as you cross Woods Creek. Woods Creek flows through the yard of the
house. The house includes Woods Creek. So, look to your right and you’ll see sitting
back up in there about two hundred yards from the road back in the trees sort of a Tudor-
style—there’s three acres of land in there.
Warren: Wow, that’s a gem.
Huntley: It’s utterly private. It belonged to people named Glasgow, and the Glasgow

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boys were close friends of mine as a student. They were both in school with me, were
both Delts [Phi Delta Theta fraternity. No:Delta Tau Delta]. I was a Delt. I knew them
very well, and I even lived in that house. One semester after the Delt house burned, they
invited me in as a guest. I lived there as a guest for a whole semester, I guess my junior
year.
Warren: So you knew the house well.
Huntley: Of course. And Mr. and Mrs. Glasgow were close friends. “Wink” Glasgow—
Francis T. Glasgow—“Wink”—was a classmate of mine who was killed in Korea, a blow
from which they never recovered. Charlie Glasgow, the elder son—one year older—died
of natural causes just a couple of years ago. Mr. Glasgow was the town’s leading
attorney, and a marvelous gentleman. We used to visit there when we came back when I
was here as a [law] student living in the “paper huts” over there on Hillside Terrace—you
probably never knew the paper huts. They were literally made of paper. That’s where I
lived when I was a law student. The Glasgows would invite us over for a cocktail every
now and then. Wink, by then, was dead, and we loved them. And we loved that house.
Evelyn used to say when we were young: “I don’t think I could ever own that place.”

         Well, time went by, and I guess it was 1974 or something like that. She called me
one day. I was at work and she was in the beauty parlor. She said, “Leave what you’re
doing.” She got a hold of Tina and Tina called me. “Leave what you’re doing. The
Glasgow house is for sale.” Mr. Glasgow had died—this was years later—Mrs. Glasgow
was living, but she had gone into a nursing home. We had seen her occasionally; we’d go
down to see her, but she had been moved out by Charlie, the only surviving son. Her
daughter, Condee, lives here now. Condee Glasgow. Still living. They’d moved her out,
and she had put the house on the market, or they had put the house on the market. Well, I
bought it that day. I made a bid on it and got it that day. It was in dreadful condition, and
we had no money.

         I looked back the other day—this is a digression—do you want to make a guess,
Mame, as to what my salary was in my first year as president of Washington and Lee?
Warren: Probably not much.
Huntley: Do you want to make a guess? I know exactly what it was. I was just throwing
away old records the other day. I have income tax returns back into the early ’60s, so I

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know exactly what I made in every year. Twenty-eight thousand [dollars].
Warren: Wow. As president.
Huntley: That was as president. When I left the presidency in 1983, my last year’s
salary, want to make a guess at what that was?
Warren: Not enough for what you had done.
Huntley: Sixty-five thousand [dollars]. Anyway, we never felt deprived. We always
thought we had plenty. But, we didn’t have that much money to—obviously, I put a
mortgage on the house to buy it. And then we made it our weekend pastime. We’d go
over there with the daughters every weekend whenever we were in town—every Saturday
afternoon and every Sunday—and worked in that house. Stripped the wallpaper. Evelyn
stripped the wallpaper from the major rooms herself. A hard job. You’ve got to soak it
down and strip it. Wallpaper that had been on there since the ’20s, since the ’20s! Where
the plaster was cracked, I replastered it. We stripped the wallpaper and replastered that
house. And we cleaned the floors and repainted it ourselves—every lick of it ourselves—
for two years. We put more time into it in the summers when we had a little bit more
time. We’d work in the summers. Had to clean up the yard. The yard was completely
overgrown with poison ivy and everything. Stripped that. It was tons of work.

         Only one thing that I hired somebody for: I wanted to convert the kitchen into a
kitchen-breakfast room combination. That required taking out a wall and installing some
electrical and plumbing equipment that I was simply not competent to do. I hired a—it
was a night overtime job for the Washington and Lee people over here, the crew. I paid
them. I paid them their regular wages or overtime wages on weekends. A couple of them
came out: a carpenter, a plumber, and an electrician. Henry Black, Henry Weeks—I can
still remember their names—came out and helped me tear down and erect a—helped me
do what I just described. But, except for that we did it all ourselves.

         At the end of two years of weekends and summers—I think it was ’76—we’re
sitting there one Sunday afternoon on the floor and I said, “Evelyn, you know this place
is habitable now. This place actually can be lived in now.” We’d by then painted
everything, and plastered all the ceilings, and cleaned all the floors, had all the plumbing
and electricity working. The ancient furnace was still groaning in the basement, but it
worked—the ancient coal furnace converted to gas—highly inefficient, but it worked. No

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air conditioning, of course. And I said, “God, wouldn’t it be nice if we could move into
it?” A long silence ensued and she said, “Well, can we?” I said, “I don’t know. Maybe we
can.”

         So, I thought about that and I went to the rector, who by that time was probably
Marshall Nuckols, and said, “What do you think of that idea? Do you think the columns
would collapse, and the world would groan in agony if we lived in both houses? The
other house will still be the president’s home. Evelyn will still maintain the place. We’re
not asking to hire anybody. She’ll still take care of it exactly as she does now. We’ll still
entertain in it exactly as she does now. We’ll still keep guests there; we just will have our
place over the other—we’ll sleep over there.” He said, “I can’t see why not.” So, I
consulted the whole board on it. They said, “No, that’s fine.” So, I told the faculty. I
didn’t ask the faculty to vote on it, but I did judge their reaction. I didn’t get a single
murmur of objection, so we moved out in the sense that I just described. We continued to
entertain in the Lee House right until the very end, but Evelyn ran both places then. Had
no one to help her run the other house, and Mrs. Tabbut, who couldn’t wind a clock to
help run the Lee House.
Warren: And no salary whatsoever for Evelyn, of course.
Huntley: No. As a matter of fact, when the Lewises came on the board—when Syd
Lewis came on the board—we became very close to the Lewises, and Evelyn was
especially close to Frances Lewis. Frances got after Evelyn and said, “Evelyn, I’m going
to tell Syd”—Syd was now on the board—“that they’ve got to give you a salary.” Of
course, Frances was a bit of a women’s libber, which Evelyn always kidded her about.
She always kidded Evelyn about being the opposite. She said, “No, don’t you dare.
They’ll just take it out of Bob’s salary.” [Laughter]. So, she never did. No, they never
considered the possibility of giving her pay.
Warren: But good for Frances for saying that.
Huntley: Frances was determined to get money for Evelyn, but it didn’t happen. But
those were great years, and Evelyn remembers them as great years, too. But they were
hard. Raising three kids and doing all that, and traveling with me. We had a wonderful
woman who could stay as a babysitter when we went out of town named Odessa Lee, still
living. She was good at taking care of the kids. And Ms. Tabbut, as I said, though of

                                                                                                                               62
limited intellect, was highly reliable and faithful. She could drive them, was a safe driver,
and could be counted on to do the necessary things to keep life together when we were
out of town. So, that was an important part of my ability to do the job, was Evelyn’s—
Warren: It would be interesting to hear your daughters’ perspectives, too.
Huntley: Oh, yeah. It would be. They enjoyed it. They liked living in the Lee House.
They also liked the other place where they had the big yard, but they had the whole
campus as their yard over here.
Warren: I bet they did.
Huntley: And used it that way. So, those were good years for them, as well as for
Evelyn, for me. But, she was tireless. Evelyn was tireless, never showed any sign of
fatigue or weariness with the job. Anyway, we interrupted. I didn’t want to overlook
telling you about that.
Warren: Oh, I’m thrilled that you told me those stories. But you’ve now mentioned
Sydney and Frances, and we should also mention Roy Steinheimer.
Huntley: Roy, yeah. Well, when I became president, obviously it left a vacancy in the
deanship of the law school, which I had to revive Charlie Light to take. Charlie Light had
been the dean when I became dean. He was one of my favorite people on earth. I just
adored Charlie Light.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: Well, he was just such a wonderfully intelligent, delightful person in every
way. A brilliant conversationalist, a good teacher, a tremendous sense of humor, just a
socially delightful person. He just was a grand guy. I just loved him dearly. He had a
wonderful way about him. As I said, a great sense of humor, a great wit. Well-read. It’s
hard to think of anything he wasn’t able to do. Well he was, by then, well into his
seventies. I called and told him I’d been made president. Could he come back as dean?
He said yes. He agreed to do so until we could find a replacement. He said he was the
only guy he knew that succeeded his own successor.

         So, I had to begin immediately trying to find a dean. I appointed a search
committee of the law faculty headed by Charles Laughlin. They began to scare up
candidates, and I began interviewing some of the candidates they’d scared up, all of
whom seemed hopeless. I don’t remember any of them now. But I did interview a

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number—three or four—who came down here at the suggestion of the search committee,
and they were all—I thought they were weak sisters.

         I believe Charles Laughlin had scared up the name of a Michigan law professor—
I’ve forgotten the name now—who was well known, Charles said. He said this guy, this
Michigan law professor, Laughlin thought we could probably get a reading on him from a
well-known antitrust scholar named Oppenheim, who was then getting old, towards
retirement—had retired. But Oppenheim was no longer at Michigan, but had been at the
University of Michigan Law School. I knew Oppenheim slightly, because I had taught
antitrust law, used his book. So, I called him and asked him if he could—told him what I
was up to and asked him if he could give me any comments about this potential
candidate—whom I had not yet contacted—at the University of Michigan. Could he tell
me if he thought he was a strong possibility? Well, he said, “He’s a fine person, but if
you want the best person at University of Michigan, you’ll go to a fellow named
Steinheimer.” I said, “Okay, tell me about him.” So, he told me about Roy.

         So, I picked up the phone immediately, that minute, and called and got Roy on the
telephone, told him of the conversation I’d had with Oppenheim so he would know the
source of my reference, because he had been one of Oppenheim’s protégés. He agreed to
come to talk to me.
Warren: Fly in?
Huntley: Yeah. He came in and we hit it off quickly. I invited him back with his wife
immediately. We brought Jane down, and all of us got along well. Evelyn and Jane and
Roy and I all got along well. It moved very quickly. I made him an offer probably within
two weeks of meeting him, and he came that—let’s see. I guess he was here by the fall of
’69—the fall of ’68.
Warren: He became the dean of law on September 1, 1968.
Huntley: Exactly.
Warren: You didn’t waste any time.
Huntley: No, I couldn’t waste time. He came. He began—which is the same year I
became—I probably became president the first of February or the last of January of ’68.
Warren: Yep.
Huntley: He became dean the next September, and he hit the ground—he made a real

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impact here, obviously. So, he was spectacular.
Warren: I’m going to pause just for a moment.
[Begin Huntley 7]
Huntley: I was very lucky in the people.
Warren: Roy Steinheimer I remember being quite the fellow.
Huntley: Well, he is. He’s still here. He’s ninety-two. I had dinner with him last night.
Warren: Where does he live?
Huntley: At Kendal [retirement community].
Warren: I didn’t know that.
Huntley: Evelyn and I had dinner with him and his step-daughter last night.
Warren: Oh, my gosh. I didn’t know he was here.
Huntley: Roy knows everything he ever knew. There’s nothing wrong with Roy.
Warren: Oh, my gosh. I’ve got to put him on my list.
Huntley: Well, you better do it quick, because Roy is ninety-two.
Warren: All right. I’m there.
Huntley: And he might turn you down. You better not just call Roy out of the blue if you
want to get to see him. He’ll just tell you no. If you decide you want to see him, you
better let me know and let me ask him.
Warren: Thank you.
Huntley: He might not do it even then.
Warren: Why is that?
Huntley: He just doesn’t like to do things like that. Roy marches to his own drummer.
Roy is not a hail-fellow well met. He’s not a backslapper. He did his job as dean
magnificently, including the entertainment function. The relationships with our law
alumni and the relationships with our board: he was wonderful at all of that. But, Roy
does not seek out companionship. He’s not likely to—he would have no interest in
recording his thoughts about the past. He would have no idea who you are, and would
have no interest in finding out who you are. It just wouldn’t interest him.
Warren: Well, I would appreciate your introduction.
Huntley: So, your only chance would be to have someone intercede on your behalf to see
him, and I’m probably the best shot you’d have of getting that.

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Warren: I can’t imagine a better shot.
Huntley: I don’t know how much time he would give you; I don’t know how much time
you would want, or if you’re going to even do that. You’re just doing these three shots
now, aren’t you? These three you’ve described.
Warren: For right now. We’ll see what Ken and Jim want.
Huntley: Well, Steinheimer’s story is worth recording, because that’s the whole history
of the law school. I could give you that in filtered version.
Warren: Well, give it to me in a filtered version.
Huntley: I was close to it, but Roy’s the guy to really tell you what happened, because
he, of course, transformed the law school.
Warren: Well, let’s get it to point of transformation.
Huntley: Well, it was—let’s see if I can’t make this as succinct as possible. We don’t
want to spend all day on this, but… We actually gave serious consideration—we being
me and the rector, Huston St. Clair, [and] one or two of the trustees to whom I was
closest at the outset: Lewis Powell, Ross Malone—to closing the law school. That’s
certainly not a fact that’s known. You’ll find no record of that, but we did discuss it.
Warren: And we’re talking right at the beginning of your administration?
Huntley: Right. It wasn’t I who brought that up; it was Joe Lykes. When he brought it
up, I had to acknowledge it was a serious question. The law school showed every threat
of becoming a drag. It wasn’t a drag then; it was probably a slight, modest plus
financially, but it was going to become what I knew it had to become to be good, to fulfill
its destiny, it was going to be a drag. Could the school say grace over all that? It’s very
peculiar to have essentially an undergraduate institution with a law school annexed to it,
anyway. The only other one I know is Dickinson [College]. I don’t know much about
that. It was here, you could argue, by accident anyway.

         Law was originally an undergraduate study. That’s why it was called LLB. One of
the bootstraps operations of the law profession made that into a doctorate, the JD, which I
was opposed to, but it was a bachelor’s degree. It was not a graduate degree originally. It
was not seen as an embarkation on graduate studies on one hand. On the other hand,
graduate studies and undergraduate studies were not as clearly demarked in the
nineteenth century as they are now. Washington and Lee offered advanced degrees in

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those years, now and then; now and then gave a master’s; even may have given one or
two doctorates in the nineteenth century.
Warren: It did.
Huntley: But the distinction wasn’t—they didn’t think of themselves as embarking on a
new—graduate and undergraduate studies were not that clearly delineated, as you well
know. The law school, of course, was a separate entity when Lee became president, and
he invited Brockenborough—who was the rector of the board— invited Brockenborough
to bring the law school into the university, into the college. And he did so. And then we
had the prominent figures: [John Randolph] Tucker and the others who were prominent
Washington and Lee people, who gave the law school a glow, a glamour. Tucker, the
founder of the ABA [American Bar Association], was a Washington and Lee dean of the
law school. And, of course, John W. Davis [1892L] was an alumnus, the founder of
Davis-Polk. Newton Baker [1894L], the biggest law firm in Cleveland: alumnus. These
were luminaries. So, the school had this distinguished group of people who had been
affiliated with it, and had loyal alumni as it still does have. Nevertheless, there was the
question whether it could maintain and engage the strength—you know, really become a
strong law school. Nobody was sure whether it could or not.

         So anyway, ultimately we didn’t go to the whole board with that question. Just a
few of us discussed it and ultimately decided not to go to the whole board with that
question. I prevailed on not to do that and we’d see what I could do.
Warren: So by this time, Steinheimer would have been—
Huntley: No, he wasn’t here. This was really very early on. This was the first month or
two of my presidency. So, when I had gotten a hold of Roy and decided he was the guy, I
leveled with him exactly on every detail of what the school had and didn’t have and what
it had to do. That’s what attracted him. That’s why he came. I think he would tell you that
if you were to talk to him. He knew the school. He knew it had a reputation. He knew it
had the basic strengths. He knew the challenge was enormous; he had boundless energy
and lots of vision for the way law schools ought to be run, and he felt like he could do the
job. He was anxious to do it. He was dying to do it. He hit the ground running.

         His first job was to enhance the applicant pool of students, which he flew all over
the country doing. He taught full time, too. Marvelous teacher. He flew all over the

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country visiting undergraduate schools, and introducing them to Washington and Lee,
and selling them on Washington and Lee. In no time flat, the applicant pool doubled and
quadrupled. He then began to hire additional faculty.

         But by this time, he and I—we always knew; I told him originally the facility was
going to have to be changed. I said we would explore enlarging the building we were in.
There were possibilities of doing that, but they were pretty limited. There was but so
much you could do to that building, and it was probably going to require more than that. I
had no idea what the chances are of us getting the funds together and finding the location.
How are we going to do that? I don’t know. That’s all for us to decide.

         It wasn’t long before we faced the issue of where the building could go. We
decided it had to be a new building. Plus, the college could use that building [Tucker
Hall]. Even that enlargement needed that building, so it was an obvious conclusion. But
where the hell to put it? That brings us back to the flood, doesn’t it? Because you
couldn’t put it back here. There was a hundred-foot fee-simple right of way right through
the middle of campus by the railroad, right through the middle. Right where that road is
now, that was a railroad. Know where the buildings and grounds building is? The B&G
building? The Facilities Management Building? The railroad ran right over that, and
dumped coal down into that building. The railroad literally ran over it. The car would
stop—do you know how coal cars worked? Opened it and dumped coal into the coal-fired
plant, which is what this school was using when I became president, burning coal in that
building over there.

         One of the things that had to be done—this is just a digression—one of the things
that had to be done is all of the infrastructure of the campus had to be replaced: all the
sewage, electrical lines, heating facilities. Of course, there were no cooling facilities. All
of that had to be replaced. Nobody wants to give memorial sewers. That’s expensive. All
that stuff, very expensive.
Warren: Nobody wants to have a sewer system named for them.
Huntley: It all had to be done. We were barely able to heat the place. There was a lot to
be done. But I needed that hundred-foot right of way. I needed that desperately. The exact
location of the law school hadn’t been chosen; it had to be over there somewhere. It
couldn’t be over here. Were we going to put it on Main Street? It had to be somewhere

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over there. We had to have that property, I figured, for lots of reasons, really.
         Fortunately, the earlier generations had enough sense to buy all that land up there

beyond the ruins, and all the pine knoll here. Mattingly had bought that in his early years
as treasurer. He bought that for a song, all that land over there. I guess we could have put
the law school up there on the piney knoll, but it would have been difficult to get back
without that hundred feet. Well, there was a huge flood here in 1969 [caused by the
storms following hurricane Camille, on August 20, 1969]. As I said, it’s an ill wind that
blows—it was terrible. You know about that, do you?
Warren: I wasn’t here.
Huntley: You heard of it?
Warren: Tell me.
Huntley: It was the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in one place, end of sentence.
Warren: Anywhere?
Huntley: Anywhere in the world. [This is an exaggeration but the storm was
devastating.] The Amazon Rainforest had never had anything like this. It rained—in a
fourteen- or fifteen-hour period, it rained something like thirty inches. Unheard-of,
literally unheard-of. And the rainfall fell within a narrow swath that runs right down the
valley of the Maury River: a narrow swath of Virginia—by narrow I mean five miles
wide or ten miles wide, at the most. Five miles wide, I would say, and fifteen miles long.
It all fell right there. It was the residue of a gulf hurricane. I forget the name of the
hurricane now. I shouldn’t have forgotten it. Camille? No, not Camille. Anyway, it was a
gulf hurricane that came up over the mountains, and went right here to dump all of its
accumulated moisture.

         I was in the Lee House, and I remember very well that evening it began raining
about dinnertime, as I recall, late afternoon. I thought I’d never heard rain like this in my
life. I went out on the porch and I called Evelyn and said, “Come out here, Evelyn. Look
at this.” It wasn’t coming down in drops; it was coming down in buckets, literally
buckets. It was as if you were standing under a waterfall. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Nobody else had ever seen anything like it; there had never been anything like it.

         By the next morning, early—I was up at dawn the next morning—this was in
August or September. It was in the hurricane season—I went down to the bridge across

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the Maury River. You know, the Route 11 bridge. It was not the same bridge it is now,
but it was in exactly the same place, exactly the same height. I went down. That bridge
had been closed, because they were afraid it was going. The Maury River, which is sixty
feet below that bridge, had risen to the bridge.
Warren: I never heard that before.
Huntley: It had risen to the bridge. I’ve got photographs of it there. You can look.
Warren: Oh, my God.
Huntley: It had risen to the bridge: sixty feet. Those who saw it say it happened all at
once. A wall of water came down the Maury River valley carrying everything before it.
Everything it touched it destroyed. It killed hundreds of people, of course. Washed their
bodies—some of their bodies have never been discovered to this day.
Warren: I know Buena Vista was badly hit.
Huntley: Buena Vista was flooded under water, but the South River area became a
torrent. I went out to the South River a day or so later, and there was an automobile—the
trees out there were all gone. There was one lone tree that somehow survived, and at the
very top of this tree was the chassis of an automobile. At the top of the tree. This wall of
water carried everything before it; giant trees were floating down and hitting everything
they saw. Automobiles, whole automobiles—it was the damndest thing you’ve ever seen.
It was the damndest thing anybody—nobody’s ever seen anything like it before and never
will again. There was no warning of it, so people who were living on the banks of that
river were all killed. No time to escape; it came down like a wall.

         But one of the things it did, besides all of the tragedies it created, was it washed
out the railroad trestle. It didn’t take the highway bridge. Almost took the highway
bridge. The highway bridge survived.
Warren: But that trestle was right there.
Huntley: The trestle was the same height as the highway bridge, and it was a very
substantial structure, a steel structure. Washed it out without a trace. All that was left
were the pediments that are still there.
Warren: That are still there to do this day.
Huntley: You can still see the pediments. Washed it out without a trace. I went down and
the thing was gone. It wasn’t going; it was gone. And I must admit to a slight inner glow

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when I saw that, because I had already begun negotiations with the railroad in Baltimore.
I’d been to see them, even, to discuss with them abandoning service to Lexington. I’d
gotten the data together indicating the need for the service didn’t exist. There was very
little freight here, and the passenger service had long since been abandoned. There was
no excuse for them—they didn’t need it. It would save them money to get rid of it.

         But railroads are the world’s worse bureaucracies, and they were not going to say
no, they just never said yes. I had a desperate feeling I was never going to get it done, but
this got it done. I must say that it wasn’t more than a week after this event that I was in
the office of the president, chief executive officer of the C&O, I guess it was, in
Baltimore. Was it C&O? [Probably the Richmond & Allegany Railroad, successor to the
Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.] I guess. But now the shoe’s on the other foot. Now he
needed my help not to have to resurrect that railroad trestle. He didn’t want to spend $2
million building a railroad bridge to a terminal that was two hundred yards away to
deliver one freight car a week, but the ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission, abolished
by Congress in 1995] was making him do that. He can’t just quit service. You’ve got to
provide service. So, now he needed my help to get permission not to revive service.

         So, I organized some community—with Bud Shell’s help. [George R.E.] Bud
Shell [superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, 1960–71] and I organized some
community viewpoint, and got the point across that the abandonment of the service
would be endorsed by the city fathers. They abandoned service. What we extracted from
them in turn was they’d give the right of way to us. They gave VMI the right of way
going through the VMI campus, and Washington and Lee the right of way that goes
through our campus.
Warren: And how about the station?
Huntley: And the station. That was the agreement.
Warren: Was that part of the deal? You got the station for free? [Actual purchase price,
in 1972, was $31,500.]
Huntley: Well, I didn’t want the station, but I got the station. The only thing he extracted
from me was a gentleman’s promise—not in writing. This is not in writing, and it’s not in
any letter, either, I don’t think—that we’d take the station and we’d preserve it. He
thought it was historically significant. “Preserve the old station.” I said, “Okay, we’ll

                                                                                                                               71
preserve the station. You have my agreement—my gentleman’s agreement on that, not
binding anybody to it, but you have my agreement that we’ll do that. I said okay, and that
was the only thing he extracted from us. I passed that on to my successors, which is why
they spent all that money to move it across the street, which they never would have done
otherwise, because that was expensive. So, that was what we paid for it. So, we got the
right of way as a result of that hurricane.
Warren: Which brings us back to the law school.
Huntley: Well, we settled on the location. We got the architects together and began to
draft rough drawings of the law school and so on, laid out functionally what functionally
was required in the building. Did all that pretty quickly, by—what time? Probably had
that done by ’72, I would guess, ’71. Something like that. Rough drawings of that. I’m
trying now to remember when the first conversation with Syd Lewis occurred. I can’t
remember.
Warren: That’s what I found very confusing, because—
Huntley: Well, it should be easy to find, Mame.
Warren: Well, he was a trustee in ’72.
Huntley: He wasn’t a trustee until he’d made the gift.
Warren: That’s what I—
Huntley: Oh, no. He was—I said ’71 or ’72.
Warren: Yes, he became a trustee in ’72, and he gave the gift in ’72, but he was a trustee
before it was announced, but I have to assume that you knew that the gift was coming.
Huntley: Was he a trustee before it was announced?
Warren: Yes, but just barely. So, I would assume you might have known.
Huntley: I didn’t know that.
Warren: But I want to hear the story about the gift.
Huntley: I wouldn’t have guessed he was a trustee before it was announced. I mean,
that’s possible, but if I had been required to guess, I wouldn’t have guessed that. The way
the gift occurred—it must have been ’71—it was quick. We were moving fast. We moved
fast on everything, as fast as we could. As fast as circumstances permitted. We had rough
calculations about the size of the law school, and so on—rough drawings and its
location—I guess by ’71, maybe by ’70. I don’t know how quickly. I can’t remember

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now.
Warren: Yes, it was already in the planning for sure.
Huntley: Sure, it was in the planning. We had already done the gymnasium. We did that
right away.
Warren: The Warner Center.
Huntley: Right. The gymnasium was desperately inadequate. The Doremus Gymnasium
was just that one little front room there, you know. That was a desperate need. The
athletic program was simply vanishing. That was the very first thing done. Jack Warner
gave most of the money. Not all of it. We added that on, probably in ’70. I’m guessing
’70. But, we were meanwhile working on the law school plans. We’d actually already
begun on library plans by then, too. We saw that as a long ways off. Those were the
desperate needs: the gymnasium, the law school, the library were the desperate needs
without which we could not proceed.

         The library thing involved two steps; the commerce school needed to be
expanded. So, all that—it was really self-evident that that was needed to be done. Those
three pieces. The order in which they were to be done was not decided except the
gymnasium needed to be done immediately. The athletic program was literally
collapsing. The law school was as high a priority as you could make it, because the
school was—that’s not going to make it in those quarters [Tucker Hall]. You couldn’t
accommodate more than about a hundred law students over there. While we wanted it to
remain small, that was too small. Roy and I figured ideal would be 250 to 300, and I
guess it’s probably 350 now. I don’t know, which I think is pushing the limits, but
anyway.

         So, I went to see Syd Lewis. Didn’t know him. Farris undoubtedly located him for
me to see, I guess, in ’70. It must have been ’70. I had in mind asking him for a modest
gift, like a six-figure gift—that was a big gift to me—in the arts: I knew of his and
Frances’s newly developed love for the arts. We needed assistance in the arts, and I was
really looking for a grant from them for that purpose of maybe a hundred thousand
dollars. I think Farris had even prepared a proposal for a hundred thousand dollars. I bet
you could probably find that somewhere. I went down to see them and gave them that
proposal. They were very attentive, listened to me, and heard me out. They didn’t say yea

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or nay, and took the proposal.
         Syd got in touch with me not long thereafter and said, “Bob, what we’d really be

interested in knowing is more about the law school.” I had told him the nature of the total
planning process. He said, “We’d like to hear more about the plans for the law school.” I
said, “Okay.” Syd was a law alumnus, you see, though he didn’t practice law. I said,
“Okay, we’ll get those plans in your hands.” So, I went down there immediately,
probably with Roy. Yeah, with Roy. I introduced them.
Warren: To Richmond?
Huntley: Yeah, introduced them to Roy, and together we described to them the then
rudimentary plans we had—we already had a sketch of the building—the rudimentary
plans we had for the law school, and that we were looking at a project that probably was
going to cost between five and seven million. Maybe more than that. That seemed like an
inordinately large sum of money, Mame. It may be hard for you to believe, but that
was—you’d have to multiply that times six or seven now to get some feel for the size of
the money. I thought maybe we’ll get a hundred thousand dollars towards this. It’ll get us
started on this.

         We came back home after what we thought was a satisfactory visit. We liked
them and they liked us, I think. It wasn’t more than a week later—maybe just three or
four days later—I had a call from their lawyer, Bob Burress, whom I didn’t know except
by name. He introduced himself over the telephone. He said, “I’m calling on behalf of
Syd and Frances Lewis.” I said, “All right.” I couldn’t imagine what in the world— He
said, “Mr. Huntley, do you have any idea what it is the Lewises are considering?” I said,
“No, I really don’t, Mr. Burress.” He said, “Well, they’re considering a gift in the
neighborhood of $7 million.” Well, I expect that’s the only time I’ve ever been
speechless during my—I really couldn’t speak. That ultimately became $9 million, of
course. And then they gave a lot more after that. They gave several more million during
the years that passed.

         So, that made it possible for us to get started immediately, and we did get started
very quickly. I don’t know when we broke ground: late ’72, early ’73?
Warren: I don’t have that.
Huntley: Well, somewhere in there. That’s the point at which I took Pat Brady out of the

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job as buildings and grounds chief and put him in charge of—in clerk of the works of that
job.
Warren: I thought that might be connected.
Huntley: We hired a—this is a slight digression—we hired a contractor from North
Carolina. We did a lot of intensive work on what contractors to get. We got a contractor
from North Carolina who was said to be the best in the world. He went into bankruptcy
when all he had was a hole in the ground over there. He got a hole in the ground; he
hadn’t gotten a damn thing done; he took bankruptcy. Not because of our job, but
because of other jobs he had fouled up elsewhere. So, we were left with a hole in the
ground and no contractor. Million-dollar hole in the ground, I called it. Well, the
bankruptcy trustee, who happens to have been an alumnus, did not abandon the job as he
could have done. He retained the job, and turned it over to us to complete. So, Pat Brady
essentially built it.
Warren: Wow.
Huntley: Essentially became the contractor, essentially we subcontracted to the—we
became the direct contractor, the school did, and we subcontracted all parts of the job. So,
we became the general. There was no general contractor.
Warren: Well, Pat Brady learned by doing.
Huntley: Yeah. And we got that done. It was an exciting time.
Warren: That was a good party, too, as I recall.
Huntley: Yeah, it was a great party. A year or two earlier—maybe ’69 or something—I
had been on an airplane on the way somewhere. One of the law alumni whom I knew
well named Alex Harman [‘44L]—who was then on the Virginia Supreme Court—well
maybe he went on the Supreme Court after that. Anyway, he was on the airplane with me
and he said, “What are you going to do about the law school?” I said, “We’re going to
build a new one, Alex. I don’t know when, but we’re going to build a new one.” “Oh,” he
said, “You’ll never get that done.” I said, “Yeah, we are. We’re going to get it done.
We’re going to build a new one; it’s going to be a good one.” He said, “The day you get
that done, I’ll dedicate the scotch.”

         So, when we got the thing done and we were getting ready, I called Alex, who by
then was on the Supreme Court of Virginia. I said, “Alex, you remember that

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conversation?” He remembered all that. I said, “I’m holding you to it.” So, he did in
fact—he had bought several kegs or barrels of a fine single-malt scotch from Scotland.
He had it delivered over here. He had to get special dispensation from the attorney
general to get it brought in and all that, and we bottled it into Lewis Hall bottles. You’ve
probably seen those. Have you ever seen one of them?
Warren: I’ve heard about it.
Huntley: We bottled it at the residue, but the bulk of it was served at the party out of the
barrels into tin cups over there on the lawn of the law school. This neat scotch. Nobody
got much. That was fun.
Warren: So, this established a new level of alumni giving, to say the least.
Huntley: Well, yeah, it did. That helped activate alumni giving, and we began to get
additional large gifts. Things began to catch on; momentum began to grow.

         The consultant you referred to was a fellow named Bob Nelson. We didn’t hire
any of the traditional Ketchum [public relations firm]-endorsed kind of consultants. I
interviewed them, but I didn’t really want to turn over my job to them. That’s what they
sort of talked like they wanted me to do—or Farris’s job, either. I didn’t want a highly
structured, card-carrying-type campaign. I didn’t think that would work.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: I don’t know. It just didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t think our alumni would like
having solicitors with cards at their door. I thought it had to be more of a self-
identification process than that. Farris agreed. I stumbled onto this fellow Nelson. I can’t
remember how we found him. Farris must have found him. He was a loner. He had one
guy working with him. Nelson just charged you for his wits. He didn’t provide you with a
staff, or you didn’t have card-carriers. You simply paid him for his wits. He had a lot of
wit. He came down here a number of times over a period of probably six or seven years,
and advised Farris directly, advised me directly. On occasion, advised the board directly.
But, mainly it was Farris and I whom he advised. I found him very helpful. He could be
sometimes a little tiresome, a little irksome, but that may have been one of his virtues. He
would get like a burr under the saddle. He kept you moving. I think Farris found him
useful; I know I did. We didn’t do everything he said to. Lots of things he recommended
we didn’t do, but everything he recommended made us think of something, and made us

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do something we wouldn’t have done otherwise, not necessarily what he told us to, but
something. So, he was good.

         One of the things Farris stumbled into doing, by the way—he may have done this
partially on a Nelson recommendation. I don’t know whether Nelson recommended it, or
if Farris just stumbled into it. We decided we needed to extend our reach beyond what we
could afford to hire in the development office. So, we created sort of alumni quasi-
volunteers. We called them development associates, or something like that. They were all
alumni—dedicated alumni—all alumni who had already had successful careers, although
were not retired. These were mid-career alumni who, because of their particular
circumstances, could afford to take as much as six months to a couple of years off, or at
least partially off, and devote that full time to us, to a regional representation, extending
Farris’s reach.

         We found maybe—I’ll say eight or ten such persons—eight maybe, all over the
country. We simply paid their expenses. There were no salaries. We paid their expenses,
and they gave their services. We found eight very able people to do that, and for the most
part, they were very effective. Some more effective than others, of course.
Warren: Were other schools doing anything like this?
Huntley: No. I never heard of anybody else doing it.
Warren: Me either.
Huntley: I’m sure it was Farris’s idea. It may have been Bob Nelson’s idea. Maybe all
three of us came up with it together. Maybe we thought it up among ourselves together. I
don’t know. But, it worked and amazingly extended the reach.

         A guy named Upton Bell out in Texas—a man of parts. Upton was a man of
considerable means himself. A guy named Adrian Williamson out in Little Rock. Two
good examples of people who gave substantial chunks of time with very effective results.
Farris would give you all their names. Maybe he already has. I don’t know. I think we
called them development associates, or something. I’ve forgotten what we called them,
but they were very effective. We did that for about, I’ll say, three years maybe, which
continued to increase the momentum. And some of those continued to linger on for a
while longer, would give us partial time thereafter, so they trailed on for three or four
years. Some of them didn’t work out, but several of them did. That was helpful.

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Warren: That’s quite a gift. Let’s take a pause for a moment.
[Begin Huntley 8]
Warren: All right. We are making great progress here. So, along about 1971, you were
having such a good time that you decided to start a campaign.
Huntley: Well, we knew we were going to have to start a campaign. I don’t remember
when we announced it.
Warren: I have that it was a ten-year campaign from ’71 to ’81.
Huntley: Yeah. Did we announce it in ’71?
Warren: That I can’t tell you.
Huntley: I think not. I think we had already—I think we announced it after we’d already
begun it.
Warren: That’s the usual way.
Huntley: But I think we announced it earlier than the standard advice would have been.
We weren’t a third of the way home, or something. I would guess we announced it in ’72,
but I’m not sure. Ten years in two phases, I guess six- and four-year phases? The total we
initially announced was $64 million. We were able to raise about $68 million, I think—
sixt- six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. We didn’t count twleve million of that, so we didn’t
count the [John Lee] Pratt estate towards that, so that would—

         The Pratt estate came to us by bequest in the ’70s. It was $12 million. We didn’t
count that as a development achievement. That was set up in a separate capitalized fund.
Pratt specified that it not be used for endowment. It was not only not endowment, it was
specifically, donor-directed not to be endowment. He directed us—his preference was
that we spend the money. He made that crystal clear. He wanted to make sure it didn’t get
tarred with the brush of endowment, which he saw as an affliction of many colleges. The
sacrosanct nature of endowment he thought was a mistake. He didn’t want that to occur.
So, he made it crystal clear in his will that the money not only could be spent, but was to
be spent. Didn’t say over what time period.

         So, we set it up in a separate capitalized account, just simply called the Pratt
Account, I recall, and spent out of it at a rate of about twice the rate that we were
spending from endowment. My recollection is we may have spent 10 or 12 percent a year
for a while when we needed it, and maybe tapered off to 8. By the way, it grew despite

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that. I don’t know what happened to it since, but it was a big help. It helped us. As I said,
I had been running budget deficits the first several years. It helped close those gaps to get
us through. So, it was certainly a windfall to receive the Pratt gift. But, we didn’t count
that. That’s not included in the $66 million that we attributed to the campaign over the
years.

         We were slow to reach the objective. I don’t recall. There’s a magazine that Farris
sent me a copy of just very recently that I had forgotten, an alumni magazine that was
published at the end of the campaign that did show the time periods in which the dollars
were raised, several different stopping points. I’m sure you can find that. Farris probably
has a copy of it. But I’ve forgotten now exactly how it worked out. I’d say by midway—
by ’76—we were gaining ground. It was pretty clear we were going to be able to make it
work. And the technique of borrowing to tide us over had helped.

         By the time I left, though, we had all that amortized. All of the borrowed money
had either been paid back, or funds set aside to pay it back. So, it was a clean slate that I
handed over to John Wilson, financially. A lot more needed to be done, which he got
done, but he didn’t have any financial dirty linen from the past to wash. He had lots to do
and he got it done. He did a marvelous job. That’s a story I like to tell, too.

         I met him for the first time at a VFIC meeting—Virginia Foundation of
Independent Colleges meeting—of which I was then serving as, probably, president. He
came to a meeting at the Homestead to participate in a panel program. He was then at
VPI [Virginia Polytechnical Institute], or at [now known as Virginia] Tech as their
provost, I guess. Their senior academic official, whatever they call that person.
Warren: Provost.
Huntley: Okay. I was very, very impressed with this guy. He had come there from Wells
[College], which is, of course, a smallish school so I knew he had that experience. I was
very impressed with him. I remember thinking—I did not have anything to do with his
being selected, by the way. I’m not leading to that. I came home and said, “Evelyn, that
would certainly be a guy I’d like to see succeed me.” She and I were already entertaining
ideas of me stepping out at some point. So, I was delighted when he ended up being the
one they selected. He did a spectacular job.
Warren: Farris told me that story a couple of days ago and I was flabbergasted.

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Huntley: I had no role in the selection, though. Don’t misunderstand me.
Warren: That’s what he said.
Huntley: I didn’t put that bee in anybody’s ear. I didn’t think it was my role to do that. I
don’t believe in that at all. It just happened that way. I have told John that, though. I
never got to know John well. Still don’t know him well. Know him favorably, but not
well. That opportunity just didn’t occur for us to—because I left years ago, a year after I
stepped out as president. That hadn’t been my intention. I intended to teach. See, I kept
on thinking of myself as a teacher. During all these fifteen years, I thought of myself as a
teacher on leave going back to teach. When I got through being president, that’s what I
intended to do and that’s what I did do.

         But, two things happened. I found out I had lost a great deal of my teaching
ability. I was not satisfied with my performance as a teacher, whereas I earlier had been. I
hadn’t kept up with the scholarship, and I didn’t really have time to catch up with the
scholarship to be the teacher I needed to be. I found I was not well equipped to teach in a
modern law school. I discovered that within a month of beginning classes in the fall of
’83? Yeah. I stopped being president exactly fifteen years almost to the day: in the
beginning of the second term of the 1983 year. The board gave me a year’s leave with
pay, but I didn’t take the year. I just took a semester, because Roy needed me to teach, he
said.

         So, I went back and began teaching in the fall and I didn’t do well. I thought what
I had to do, I’d be able to patch it up. I’d be able to catch up. I’d be able to take time and
repair the missing scholarship that I’d missed all those years. In other words, I was
disappointed in my performance. I hadn’t decided I couldn’t do it, but I was disappointed
in my performance.

         The second thing that occurred: I found was I was being made uncomfortable by
being here. Not by John, who was very careful never to do anything that would make me
uncomfortable, but by others who were old faculty members and old staff who would
come to me to wash their dirty linen, or make their complaints. There are always
complaints about a new president or, I suppose, about any president. John’s style, I guess,
wasn’t the same as mine—probably better—but it wasn’t the same. But, he rubbed a few
people wrong here, there, or yonder; nothing serious. But, I found people coming to me

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for advice, or counsel, or help. I didn’t want that; wouldn’t have that. It made me
uncomfortable. Those two factors: I didn’t expect either of them. Those were both
surprises to me.

         So then Syd and Frances suggested to me I come to work for Best Products [their
company, based in Richmond], I don’t know, about Christmastime. And I did. I left.
Warren: That was quite a transfer to go into business.
Huntley: Yeah, it was. It was. That was the hardest work I ever did, those next six years.
I worked even harder than I worked here. I still had a lot of energy, fortunately, and we
got it turned around—it was sinking—we got it turned around and it became profitable.
Everything was going pretty well. Then it got bought out, and the people who bought it
out broke it. But, those were a busy five or six years. I probably shouldn’t have done that.
In retrospect, I feel like I did it okay. The business was turned around, but it was a
strange thing for me to do. But that’s another story. That’s nothing to do with
Washington and Lee.

         Let’s see. The only thing I can think of that we haven’t covered is coeducation.
Warren: There’s that. There are several other things, but let’s go to coeducation.
Huntley: What are the other things? What else have you got?
Warren: Well, you built the new library [now the James G. Leyburn Library].
Huntley: Yeah. That’s true. And as I said, we identified that early on as one of the three
things that had to be done. Accompanying that, of course, was the renovation of the old
library [McCormick Library, now Huntley Hall]. That was a big job. To house the
commerce school, it had to be gutted and redone.
Warren: One thing I’d like to talk about—and of course it started with Lewis Hall. This
is quite a change in the architecture of the campus.
Huntley: Well, yeah.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Huntley: Well, as far as Lewis Hall was concerned—both of them, really—the idea was
to make them fit on the ground, to mold them to the ground, and not to mimic the
Colonnade. The last thing we wanted to do, I thought—and others thought, the board
thought—was to build a kind of a poor mimic of the Colonnade. We thought the better
thing to do was as nearly as feasible was make these buildings part of the Rockbridge

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County landscape, rather than copies of the neocolonial structures that sit up here.
         So, for example, take the library. The library’s a huge building. It contains more

space than all the Colonnade combined, more square footage in that library than every
building in this Colonnade put together. It’s only one storey high, because the ravine
allows you to drape it down into the ravine. There are actually five levels if you go all the
way to the bottom, down to the bottom of the ravine. So, the ravine becomes a plus. The
objective was to do just that: to give it as low a profile as we could do to accommodate
the space that we had, and to give it the red and white coloration, but not otherwise to
mimic the Colonnade.

         The law school’s the same way: to set it on that landscape to make it mold to that
landscape as nearly as we could. It’s a massive building. Of course, it’s even bigger than
the library. Not to make it appear as massive as in fact it is. To have built it in traditional
architecture—an erect multi-storey building—would make it seem like a monster. We
chose not to do that. That’s the basic explanation for it.

         Again, we had to renovate the old library and build this library. We managed to
get all that done. Lots of individual givers; no single large donor for the library. It was
lots of donations, and we began to build that before we had raised all the money, but we
did eventually raise it all. Let me see what else.
Warren: And you were given the gift of Skylark.
Huntley: That’s true. Yeah.
Warren: Was that an asset? Was that a surprise?
Huntley: Well, it’s an asset. It’s not a major asset. Leslie Cheek owned that, had built it.
He was the director of the Virginia Museum. Not an alumnus, someone whom I only
barely knew. But, he caught me up there one day. His lawyer in town named Penick—
one of the lawyers in town whom I had known here—was the one who introduced me to
him, and told me he would like to consider giving it to Washington and Lee. Would we
consider accepting it? We discussed it one afternoon. He said, “I would want to restrict it
against sale.” I said, “We can’t take it under those conditions. I have to consider whether
we can take it at all, but we certainly can’t take it if it’s restricted against resale. I can
give you—” Ultimately, I discussed it with the board and we agreed to take it, but with
no commitment to keep it, or to maintain it in any particular form. I said, “We’ll do the

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best we can. I give you my understanding that it’s not our intention to sell it now, but I
can’t tell you we won’t decide to sell it later.” There’s no commitment to retain it.

         He agreed to that, and gave it to us with no strings attached. I guess we never
really found a good use for it. It’s a beautiful place. We used to spend weekends up there
a lot my last couple of years here. But I don’t think they make much use of it now. I don’t
believe they do.
Warren: That’s a stunning property, that’s for sure.
Huntley: It is.
Warren: Well, let’s talk about coeducation.
Huntley: All right. Well, of course, coeducation was always an issue here from the day I
became president. We did, in fact, coeducate the law school without murmur in
[September 1972] , probably, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76, somewhere in there? I’ve forgotten the
year. We just did it.
Warren: It was fairly early.
Huntley: Yeah, ’74 maybe?
Warren: Early ’70s I think.
Huntley: About the time we moved into the building, or maybe even before that.
Warren: No, they were in Tucker Hall.
Huntley: They were, because we had to convert the urinals.
Warren: They were in Tucker Hall.
Huntley: They were. It must have been ’73 or ’74. But that was an easy thing to do. The
difference is self-evident—it may be self-evident. It doesn’t seem to be to everybody—to
coeducate a law school, you don’t change the curriculum. There are no curricula
implications with the gender of your law students. That’s not likely to be true with
undergraduate education.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: Because women enrolled differently from men in various courses. They
enrolled less heavily in the natural sciences, more heavily in sociology and the arts. In a
small school, this skews your student body to one end or the other of the curriculum. It
changes the arrangement that you had before. It’s hard to predict what those changes will
do to you. In a small school—as Washington and Lee was then smaller than now—you

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can’t have a large curriculum as we did. Again, all this is self-evident, but nobody seems
to think about it.

         You can’t have a large curriculum, which we did, unless the student body, either
voluntarily or by force, spreads itself across that curriculum. You teach physics and don’t
have anybody taking physics, you don’t long teach physics, or you don’t long have
anybody who will teach physics, to take an extreme example. If you teach psychology,
and everybody takes psychology, but nobody takes biology, or chemistry, or physics,
pretty soon you’ve got a school of psychology and your physics and chemistry teachers
don’t want to stay. I don’t have to spell that out; that’s self-evident. The student body
needs—at least in those days; this is less true now, because women’s tastes and
objectives in life have changed, but it was much truer then, easily demonstrated by
looking at schools’ enrollments—which we did—everywhere. Enrollments by sex, by
gender.

         You could easily predict in a student body of fifteen hundred—half women—
where the students would enroll based on the data you could gather from enrollments at
other schools. What you discovered was that you had a very lumpy curriculum, much
lumpier with the women than with the men. Men tended to spread themselves more
nearly evenly across a curriculum than women did. So, if that’s true—and it was true
then; I think it’s still true, to a degree—then you would have to enlarge the school and
more of them to retain people in the under-populated portions of the curriculum, or
subsidize the curriculum by forcing people to take courses they didn’t want to take. I call
that subsidizing the curriculum—that’s my term—which is a choice we didn’t want to
make. We didn’t want to do that; that’s not what we had done. When you have
distribution requirements, which to some degree subsidizes the curriculum, but beyond
the very basic courses, it doesn’t do that.

         But you don’t have anything to consider along those lines with law, you see.
There’s no analogous issue in the law school. The curriculum is the curriculum of law.
You’re not teaching sociology of law—well, you might be, but you’re not teaching much
of it. It doesn’t really matter much, because the students have already selected law as
their profession. Undergraduates haven’t selected any profession so, it doesn’t have any
curricular implications. All it does is enlarge your pool of students. So, it was much more

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of a no-brainer than the undergraduate school would have been.
         So, Roy and I went to the board of trustees—or I went, I guess in ’72 or ’73—and

described this—what I’ve just told you—to them in somewhat more detail and they
agreed. We coeducated it without much fanfare. There was very little attention paid to it.
It went smoothly. I remember Roy laughing about having to put flower pots in the urinals
in one of the men’s rooms we had to covert in Tucker Hall, so it must have been before
we moved: ’73 or ’74.

         The more general issue of coeducation was much thornier than that. We did many
studies of it over the time that I was president: one intensive study and two lesser studies,
and concluded a number of things, including what I just said about the curricular skewing
that was likely to occur. The likelihood that the school would have to increase in size was
fairly high. The probability of the need to increase in size was high. Of course, it has
increased in size. That’s been borne out. What is it, seventeen [hundred and] fifty,
eighteen hundred [students]?
Warren: I believe so.
Huntley: It’s well past the maximum which the board set. The board set x, and it’s now
x+2. Inevitable, I thought. That was a major factor in my thinking, and in the thinking of
many others. The size of the school we thought to be the vital element of the school. As I
say in that letter I gave you a copy of, size in a school like Washington and Lee is not a
relative matter; it’s an absolute matter. You could say, for example, that since the
University of Michigan enrolled forty thousand—it used to enroll, say, when I was a boy
two thousand—maybe. I made those numbers up—you could say that now, Washington
and Lee, which in my childhood was twelve hundred, could now be six times that. That
would be relative.

         But size with a school like Washington and Lee is not relative; it’s an absolute. It
needs to be above a certain minimum in order for you to have the curriculum that I’ve
just tried to describe, in order for that to be economically feasible, or for you to achieve
the very minimal economies of scale, both academic economies of scale and economic,
dollar economy of scale.

         But, beyond some upper limit—I don’t know what the numbers are, although I
think we’re close to it—there occurs the chemical reaction. If you ever did chemistry,

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certain substances you could put in and they would suddenly fractionate. Do you
remember that? You drop a drop of fluid x on fluid y, and it would spread into separate
little globules. Beyond a certain size, that happens to a community like Washington and
Lee. What was a coherent glob quasi-suddenly becomes a separate series of little blobs, I
think. Once that happens, it’s very hard to ever get it to go back together. Maybe
impossible.

         Once you reach some point—I don’t know where that point is. Maybe it’s way
beyond where we are now; I don’t make a case about that—once you reach a point where
the globule separates, you’ve lost a characteristic that you may never regain, and that
most people never had in the first place, which for lack of a better term you could call
community. Once you lose that, you’ve lost what for Washington and Lee, historically,
was a vital element of its being. An historically accidental element, to be sure.

         Washington and Lee’s greatest virtue has been its ability to make virtue out of
necessity. Its small size was, one could argue, a product of necessity. Washington and
Lee learned, or molded itself into a product that maximized the virtues of smallness. No
one set about to design that, but it happened that way. I thought it important that we not
lose that—vitally important. I still think it’s important. It’s probably the single-most
important thing the school has got to—at least most of its other attributes flow from that:
the Honor System being one. I thought it important not to lose that.

         A second combination of factors—that’s one combination of factors: its
curriculum skewing and size. A second factor is economics. If you sell silver dollars for
sixty cents, which is what we were doing, you don’t make money by selling more of
them, right? Mutt and Jeff used to have little cartoons about that. So, schools don’t get
affluent by increasing their enrollments; they get poor by increasing their enrollments,
unless they increase their endowments to support the enrollment by at least the same
amount, at least the same percentage. So, if it requires x-ty million in endowment to
support twelve hundred students, it will require x-ty plus x millions to support fifteen
hundred or seventeen hundred students. It’s a fairly simple arithmetic equation, with no
demonstrated significant economies of scale beyond a certain minimal level. It tends to
go up arithmetically if not, occasionally, geometrically.

         So, vast new resources are required to increase from, let’s say, twelve hundred to

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seventeen or eighteen hundred students. The fact that they are required won’t be obvious
on day one, because the costs are lagging costs. The initial benefit of additional
enrollment tuitions will be an apparent affluence, but the costs will catch up. The costs of
additional faculty are catching up with the school now, additional faculty that Ken is
having to add all the time to retain a low student-faculty ratio. The sandbag of costs is
swinging right behind your butt, and if you quit running, it’ll catch you. As soon as you
stop the enrollment growth at, say, eighteen hundred, seventeen, sixteen hundred, the
sandbag hits you in the butt, and you’ve got to pay Paul. At least that’s the way I
analyzed it.

         So, I figured if we needed x million to put the school in healthy condition, with a
student body of twelve to thirteen hundred undergraduates and three hundred law
students, we would need substantially more than that to emerge economically healthy
with seventeen or sixteen hundred students, which I calculated to be to be the minimum
necessary to coeducate. That turned out to be close to correct. So, I didn’t see that
happening. I didn’t see it happening then.
Warren: And you saw it that way because—
Huntley: I’ve got things in writing about that. You can find these write ups if you want.
Warren: But you thought that because you wanted to maintain the number of men, or—
Huntley: I wanted to maintain the size and the curriculum. The vital elements to me were
the small size, the economic health, and the size of the curriculum. Now, I had not
decided—still haven’t—that seventeen or eighteen hundred was so large we couldn’t
retain those things, though I’ve already told you I think it’s close to the border. That’s
just instinct; I could never prove that. But, I wasn’t sure that was more than we could
sustain. I was certain it was more than we could sustain economically, because we were
already broke. I thought it desirable to get the school to a point where we could survive
before we enlarged it.

         And the costs of coeducation would go beyond that. The big initial costs, upfront
costs: dormitories, facilities for women different from the facilities for men, health
services for women that you don’t have to provide for men. A whole array of things that
we identified and put price tags on. So those factors all militated against it.

         It seemed to me, then, and now in retrospect it seems to be fairly obvious that it

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probably was—I saw it probably as inevitable that Washington and Lee would become
coeducational. But, I never reached a conclusion as to when that would occur. I did reach
the conclusion I didn’t want to do it. In the first place, I was going to be out my fifteen-
year limit, and to have committed myself to a whole other chapter at Washington and Lee
was not something I thought I should do. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could do it; I
didn’t think I should do it.

         I was tired of the job after fifteen years. Not physically tired, but emotionally and
mentally tired. As I told the faculty towards the end, I used to enjoy hearing the questions
and coming up with answers. It got to the point where not only did I not have new
answers; I didn’t even want to hear the questions. That’s not necessarily good for the
school. I thought fifteen years was long enough for me. If it was to become
coeducational, it was going to happen after me, and of course it did.

         I must say that I feared it would be difficult to retain the sense of community—
more difficult to retain the sense of community—with coeducation. I feared that, and I
don’t know whether that’s happened or not. I do sense through my granddaughters, who
love it here, that they don’t have the same sense—they don’t tell me this negatively, and I
don’t ask them questions that require negative answers of them—but I know them very
well. They don’t feel themselves to be part of a cohesive community in the same way that
I did. They don’t feel that. They like it. They’re part of a community, but it’s not a
campus globule, to use my earlier analogy.
Warren: I like that image. I’m going to pause just for a moment.
[Begin Huntley 9]
Huntley: It has changed. It’s not necessarily a fatal change, but it’s a big change and I
didn’t look forward to introducing that change to Washington and Lee.
Warren: One of the things that occurs to me as you’re describing the size of the student
body and the relationship within Washington and Lee is that to increase the student body
also has an impact on the town of Lexington—
Huntley: Sure, sure.
Warren: And the county of Rockbridge.
Huntley: Of course.
Warren: And we haven’t really talked about Washington and Lee’s role as a citizen.

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Huntley: And on the size of the faculty. Right. Well, I must say I didn’t worry a whole
lot about that. I thought that would take care of itself; maybe I shouldn’t have. I didn’t
have time to worry about that. I really didn’t. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to worry
about planning for Lexington. So, I didn’t really spend any time on that.
Warren: I have a sense when I was here from 1995 to 1999 that, in particular, Frank was
spending a lot of time interacting with the city. But that kind of thing didn’t occur much
during your time?
Huntley: Well, there was interchange with the city, and I saw the city fathers from time
to time, but no, there was not a lot of interchange. Frank, even then, had some contacts
with the city, but I’d say it was a very low-level priority with me. You can’t make
everything a priority.
Warren: Well, I remember during my time here in the—
Huntley: Well, I knew everybody in town. I’d been here for years.
Warren: Well, in the late ’70s, I certainly remember the fraternities having an impact on
the town.
Huntley: Yeah, that’s true. They probably did. I must tell you, it was not a matter I gave
a lot of thought to. Others probably did. I mean, I don’t want to suggest to you that I
thought of everything and did everything; I didn’t. A lot of things I didn’t do. That was
one of them. I wasn’t much of a student of the role of Washington and Lee as a
Lexington citizen. No, I wasn’t.
Warren: Well, we’ve done a pretty good job of working our way through my list. Are
there—
Huntley: Good. No, there are not.
Warren: —things we haven’t touched on?
Huntley: I don’t know. There probably are lots of things, but we can’t touch on
everything.
Warren: Well, you know one thing that I think would be interesting to get your
perspective on—and we touched on it early in the day—is that really the first influx of
black students happened during your presidency.
Huntley: Yeah, very early. Very early. Yeah, that was a very interesting episode in the
school’s history. It ought to receive some attention. The numbers you’d have to go check,

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but early on, I told the admissions dean, Jim Farrar [Sr.], and [dean of students] Lew John
that I wanted a significant number of black students immediately. They produced—I’d
have to go back and look at the numbers, but in several successive classes: eighteen, a
dozen, twenty: a significant number from zero.

         They had a hard time. I saw a lot of them [the black students]. I spent a lot of time
with them. So did Lew John. They came to see me whenever they wanted to; the door
was always open to them. They came to see me anytime. For a lot of them, it was tough.
Many of them were not as well-prepared academically as the students they were
competing with. They found the social life difficult. Not so much that they encountered
overt discrimination, but they, obviously, did not encounter much social opportunity. We
did what we could. We gave them cars, or helped them transport themselves to nearby
colleges and all that sort of thing. Many things. Lew’s a fellow you probably want to
interview about that, Lew John. He did a lot of that. I talked with them religiously. We
sort of talked them through it, I would guess. Most of them survived. Most of them
survived the experience. I would say 75 percent of them did. I haven’t looked at the
numbers, but I bet it was 75 percent. Those who did have become very, very loyal
alumni.
Warren: They have, indeed.
Huntley: There are one or two on the board. Turn off the record. I want to tell you a
story.
[Interruption]
Warren: May I start again?
Huntley: Yes. They’re always telling me what the experience here meant to them, and
what being an alumnus of Washington and Lee means to them. Some of their children are
here now.
Warren: Yes, indeed. I became—when I was here doing Come Cheer [for Washington
and Lee, 1999] I became friends with Bill Hill [’74,’77L].
Huntley: Hill, who in those days liked to be called Hill.
Warren: Hill. He still does like to be called Hill.
Huntley: It was funny, when he was a student, I’d call him Mr. Hill. He’d say, “Will you
call me Hill?” I said, “No, sir, I won’t call you Hill. Don’t you call me Huntley, either.”

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[Laughter]. He still remembers that, too.
Warren: Even his wife calls him Hill.
Huntley: I know. He was one of that group, that early group. Maybe the second wave, I
would guess.
Warren: Yes, he was the second wave, and he’s the first to acknowledge that he was not
academically prepared to come here.
Huntley: He wasn’t. Almost none of them were. The faculty were staunch. The faculty
really did that job beautifully. They didn’t cut them slack; they didn’t grade them
differently; they just gave them more time, spent more time with them.
Warren: That’s what they needed.
Huntley: Which we could do, being small. As I said, they didn’t cut them slack; they
gave them the grades they made. They’d come to me about their grades sometimes: “I got
a D. Can you believe I got a D on this paper?” “Well, Mr. —, I’m not going to read your
paper and tell you it shouldn’t be a D, but if you got a D, I guarantee you you deserved
it.” But they ultimately learned to accept that, and improve those things.

         The law student Smith I mentioned—Leslie Smith, the first black student—I was
then a law teacher when he came. He had already graduated from St. Paul’s down in
Lawrenceville, and he was semiliterate. He’d graduated at the top of his class down there,
and he had not really read anything significant. The disadvantage he suffered in
comparison with the other law students was just enormous. I was a law teacher. I gave
him a reading list, not of law matter products, but of books he had never read, maybe a
dozen or so books. I may even be able to dig that up somewhere, that list. He read them,
and I discussed them with him. He was bright. The redeeming feature was he was bright.
He was untutored, but he had plenty of sense and he wanted to succeed.

         In his first year, he just barely skimmed by on the skin of his teeth, just barely
above the necessary level to remain in school. The second year, he was slightly better,
and by his third year he was making A’s and B’s.
Warren: And you said you were part of recruiting him to come here.
Huntley: Yeah. I went down at Fred Cole’s behest to Lawrenceville to see him,
personally.
Warren: How did you know about him?

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Huntley: Because Fred Cole knew the president of St. Paul’s and told him he would like
to get one of his students to come to law school. Fred had set up—in fact, I had written
the documents that underpinned this—set up an exchange program with St. Paul’s. It
didn’t work. They sent a few students here—the program allowed students at either
school to enroll in the other for courses. No students here were going to enroll at St.
Paul’s. I think maybe one did as a kind of experiment at Fred’s request. But, a number of
them came up here, but they didn’t really work because they couldn’t—the contrast was
too sharp. The academic contrast was too sharp for them.
Warren: I don’t know what St. Paul’s is.
Huntley: It’s a small, previously all-black college in Lawrenceville, Virginia.
Warren: I see. Okay.
Huntley: Still probably all-black. Anyway, Leslie was uneducated, even though he
graduated at the top of his class at St. Paul’s. But he educated himself. Then the saddest
thing—he left here and he took a job with the civil rights division of the Justice
Department. He thought he was going to do his stint. He felt—I remember talking to him
about it, because he had plenty of job opportunities. He could have gotten a job at a good
law firm. But he said he thought he ought to put in his time in this sort of service first. He
went over to the civil rights division of the Justice Department and was murdered in his
apartment about a year after he went there. Maybe less than a year.
Warren: I thought I remembered that.
Huntley: Was found shot to death, or murdered in some way, in his apartment in the
District of Columbia.
Warren: I thought I remembered that.
Huntley: End of story. I don’t know what happened to him. He had a brother who went
here, too, and finished later.
Warren: Well, I’m glad we covered that.
Huntley: That’s about it, I think.
Warren: That’s an important story. This has—
Huntley: It is an important story.
Warren: This has been just an honor and a pleasure for me.
Huntley: Well, I’m glad. It has been for me. I’ve enjoyed it.

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Warren: I have one last thing I’d like to ask you.
Huntley: All right.
Warren: Right about in the middle of your administration, there was a fellow who went
to school here named Ken Ruscio.
Huntley: Yeah, sure.
Warren: Did you know him as a student?
Huntley: Yes, but not well. I knew him. I knew most of the students. I knew all by sight,
and most of them by name.
Warren: Which is remarkable. I remember that you used to speak to everybody by name.
Huntley: I knew all of the seniors by name, and most of the students, most all of them. I
knew them all by sight. And Ken worked for us. We had a program then of retaining—a
senior student would be asked to remain on for a year, sometimes two, as an assistant in
the Dean of Students’ office. That’s what he was asked to do, and he did do. I knew him
in that role. I didn’t have daily contact with him, but he was there and I would see him
occasionally. I didn’t have an occasion to interact with him much. He was working for
Lew John, really. I remember being favorably impressed with him, but I did not have an
opportunity to know him well. He was not a student body officer, all of whom I got to
know well because I had to deal with them on a regular basis—student body presidents,
all of whom were good. In my fifteen years, there was only one really weak student body
president out of fifteen. We had marvelous student body presidents, student body
leadership.

         During those turbulent days in May in ’69, ’70, and ’71, the student body
leadership was superlative. We didn’t talk about that, but we got through that well. The
faculty were staunch, and students were restless and caused a lot of pains in the neck, but
ultimately we came through it very well. We were close enough to them all to survive it.
Warren: I haven’t concentrated on that today because we covered that very thoroughly
before [in the May 14, 1996, interview for Come Cheer for Washington and Lee].
Huntley: Right. Anyway, that book you wrote was—we survived that as well as we did
because of the school’s close-knit community.
Warren: And, I would guess, because of the Honor System.
Huntley: I think so, yeah. And the student body leadership was just superlative. [Marvin

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“Swede”] Henberg, the outgoing president, was a Rhodes Scholar, and Fran Lawrence
[’71,’75L], the incoming president of the student body—that was in May. You have two,
really, one going out—both just superior. Fran sort of had a foot in every camp. Fran was
sort of on the—appeared to be on the radical side, and Swede was staid, conservative
side. Between the two of them, they covered the waterfront. So, they knew everything
that was going on, and kept me informed of everything I needed to know. Sort of like
Murph: they didn’t tell me things I didn’t need to know. They were great.
Warren: Well, you’re pretty good yourself, sir. Thank you so much.
Huntley: I’m very lucky to have such people with me during all those years.
[End of interview]

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