JEFFREY LABORDE '95

                                       November 6, 1996

                                         Mame Warren,
                                           interviewer

Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the sixth of November, 1996. I'm in
McLean, Virginia, with Jeff Laborde, who's actually a legendary figure at
Washington & Lee at this point. I want to just cut right to the chase and get the story
about why you are infamous, maybe not by name, but-
Laborde: Sure. Certainly. Not by name nor by looks.
Warren: Not by name, but it's just a story that is well-known at W&L.
Laborde: More well known than I thought, actually, or now I realize.
Warren: Well, tell me what the truth is. Tell me the story. Tell me what happened.
Laborde: Well, I guess it was my sophomore year, the winter of my sophomore year,
which was, I guess, when pledgeship was supposed to have started in January, so it
would have been in 1993. It was towards the end of pledgeship, and traditionally we
had always had stories passed down to us within the fraternity house and SAE. You
may not want to mention that, I'm not sure. It's a story in and of itself, I don't know
if it needs fraternity affiliation. We had had stories passed down to us about how
towards the end of pledgeship, before things wrapped up, the freshmen pledge class
usually was encouraged to kidnap a sophomore and-
Warren: Why a sophomore?
Laborde: Because sophomores were the next level and they liked to think that they
were still a full part of the house, but the juniors and seniors always, to them they
were still freshmen, if you know what I mean. And not only that, but the

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sophomores were usually much more involved in pledgeship because they were
hands-on, it was their first time as actives, and so the freshmen knew them a lot
better. So they got to pick different ones that they had certain feelings about.

         Let's see. So as the pledgeship wore on, we would tell them the same stories
that we had heard about people being kidnapped in the past, nothing really
outstanding. I think the only one I ever really heard of was like three or four years
before myself, where a guy had just gotten a pilot's license, so they kidnapped an
active and flew this guy to the middle of nowhere, dropped him off on a tarmac,
turned the plane around, and took right back off. They were told, you know, I think
the unsaid rule was that if the pledges drop you off and they come back and they beat
you back from wherever they take you, back to the campus, then you can't really get
back at them. They've accomplished their challenge, and so they get off scot-free.
Whereas otherwise, then, you know, then they're your pledges again and you get to
have all your pledge rights with them as a class, I guess.
Warren: If you get back first?
Laborde: If you get back first. So that was, like I said, really the only story that I could
remember. There were a couple of other ones that I'd heard from other fraternities
where they had taken guys down to Hollins, I think, was one good one, where they
chained a guy to a fence, I mean a tree, in front of the Hollins dorms, and took off all
his clothes. Luckily, I didn't have anything quite as embarrassing, but it was still
pretty interesting when my year rolled around.

         When I was a freshman, we kidnapped a guy. They had frightened us so
much by saying, "You'd better leave us alone. You'd better not mess around with us
or else we'll get you guys," that we just picked one guy up and then drove him out
to the country and made him walk home, you know, nothing too special.

         But my year, the pledges were a lot bigg~r than a lot of the guys in the house,
if I remember correctly, or some of the guys in the house, so there was a little more

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intimidation. Some of them were pretty renowned for being pretty extreme, like in
the martial arts and stuff.
Warren: Now, when you say bigger, you mean physically bigger or more in
number?
Laborde: More in number. We only had, I think, fifteen or sixteen guys in the
fraternity, and there were twenty-three guys or twenty-four guys in that class. Let's
see. So we rolled around and we kind of got a feel. My roommate and I had been
warned by a couple of the guys in their class who we were good friends with, that we
were going to be targeted, so we were watching out for these guys. Because they only
had a week in which to do it, so we were keeping an eye out. We did things, like I
think the night before, it actually worked out really well, we went up to the
freshmen parking lot and let the air out of the freshmen cars, their tires, so that they
wouldn't be able to use their cars to take us anywhere. They actually got around that.

         So it came up almost the day where the window of opportunity for them was
about to close, and it was a Friday afternoon after a big snowstorm. Everyone was
heading out to Windfall, which is one of our big party houses, and it has a big hill.
Everyone was going out there sledding. I was in my last class on the Hill that Friday
afternoon and I was heading back out there. I was sitting there in the middle of class,
I had actually gone to class later than when I usually do, it was Dr. Fletch's [phonetic]
class, actually, a history class. One of the freshmen walked in, one of my freshman
pledges walked into the class,and stuck his head around and it was like, "Oh, I'm
sorry." I was kind of, "What is going on?" Closed the door. Walked back out. Then
didn't think anything of it, but I should've thought something of it, because the bell
rang, I got up and I was walking out of class, you know, obviously the last place I
ever would've thought to have worried about being kidnapped was from the Hill,
and obviously they put their finger on that, too.

                                                                                                                  3
         As I was walking out of class, I walked about twenty feet out of Newcomb
Hall, turned out of one of the side doors, turned around, and noticed that there were
two of my freshmen pledges coming out of a door right behind me. I turned around
and I saw two coming around the corner right towards me, and then all of a sudden,
I don't know if I would consider myself paranoid or not, but something clicked and I
decided that I'd better get out of there. So I turned rapidly to walk towards the
Colonnade when I think about two or three more guys came out.

         By that time the two behind me had kind of hustled up and were right on me,
and they didn't have smiles on their faces. They were determined. They had this
glow in their eye. It was like a lamb going to the wolves. They physically jumped on
me, grabbed me. I kind of started swinging around. I didn't yell or anything, because
I figured if I could get away quickly, nothing would be made of it. So I struggled. It
was right as the classes were letting out, so there were hundreds of people
everywhere. I remember some of my friends saying that they were walking out of
the library and they saw me being carried like a coach who had just won a football
game, except I didn't have the same look of happiness on my face.

         Back towards, I think, the registrar's center, they had one of my pledge
brothers' car there, which they had borrowed, and he said, "I'll loan it to you, but
you have to promise me that you won't use it to kidnap anyone."

         They said, "Sure," but they obviously broke his trust on that.
         They threw me in the back of the car with a couple of other bigger guys, with
the engine running. Then they taped up my hands and my legs and put a blindfold
on me and drove me around town for a little bit, having fun, saying all kinds of
things that they were going to do to me and stuff. Then they turned around and
threw me in the back of the trunk.
Warren: In the trunk?

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Laborde: In the trunk. Well, it was a Jeep. It was like one of those Wagoneers. In the
back, back behind the middle seat, it's just a big open space. So they threw me back
there and there were a bunch of bags and coats and stuff back there and they just
kind of covered me up. After about an hour of driving around town, messing
around, I think stopping to visit people and pick up people and tell people what the
plans were and stuff, we just took off driving. Got on the interstate, drove forever,
drove for like six, six and a half hours. I'm sitting there cramped up and getting all
kind of-needless to say, the anticipation is building, not knowing where I was
going, even with whom at that point, other than that they were freshmen. They
were told that they could never do anything to whoever they kidnapped that hadn't
been done to them, so I knew I was relatively safe as far as that goes.

         So we get somewhere, we stop, they pick up someone else who I had never
heard his voice before in my entire life. They took us to someplace, I could tell it was
in the middle of nowhere, when they pulled me out of car. One of the guys had a
country house, and they had taken me all the way down to Savannah, Georgia,
which is where this guy lived. He was a pledge and he had a friend who was an SAE
at another school, who he was really good friends with. This guy was even more
gung-ho and even more psychotic. Supposedly he's a Navy SEAL or something like
that. So they pretty much had their fun with me, messing around, mind games and
stuff like that, until probably, I'd say, 4:00, 4:30 in the morning. They had been
drinking the whole time.

         It was only five guys, too, five pledges. In my mind, they were the five pledges
who deserved the least to be able to get their kicks out of this, because they were the
five worst pledges, by our book. The rest of the pledges, I came to find out, were
supposed to make it down there, but they couldn't because both their cars had
multiple flat tires. So I did save myself a little bit of trauma in that sense.

                                                                                                                       5
         So about 4:30, they pulled me out of this guy's house and put me back in the
back of the Jeep, and at this point they really hadn't told me anything about what
was going on. I knew they only had, like I said, that window was the weekend. They
had to be somewhere, I think. They had their last study hall Sunday night and this
was Saturday morning, early. So I knew they couldn't mess around with me for too
long.

         Let's see. So they had said that they were going to take me by boat to an island.
I had guessed by that point who they were and where we were.
Warren: Were you still blindfolded?
Laborde: I was still blindfolded the entire time and my hands were bound, my feet
were still bound. I had guessed where we were, just purely based on, I don't really
know, I guess because the guy who was the "ring leader" was the guy who was-I
figured he was the ring leader and realized where he lived, and this guy that they
had brought in was his friend.

         And so we went on and they proceeded to tell me how they were going to
make sure that they beat me back and how they weren't going to have to worry
about it. They were going to drop me off on this island. They said, you know, "We're
going to take you off the coast by boat and it's a big cemetery. It's not too far off coast
and they have a boat that comes out there once every two days, and there's a
caretaker and he comes and cleans things up and stuff. So he'll either be out there
later on today or tomorrow, so don't worry about. You'll be safe. We'll give you
enough clothes, don't worry about it."

         In the meantime, I think, I forgot to say earlier on, they had taken my wallet,
my checkbook. I think they had gi~en me back my ID, identification card, just to
make sure, if anything happened. I think they gave me back-no, they had taken my
checkbook and really I was left with almost no means, if that was the case. So they
take me over to the marina, put me on the front of a boat and we just kind of go.

                                                                                                                            6
We're driving along, I can feel the wind, obviously tell that I'm on a boat and we
just keep on going, still blindfolded the whole time. They had unbound my hands
and my feet, so just in case anything happened, I would only be blindfolded, so they
said. They put a life preserver on me or something like that.

         So we're driving and they're gunning the motor and going slower and faster,
talking about how the title's coming in, so they wanted to be careful not to get stuck.
Again, all for psychological value. We finally come to a stop, I can tell, and they're
like, "Okay. Stand up. You're going to jump and there's only going to be about two
or three feet of water." At this point I was like, "Forget it. I don't care. Just get me
out of here, let me off the boat." So I kind of took that leap of faith and landed in
water that was about up to my knees. And they were like, "Just walk forward,"
because the blindfold was such that it was taped, so I could either stand there in
water up to here for about thirty seconds to a minute, for as long as it would take to
get the blindfold off, or walk on up to the beach.

         So I jumped in the water, and as I was unraveling, I was walking up to the
beach, I think I fell and it was into the sand and kind of mud on my way up, because
I tripped over a rock or a tree. It wasn't that cold, though, luckily, down there. So I
got the blindfold off, turned around and looked, it was still dark, the sun was barely
coming up, and I saw their boat heading away. It looked live a river, it didn't really
look like an island. If it was an island, it looked like there was only about a hundred
yards separating the land.

         I walked up, after I got the blindfold off, and I walked up onto the beach and
saw them. This was really kind of where I guess I started getting, I guess. one of the
things the entire night that was a source of comfort for me, was the fact that while I
had been in the trunk of this guy's car, or in the back of this guy's car, I had realized
that they had taken my wallet and all that stuff, so I knew that I was going to have
no way to get back and that no one up at the house is going to wire me anything. So

                                                                                                                               7
in the six and a half hours that I had hid back there, I had started messing around in
the bags looking for some means of sustenance just in case such a situation should
present itself, which it obviously did. So I had smuggled some financial means from
one of their wallets into my shoe, obviously with the full intent of reimbursing
them once I was-it was just a loan, in my mind, just to make sure that I could get
back, since they had actually taken my wallet and whatever was in there, I wanted a
little collateral.

         So I got off the boat and dug around in my shoe, which is where I had hidden
it, and pulled it out and actually walked through this cemetery. It was a big cemetery.
I walked up off the beach, the cemetery, it took me about a half an hour to figure out
it was really just a river and that they had just dropped me off on a bank south of
town, I think it was, in the cemetery.

         So I walked through the cemetery, out to a road, and hitched a ride with a guy
who had been selling pipes or something like that. He was really upset, because I
had just fallen. It was cool, but it wasn't very cold out that morning, and I mean,
needless to say, I probably didn't look too good after being up for the past twenty-
four hours. He was just kind of like-once I told him we were just doing a fraternity
thing, it was a big mistake, he was just, "Those damn fraternity pranks. We should
go report this to the police," going on and on about all this stuff. So I finally calmed
him down, got him to drop me off at a hotel in town. So when I was there, I walked
into the hotel, checked in and got my clothes washed because they were all muddy
and whatnot and wet, and took a nap, got some food. Called and found out there
was a flight from Savannah to Atlanta and that I could get a connection from
Atlanta back to Roanoke. I figured that these guys wouldn't be able to turn right back
around and head out, because they were pretty inebriated, I think, from the previous
evening and, needless to say, very tired.

                                                                                                                      8
         So I called a cab, and the flight was at twelve, and flew back on the flight, and
then had some of my fraternity brothers pick me up, and we drove back up. They
were like, "Tell us the whole story, what's going on." But all of this was done based
on the financial means that I secured previously. So that was pretty gratifying in the
sense that if this race was going to be done and I had been embarrassed by being
caught, which is half the battle anyway, I mean, how was I going to save face, which
is always the concern, especially when you have two classes above you willing to
make fun of you for one thing and one class below you willing to make fun of you
because they caught you. So this was, for me, kind of a big salvation.

         So I got back and we had, actually, out of coincidence, had planned to have a
big fraternity party that night at the house. So I took a nap, cleaned up, and the party
was in the fraternity house. I went downstairs and sat right by the door of the party,
and people started filing in, and I have never seen so many faces that you could tell
that they were just happy to see me. I guess my sarcasm may not be picked up on the
tape. But the looks of amazement that I got from these faces, the double-takes that I
got as they were walking in the door, was unbelievable. Needless to say, the word
had-from these freshmen that had not been able to go, but the freshmen who had
been down there hadn't even made it back yet, and I was back, looking good as new,
sitting right there with a big grin on my face, knowing that I had won the bragging
rights, got back in time, and, as they were all soon to find out, gotten back on their
own means, essentially.

         So it was a night of just telling stories over and over again, and word got
around, I'm sure, like wildfire. Then the other guys got back the next day and they
were just-you know, what could they say, really? I talked to the guy who had kind
of been the ring leader for the whole thing many, many times, and we're good
friends to this day, and he still to this day, he says, "I'm just so bitter, upset with
you," in a good way, of course, but that, "I thought we were going to cap things off. I

                                                                                                                           9
thought we were going to be the ones that would have the bragging rights just
forever, and you topped us."

         So everything was said and done, and we all had a pretty good time. We all
had a pretty good story to tell and we all got something out of it. In the end, he
actually, I think-we took house funds and reimbursed them all for the expenses of
my getting back. So it was no hair off anyone's chest. Like I said, it was definitely a
story that we kind of knew that would kind of expand on itself, as I'm sure it has.
Warren: No, actually the story I heard is the story you just told.
Laborde: Well, good.
Warren: That is amazing. I was fully prepared for it to be quite a different story.
Laborde: Oh, really? Okay.
Warren: But isn't that interesting that you're telling me-
Laborde: That is, amazingly enough.
Warren: Pretty much true to fact.
Laborde: Well, there's not too much more to exaggerate on, because it's pretty
ridiculous in and of itself.
Warren: That's pretty good. Although I had heard that it was an island. So I'm a
little reassured to know that it wasn't an island.
Laborde: Right. I had heard that it was an island, too. [Laughter]
Warren: So did this story keep coming back to you, or did everybody know that you
were the star?
Laborde: Most people knew at least that year and the year to come, most people
knew. When I started finding out from people that didn't know, or that, "You're
that guy," was maybe I was like a senior, which was two years later, and freshmen
might have heard that story and been like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe it," blah,
blah, blah, going on. Then I also heard it from a couple of alumni who came back for
Alumni Weekend and they were like, "We heard this great story about this

                                                                                                                 10
happening," and stuff like that. It did come back, but it came back in ways I guess I
really didn't see it coming back. Most people pretty much knew then and there and
would say something about it at a party or on the Hill or something to that effect.
Warren: That's a wonderful story. Does something like this stay at the student level
or did the administration get wind of it?
Laborde: We actually had some talk from some of the IFC members and the faculty
who were on IFC saying that fraternity activities should have been kept on the
fraternity level, in the sense that they didn't want to hear anything more than they
had heard, which is obviously the rest-anything else that might have happened
within fraternity bounds, since we usually don't share that many things, details and
whatnot, but they had said that they usually like to keep things off the Hill, and the
fact that they got me from the Hill, obviously I'm sure some teachers and stuff saw
it, thinking, "Why would they want to kidnap someone? What's going on there?
What are they doing? What are they going to do to that poor boy?" and stuff like
that. I think they had cause for concern in that sense.

         But other than that, like I said, it's something that had been done, it's been
done very innocently, and there aren't hazards to your health and whatnot there,
and things going on in that sense. Although being blindfolded and I think that was
the whole purpose of that, you say there are going to be mind twists that they can do
which makes you think that there's a lot more danger there than there is. So
essentially they really didn't-it's something that other fraternities are going to do as
well, and it's not something that's seen as abusive of the freshmen, which I know
fraternities have been accused of and had problems with in the past. So there really
wasn't that big of a turmoil made about that. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they
knew about it, but I also wouldn't be surprised if, from both angles, "Why would
they want to do something like that?" and the other one, "Oh, it's just tradition."

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Warren: So one thing they keep mumbling about, talking about, talking about
seriously, is the idea of hazing. Would something like this be considered by them to
be hazing?
Laborde: I could see it very easily, but I could see them approaching it from this
angle, not that it was hazing by the upperclassmen, but that the freshmen were
doing this as a result, if you will, of the hazing that they had received. Like this is
their chance to kind of get back, and why would they want to get back if they had
never been hazed in the first place? But like I said, the traditional aspect is much
closer to the truth of it than anything else, just because it's that challenge that
everyone kind of builds them up for from early on. So can you guys top what's been
done in previous years? What do you got? Although if they had pulled it off, they
generally would have been lauded as, "Wow, man, you guys did a great job," blah,
blah, blah. But since they didn't, it turned around and that much more on them and
so it was just like, "Oh, you guys can't do anything right. You had the makings for
an incredible story and it turned out to be an even more incredible story, but not in
your favor."
Warren: This isn't just an SAE tradition. This goes on-
Laborde: No not at all.
Warren: Is this going on at other schools, or is this a W&L thing?
Laborde: I have heard it rumored in other schools, but not as much as I have at
W&L. I don't know whether that's just because of my contact with W&L. I have
definitely heard of it happening at W&L, especially in some of the larger fraternities
that, I guess, have more of a tradition of being some of the stronger fraternities in
the sense of numbers and tradition and whatnot, some of the older ones. But like I
said, outside my own fraternity, there were stories separate from that. The playing
one and some of the other ones were things that I just heard within, but then the
one about the guy being taken down to Hollins and stuff like that were from other

                                                                                                                   12
houses and whatnot. I'd heard stories about Phi Kap and Phi Delta and K, I think, as
well. I'm not sure if Beta did any, but I definitely heard about stories from those
other houses. And a lot of attempts, as well, I might add. Most guys were a little bit
more fortunate than me as far as eluding kidnapping.
Warren: I think that's amazing, with the audience you had for the whole thing.
Laborde: That just added to it, as far as people showing up that night for the party,
kind of like wanting to know what was the result of the whole scenario, the whole
scene on the Hill.
Warren: Well, Jeff, I want to ~hank you. That's getting it from the source. You don't
often get to the horse's mouth.
Laborde: No, you're right, you're right.
Warren: All right. Now I'm going to back up. That was the unique story that only
you could tell. Now I'm going to back up and do some of my usual questions.
Laborde: Oh, sure, sure.
Warren: Which is, first of all, what made you go to Washington & Lee? Why did
you choose W&L?
Laborde: The first exposure I had to at all, coming from New Orleans, was one of
my sister's friends. My sister's about three years older than I am. A girlfriend of hers
who actually had known very well from when we were younger had gone to a place
called W&L. I knew she was pretty intelligent and that she had nothing but good
things to say about it. So I did a little more talking about it and research and found
out that there were a lot of my parents' friends, and that kind of lead me to realize
that there was rather a large W&L community from New Orleans, alumni
community from New Orleans, and went up to visit a bunch of schools. I applied to
like ten different schools, all pretty much in this area, from Boston on down to, I
guess the most Southern place was, I guess, Vanderbilt in Tennessee.

                                                                                                                   13
        Got invited up for one of the Scholar Weekends, or something to that effect,
which is a whole other story. But had by far and away the best time. It was a St.
Patrick's Day weekend that just happen to coincide. I had been by far and away the
best time at W&L. I went to three different other schools. I went to Georgetown,
Tufts, and, I think, Boston College, and checked out their whole weekends and what
they had to offer. None of them could compare. A lot of people questioned my going
to a small college in a small town, and I had absolutely no hesitation coming from
such a big city with so many big city problems and being exposed to those in a
relatively large high school. So having so many good experiences there and
knowing that they had a pretty good commerce school as well, which was what I was
interested in, and knowing that they had a lot of tradition was really a big draw for
me.
Warren: St. Patrick's Day didn't hurt at all, I'm sure.
Laborde: It did not. It did not. It happened to be a very mellow weekend. It was
actually the first weekend I ever had grain alcohol, and it didn't take much, but I had
a really good time. It was fun.
Warren: So you mentioned you came for Scholars Weekend?
Laborde: It was actually the people who had just missed the Scholars, I think. So the
Scholars came the weekend before us, or we might have all come and then they let
us know what the results were. They had said I think we had just missed it or
something to that effect. Do they still have the University Scholar Program, where
they give away the scholarships to freshmen coming in, and if they maintain a
certain GPA, I think they-yeah. I didn't receive it, but that was just what the
weekend was for.
Warren: But you said there's another whole story there.
Laborde: It was just with getting-I got pretty inebriated, and we were staying with a
host, as a freshman, who is a freshman in the freshmen dorms. I went there and he

                                                                                                                       14
actually went out of town for the weekend, so he wasn't too much of a host. I got
rather sick that evening after I'd gone to bed. I tried to clean everything up, but I had
a flight that I had to catch, I had to leave about 6:30 to catch. So I didn't realize that I
had made a mess until about 5:00, so I had only about ten minutes to clean up.
Cleaned up, turned on the fan, opened up all the doors and windows, and his next-
door neighbor, who I'd actually become really good friends with, he played on the
soccer team and I was interested, I had met the soccer coach and stuff that weekend,
because that was another reason why I was going to W&L, was to play soccer, which
ended up being just a couple of years. But he and the other guy had kind of a rib
going on, and so he laughed at me.

         It seemed that the guy's room still probably didn't smell very well and hadn't
been thoroughly 100 percent cleaned, so he closed the door, turned off the fan, and
turned up the heat. So that by the time the guy got back two days later, his room was
just a mess. I didn't see this guy again until I was coming through rush, the
freshman whose room it was. So I was coming through rush my freshman year, and
it was such a conversation piece at that fraternity. He was actually a Pi Phi and I
knew a bunch of them from soccer as well, and they all found that out real quickly
as well. He started off by saying, "I can't believe you'd think about coming back here
after what you did to my room," and whatnot. But it ended up being, like I said, a
great conversation piece. I actually got along with those guys really well.
Warren: That was another whole story.
Laborde: Yeah. And there were actually even guys who were tied into it. It's getting
pretty disgusting now, but I've started, so I guess I can't stop. But guys in his
fraternity who came back to check on him that night, as far as saying, "Come on
with us. We're going to get some food," or something like that, I'm sure, just to
mess around with him and wake him up. They came in, and actually one of them
slid around and fell in what I had left, and he was one of the guys on the soccer

                                                                                                                    15
team. So when he found out that this new goalie of his was a part to this, it was
pretty embarrassing. One of the few times actually that I've ever gotten sick from
such a thing.

         But surprisingly enough, I recovered and put all that aside and realized at the
time I'd had before any of the alcohol was involved was definitely one of the more
enjoyable weekends that I had.
Warren: So you were a C School major?
Laborde: Yes, I sure was.
Warren: Were there any teachers who made a real difference for you?
Laborde: One teacher, I guess, was Goldsmith, who was a really charismatic guy. I'm
not sure if he's still there. He might have left. He was a really incredible teacher,
very, very energetic, very unique for a C School teacher because of his energy about
the whole thing and his unorthodox styles of teaching. He was really a good first-
year guy to have as a freshman. I came back my freshman year and he's still my
advisor. He said, "So how'd your summer go?" I told him I worked in an
accounting department and that the business aspect, the whole business aspect of a
company appealed to me, more than just economics with theory behind that. So he
did a pretty big thing, right then and there, he was like, "All right. Well, let's go find
you an accounting or a business advisor."

         So he took me next door. He's like, "Let me introduce you to my good buddy
Bill King." Dr. King kind of pretty much molded me and pushed me in the
direction I've taken. He was a big influence by identifying and kind of taking me
under his wing early on. I give a lot of my credit to my success to his really kind of
watching out for me and giving me a lot of credit, which sometimes I felt I wasn't
always necessarily due. But he also made some very good suggestions when it came
down to my senior year in choosing places to work. He gave me some very good
advice about that, whether or not to go into public accounting, which is what I'm in

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now, and if so, with whom, and if so, also in what areas to focus in. So definitely a
unique experience. I'll never forget him. And it's very different from what I hear
from my other friends and family, even, my siblings and whatnot and their
experiences with their faculty. If they got lucky to see them once a semester, they
considered themselves fortunate. I'd stop by to see Dr. King at least once a week, if
not more, in addition to the fact that I had him pretty much for a class almost every
semester for my last three years.
Warren: The personal touch?
Laborde: Yes, the personal touch.
Warren: How about those experiences that are uniquely Washington & Lee? Did
you get involved in Mock Convention?
Laborde: Well, no, because I was a freshman when Mock Convention rolled
around. The only way you got involved in it was as pledges and building a bunch of
floats for the seniors and juniors who became delegation heads. I think we built
Alaska, which was really funny. I was on Kentucky, because one of the seniors
needed a bunch of bodies on his group to help make calls, on his delegation to help
make calls to make money. Then another senior said, "We need you to help come
build my float," and another senior said, "Come help build mine and help drive it
and ride on it with me. We need more bodies to ride on it."

         So I ended up riding on the Alaska float. We had a Jeep with a big stuffed
moose head on the front of it. We had pretty much just done it the night before and
put cotton over the entire float. It was a bed, a trailer bed that we were towing
behind the Jeep. It was probably like fifteen feet by ten feet, and there was a big old
barbershop kind of candy cane going right in the middle. There was a sign on it
saying "North Pole" and pointing that way, and "New York" pointing that way, and
they put a sled on it with a bunch of Christmas presents wrapped up, and then they
had put a couple of the fraternity dogs leashed onto the sled, just sitting there

                                                                                                                 I7
surrounded by all this cotton. The dogs, one of them was like a little hot dog, a tiny
one, but the other one was a basset hound, so really good comic-
Warren: Your basic sled dog, right?
Laborde: Exactly. Then on top of that, they dressed up in earmuffs, mittens, and
coats. They had three or four of the more definitely I'd say more renowned for their
looks, women who were renowned for their looks from W&L student body, who
they all happen to be pretty good friends with and they were wearing bikinis with
snow boots and earmuffs and mittens and stuff like that, and throwing the candy off
and playing music and driving along. It was pretty fun. It was.

         But other than that, I stayed pretty involved my freshman year encompassed
by soccer, which took a lot of time. I kind of used it as an excuse, I guess, in a sense
that because it did take up so much time. I realized that, so I stopped playing soccer
my junior year and started getting involved in other aspects. Elected to House office
and then became president of SAE my senior year and just joined a bunch of
different clubs on campus and stuff.
Warren: What kind of clubs?
Laborde: I was on a couple of Commerce School clubs. One was like the Commerce
Student Body of Consultants, which really didn't take that off that much. We were
supposed to volunteer what little classroom knowledge we had for local merchants.
Then I was on the Student Board of Advisors for the Commerce School, where we
would meet with the board members who, I guess, dealt with the Commerce School,
I think once a quarter.
Warren: The board of trustees?
Laborde: The board of trustees, and they would ask us questions and we would ask
them questions. One of them was really interesting because they critiqued our
resumes for it. We all brought resumes, and they just passed them around, got up

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front and said, "All right, look at this one. This should be better, this should be
better. Don't ever do this. Try to do this."
Warren: That's valuable.
Laborde: Yeah, it was. It was definitely pretty valuable. I enjoyed that. I tried to stay
really involved in IFC, especially as president, and it was tough my senior year to see
things change, see some really huge change be pushed through, kind of like I had
known had been pushed through the year before my freshman year. We had moved
four years before. I was the first year that had the winter pledgeship, where you're
going to have fall rush, which was the compromise that the faculty on the student-
I can't remember, the Student Affairs Committee, I can't remember which student
board made those decisions. It wasn't the student board, I'm sorry, it was the faculty
board that had two or three students on it and they made those decisions. So that
was a huge change we were told when we came in.

         Then my senior year, they pushed through a change to take effect this year in
'96, where they were pushing fall rush back to the winter. So they had winter rush
and then winter pledgeship, and in the process they had restricted the time
restraints and pretty much restricted-rush was cut down to two weeks, I think,
from five or six weeks and pledgeship was cut down, I think to ten weeks from
twelve weeks, to prior to that like twenty weeks or something like that. It was just
frustrating. I kind of left with at least having such a good feeling about the student
government meeting that went on there with the Honor Council and the fact that
we were able to uphold that on our own. You were being judged by a group of your
peers. It got pretty frustrating to see all of a sudden, no matter how strongly we-
there wasn't a single fraternity that was in favor of this and we made some really
good arguments about in favor of this and how we could change it, but they kind of
had their own mind-set, so we had to change it for what we all felt was the worse.

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         One of their main arguments was that the freshmen didn't have ~ime to get
to know the fraternities own their own, through rush, the first semester, that they
needed a whole semester of open contact prior to that. They were afraid that the
freshmen's grades suffered too much the first semester because of rush, and if rush
only lasted six weeks and this open contact lasted the whole semester, and you felt a
lot more pressure to get out and get to know people, and we failed to see the
difference that it would have on the grades that much.

         But that and also the sophomores having to live on campus now, that's a big
change. I mean, in fraternities, especially, I know it happened in a lot of sororities,
too. Your sophomore classes were all usually the same size and you'd have seven,
seven, seven and two mixed up groups from that house that would kind of take
over houses from other upperclassmen that had been in the fraternity, you know,
that people had stayed in and had parties at and whatnot and had traditions of their
own for years and years and years. I think we've had Windfall for over twenty-five,
thirty years. if not more. That's been hurt by this whole process, for girls especially, I
think. Guys aren't hurt by it because most of them have to live in fraternities
anyway, I think, because it's considered university housing. But all the girls' houses,
they all have to live in Gaines, of all places, which, when I was there, it's such a
stigma, it's pretty funny.
Warren: What kind of stigma?
Laborde: Just as being the place to live when you didn't have anywhere else to live.
Because, number one, and this is, you have to keep in mind, coming from someone
who is very in favor and very pro fraternity and whatnot, but if you didn't belong to
a fraternity, nine times out of ten your sophomore and your junior and senior year,
you would live there. That wasn't always the case, but a lot of people there usually
didn't live in fraternities. There were so many open rooms and you still had the, I
guess, constraints of living in university housing. So it wasn't the freedom, I guess,

                                                                                                                         20
that you had and needed and the sense of responsibility that you had of living on
your own and paying all the bills on time and whatnot, stuff like that.
Warren: Where is Windfall?
Laborde: It is-I'm not even sure if it's in Rockbridge or in the city. I think it's right
pass the county line. If you're heading over the Maurais [phonetic] River and East
Lex is on your right, you take a left on that road, right there that heads out along the
Maurais River and it's right up by Shaner's Greenhouse, in that area, right back
behind where the prison is, Rockbridge County Prison, I think. It's an old farmhouse
that's on a big plot of land that Shaner actually ropes off and has cattle grazing all
around. Like I said, it's been our house for a very long time. It's really beat-up. I was
president, so I didn't get the opportunity to live there, you know. It definitely had
the reputation of being one of the "in" places to live for guys within our house.
Warren: And so convenient to East Lex.
Laborde: Quite convenient to East Lex.
Warren: I've got to turn the tape over.