Reilly interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] 15 Warren: I really would like you to talk more about May 1970. Reilly: Well, I think we had, on the campus, we really had gotten a strong anti-war sentiment going. I know that there were faculty who were very much thinking along our lines. We had a lot of demonstrations, and we felt like we were making an impact. No doubt the events at Kent State really congealed a lot of those thoughts, particularly, as I was saying, the question of free speech rights. I remember the chants of Amerika with a K. You know, thinking that we were going into some kind of a, if not totalitarian, certainly authoritarian-type government where people’s rights were going to be trampled on. I think it also probably pushed a lot of people back away from their sort of counterculture way. I think a lot of people who, in fear, moved back into what would be considered more of a mainstream point of view, but certainly most of the people that I knew, that just them more radicalized. I certainly didn’t consider myself to be a wild rabid sort of radical in the sense that I wouldn’t think of burning down a building or destroying someone’s property or something like that. But on the other hand, I felt that they were definitely rights that we had as Americans that were starting to be lost. I think a lot of students felt that way. A lot of the old-line faculty probably felt the opposite. I think there was a very strong contingent of very conservative faculty who felt that this was wrong, that students should not be involved in any kind of political activities, particularly not criticizing the government. Warren: Who would fall into that category in the faculty? Reilly: Oh, gee. I guess, I’m thinking about some of the professors that I had, and maybe this is not fair, but Dr. [R. Winter] Royston was one. I don’t know if he’s still living or not. Gee, I have to go back. I could probably go back to some of my transcripts or something and look at courses that I was taking and tell you who the professors were. Because I know that certainly after the strike, there had been, I don’t know the 16 exact details, but a lot of time had been missed from class and, I think exams had been missed and so on, so there was an effort on the part of the administration to make sure that students who were involved in that were still able to complete that semester. Then the professors who were unhappy with the way things worked out, that students were even going on strike, penalized a lot of us just on that basis, that you were involved in an activity which they didn’t approve of. But in all fairness, we certainly had sort of gone off the edge academically at that point. We just let everything drop. That was certainly a very polarizing time. We definitely felt like there was a lot of tension in the air. You had friends and you had enemies, almost. I mean, it was a rough time, I’d say. I mean, we kind of kept having our parties and sloughed it off somewhat, but I think it left a pretty indelible impact on people. Warren: Did you participate in the Free University classes that went on? Reilly: Somewhat, yeah. I’m trying to remember what we had going on then. But, yeah, certainly I did. They were not academic in any sense. Boy, I hadn’t even remembered that. Now you mentioned it, I’d have to think back as to what all we did. Maybe we could take a break. Warren: Okay. [Tape recorder turned off.] Reilly: I guess you just sparked my memory a little bit as far as what was being put out, although, you said published. I don’t know that I really thought of it in that way. But back before the days of mini Xerox machines and so on, we would manually type up these mimeograph sheets. I think we had several things going out every day that we would mimeograph hundreds of copies, and we’d be out on campus handing out literature trying to get people active. I don’t know if that’s what you’ve got is mimeograph stuff, and it’s been saved. That’s incredible. I’d love to see it. Warren: It’s quite a volume of stuff. Reilly: Boy, it’s amazing that someone saved all that. I don’t think I did. 17 Warren: The impression I got from reading this stuff is the townspeople were very involved, too. It wasn’t just Washington and Lee. What’s your memory of that? Reilly: Boy, I certainly remember that the townspeople and county people who I saw more of were, a lot of them were very, if not conservative, they were very sort of anti- hippie. Of course, this was the hippie time, if you will. So there was a lot of negative feelings there. Now, I don’t remember in town, particularly, how much was going on from an activist point of view. I remember there was a professor at VMI who was in the Democratic Committee in town. Certainly, from that point of view, the Democrats, the people who were against Nixon in general, had this as a focal point. I guess, if that’s what you were thinking of, certainly there was a lot of that going on. I’d have to think back to remember all the names. Certainly after 1972 and the impeachment attempts or attempt to impeach Nixon and so on, there was a lot of activity. Now, in my freshman year, I guess I didn’t interact as much with the townspeople. I think there were certainly the younger townspeople who were students or young people out of high school working at jobs and so on, who also felt the same way as far as the war was concerned, but I don’t have a real strong recollection of who they were and how they related. I know there was a lot of—there were faculty who were anti-war, and there were certainly children of faculty members who were either grown or high school age, senior in high school age, who were pretty active. I’d say Mario Pellicciaro was very active. Henry Schloss, he was probably the most activist, and I think probably cost him his job, as I recall, of the professors or instructors—I’m not even sure what level he was on the hierarchy, obviously he wasn’t tenured—who were very supportive. I’m just trying to think back to all the things that we did put out on those mimeograph machines. That really brings back memories of typing all this stuff on the mimeos and what a different age it was. But we certainly put out a lot of stuff, and we did a lot of organizing to get people to go to Washington. We did a number of trips to 18 join the marches on Washington. I think Jeff Gingold, as I mentioned before, he’s someone who—I think he’s an attorney in Seattle or something now. He would certainly be someone to talk to about that. Warren: In the middle of all this, reunions happened. Do you remember that aspect of it? Reilly: Boy, no, you know, I don’t. I think those things, they take place over the course of a year several times, so I don’t have any strong recollections of any one or another that happened. I do remember that the Student Union Building was certainly a kind of gathering point for us in a lot the activities we did. So to the extent that there were alumni activities going on that went on there, they were certainly aware of our presence. Boy, I hadn’t given that a lot of thought. Do you have people who you have interviewed who were at reunions? Warren: No, I wish I could find somebody who was. I haven’t found that, but I’d love to get— Reilly: I’m sure they would have viewed it with displeasure. Let’s take a minute break. Warren: Okay. [Tape recorder turned off.] So shall we shift gears? Maybe I’ve pumped you dry on this. Reilly: Maybe give me a chance to— Warren: Okay. I’ve got a totally out-in-left-field question. Were you around for Mel Greenberg? Reilly: Oh, yes, I remember Mel Greenberg. That was a very funny time. Warren: Tell about Mel Greenberg. Reilly: Oh, boy. Mel Greenberg was, I guess, some kind of a scam artist who came into town. I don’t remember exactly when it was now. You probably have got something that has got the date and time— Warren: I can find out. 19 Reilly: But he was supposedly making a movie, and he had set himself up at the Keydet General [Motel], as I recall. He had rooms and was interviewing potential actors and extras for his movie. He was supposedly some big Hollywood producer. Boy, I didn’t go in and try and get interviewed or anything, but many people did. He was treated very well. I mean, he was partied and wined and dined. As I recall, either city or county officials were really trying to woo him to do this film in Rockbridge County and so on. It turned out he was just a total scam artist, that there was no film. He had no connection to Hollywood. He had stayed in Hollywood once or something. I don’t know, maybe Larry or Sally Mann might have a lot more information. Warren: I think I remember them talking about it. It just flashed in my head that you were probably there at that time. Reilly: Yeah, yeah, and I remember he was kind of. as I recall, sort of a flashy, middle- aged guy in a leisure suit sort of acting like he was a big-time producer from Hollywood. He really had people snowed over. I do remember that. It seemed too good to be true. He was offering huge amounts of money for people to be actors and extras and so on. It just didn’t completely make sense to me. I didn’t, I guess, get closely enough involved to give you a lot of particulars about what he offered individual people and so on. But there were stories about hanky-panky in the hotel rooms. I don’t know whether he was caught or whether he left town without paying his bill there at Keydet General. I wonder if there’s anyone at the Keydet General who would remember the specifics. But he flew the coop. I think he was eventually caught doing another scam in Roanoke. Warren: He should have gone farther away. [Laughter] Reilly: Yeah. Warren: You've mentioned the classroom a few times. I guess since we’re talking about your university days, we ought to talk a little bit more about academics. Were there teachers who made a big difference in your life? 20 Reilly: Well, there were several at Washington and Lee. I’d say probably Harry Pemberton was the one who made the most difference. I majored in philosophy. He was my advisor. I think probably Ramsey Martin, who has been head of department—I think he retired this year—probably wouldn’t think as highly as me. I didn’t do as much in terms as logic and that whole end of philosophy as he might have liked. But certainly Harry Pemberton really brought a lot of insight. I took many courses from him. He definitely had a way to bring you into the whole realm of thought of the ancients, if you will. I remember he did seminars on Plato. There was a lot of sort of role-playing in the way that Plato’s books and works had people engaged in discussion. I think he made a big difference to me in terms of how I looked at things, certainly opened up my eyes to a lot of philosophers and so on. Although I didn’t take any courses from him, Dr. [I-Hsiung] Ju, who was in the art department, who later went on to start the Art Farm. I believe he is still there. I don’t know if he still teaches at all. But he was someone who I met who I admired a lot, and he wasn’t in any way involved in sort of the early days, the radical thought, or anything like that, but just the Chinese painting and the whole tranquillity that he sort of has an aura around him was an influence. I knew many students of his. So I met him, in that I would meet them there. At that time, the art department and the philosophy department were both in the same building, so there was interaction there. I’m trying to remember some of the other professors who I liked. Certainly Jim Boatwright I liked a lot. I don’t remember how many courses, if any, I took from him, to be honest with you. Maybe one. I’ll just have to think back on that in terms of professors. I mean, I remember a lot of things about, for example, the Phys Ed department, which I, at the time, didn’t think much of the physical education requirements. I tended to take whatever the courses were that I thought would be easiest to just get through and not have to deal with very much, such as skiing. I think I took skiing twice. That was because we didn’t have 21 enough snow the first year. In fact, I remember now they gave me an "incomplete" in skiing one semester because there wasn’t enough snow for us to have all the ski lessons. We actually drove to the Homestead to do our skiing. In later years, I took things like bowling. [Laughter] But even there, I had my arguments. For example, I’m sure that Coach Lord would not be happy to remember me. In a bowling class, he had an arrangement where you would place bets. He was trying to get the interest going, not place bets, really, but everybody would put down a certain of money, and whoever won or had the best score that day would get the pot. I remember objecting to the gambling during sports, and even writing a letter to Dean John. He was probably pretty upset at me for doing that. As I recall, I actually had one credit to go, and they ended up changing my "incomplete" to a pass in the old skiing course so they didn’t have to deal with me any more. [Laughter] Warren: Get you out of there. Reilly: They probably don’t remember me with any fondness, if at all. Put me out of their minds. I took a lot of journalism courses, actually. Pat Hinely would be the one to really tell you about the journalism department. He certainly had a lot of people over there who were his mentors, I think, in the early years. I took a number of film courses. Why can’t I remember the professor’s name? Warren: Tom Riegel? Reilly: Tom Riegel, of course. Anyway, I thought very highly of him. He was a very interesting person. I actually thought seriously about changing my major to journalism, and I probably wasn’t that far away from being able to do it in terms of the number of courses that I took. But he certainly was an influence on me in that way, I think just someone who had a lot of insights into what was going on in the real world. He certainly had been involved in film and production other than in the academic area. Do you want to pause this for a second? [Tape recorder turned off.] 22 Warren: Were we in the middle of something? Did you want to continue? Reilly: No, I think we had talked about Tom Riegel. That’s where we stopped. Warren: Was Fancy Dress still going on? Reilly: Yes, I mean, it still went on. It was something that I never attended in my years over there. This was definitely the counterculture aspect of my time at Washington and Lee. All those kind of events, I mean, they were certainly related a lot to what was happening with the fraternities. Usually it was, you know, one of the fraternities was president or one of the fraternities would be president for Fancy Dress. It was just a whole different scene. As I say, I think there were parallel sort of routes that people could take, still. As much as we tried to get people interested or active as far as the anti-war scene and all of that, there were still a lot of the just the traditional activities at the university, and the fraternities and so on that continued basically unchanged. I guess events on campus like that were just not really of much interest to myself or most of the people who I spent time with at that point. Warren: But they were still going on? Reilly: There may have been a year when they stopped them, but I don’t remember. Warren: I know at some point Fancy Dress, Fran Lawrence talked about it, at some point it just died out for two or three years. Reilly: For lack of interest or whatever? Warren: Yes, I just think it got petered out for lack of interest. I’m just not clear when that was. Reilly: Yeah, I remember it going on, and I remember that the groups, the kind of music that we were listening to was the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and Allman Brothers and so on. Fancy Dress was much more traditional in terms of music. Warren: Were there any particular big concerts or important speakers who came during your time? 23 Reilly: Oh, gee. There were definitely important speakers, and I’m just trying to remember. I’d have to go back, though, and think. Probably Patrick would be the one to talk to about that, Patrick Hinely. Even concerts, I mean, there were concerts on campus pretty regularly. Even those, I didn’t go to too many. The scene was just not—it was not the same scene that I was interested in, if you will. I guess in that way, I’m probably not as good a person to give you a broad picture of the area as someone who stayed in town and really saw the things that went on at the campus twenty-four hours a day and so on. My freshman year was really the only year that I spent a lot of time on campus, and maybe my senior year, which, since I skipped out for a year and came back to finish in 1974, that year I certainly spent a lot of time on campus. Academically, that was the time when I put my nose to the grindstone pretty much. Warren: Did you literally leave town? Reilly: No, I stayed in Lexington. Warren: And just didn’t attend classes for a year? Reilly: What happened was, and I'd have to go back again to my transcript to see, but I had signed up for my senior year for courses that I wanted to take. Of the, I guess, four courses that I was due to take that first semester of my senior year, when the registration came back, I had been not admitted to any of them, not for academic reasons, but supposedly because they were full. Then when I went to the registrar, I found that there were juniors who had been admitted, and that I had not been admitted as a senior, and it was my last chance to take those courses. So, needless to say, I was pretty perturbed about the whole thing. I went to the dean and basically demanded that I be let in to some of those courses, and they said, “Well, no. They’re all closed now. It’s all a done deal.” So I withdrew. I know my father was pretty upset, probably more with me than with the university, but I was very perturbed at that time. 24 So I worked for a year. Probably put me into the occupation that I ended up in now in terms of pretty much the only thing you could do was construction or something along that line. Even then, around Lexington there wasn’t that much going on. I had to travel to Covington and different places to work. Warren: That was one of the things when I moved to Lexington in 1977, I was fascinated at how well educated the carpenters were in that town. So many of you from that era stayed or stayed for a while. What was going on there? Reilly: Well, I think it probably the lure of the country, you know, the rural setting. That certainly was very attractive. Probably, in retrospect, a lot of it was just trying to hold on to those aspects of our college years that were the most enjoyable or the ones that I’ve gotten the most pleasure from, if you will. Also, for me, I don’t know about the other people who stayed and did carpentry or did whatever they did, blacksmithing and so on, I didn’t really have any roots in the States, because I had lived overseas in different countries all my childhood. So to the extent that I was going to go somewhere, at that point, since from the time I got to college, my parents had moved from Switzerland to Ohio to Michigan, I didn’t really have any connection with where they lived. Certainly, in terms of graduating from college and going back to live with my parents, that was just not even an option that I would have considered. And with my degree in philosophy, there wasn’t exactly a big job market for me to jump into, either, if I had wanted to. So I just kept with what I had been doing in the year that I was off. I guess to the extent that I was able to earn a living and maintain the lifestyle that I had, that was all I was really looking for. In retrospect, I think that was also one of the big failings of the university at that time, although I can’t blame it totally on the university, but to the extent that so many of us kind of went on a different track, there really wasn’t any counseling. I mean, there were some counselors, but there really wasn’t a lot of emphasis on getting people pulled back into a career track. I think people who were in, say, the Commerce School, 25 the C-School, as it was called, they certainly had a track already in mind. By the time they were in their senior year, they were interviewing with companies for jobs and so on. I think we, the people who I knew, none of us were really along in that mode at all to begin with. We pretty much sort of found our way in the dark, if you will, in terms of stumbling upon occupations. I think you probably should talk to John Gunner, if you haven’t. He certainly would be one to talk to. He’s someone who I knew during my student years, but only very slightly. I think a lot of people who had moved to a country places, although with all this talk of these parties and wild events and so on which did happen with some regularity, I think there was also just getting away from it all and going to the country, working and living a fairly quiet life in a non-urban setting. I think that was very appealing to me and probably to a lot of people. In terms of my focus on the long term, I think that’s something that I really didn’t have then. That was not really something that was encouraged, I think, in any formal way. I’m trying to think of things that happened in later years, say, in my junior or senior year. There was certainly several people in the Chaos General Staff, if you want to call it, Ray Clemence who dropped out. Bill Green, who ended up living at Chaos West, dropped out. There were a number of people who, I think, suffered because of the drug scene and because of the fact that, as with anything, any kind of drug or whether it be alcohol or whatever, there’s some people that are going to be susceptible to just go off the deep end. I am not saying that’s the case with all the people, but certainly I saw many people who withdrew or left because they had gotten in too deep over their heads. Certainly, in my freshman year there were a number of people who experimented with psychedelics and just lost it altogether. That was a very sad thing at the time. 26 I guess, to another extent also, the fact that people kind of went their own ways during those last few years, in no small way was due to the fact that this drug scene had developed really got pretty serious after a while. There were, clearly, people who were getting into the hard stuff, if you will. That was very troubling to me. Certainly, I saw people who were getting into what I considered the hard stuff, cocaine and other opiates and things like that that really kind of separated people out. You know, you either were or you weren’t. And I wasn’t. Some people certainly kind of went over the edge that way. I think probably in those last couple of years that I was there, there were drug busts. Some students were sent to jail. That was a time when things had kind of come full circle. There was no longer sort of that carefree attitude that there was in the early days. It’s amazing in some ways, the different tracks that people did go on. Certainly, I remember Ben West, who is now a very successful advertising executive down in Tampa, I guess, or St. Petersburg, Florida, who certainly partied with the best of them, if you will, who was probably the person who introduced me to this group of chaotic people, if you will, and who, of all of them that I know of, has sort of risen above all that into a sort of success in the financial business world, if you will. He would probably be a good person for you to talk to, actually. He was featured in the alumni magazine a few issues back. Warren: There’s actually somebody else down there I need to talk to. He’s in Tampa area? Reilly: I think he’s in Tampa now. He was from Jacksonville originally. I know he worked in New York for Young & Rubicon for a while, because I had an uncle who was chairman of Young & Rubicon. So we had helped make a connection back then. Warren: Just to sort of round things out, when I first arrived in Lexington, not only were there all these very well-educated carpenters, but a theme that I picked up on very 27 quickly where there’s seemed like every other car had a bumper sticker on it that said, “Chaos.” [Laughter] Do you ever see Chaos bumper stickers anymore? Reilly: I haven’t in quite a long time, actually. I think I still have one or two stowed away somewhere for posterity. No, I guess what I would say about Chaos was that it was more of a response to what was actually going on, that the world had been turned upside down somewhat at that point for so many of us in terms of what our expectations were and what the realities were. So the bumper sticker "Chaos" was more telling it like it was as opposed to trying to create chaos, if you will. It wasn’t so much that we were saying things should be chaotic as things are chaotic, and you just have to deal with it. Of course, I’ve looked with interest on all these chaos theories and so that have come out in recent years. Certainly there’s some element of that in the universe. But I think that’s really what that was about. It was just a recognition, really, is all it was, although I’m sure it was seen, to some extent, as a threat to the established order, if you will. I remember we got those bumper stickers printed up that first year. I think there were lots of things done with those bumper stickers that shouldn’t have been. Warren: Like? Reilly: Like they were put on street signs, as I recall, one night. I don’t remember everyone who was involved in it, but, you know, Nelson Street became Chaos Street. "No parking anytime" became "No chaos anytime." [Laughter] I think that was just youthful pranks and probably more considered vandalism nowadays. Warren: How much do you think people like Bob Huntley were aware of Chaos? Reilly: Probably more than we knew. I felt like they had—and I’m trying to remember the person who was in charge of security. Warren: Murph. 28 Reilly: Murph. Yeah. Right. I think he knew. He had several people working for him who kept tabs on this kind of stuff. I think he probably knew who was who and what was going on where. You know, I think, to a certain extent, his job has become sort of being an intermediary to prevent any kind of conflict or—not conflict, but problems that occurred between the town police and the students, because certainly some of the activities that were going were either illegal or questionable. But I suspect a lot of the activities were, if not monitored, that there was some knowledge of who was who and what was happening with what people. Certainly in the times when there was the student strike and all that kind of activism, I think there was very much more heightened awareness of who of the leaders of the strike and who were organizers. I can’t imagine that he didn’t have some kind of reports coming in. I think the point there was that, in general, the people who were on campus were not violent, were not interested in destruction of property, basically. So I guess with the exception of—I think Abby Hoffman came to campus once. There was probably some concern at that point. But I think if you could get Jeff Gingold to talk about those times; Henry Schloss would also be someone who had a lot of insight into the happenings in terms of the faculty and the administration and what awareness they had of what was going on. Warren: I need to track them down. Well, thank you, Sean. We’re just right at the end of the tape. If there’s anything else, I’d be glad to pop in another tape. Reilly: Well, no, I think I’ve pretty well drained myself. Warren: Well, thank you. It’s been great to get your reminiscences. Reilly: You're welcome. [End of interview] 29