Rouse interview [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is Mame Warren. This is tape two with Parker Rouse on December 15, 1996. My last couple of questions. Did you get out into the country much? Did you get out to Goshen or House Mountain? Rouse: Yes. One of the nice things about Lexington, we thought, was the surrounding area. Some of us would go out and camp all night on House Mountain. I remember once going with a guy named Morton Brown from 29 Louisville, and Jim Andrews from Norfolk, and somebody else, I can't remember. But we built a fire and cooked our dinner, and sat around, I guess, and had a little beer. Then we tried to go to sleep, but it was cold, and our bed packs were borrowed from somebody. They were awful. They didn't give you any softness, and we couldn't sleep. I began to think about the wildcats. We kept the fire going, the embers of the fire, so we'd have it in the morning, and then I remember that I read that wildcats were attracted to fire. But it was a very unpleasant experience. I think we did it two or three times. In the summertime, we'd go down and swim in Goshen Pass, but the water was hideously cold. I was a Tidewater person used to water temperatures about 78 or 80 degrees, which is comfortable, but up there the water in the Goshen Pass was always impossible. Marshall Penick had a racehorse. It was the son of-it was of a family of horses that had been sired by Sun Beau, S-U-N B-E-A-U. Dr. Lee, Dr. Bolling Lee, who was a grandson of Robert E. Lee, he was a physician in New York City, and a fairly well-to-do man, Dr. Bowling Lee was given this racehorse by somebody, and he, in turn, gave it to Mr. Penick. Dr. Lee was on the board of Washington and Lee, so he gave this little colt to Mr. Penick. Marshall used to go out in the country where she boarded the colt, and take friends to feed the little horse sugar cubes. We went out, Lewis McMurrran and I, one Sunday. She had taught her class at the little Presbyterian chapel at House Mountain. We went out to feed the horse, and there was another colt of a common variety in the stable with him, because they said it made a thoroughbred horse more amenable to being trained if you had it with another horse in the same pen. But when Marshall tried to feed her horse sugar, the other horse came up and bit her on the bosom. It was a crisis, because she was a young lady and we were two young men, and we couldn't do but so much. [Laughter] We rushed her back to town where she saw Dr. Reid White. Dr. Reid 30 White pronounced the damage to be superficial. But we used to go with Marshall occasionally to see her horse. Occasionally, when theater events would occur in Richmond, some of us would rent a car and go down. One year Francis Letterer was performing in a play by S.M. Veerman [phonetic]. I can't remember the name of the play. It was a very successful play of its time. It was being done in Richmond, and four of us rented this car. Believe it or not, we had four flat tires coming back. We got there in time to see the play, and then as soon as it was over, we started home. But first one tire and then the next. The car was old, the tires were terrible. So the last time we had given out of all the material you use to repair blowouts, so we just had to leave the car in Amherst and get a taxi to take us to Lexington to try to get to class on time. I'd go over to Hollins occasionally. Once I went to Hollins, and the girl I was going to see was all dressed up like a boy, because in Hollins in those days, they had student dances and the seniors went as girls, but all the lower classmen went as boys, dressed up as boys, and broke with the seniors and danced with them. I said, "Good Lord, I never expected to see you like this." The girls' schools were very snippy. One night some of us went to Mary Baldwin. It was wet and the car had a lot of antifreeze in it, and the antifreeze had got hot and the fumes had come back in the car, and there was somewhat alcoholic- smelling. When we got to Mary Baldwin, Dean-she had a German name-the dean of women, who had to interview you when you came in for your date, she said, "You have been drinking alcohol." And we said, "No, ma'am." She said, "Well, you smell of alcohol." We said, "That is the antifreeze in the car." One of my fraternity brothers was a law student. He said, "Madam, if you persist in saying we've been drinking alcohol, I can bring a suit against you for 31 defamation." He said, "We haven't touched it." We hadn't, really. I think her name was Dean Pfohl, P-F-0-H-L. Another one of the deans in Mary Baldwin married Dr. Campbell, was the lady you saw. Warren: Yes. That was Dean Pfohl. Rouse: Dean Pfohl. Okay. All right. I can't say I remember her at all, but she evidently is a very superior lady. Warren: She was very impressive, very impressive. She told stories like that, so it's fun to hear the stories from both sides. That's what I love about doing this. I get stories from both sides. Rouse: I don't know. The last year I was there, Europe was beginning to go crazy, and also, I believe while I was there, the British ditched Edward, King Edward, and the affair with Edward and Wallis Simpson was going on, and my fraternity housemother, Miss Mead, was absolutely torn up by that. She just thought the Prince of Wales was the most wonderful guy in the world, and we would sit in her suite in the fraternity house listening to this thin little international broadcast, when he would talk about, "I cannot marry the woman I love," or something like that. "I'd be king with the woman I love," and so on, going to leave. Anyway, my Lord, she cried, she cried and cried. It was terrible. I said in that little talk I made, I don't think we really appreciated all the things that were happening in Germany and in Europe. We were so absorbed in ourselves and school. Oh, there's one other thing. When I was in my last year, I did a survey of the senior class that was published in the school magazine. I asked them all these questions about what do you expect to earn and what do you expect to do. It was pitiful. We all thought that we would perhaps be lucky and earn as much as $10,000 a year, because at that time the professors at W&L were making $5,000 a year. Dr. 32 Gaines, I think, as president was making something like $15,000 or $16,000. The whole salary scale was sort different. This was before the great leap in World War II in prices and everything, and our ambitions seemed very modest. I had a copy of that thing somewhere, and it really reflects, if you want to go that much in detail, reflects what college kids were thinking in 1937. Warren: I'll look that up. That sounds very interesting. Rouse: The magazine is the Southern Collegian, and it would have been an issue for either '36 or '37. Warren: Okay. I'll get that at the library. I'd like to see that. Well, what happened? You mentioned what you all thought was going to happen. What happened after college? What happened at graduation? Rouse: Oh, Dr. Gaines, as always, made the most marvelous farewell. In those days, and I think it's still true, the president made the farewell address, rather than have somebody come in from away. Dr. Gaines started that. Really, all of us just really hated-my brother, who came along two years after me, cried all the way from Lexington to Staunton when we were going home. I'd gone up for his graduation. Because there's something about being at that school. Maybe other people feel the same way about their schools. And we got out at a very poor time. I got offered a job for twenty dollars a week at the Daily Press in Newport News, and I talked to Tom Riegel in the journalism school. He said, well, he thought that was about the starting rate for newspaper jobs. So I went down there. After three years, I was offered thirty-five dollars by the Richmond paper, so I went on up there. But the salary scale after World War II then suddenly really began to jump. Now, newspaper reporters must make $25,000 or $30,000 a year. Warren: So what was your first job out of- Rouse: As a reporter on the Newport News Daily Press. 33 Warren: Okay. That's what I thought. Well, let's jump way ahead, because one of the questions I like to find out from everyone is what your feelings are about the big change at Washington and Lee about coeducation. Rouse: Well, although I'm an old alumnus, I was much more prepared for coeducation than most of my contemporaries. I lived here in Williamsburg, and William and Mary was the first Virginia school to go coeducational, and it was drawing some very good students by the 1930s, and constantly increasing the level of its academic demands, and its SATs suddenly got way ahead of W&L's, and it really hurt my pride that Washington and Lee, which, when I entered college, had been much the superior of the two schools, was now way behind William and Mary. And when Colgate Darden became president-I liked him and knew him in Richmond on the paper-when he had become president of the University of Virginia, he reluctantly-he said he hated the idea-concluded that they ought to go coed, and they did, and he said, "Parke, it's made all the difference in the world. This is a much better institution now because the competition is much greater. The pool of applicants becomes huge, and you can pick and choose, and then once in school, the boys and the girls sort of compete for positions." He says, "Rather than upsetting the campus with rape, with sexual enthusiasms, it's stabilized it, because the children, the students, are living in more or less natural circumstances, the way they would live anywhere, boys and girls all here together." So he said it's done great things for the University of Virginia. As I said, I hated seeing us-we were taking some people from Williamsburg and places around that I didn't think were up to W&L standards. In fact, W&L has always-I don't know whether this needs to get in the book-always had a problem of getting the best people in Virginia, because Virginia has very good publicly supported colleges. Today I could go to Virginia for about half of what at W&L, and William and Mary the same thing. I try to talk young people into W&L and they say, 34 "Yeah, but my father says he can't afford $20,000 a year at W&L, when he can afford $10,000 a year at Virginia." I just think it was a matter of necessity, although I'm sorry to see it. My brother in Washington, he just hasn't had anything to do with W&L since then, because he dislikes it so. Warren: Have you been back to campus since coeducation? Rouse: Yes. I think it seems fine. I'm surprised. It seems to me that with the big fraternity houses that the boys have, the girls would expect some similar accommodations, and I'm wondering whether that's ever going to become an issue, because- Warren: Oh, it's an issue right now. Rouse: I bet it is. Actually, I think the fraternities became a little overambitious for a while. They didn't keep the buildings up the way they should have. Most of them were shambles when I was there. Warren: When you were there as a student? Rouse: Yes. Anyway, I think from all I can see, I know that it's raised the academic standards. If W&L is a private school which has to charge more than public schools, to attract superior young people, it's got to be a highly superior school. It can't be a highly superior school if it has to take people with grade levels that are only mediocre. Warren: Well, those numbers seemed to have changed recently. Rouse: Yes. Warren: They're much better. Rouse: I see a lot of academics in Williamsburg, good friends of mine, and they say, "You're always talking about W&L. Look at our SATs are so much better than anybody in Virginia." Now they don't say that anymore. 35 The chairman of the board of William and Mary, about six years ago, got some bad information. She said William and Mary has the highest SATs of any school in the country except Harvard. [Laughter] Actually she's had the highest SATs in Virginia, I guess, of any school except Washington and Lee and the University of Virginia. She got hold of some wrong dope. Warren: Well, we've gotten through my list of questions. Is there anything more that you would like say? Rouse: I have a great respect for the Scotch-Irish who settled the valley, and I think, by and large, the record those people made in colleges and schools was a good one, in Princeton and Davidson, and the levels of schools. The Scotch-Irish, or the Scottish never were as rich as the English, but they seemed to put a big emphasis on scholarship and academic work. I think that shows up in schools like-Dr. Tucker, the dean at W&L, used to say he didn't think Washington and Lee should ever be too rich. He thought that the old saying that the best university was Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other, had a lot of truth, that luxurious surroundings, beautiful buildings, expensive trips and so forth, were not necessary for education, that what you had to have were really dedicated profs and dedicated students. Well, I don't know whether you can say that anymore, because education's become a more expensive thing. I do think Dr. Gaines did a great job of establishing a sort of support body for Washington and Lee, and I think he had to do that by showing that it was a serious school. When I went to work with Virginius Dabney on the Times-Dispatch, he said, "Look, Parke. Everybody knows Washington and Lee's a good-time school, but we don't think of it as a particular academic school." It was known in Tidewater by a lot of people as a place where people went to Fancy Dress and things like that. I sometimes wonder whether Fancy Dress was an asset or a liability. But I think it's 36 taken seriously there. You look at these magazines that attempt to rate schools, and most of them seem to think W&L's a very good place. Warren: These days it's way up there, isn't it? Rouse: Sure is. Warren: I'm very proud to be associated with it. Rouse: I hope I haven't talked you to death. Warren: You have not at all. You have just been a marvelous interview. I can already see the quotes on the page. Thank you so much. Rouse: You're very welcome. [End of interview] 37