Smith interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: So tell me about being a student here. Did you know you were going to Washington and Lee? Smith: Oh, sure. Warren: Was there any other place you were interested in going? Smith: Yeah, the United States Naval Academy. Warren: Really? Smith: Really. And that was because I’d been up there on athletic trips and I was impressed with it, really was. That was my first ambition was to go to the Naval Academy, and I don’t know really what happened to that, although I told you I had some health problems, and I think that interfered with a whole lot of things. I was pretty young to come to college, immature, and I probably would have gone away to prep school or something if I hadn’t had—allergies is what it was. I had a rough time with allergies. Coming to Washington and Lee, I knew that I was going to get a scholarship, as every other child of an employee did, and I stayed at home, so I got a very cheap education. I had enough of it by the time I was finished, I think, and got my A.B. degree in that I hadn’t been away, you see. I was in the marine corps during World War II, and when I got out, I had had one year of law here as my senior academic year, so I had the GI Bill and I went to the University of Michigan Law School, so I got away. But going to school here was terrific, you know, wonderful, and being that close to my father probably kept me out of trouble, to some extent. Warren: Did you join a fraternity? 17 Smith: Beta Theta Pi, influenced in that direction by Edgar Finley Shannon. Warren: Senior? Smith: Well, no. He became the president of the University of Virginia. Warren: Oh, okay. So he was a friend of yours? Smith: Oh, yeah. We both grew up here. He’s a couple years older. He was in the Boy Scouts and I was in the Boy Scouts. But I admired him, and so that’s the primary reason I went Beta. The trouble is, then I found out that there’s such thing as a real good time that didn’t have anything to do with books. Warren: Tell me about that. Smith: You have to put on a priest’s gear, don’t you, to get a confession of that kind. Warren: Oh, come on, now. I’m looking for the true Washington and Lee story here. Smith: Oh, well, If I had been mature at all, I might have spent some time in the stacks working, but I didn’t. I did as much as I could possibly do and have a good time in a useless way, without getting in trouble at home. Warren: Did you live at the fraternity house at all? Smith: No. Warren: You lived at home all four years? Smith: Lived at home, yeah. Warren: So you couldn’t have been too wild and still gone home at night. Smith: Well, yeah, but I had ways. I’d come up around that curve and turn the lights out on the car so they wouldn’t shine on the house. I wasn’t very good. Warren: So being a local person, you must have known all of the local hangouts. Smith: Yeah, and the local girls. Warren: You’re not going to tell me anything, are you? Smith: No. I’m just going to say yes and no to whatever you ask me. Warren: Oh, that’s no fair. 18 Smith: Well, there was Mike’s Place. Mike’s Place was out where the road turns off of, I guess it’s where 11 goes into the country club. There on the corner was Mike’s Place. Mike had a pet bear and he sold beer. It was a joint, you know, beer joint. I guess I had one or two bottles of beer out there. Warren: I won’t tell your father, I promise. Smith: He’s laughing right now. Let’s see, where else? There was Steve’s Diner. Do you know where Steve’s was? Warren: No, I don’t. Somebody’s mentioned that, and I don’t know where it was. Smith: I’ll tell you. If you come in by Cameron Hall—gosh, there’s a lot of people in town, VMI. Both sides of the street are totally packed with cars. Warren: There must be something going on up there. Smith: Oh, yes, bound to be. I came in that way, and as you get to where you turn right to go up Jefferson off of Main, right there on the left, it would be the left side of Main, was where Steve’s Diner was. Warren: And what kind of place was Steve’s Diner? Smith: Oh, great place, a quick bite to eat and beer. Warren: I’d love to find a picture of Steve’s Diner, because a number of people have mentioned that. And I’d like to see Mike’s bear, too. Smith: I bet you would. Mike Brown. Warren: Mike Brown. Well, I should would like to find pictures of those places. Smith: I’m sorry, I don’t have any. It would have been so easy to get one if I’d known I was going to be talking to you. Warren: Do you know somebody who has some? Smith: No, I don’t. Warren: That would be great. Smith: No, I don’t. Warren: So when you came to Washington and Lee as a student— 19 Smith: Then you could go to Buena Vista and drink beer and maybe see a Southern Sem girl. Of course, the boys pretty much traveled a lot, went to Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon, Mary Baldwin, even in those days. There wasn’t any traveling here from those places except on dance weekends. Warren: How did the girls get here? Smith: I don’t know, unless they came on buses. I don’t know whether maybe some of them had cars, because the boys had cars, not as many by any stretch. Warren: What was your major? Smith: English. Warren: English. Oh, you did follow in Edgar Shannon’s footsteps, then. Who were the really good teachers back then? Smith: Oh, my. Well, I had George Jackson freshman English, and he was good, very good. Flournoy. Warren: Tell me about him. Smith: Fitz, Fitz Flournoy. He was good. I had, I think, a Shakespeare seminar type thing with five or six students, and he just was very interesting, you know, was into it, not reading out of a book. Then for mathematics was Smith, Dr. Lib Smith. He was a character, good one. He taught my father. Warren: So he’d been here for a while. Smith: I got along pretty well in math until I hit calculus, and at that point I had decided there wasn’t any math course that I couldn’t learn with a book in three weeks by myself. So I skipped around. Maybe I had cuts or something. I didn’t learn any calculus, I can tell you that. And then when I tried to learn it from the book in three weeks, it didn’t work. I can’t remember whether I flunked it or had a D, but anyway I repeated the course. I was just stupid. 20 I didn’t pay attention. My father, every now and then he’d say, "You only come this way one time, one chance." It didn’t sink in. Other good teachers. Good law school teachers. Skinny Williams. Warren: Tell me about Skinny Williams. Smith: He had a certain sort of intensity about his teaching. It was good, and he was good at it. In law school, it’s important that your students understand what you’re saying. I found out at the University of Michigan, they had two or three professors that nobody understood what they were saying. I caught a couple of them. But you’re not going to learn anything if you don’t communicate, and both Williams and McDowell and Moreland and all those guys knew how to communicate, Johnson, get through to you, and you were interested in hearing them communicate. I don’t know what the secret is exactly. Warren: I don’t know, but apparently some of them really had that secret here. You know, someone who I think is probably a legend around here is Cy Young. Smith: Yeah, sure he’s legendary. Warren: You must have known him pretty well. Smith: Sure. Warren: Tell me about him. Smith: He was a guy with a lot of enthusiasm and was simpatico with the boys to a large extent. Kind of a explosive kind of personality. I don’t know how to say that exactly right. One of the things they all remember is when they’d have a rally before the University of Virginia game. They’d always call on him to say something, and he’d get up there and give an impassioned speech, like he was one of the boys, really. "I hate those damn Wahoos." I mean, he’d just go on and on. He was good, too. He’d get them all worked up. And he was a good coach. Warren: What did he coach? 21 Smith: He coached basketball, and then he coached some freshmen sports. In those days, we had freshman teams. He coached baseball. He could coach anything because he was a four-letter man, sixteen letters or something like that. Warren: Did you know how famous he was? Smith: At that time? Warren: Yes. Smith: Oh, yeah. And then it was during my time here, I think, that he was alumni secretary. That was his principal job after he gave up basketball. Warren: Did people talk about it being real special to have Cy Young here? Smith: Oh, yeah, I think they did. I think everybody knew the kind of record that he’d had here as an athlete, so he was recognized for that. Very likable man. Warren: Did he ever talk about his record or was it just something everybody knew? Smith: Yeah. I can remember there was at least one other man who would compete with Cy Young as being the greatest college athlete ever at Washington and Lee, and that was Leigh Williams. I think Leigh Williams was the reason my father agreed to be basketball coach. My father had never played basketball. He didn’t play basketball when he was coming along, and he didn’t coach it except for four or five years, and I think he won the state championship every year, because he had the boys to do it, and one of them was Leigh Williams. Leigh Williams came from the Norfolk area, and there was a sports editor down there who liked my father and they were friends, and he called my father one day and he said, "There’s a young boy down named Leigh Williams who is a great athlete, and you ought to see if you can’t get him to come to Washington and Lee." So at that time, later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell was, I think, manager of the football team and president of his fraternity, and my father said, “Lewis, I want you to take this car (the athletic association had a car), and here’s five dollars for 22 gasoline. I want you to go to Norfolk, and don’t come back till you bring Leigh Williams with you.” So Lewis didn’t know, you know. So he went to Norfolk. He introduced himself to the parents. He won the parents over and won the boy over. The mother said, “He can’t go to Washington and Lee unless he can room with you.” Lewis brought him back. He pledged him to his fraternity and had the boy room with him, and Leigh Williams turned out to be the greatest athlete that ever went to Washington and Lee and certainly as good as Cy Young was. He was awfully good, Leigh Williams. The reason you don’t hear about him anymore is that three or four years after he graduated, not long after he graduated at any rate, he died of, I don’t know, cancer or something. But he was some kind of an athlete. I started out by saying my father coached basketball because he had Leigh Williams and some other good players, and I think he just went along and watched them play, took credit for it. Warren: That sounds like a good job. Smith: Yeah. Warren: So what were the politics between the athletic department and the rest of the school? Smith: Well, they had an athletic committee, and I think the faculty was represented on that committee. I’m sure it was. Every now and then the athletic department would get the feeling that some professor had graded an athlete down. He might have been borderline or something. And that would get them upset, but that’s just sort of a natural thing that’s going to happen in any university where you’ve got an athletic department. Actually, I think they got along extremely well here. Warren: Were they happy with the facilities here? Smith: I don’t know. You mean the coaches or the students or the who? 23 Warren: Yes, everybody. Smith: I think so. Of course, I didn’t know any better. I thought the old pool was adequate. I just didn’t know any better, and so that sort of thing never really— One of the problems with trying to have an athletic association that supported itself was that you had to make your money out of football. You couldn’t draw enough people or accommodate enough people or draw them to any of the other sports. Well, football, it was bad enough trying to get crowds to the football game, you know, in a place like Lexington because we were so remote, even more so then than now. So you had to really exercise some imagination to try to do something, and in that connection, Washington and Lee and VMI would have double-headers, football double-headers. Washington and Lee in the morning would play Virginia. VMI in the afternoon would play VPI. Not VPI, but somebody good, you know. It got so before the war that the last several years before the war there was always at least one double-header here in Lexington, the idea being that you could get people to come from Richmond or Roanoke or someplace where there are a lot of people if you had two games they could see. Warren: I hadn’t heard that. Smith: It worked out very well. Warren: Where did people stay when they came for two games. Smith: They’d just come in the morning and leave at night, I think, most of the time. Warren: That’s a long drive. Smith: Yeah. It’s not too far from Roanoke. But it would start bringing them from Buchanan and other places that wouldn’t normally come. Warren: It must have been pretty exciting on a day like that. Smith: Well, it could be, it could be. It really could. Warren: Was Wilson Field as we know it now Smith: Well, let’s see. My father was here when they built the steel stadium. 24 Warren: Do you remember that? Smith: Not really. Warren: It was always there as far as you’re concerned? Smith: Yeah. It might have been added to once. Warren: Do I understand that the baseball field is named for him? Smith: I think so, yeah, the current baseball field. Warren: Was there any kind of ceremony for that? Smith: Not that I had anything to do with. I don’t think so. I think somebody just said we’ll name it on that day. Warren: What about when he retired? Was there a big to-do? Did you come? Smith: I don’t really recall. I think he got a watch. Isn’t that traditional? I don’t recall. Warren: What’s your favorite story about your father? Smith: I don’t know. I feel so inadequate to remember the darn stories. I just can’t. Let me look at this thing. Turn that thing off for a second. Warren: Okay. [Tape recorder turned off.] Smith: In about 1939, Memorial Day, VMI Corps was marching from the VMI grounds to the cemetery, I suppose to do something about Stonewall Jackson because it was Memorial Day. They came down Letcher Avenue and was marching by the Beta house. I had a fraternity brother named Mac Wing [phonetic] from Tampa, Florida. We had had a house party that weekend, and the guys who played the music at the house party had left their instruments. So Mac Wing went inside and got the bass drum, and he came out and as the VMI boys went by, Mac starting beating on the off beat. Isn’t that awful? So that they were just going up and down and out of step, the whole crowd, and every now and then they’d look up, and, I mean, you’re talking mad. They were furious. But they were in ranks and couldn’t do anything about it, until that night. Warren: And then what happened? 25 Smith: Well, in the morning the Betas woke up and found that the columns on the Beta house were painted red, white, and yellow. That was one story I had. Well, that isn’t the only time the columns were ever painted red, white, and yellow. Washington and Lee boys every now and then would go down and drag the VMI cannon off the parade ground and set them out in front of the columns in the Colonnade on the Washington and Lee campus, and VMI would get terribly upset. Of course, Washington and Lee administration would make them take the cannons back. But then the next thing you’d know, the columns on the colonnade would be painted red, white, and yellow. That happened more than once, in my memory. Of course, those were I guess the glory days of Washington and Lee athletics. In those days, the Southern Conference, there was no ACC. There’d be Virginia, William and Mary, W&L, VMI, VPI, and Richmond, the big six in Virginia. And then also in the Southern Conference you’d have all the major schools in North Carolina—North Carolina, North Carolina State, Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest. All these schools would play each other, and then in addition, it seemed to me we were also always playing somebody primarily to get some money—the University of Tennessee, Georgia Tech, West Virginia, University of Kentucky. Almost every year there’d be one or two outside pretty big games. That was another way that the athletic association, in addition to the Co-op. In the dining room, the waiters were always athletes. They had jobs waiting tables. Warren: Were athletes given preference in getting jobs? Smith: I think so, in the dining room in the Co-op. Warren: Well, we’re getting low on tape here. Are there any other stories that you want to tell? Smith: I think I’ve covered everything. Yeah, I’ve covered everything, that I can think of. 26 Warren: Well, I’ve really enjoyed this. I feel so honored to be talking to Captain Dick’s son himself. He’s just legendary around here. Smith: Yeah, he is. Yes, ma’am. Well, it’s nice to talk to you. [End of Interview] 27