TAYLOR COLE December 30, 1996 — Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is December 30, 1996. I’m in Blacksburg, Virginia, with Taylor Cole. You arrived in Lexington in 1959. Cole: That’s right, in the fall of 1959. I was six years old. When we first got to Lexington, the Lee House was undergoing a renovation, and we couldn’t move into the Lee House. We moved into a house that was owned, to the best of my knowledge, by Judge Davis, on, let’s see, it was Jefferson Street. I think the Reids have been the most recent occupants in that house. A beautiful, beautiful house. We lived there for the better part of a year when we first got to Lexington, which was really a wonderful place. It had wonderful boxwoods and a goldfish pond in the backyard. The poor goldfish didn’t make it for a year with me there, I’m afraid. [Laughter] But it was a great place. Warren: So you remember your father being selected for the job of being president and what his reaction was? Cole: Really, I have to say I don’t. Over the years I’ve heard about Dad being considered for different colleges, and that he chose Washington and Lee for several reasons. My understanding was he was on the list for the University of Alabama and a few other higher-profile schools, I guess, in the South at the time. But Dad had two things that I think, again, my understanding, that made Washington and Lee was his choice. One was the fact that it had a wonderful academic record, a tremendous reputation for turning out well-qualified graduates. Then secondly, Dad really liked the 1 idea that Washington and Lee had dropped the subsidized athletics back in the early fifties. Some of the articles in this box refer to his feelings that subsidized athletics were a distraction from what the true mission of a university ought to be. Warren: Probably the University of Alabama would not have been a good place for him. Cole: Probably the University of Alabama would not have been, but, of course, you know, back in those days in the circles, that was a plum. So for Dad to bypass the University of Alabama for a 1,400-, 1,500-student school in the Valley of Virginia was a significant acknowledgment that there were a lot of very important features in Lexington that weren’t available just anywhere in the South. Warren: Tell me about those features. What do you think the attraction is? Cole: Well, again, at Washington and Lee there’s an absolute dedication to the student, and to give that individual the greatest opportunity to make the best use of his intellectual resources that can be done. That’s where the priority is, and continues to be there. If it’s possible to improve, I feel like it is improved. Our continuing an evolution may be a better way to put it. Again, I think that was very much what my father believed very deeply in, that giving individuals an opportunity to bloom in an intellectual sense, as opposed to a necessarily physical sense, was of much more importance to a well-rounded and fulfilled life than prowess on a particular athletic field. But saying it was just the athletics is very much an oversimplification. Lexington, Washington and Lee, its academic reputation is second to none. Dr. Leyburn, I believe it was, used to say Washington and Lee is the Harvard of the South. That’s absolutely the case. For someone who, as my mother used to say, whose greatest aspiration was to be an academic, for someone with that orientation, Washington and Lee and Lexington was the place to go. I mean, it was the Athens, I guess, of universities where you went to really explore and give your mind license to 2 really bloom. I think that’s, for an academic, where you want to be and the type of people you want to surround yourself with, to be thought of as having a role in helping the university to prosper and bloom in its own right. Very attractive. Warren: Can you take yourself back to being that six-year-old boy, and seven and eight and nine-year old boy— Cole: Oh, absolutely. Warren: —growing up on campus? What was it like to be there as a child, and to be in that central position? Cole: It’s funny you would ask that question, because I’ve got to admit I was kind of particularly stuck in a traffic jam today, and I was toying with some thoughts of back then. That was such a profound influence on my life, that it’s very easy for me to get down inside of it and talk about it. My first thoughts when we got to Lexington were of Robert E. Lee. I spent my first six years in New Orleans, and Dad used to take me down to what was called Lee Circle, and there’s a great huge obelisk down there with a statue of Robert E. Lee up on top of it. When I was three, four, and five years old, I mean, it was straight up, and there was this Robert E. Lee standing up there. With the rest of my family heritage, he was thought of very highly, and always as a gentleman. When we got to Lexington, the idea of being able to live in General Lee’s house was almost more than I could handle, having grown up and just being absolutely surrounded by—so it was a great thrill for me. That first year, as nice as the house on Jefferson Street was, I was chomping at the bit to get into Robert E. Lee’s house. Of course, my two older brothers made up all kinds of stories to go along with the house, and secret passageways. I knew where every one of them was, too. [Laughter] I have no idea whether they’re actually there or not. Someone has told me since that there was a stairway somewhere in the house that had been bricked over or something like that at one time or another. There was a place in the basement where you could go and open 3 up the little trap door or something, and look through and see what looked like stairs going down. So I was convinced the whole time I was there that that was the secret escape. [Laughter] Growing up in the Lee House was a wonderful place for a little boy who was probably over-romantic anyway. It’s a wonderful house, and that front porch lent itself to being a ship’s bridge, with the railing that went around it. A huge big house. My friends and I, from down in what they called the Hollow—do you know where the Hollow is? Warren: Tell me about the Hollow. Cole: A lot of faculty lived down there. There was the Hainers [phonetic], Rob and his sister, I believe whose name was Christine, lived down there. I want to say Pat Wise— Wise. His family went back to the governor of Virginia, but I can’t remember his first name. He went on to— Warren: Chris Wise? Cole: No, I’m not sure that that’s right. But his last name’s Wise, and he was a couple years older than me. Then, of course, there were all the kids from over at VMI, too. We used to have wonderful dart-gun battles in that house. You could go and hide and nobody’d ever find you. So it was great. It was great fun. In the afternoons, Mom would be in one part of the house. It was very easy for us to go out and get lost in another part of the house and have great dart-gun battles until, of course, she found us. [Laughter] So it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the historical importance of the place was always with you, especially in the summertime when all the tours would come to Lexington. Of course, it’s not the tourist Mecca that it is now, but then there were still a large number that would come to the house. Quite often, back in those days, we really didn’t lock the doors very much during the day, and it was not unusual for us to come downstairs and to find tourists wandering around in the downstairs of the house. My sister used to give me an awful 4 time because I would assume the role as tour guide and go ahead and finish the tour for these people, which proved to be embarrassing sometimes. My sister lived there with us for a couple of years after she graduated from college. She never has let me forget that. It was a busy place. There was always the formal parties that Mom and Dad would put on, receptions, university parties. Of course, we had four kids in our family, too, so we would have our own functions there. My brothers would entertain, and my sister would entertain their friends there, too, which was a lot of fun. Their entertaining—of course, Gray being eight years older than me, and Fred being ten years older, Caroline fifteen years older, their entertaining was a good bit different from my dart-gun. I was at the age where it was nice for the little brother to be seen and then put someplace where he couldn’t do any damage. [Laughter] I had a great little treehouse out in the back yard. Warren: Really. Cole: Oh, yes. The tree that the treehouse was in has long since gone. Warren: I was going to say, I don’t know any tree in the backyard. Cole: Well, there were several trees that were back there when I was growing up that aren’t there now. The hemlocks that are at the back of the back yard that form a barrier between the dorm and the back of the house were planted when we were first there, along with the sundial that is in the backyard. Actually—and this is probably one of those things that needs to be edited out—that actually was a present from my father to my mother, and one of the things they decided to leave when they left. But that was a real favorite of hers, that sundial. She had a beautiful rose garden back there, and took a lot of pride in the roses. They formed a line all along the hemlocks there. Then there were peonies in two areas on either side of the door that came out of what we called the breezeway there. We had a basketball goal set up in the breezeway. Lea Booth—you know who Lea is? Warren: Yes, I know who he is. 5 Cole: Lea would come by after a football game or something. I was six, seven, eight years old, and he used to tell me he was going to help me get a basketball scholarship some way. I’m six, seven years old. Man, I practiced and practiced and practiced. [Laughter] He was a wonderful—well, still is—just a wonderful man. You know, he was just inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame. There’s a wonderful picture of my father and Lea Booth from back in the sixties somewhere. Warren: Great. Wonderful. I’ll look for that. What about the fact that you were in the middle of a college campus? Was there interaction with the students? Cole: Oh, of course. Oh, of curse there was. Wonderful, wonderful times. To be six, seven and eight years old, it was like having 1,400 playmates around. Whether they viewed it that way was another matter entirely. But I used to love to set up a little snow fort there just right next to the Robert E. Lee Episcopal Church, just across the sidewalk there. As they would come walking down the road—at that age, I was an awful athlete. I couldn’t do anything. So my aim was pretty poor. I don’t think there was ever any threat that I was going to do any damage, but I would make a snowball and throw it. You could just about count on the fact that they would pick it up and have a little snowball fight. So you could spend a nice winter afternoon down there with a lot of them. Sometimes they would have a tendency to escalate, and as some would come by, they’d start throwing at each other. I was probably somewhat of an instigator in some of that. I used to have a red wagon that I would—it was a great deal of fun to take that thing down there near Cyrus McCormick and ride it down the hill. At six, seven years old, it’s kind of hard, after doing that a couple of times, to get that thing back up. They were wonderful. I never will forget, all of them would walk by and offer to help me pull it up the hill, and they were great about that. Later on when skateboards first came out, that was a big thing both for me and for the students, as they are now. We would start up at Washington Hall. Skateboards 6 weren’t quite as good as they are now, and we would ride down and there was curve. They’ve got steps there at Lee Chapel, but back then they didn’t have the steps, they just had a curve in the sidewalk and you could go all the way down to the Memorial Gate down there. All the students and I would spent lots of time out there. Warren: When are we talking about now? Cole: I was probably twelve then, so that would have been ‘66. Warren: Have skateboards been around that long? Cole: Oh, gosh, yes. I’ve still got mine, as a matter of fact. Still got mine. I am, as you can tell, a pack rat. [Laughter] Rouse: I love pack rats in my line of business. Cole: Right. I’m sure. Warren: I depend on pack rats. Cole: I’m sure. I’m sure. Warren: Did you hang out at the gym? Cole: I did. Sure did. Dick Miller, or Canfield— Warren: Vern Canfield? Cole: Vern Canfield chased me off of the gym floor many, many, many times. Dick Miller in particular, he was just one of my favorite people. He’s a great guy. When I was a student at Washington and Lee, I was a history major. For some reason, I had no idea what it is, I walked in to see him. When I was little, I always kind of, whenever Dick came around, I was always trying to run the other way. I didn’t do that when I was a student. I used to go in and we used to have some wonderful times sitting in there in his office. But one day, out of the blue, I was a history major, horrible at math, couldn’t do anything, and out of the blue Dick Miller gave me a book on money and banking. I wanted to be nice. I said, "Thanks." I was like, "Okay." [Laughter] Lo and behold, it turned out to be somewhat prophetic. 7 Warren: I dare say. Cole: I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned that to him before. I’m going to have to make a point to do that. I still have that book. I still have the book. Warren: Isn’t that fascinating. Cole: That is. That is. It was a number of years before I got myself in line enough to kind of realize that this would be something I enjoy. Warren: Well, maybe he saw something in you that you didn’t know was there. Cole: Really. Really. Bless his heart. We’d spent a lot of time, of course, down in the swimming area. Sterns was the swimming coach then. But golly Moses, of course, when I was growing up there, Lee McLaughlin—Lee was a year older than me—and Jim Farrar, who was, of course, the alumni secretary now, and Marshall Washburn, all of us were fairly close in age. Lee and I were particularly close. I used to spend an awful lot of time with him while football practice was going on, playing around particularly underneath the stadium down there. Great dirt-clod battles took place underneath that stadium during practices, and sometimes during games, too. But it was an awful lot of fun. Spent a lot of time. I guess of the destinations, as I got a little bit older, six, when I got up to be eight—well, probably ten, eleven, twelve years old, I’d spend a lot of time, watched a lot of basketball games. Interestingly enough, Roger Farber, who was a star basketball player back in the sixties, and I think was president of the student body, and was a regional president for Century Fidelity, and he has just retired this year, and I remember watching Roger play basketball in old Doremus Gym. People talk about how Cameron indoor stadium down at Duke University is a wonderful place to go and watch a basketball game, because you feel like you’re right on top of the game. Didn’t have anything on old Doremus Gym. I mean, you were 8 literally over top of the players. They would cheer and get that old track—I don’t even know if it’s still in there—get that thing just rocking. It was a wonderful place to watch. They had some awfully good basketball teams back then. I remember a guy named Mel Cartwright and Neer. I forget what his first name was. Warren: He’s been inducted in the Hall of Fame. Cole: Yeah. But they were terrific years to watch basketball at Washington and Lee. They were one of the top teams. Of course, when we first got to Lexington, Coach McLaughlin had the football team. They were the number-one small college team in the country there for a couple of years in the sixties—’61. Bob Payne [phonetic] was playing back then, was a lineman on the football team. I went to Coach McLaughlin’s camp once I was old enough to do it. Warren: Maxwelton. Cole: Maxwelton. Lee and I being close, I got to spend an awful lot of time out there, both when there was camp and when there wasn’t. Rosa McLaughlin, in particular, was just an absolute wonderful influence on me when I was growing up. She was, and still is, has been a great, great influence. I can’t say enough wonderful things. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to spend any time with her or not. Warren: I live up Jump Mountain Road. Cole: Oh, do you? Warren: Yes. Cole: I didn’t know that. Warren: I was at a place Saturday morning that you’ve probably been to many times, up to the graveyard— Cole: Oh, absolutely. Oh, gosh, yes. Warren: Some of my children friends took me up there. Cole: I’d be glad to tell you stories there if you’d like to hear them. Warren: But not on tape. 9 Cole: Well, I’ll tell you what, one of my—and sorry to get off the subject here—but one of my proudest, proudest things I’ve done since reaching maturity or whatever is when they were trying to build that camp, up near Maxwelton. I had an opportunity to go and speak to the planning commission about that. Warren: Thank you. Cole: And also had an opportunity to do a few other things behind the scenes which I think might have helped a little bit on that. Warren: Thank you. Cole: That was my one opportunity to give back to Mrs. McLaughlin all that she’s given me. Warren: That was a really threatening thing for our neighborhood. Cole: It really was. It was a shame that it ended up where it did, because that was a wonderful place, too. But I’m glad it wasn’t in the back yard. Warren: It would have been a little bit more tough to worry about. Cole: I’ve climbed the mountain behind my place over in Augusta County, Deerfield. You probably know where Deerfield is. Warren: No, I don’t know Deerfield. Cole: Well, I can climb my mountain and look over on Jump Mountain, so I still feel like I’m pretty close. Warren: Well, we’ll wave to each other. Cole: Right. Right. Warren: Jump Mountain is right out my window. I look at it every single day. Cole: Yes. That’s a wonderful—I tell you, I’ve got a picture of it at home. I’ve got a picture of House Mountain. Warren: Let’s talk about the wonderful setting of Washington and Lee. Obviously, you’ve probably spent lots of time at Goshen and House Mountain and places like that. 10 Cole: Well, you know, when I was growing up, again, Washington and Lee and Lexington was a wonderful place for a kid. I mean, I haven’t gotten over it yet. Look, I’m here at Blacksburg, and this is too big for me. [Laughter] I haven’t gotten over it. When I was growing up, I used to spend an awful lot of time back over behind the Wilson field, back up in all that property where the cross-country track was. Down at the river, as you would go through the cross-country area and down, there was an old, I guess it was a C&O lock down there. Used to spend an awful lot of time. We’d go down there with some of my student friends. A fellow that comes to mind is Bill Brown, who was from Midland, Texas. I heard from Bill not too long ago. I think he’s in Charlotte now with somebody. But that was great fun. There’s that little Woods Creek that, back before they had any of the apartments or the library or anything down there, for a kid like myself, and I really did enjoy being outside, again, I guess, part of our family heritage was growing up in farm country, and I just really enjoyed it. But I would go down there and catch crawfish and bring them back into the Lee House and ask whoever was around to cook them for me. [Laughter] I’m not sure that I’d want to eat any crawfish that came out of Woods Creek now. Warren: Not anymore you wouldn’t. Cole: I don’t think so. But back then, and there was that tunnel. You know there’s a tunnel underneath the old cement footbridge, world’s longest non-suspension cement footbridge. There’s a tunnel down there. Again, for a kid that age, what a great place. I had a bow and arrow, the old-fashioned bow and arrow, and we’d go down there and shoot at trees. So that was an awful lot of fun. Not long after we got there, my father found us a retreat out in Bath County, on the Cow Pasture Railroad. The place I have now is not too—I’m on the little Calf Pasture. So again, I haven’t gotten it out of my system yet. We would spend our weekends out there. Dad loved to go out into the river and fish, cigarette in hand, would just spend hours out there. I’d ask Mom, "Mom, what’s he doing out there?" 11 And he’d never catch a fish. [Laughter] Mom said, "He’s thinking." Dad was quite a thinker. He would put in an awful lot of time out there just running things through his head. I never will forget, we had a little rowboat out there. When I was very young, I got in a rowboat and got caught in the rapids, and Dad had to come and "rescue me" one night in all of his clothes. Even back then, when Dad put on his suit, I had a great deal of respect for him. Dad was a very debonair dresser, and really cut a fine figure. He looked every bit the role that a university president should. Dad, of course, grew up—I don’t know if you want to get into his history, but he grew up on a huge cattle ranch in Texas, and, of course, horses were a fact of life for them. He worked very hard growing up. The five uncles that I had, four of them—all five of them were very successful in their careers. The youngest one picked up the farm after my grandfather died. But the other four boys, my Uncle Taylor, who I was named for, is provost at Duke and Medal of Freedom winner. Had an Uncle Tommy was a doctor, and Uncle Estes was [unclear]. But they all grew up working on this farm. They all sworn the reason they became successful is because they didn’t want to have to go back and work on the farm. [Laughter] Dad one time asked me to saddle up. We had a horse out there. I saddled up that horse, which was a real honor for me to saddle my dad’s horse. I saddled that thing up and the horse had blown up on me. I was about nine and I didn’t know what. Dad took off and was every bit as distinguished riding that horse as he was when he was walking down the sidewalk at Washington and Lee. Got down about a quarter of a mile and I was watching, and all of a sudden, saddle and Dad. Oh, gosh, that was a traumatic experience for me. [Laughter] Warren: And for him, too, I suspect. Cole: He was laughing. 12 Warren: I’m real interested that you talked about how debonair he was, because one of the things that I know started to happen in his time period, in his administration, was the beginning of the end of conventional dress. Cole: Yes. Yes. You’ll find an article in here that discusses his opposition to deterioration of that standard. Warren: What was your experience of it? You were there; you saw it happening. What did you see? Cole: Quite frankly, we left in ‘67. I never will forget the first Beatles haircut that came to Washington and Lee. As a matter of fact, Dad gave the first one a ride to Lexington. He had been to a trip up northern Virginia, and somehow or another linked up with this guy and gave him a ride down to Lexington. It was the topic of discussion throughout the entire campus. This was like ‘65, ‘66, somewhere in there. But quite frankly, while I was there, things were still pretty much as they had always been. It was probably more of a function of my growing older and being more sensitive to the fact that these weren’t playmates anymore, that these were young men who had parties and such. But it seemed like to me that just before we left, things were getting a little more— the decorum was not as great as it had been when we first got there. We went to high school for four years when we left Lexington. When I came back—and quite frankly, while I was there, Dean Gilliam sent me a copy of the Calyx when I was in high school, and I was shocked, going through some of the pages of the Calyx, to see fraternity pictures. In the fraternity pictures, some of the guys’ ties were askew and weren’t dressed as I had remembered them being. And, of course, when I came back in ‘71, it was a totally different place. All the traditional dress mandates were gone at that point. People still did it more as a lark, I think, than out of tradition. The peer pressure at that point was to—in the early seventies, people looked pretty rough relative to the way they looked when we first came to Lexington, and, quite frankly, relatively the way it looked now. That was a 13 rough time. There was a lot of turmoil in the late sixties and early seventies, as I’m sure you know about. Dad wouldn’t—you had to pry to get his opinions on such things, and my father’s statements were generally very short, very to the point, and, in a strange way, kind of very bottom-line-oriented. He didn’t react as, "Oh, the world’s going to hell in a handbasket." His was, "Well, it’s probably not in their best interest," meaning the students. Or some other something would happen and he would say, "Well, that’s unfortunate for the university." Those were more his reactions to those types of things. Of course, again, the Beatles haircut, everybody else in town was talking about it, and Dad, even though he had given this guy a ride, his only comments, to my recollection, was that he’d given the person a ride down. [Laughter] So he had spent some time and he had seen it. Warren: Can you remember who that was? Cole: I cannot. For the life of me, I can’t. It seemed like to me that year there were two on campus at the same time. It was really quite the thing. This was probably ‘65, maybe, ‘64 or ‘65, somewhere in there. Quite a thing for Lexington, in fact, at that point. Warren: Quite the thing for anywhere. Cole: Yes. Warren: One of the other major things that was going on in that time period was the whole issue of integration throughout the United States, particularly in the South, and at Washington and Lee. What do you know? I know you were young, but what do you know about that? Cole: A traumatic time, of course. My father took a very brave stance relative to that. He took it not only as far as Washington and Lee was concerned, but also as far as on a national level with Prince Edward School situation. Dad was very committed to equal opportunity, and regardless of probably convention, he was going to see to it as much as it was within has ability to have an impact, that was going to be something that was 14 going to be part of his legacy to Washington and Lee, as it turned out to be. Of course, we’re all extraordinarily proud of that, what he did. Warren: Well, you should be. It’s a story that, I think, it’s a difficult one certainly to deal with, but it’s one I’m not at all hesitant to include. I think it’s very important. And clearly, what I’m finding as I do my research is that there was a lot of resistance from the Board of Trustees. Cole: Huge. Huge. Warren: Can you talk about that? Cole: Not with any authority. Again, at my age I wasn’t party to the heavier discussions. I do know that there was a heavy temporary price to be paid in terms of some of the benefactors of the university. But that was symptomatic of the times. Dad took what at the time was a very brave and bold stance, and it was the right thing to do. That was my father’s bottom line. I think anytime you’re in a position like that, there’s going to be a price. He paid that, I guess, to a certain extent, on a short-term level to the university, paid it, and was willing to pay it, and it’s a stronger institution now for doing that when he did it. Warren: Do you remember the controversy about the invitation to Martin Luther King [Jr.]? Cole: You know, I don’t. I don’t. There is an article in there referencing that, and you’ve probably seen most of what I have here. Warren: No, I probably haven’t, so I’m real interested to look through. Cole: There is one in there. Warren: Good. Another thing that—I’m not quite sure, I should have sat down with the Calyxes and figured out exactly what had happened, but another thing that’s starting to happen was the death of Fancy Dress. Had that died by the time—I think it was still going [unclear]. 15 Cole: It was still going when we got there. That was a big thing. Again, for me at my age, I wasn’t party to the heavier discussions relative to some of these things that were going on, but oh, man, for me, that was a wonderful time. The whole university was excited, and certainly our household was. It was taking place right across the street. Back in those days, some of the students—we actually had dates that would stay at our house. That was one of the things that was still in effect, to a large degree, when I first got to Lexington. A lot of the girls’ schools were in the area. You had to say where you were going to be saying, and, by God, you’d better be there. [Laughter] Warren: Especially if it was at President Cole’s house. Cole: We had several. I remember, distinctly, students coming to pick up their dates at our house. Does the name Rob Vaughn [phonetic] mean anything? Rob was quite a student leader and is at Charlottesville, and is—forgive me, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the organization that Rob is in charge of now—humanities, associated with the university, I forget. Warren: In Charlottesville? Cole: In Charlottesville. Warren: Is it the Virginia Humanities Council? I know they’re in Charlottesville. Cole: I don’t know. But Rob, I remember when he was a student coming to pick up his date. A young man by the name of T. K. Oates used to keep dates at our house. Mom and Dad just loved it. I mean, they just thought that was great, watching these guys come in all their regalia to pick up their dates. Particularly, I remember one in particular, it was a Civil War theme and, of course, all of the students were dressed in their Confederate uniforms and all the dates were dressed in their hooped skirts and everything. Of course, that was at a point that I was still just enthralled with the fact that I was living in Robert E. Lee’s house, and here were these real honest-to-goodness Confederates coming to our door. [Laughter] Warren: That’s great. Let me flip the tape over.