Virginia "Dinny" Wetter, W&M Class of 1940


Virginia Wetter arrived at William & Mary in 1936. During her time at William & Mary, she participated in Chi Omega, French Club, German Club, the Literary Society, and served as an Orientation Aide. She also wrote for the Royalist and the Flat Hat.

After earning her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1940, Wetter’s trajectory took her into the radio and broadcasting industry, namely, as president/general manager of WASA and WHDG radio stations in Havre de Grace, MD, and as Chairwoman of the Board for Chesapeake Broadcasting Corporation. She stayed connected to William & Mary through her service on the W&M Foundation Board.

In her interview, Wetter makes a connection between her experience as a William & Mary student and that of current students, suggesting they spent their free time in similar ways--walking down DOG Street, grabbing a bite to eat, attending movies at Kimball Theater. Another experience, more unique to Wetter's demographic, was attending the annual Christmas Party of President John Stewart Bryan, at which everyone in attendance dressed in costume. Three generations of Wetter's family have attended William & Mary.

Transcription

William & Mary

Interviewee: Virginia Forwood Pate Wetter

Interviewer: Kim Sims

Interview Date: October 16, 2015                      Duration: 00:43:45

____________________________________________________________________

Kim:                My name is Kim Sims and I’m the university archivist at the College of William & Mary. I’m interviewing Virginia Forwood Pate Wetter, also known as Dinny, a member of the William & Mary class of 1940. Today’s date is October 16, 2015, and this interview is being recorded in the Chandler Room of the Alumni House. So Mrs. Wetter, can you tell us when and where were you born?

Virginia:          I was born in Havre de Grace, Maryland in 1919 on August 10th.

Kim:                Did you grow up in Maryland?

Virginia:          I’ve lived in Maryland my whole life. It’s kind of amazing to me because people don’t usually stay in their birthplace all their lives. And I’ve been married twice and both of my husbands loved this little town. One was from Georgia and one was from New York, and they both came to live there and never left till they died. [Laughs.]

00:01:00

Kim:                So when did you attend William & Mary?

Virginia:          I attended William & Mary between 1936 and 1940.

Kim:                So coming from Maryland, why did you decide to attend William & Mary?

Virginia:          Oh, that’s a little bit of a story. My mother was pretty modern for her day and age, and she and my father wanted me to go to college. I would be the first person in my family to have a college education. But she had one restriction. She did not want me to go to an all girl school. She said it was normal for men and women to grow up together and to live together, and so she wanted me to go to a coed school. And we talked over various schools.

00:01:57          I did not want to go to the University of Maryland. My friends who went there came home every weekend and I didn’t think you got a true college experience if you ran home every weekend. So we came down here to look at William & Mary and we liked it, and I decided to try to come here, and I was accepted.

Kim:                What was your major?

Virginia:          English. I really wanted to take journalism. I wanted to be the great writer, which never happened. But they didn’t have a journalism course. I don’t even know whether they do today. But they didn’t then. So I just majored in English. Actually, I concentrated in English. If you concentrated, you didn’t have to have a minor, and I simply had a concentrated major, I guess. [Laughs.]

Kim:                So what are your memories of your first day as a student at William & Mary?

00:03:00

Virginia:          I saw that question and it was amusing to me that after, let’s see, this is 75 years since I graduated from the college, and 79 years since I started, and how was I going to remember my first day? I remember several things—that my parents brought me down here, that we waited for my trunk. In those days, I had a big steamer—oh, it was about that high. You know, you could hang things in it, and it had drawers. And it was shipped by rail and we waited for it to be delivered.

And my mother helped me unpack, and we went down to Rose’s. That was located then in the first block of Duke of Gloucester Street. But then the first day, when we had to register, I guess my most vivid memory is standing in line with a very nice girl that I never met before, and her first name was Virginia, as mine is.

00:04:09          She was an Army brat. And we became lifelong friends. She died some years ago, and I still stay in touch with her children. In fact her son and his wife just two weeks ago spent several days with me in Maryland. So it was a…my biggest memory is making this very wonderful friendship with Virginia [Bren].

Kim:                Wonderful.

Virginia:          And that’s about the extent of what I remember of my first day. [Laughs.]

Kim:                That’s great, though. Thank you. So when you entered William & Mary as a freshman in 1936, there were 708 women enrolled and 528 men. At orientation, women were divided into 20 groups under junior sponsors.

00:05:05          The groups had four meetings in which they received instruction on the social rules, the honor system, and the constitution of the Women Students Cooperative Government Association. And then an examination on student government was given and a grade of 90 or above was required for passing. And this information came from an article in the Flat Hat from your freshman year, and it specifically put the focus on the women students and not on the men, leading me to presume then that this was something specific that women freshmen had to do. So what are your memories about this time?

Virginia:          Not very much.

Kim:                Okay.

Virginia:          I just know that it happened. And of course there was a big difference. We had specific rules that we had to follow as women, and the men didn’t have any rules at all when it came to social things and what time to be in at night and such. But the women did have many more rules than the men.

00:06:15         

Kim:                So then there were obvious differences between them—

Virginia:          Big differences, yes.

Kim:                So with the curfew being one such difference in terms of social rules—

Virginia:          We had to be in at 10:00 at night. We could get special permission if we were studying in the library. It was sort of a library permission. And then we could stay out till 11:00. But we had to be in the library studying. It wasn’t to stay out and do anything else.

Kim:                Were there rules about how women dressed?

Virginia:          I don’t remember there were rules about it, but there was a code of dressing that was more or less accepted.

00:07:00

Kim:                And were you allowed to date or did you have to have like permission to—

Virginia:          Oh, yeah, sure you could date, or you could go downtown and meet somebody and go to the… One of my big memories of going… There were two pharmacies downtown across the street from one another. I mean, the first block, Merchant Square was totally different from what it is today. And one of the pharmacies made a tin roof. You know what a tin roof is?

Kim:                I do not.

Virginia:          I think it’s a shame they went out of fashion. Ours came in a paper cup and had vanilla ice cream in it and chocolate sauce over it and salted peanuts. And everybody went around the campus holding these little cups and with their spoons eating tin roofs.

00:07:53          The only other university I ever found that knew what a tin roof was was the University of Alabama, because in later years I served on a board of education in my county and the president of the board at that time and I used to compare notes on tin roofs. [Laughs.] But why don’t they serve them anymore? They were good.

Kim:                They sound good. So what was dorm life like?

Virginia:          Well, it was… How do I want to put it? I mean, it was normal. It was fun. The hall on which I lived had a bunch of really nice young women, and every Saturday night when we had to be in at a certain time, we met kind of at midnight and had a snack. We prepared for it and so forth.

00:08:55          And in my particular case, our group decided we needed a name. And first of all we agreed that we were overworked, so oh, well, Order of Overworked what? So they decided it had to be OOO. So we became the Order of Overworked Okapis. You know what an Okapi is?

Kim:                I don’t know.

Virginia:          I have a toy one on my bed at home. My son-in-law gave it to me. The Washington Post ran an article that Okapis were becoming an endangered species, and one of our members immediately wrote the Washington Post—she lived near Washington—to inform them not to worry, there was an Order of Overworked Okapis at the College of William & Mary. [Laughs.] And they printed up a little article about it. I think it’s still in my scrapbook.

Kim:                [Laughs.]

00:10:00

Virginia:          But anyway, we had fun. I mean, they were nice girls and we enjoyed being together. But every Saturday night we had our little midnight meeting and sort of caught up on the week, and talked, and ate.

Kim:                So at that time were most of the women housed within one dormitory, so were you around upper classmen as well as other freshmen women?

Virginia:          I actually, as a freshman, roomed with a senior. At first I was disturbed about it because I would have preferred having another freshman. But we became such good friends it just didn’t matter. She was a transfer from the Norfolk division of William & Mary, which I think is now Old Dominion, isn’t it, University?

Kim:                Yes, ma’am.

00:10:51

Virginia:          And actually, it was the last year that you could go three years in Norfolk and come up to Williamsburg for your senior year. After that you could only go two years in Norfolk and then you had to spend your last two years in Williamsburg. And she again became a lifelong friend, of course. I think some of the friendships you make in college are invaluable.

Kim:                Absolutely. So did you have a favorite professor?

Virginia:          I’m sorry.

Kim:                I’m sorry. Did you have a favorite professor?

Virginia:          Probably. I was very fond of Dr. Borish, Eugene Borish in the English Department. And sadly he died in the war. And  also Dr. Edmund Harrison in the English Department, who eventually left here and went to another university in the South. And I guess in the long haul my favorite professor was Dr. Harold Lees Fowler.

00:12:01          And we even became good friends after college days because World War II came along. He was called up to serve in the Navy, and where I lived in Maryland, across the Susquehanna River was a Naval base called Bainbridge, and Dr. Fowler was sent to Bainbridge. And his wife wrote me. I was married by that time and had my first child. But wrote and asked if we could help them find a place to live, which we did. And the fact that they were in our little town during World War II for several years, we became very good friends.

Kim:                So what was it about him that made him one of your favorite professors?

00:12:55

Virginia:          He was darn good at what he did. He made history come alive. He did a lecture on Henry the Eighth that was so popular that students who had been in his class, say, the year before when he gave it would want to find out when he was going to give it again the next year, even though they were in other classes, and go back to hear it.

And when my daughter Barbara was here in school, I think it was her senior year—he had retired by that time—she asked him if he would give that talk again about Henry the Eighth at a large club meeting. I’ve forgotten which club it was. And they invited other people to come.

00:13:58          And I drove down from Maryland just to hear it. And he would not let anybody record it. But he was very knowledgeable, very fair, and just an excellent, excellent professor and teacher.

Kim:                So how challenging were your studies?

Virginia:          They were very challenging. [Laughs.] I thought William & Mary was truly tough in those days. And I certainly know I had to work hard to maintain the level that I wanted. And one of your questions in there, which interested me, was did I think it was as hard today as then. I’d have no way of knowing. I don’t know whether it is or it isn’t. But I always thought then that it was really a tough university, and that I was getting an exceptionally good education.

00:15:04

Kim:                So how did you manage the workload?

Virginia:          We studied a lot. [Laughs.] I don’t know. I think that’s something that’s individual. Each person perhaps has their own disciplines that they use to manage whatever they have to do.

Kim:                So you were a very active undergraduate. Your student activities included the Royalist, the Flat Hat, the French and German Clubs, Chi Omega, the Colonial Echo, and the literary society, the YWCA, and you also worked as an orientation guide. So what motivated you to be so engaged in addition to having to carry such a—

00:15:53

Virginia:          I don’t know. I had always been active in high school, and you’ll notice that a lot of the things have to do with writing and journalism, and I thought that would be a big help. And I’d like to point out that the German Club had absolutely nothing to do with speaking German. French Club did—well, in speaking French. German Club was a dance club, and twice a year we had a big dance where the women invited the men or the women could go stag. And since we did cutting in in those days, we could cut in on somebody and dance with their date.

Kim:                Yeah, I saw references in the Flat Hat to the German Club’s dances, so I was excited when I saw that you were a part of that because I thought what a fun…to make the Flat Hat and be such a…it looked like it was something that was well received by the whole student body.

00:16:55

Virginia:          Oh, we loved the Flat Hat, yes.

Kim:                So what did you and your classmates do for fun when you weren’t focused on your schoolwork if you went out into the town?

Virginia:          The same things that probably young people do today. You know, you might get together and go for a tin roof or walk down Duke of Gloucester Street to the capitol on a beautiful day. And I don’t know. I think that’s just whatever is popular at the time you do, and you meet your friends and maybe have lunch someplace.

The movie was popular then. The same little theater that’s still in Merchant Square was there, but it had movies. And we went to movies a lot. I think there was one row that was sort of, not truly reserved, but always occupied by the Chi Omegas, and I was a Chi O.

00:18:01          So if you decided you wanted to go to a movie, it didn’t matter if somebody was with you, you could wander in the movie and find some of your friends sitting in the Chi O row and go sit with them and watch the movie.

And I was thinking about that yesterday because I was looking over the questions. It was funny about movies then, and I don’t think anybody would do this today. They ran continuously once they started at 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon and ran through until 11:00 at night. You might walk in on the middle of a movie, and that was fine. You watched it through the end. And then when it came on again, you watched to the point where you had walked in in the middle.

I don’t believe anybody would do that today. They figure they have to be there when it starts and just watch it through. But we often did that. It was the time that we had available to go, so you walked in at whatever point the movie was, you saw it to the end, and then you watched it to where you had come in.

00:19:08         

Kim:                So the next couple of questions are really more for curiosity’s sake because we don’t know much about the William & Mary mascot, and I think a lot of people are really surprised to hear that there was pony mascot that came in 1937.

Virginia:          Hear about Wampo.

Kim:                And that his name was Wampo after the Flat Hat had a naming contest. So what are your memories about that time? Did the addition of this pony generate a lot of excitement among the student body?

Virginia:          Vivid. [Laughs.] Everybody loved Wampo. He was the cutest pony. And you didn’t think of Wampo without thinking of Tim Hanson. Tim was the one who took care of Wampo, ran Wampo up and down the side of the field. And Tim and Wampo were always together.

00:19:58          Tim Hanson was not very tall, but he was…if not in physical stature, he was tall in personality. [Laughs.] His father, I think I’m right about this, was a prominent lawyer in Washington, D.C.

I have a good memory of Tim of something else, too. When I had gotten well into broadcasting, I was over in Washington for a broadcasters meeting. Came out of the Washington Hotel and needed a cab. I’m standing there waiting for a cab and a cab pulls up right in front of me. Tim Hanson jumps out of it and said, “Okay, Dinny, here’s your cab,” and he’s off.

That was the most he said to me. I hadn’t seen him in years. [Laughs.] But that’s how you, you know, you knew somebody so well and saw them again, and here’s your cab. So I got in the cab. But yes, we loved Wampo.

00:20:59

Kim:                So was Tim another student?

Virginia:          Tim was a student and he also studied law. I assume he studied law here. He married a William & Mary girl. She was a Kappa. I remember Jane well, yes. But they’re both gone.

Kim:                So in 1938 Georgia O’Keefe received a Doctor of Fine Arts at commencement and there was an exhibit of her art at PBK Hall. And I was just curious if you had the opportunity to see either her or her paintings.

Virginia:          No, I did not see her. I knew she was coming and she was here. Years later, when I was in Santa Fe—I think that’s where it was, or Albuquerque, well, one of them—we went to her studio and saw some little mention in all the blurbs about her that, you know, she had been at William & Mary. But it was the end of the year, and I have an idea I had already gone home.

00:22:03

Kim:                So President John Stewart Bryan was known for hosting annual Christmas parties which required faculty and townspeople to dress in 18th century costumes. Students had to come in costume, but were not required to wear 18th century inspired costumes due to the added expense. And in 1938 Abigail Rockefeller attended. And I’m curious if you ever attended the Christmas parties, and if so—

Virginia:          Always.

Kim:                —could you describe what they were like from a student’s perspective?

Virginia:          Always. Everyone looked forward to those Christmas parties. The students didn’t have to dress in Colonial costumes, but they were asked to dress in a costume. And for years I think I kept the one that I wore each year. But they were fun. And we watched the Rockefellers come in with President Bryan and march onto the stage. And the parties were just really great.

00:23:04

Kim:                So what were the costumes generally like for students?

Virginia:          Their costumes were beautiful because they all wore Colonial costumes. They were all dressed as they would have dressed when the college was new.

Kim:                But with your costume and the students—

Virginia:          Oh, my costume. It wasn’t a colonial thing.

Kim:                Right.

Virginia:          It…I don’t know how to describe it. It was just something that I had gotten. We had costume parties then. I don’t think anybody has costume parties today, do they? I haven’t heard of one in years.

Kim:                Not that kind of costume party, anyway. And actually, in the university archives we have President Bryan’s Colonial costume from the wig all the way down to his shoes.

Virginia:          Yes. I can still see him in my mind’s eyes.

Kim:                That’s great. So what were your aspirations upon graduating from William & Mary?

00:23:55

Virginia:          Oh, I wanted to be a writer. I had written the great American novel when I was ten years old, and it was actually published—[laughs]—in our local weekly newspaper, a chapter at a time, written by little Miss Virginia Forwood. I’m sure I still have all those newspapers hidden away somewhere.

So my first job was in Philadelphia at the Standard Oil Company of Pennsylvania. And it was so funny because I don’t remember how I…yes, I do remember how I got there. I had several interviews in Philadelphia, one of them being with Curtis Publishing. Curtis Publishing—today’s people wouldn’t believe this—would only pay me $15 a week.

00:25:00          Standard Oil Company, I went to interview there in a public relations job, paid me $85 a month. So I took the one that paid me the most because I didn’t want to ask my parents for money. And believe it or not, I found a room to rent in a boarding house that I could afford on $85 a month. I could eat on a dollar a day, 15 cents for breakfast, 35 cents for lunch and 50 cents for dinner, and saved $5 each month. So think what inflation has done to us. It’s just incredible.

00:25:59          Imagine one of William & Mary graduates today hearing that they could get a job at $85 a month. They’d want $85 a day, I’m sure. [Laughs.]

Kim:                You’ve alluded to this earlier regarding the friendships that you had, and I wonder if you could go into some more detail about after graduation your being able to stay in contact with the friends you made while at William & Mary.

Virginia:          We stayed in contact with writing letters, with telephone calls. It wasn’t daily contact, but we stayed in touch. It’s not like today with the cell phones, and the computers, and the emails. But we certainly stayed in touch to the point of continuing our friendships.

00:26:57          I had two roommates. For three years we lived together in the Chi Omega house. One of them lived in New Jersey and one lived in Pennsylvania. And each Christmas we met in Philadelphia for lunch.

And I remember the last time we ever met I took my older daughter and Jane McKee brought her older daughter and we put the two girls over at a table by themselves so the three of us could be together because we figured we’d bore them stiff with getting caught up on one another. So we… And even with my friend Virginia Bren, who married an Army doctor and moved around a lot, we kept in touch through letters. We wrote to each other.

00:28:05          And so I continued my friendships with these people that had meant the most to me while I was in college.

Kim:                So how many generations of your family have attended William & Mary since you?

Virginia:          Well, I was the first one, of course, who came. I was the first one in my family who went to college. And that meant so much to my mother and father. They were so pleased. And then my brother came here. However, in his sophomore year, he got drafted, because we were in the middle of World War II. Then I had two daughters who came here, Kennon Pate McKee and Barbara Pate Glacel. Barbara’s had two daughters who have come here, Jennifer Glacel and Ashley Glacel.

00:29:00          I think the last one graduated in 2002, I think. And yes, because Jen graduated in 1998. So now I have a raft of the cutest—well, I think they are—little great-grandchildren you’ve ever seen, so we’re sort of figuring out which one of those might someday come here. The oldest one is only six, so we have a while to wait.

Kim:                So was it, you think, your influence on them as to why they chose William & Mary in addition to William & Mary’s reputation as a top academic institution?

Virginia:          I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.

Kim:                Sure. So I was wondering what drove your children and grandchildren to come to William & Mary. In addition to its reputation, was it also kind of seeing how it influenced your life?

00:29:58

Virginia:          I don’t know that I can actually answer that. They wanted to come here. There was no question about that. And where my two daughters were concerned, I took them to see other colleges. I didn’t want them to come here just because I had. I wanted them to come here because that was special to them.

Kim:                So in your opinion, maybe based more on the experiences of your children and grandchildren, what do you think has changed most on campus or about the student body since your time?

Virginia:          Look, there have been so many changes on campus in 75 years, I wouldn’t know where to start. In the first place, when I came here the campus ended at the end of the sunken garden.

00:31:00          The first time I ever came to Williamsburg to see William & Mary, my mother and father brought me down here in June after I got out of school in my junior year in high school, and they were constructing the sunken garden. And I can assure you the campus wasn’t very attractive with all the equipment there digging all this dirt out to make this huge sunken garden. So I certainly didn’t come here because of how beautiful the campus was. It was very pretty when I got here, but it surely wasn’t then.

But it ended at the end of the sunken garden. Tercentenary Hall wasn’t even there. All the time I was in school they talked about building another building there. And they didn’t build it until 1993 when we celebrated the tercentenary.

00:31:57          The library—I don’t know what was the library for me anymore. The back of the Wren building, it was the first building on the right.

Kim:                So Tucker?

Virginia:          I guess, yes. But that was the library when I was here. So stop and think of all the changes. Even by the time that Kennon came here as a freshman they had started building everything out in the back, and it came building by building.

In fact they were so crowded that year that across Jamestown Road, back in some kind of a housing area the college was renting apartments, and she lived…I don’t think Barbara did. I think it was Kennon who lived there. I may be wrong about that. And lived in this apartment with several other freshmen girls. So the changes have just been tremendous over the years.

00:33:00

Kim:                So you have served William & Mary in several ways as an alumna, serving on the William & Mary Foundation board and the Fund for William & Mary board. Why was it important for you to stay involved with William & Mary after graduation?

Virginia:          I liked William & Mary. [Laughs.] The first five years after I got out we were at war, and I don’t think we even had a fifth anniversary celebration because the war was just winding down at that time, so it was ten years before I came back for a reunion. And my husband and I came to that. He liked coming here. That was kind of nice because my first husband died when he was very young, and I married again, and both of my husbands liked coming here.

00:34:00          And everybody was friendly, and it was really nice. So if I was asked to do something, I was happy to do it. I think that’s the answer.

Kim:                As a result of your staying involved, in 1969 you received the Alumni Medallion and in 2006 you received an honorary degree. So will you describe those experiences and what they meant to you?

Virginia:          They meant a lot. It was wonderful first getting the Alumni Medallion. And I was the first one in my class to get it. But the honorary degree was just up in the sky. I had no idea that I’d ever get anything like that. Years ago I had wanted to go back and just get a master’s degree, and somehow or another I never had the time.

00:35:02          I mean, my first husband died, and I took over his business, the radio stations, and then I had the three children, and getting them through college. And there just wasn’t the time to do it. I was going to go up to University of Delaware—we’re only 20 miles from the University of Delaware—and try to get a master’s degree.

At that time I remember I was on the Hartford County Board of Education in Maryland. And I talked it over with the superintendent of schools, and he said to me in your profession, what will a master’s degree do for you? And I said nothing. And that was true. I didn’t need it. And he said you’re already doing more than most people your age. He said you have three children, you’re taking care of them, you’re preparing them to go to college, and you’re running a business full-time. He said I think you just should forget it. So I did.

00:36:04          So getting the honorary degree was just sort of the icing on the cake. It was wonderful. I was very grateful to the college for doing that.

Kim:                So how did attending William & Mary influence your life?

Virginia:          I think it had a tremendous influence on my life. I think the education that I received here, in many ways, prepared me for what life gave me later on. Gave me the confidence and the ability to walk into a radio station and take over the management without ever having worked in broadcasting.

Kim:                I want to get back to that in just a second, but one last question regarding William & Mary specifically.

Virginia:          Sure.

00:36:56

Kim:                In 2018 William & Mary will commemorate 100 years of coeducation. And what are your thoughts about the value and contributions of women?

Virginia:          I think women have come a long, long way, but I think women can do more. I think we still, at times, tend to sit back and let men take the reins and run with them. I think there’s a lot more that William & Mary women graduates could even do for the college than what they’re doing now. And I hope they’ll realize that and take advantage of it.

Kim:                So if you don’t mind, I would like to ask some more questions regarding your career running a business, because at the time that you did so it wasn’t very common to see women running businesses and do so so successfully. So would you mind sharing with us how you came to take the reins of this business and continued to see to its success?

00:38:12

Virginia:          Well, let me go back a little bit. There was a time when my first husband, Jason Pate, thought he might get called back into the Army because of some international situations going on in the world, particularly between North and South Korea. And he decided that if he had to go back in the Army he wanted me to run the radio stations until he came back, so he prepared pages and pages of instructions, mostly on where everything was, and what he did and how he did it and so forth.

00:39:06          Well, he never got called back into the Army, and sadly, he did die at age 44, suddenly. So I was on the board of directors by that time. He had made sure that when one gentleman died—they were all men—that I came on the board. So these other men were all professionals and had their own jobs, so they were willing to give me a chance. They told me they’d give me a year and see how I made out running the station. The auditor—not auditor, but CPA was immensely helpful.

00:40:03          He was a friend as well as our CPA. And I remember he came to help me the first week there. And I remembered this paper that Jason had written, and we found these sheets, and we went over them, and they were a big help. But in the beginning I felt my way.

The sales manager was a big help, the program director was a big help. They didn’t want to lose their jobs. They wanted everything to keep going, so they were more than willing to help me.  And my husband had told me something to serve me well for many years. He said if there is a problem, and you need to make a decision, listen. Listen to what everybody says.

00:40:59          You keep quiet. Let the rest of them talk about it. And then slowly it will come to you in your mind what the right path is to follow. And that’s what I would do when I wasn’t sure about something. And sometimes the sales manager had one point of view and the program director had another one, and the engineer had still another one. But I’d listen and then I’d think about it, and it served me well. It worked.

And then, of course, you stay in the job and you get accustomed to it. I used to laugh. American Women in Radio & Television would ask me to speak to women about having a broadcasting career and I used to say I’ll come and talk to them, but I didn’t start at the bottom, I started at the top. [Laughs.] But it all worked out by thinking.

00:42:03

Kim:                And so you helped lead from radio to television.

Virginia:          I was never in television. I was only in radio. No, I wasn’t. I eventually got into cable television, but I was never that active in it. But we did have cable television franchises where I live, and we actually ended up merging with Comcast.

Kim:                So at the time you were running the radio stations, were you the only woman or one of a few number of women in that position?

Virginia:          When I first got into management I was one of probably five women in the entire country that was in general management. I knew three of them.

00:43:01          One was in the state of Washington, one was in New England, one was down in North Carolina.

Kim:                Is there anything else you’d like to add about William & Mary or…?

Virginia:          Well, I’m glad I came to William & Mary, and I think it was a big help to me to have had the liberal arts education that I had here. And I love coming back. And I just want to thank you for asking me to do this. It was very thoughtful and I’m glad I could do it. And I hope I’ve come up to your expectations.

Kim:                Absolutely. We thank you as well.

Virginia:          Thank you.

Kim:                It’s great.

00:43:45          [End of recording.]

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Special Collections Research Center at William & Mary Libraries welcomes non-commercial use and access that qualifies as fair use to all unrestricted interview materials in the collection. For more information about fair use, see William & Mary Libraries guidelines here.

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