William & Mary

Interviewees: Virginia Wetter, Barbara Glacel, Kennon McKee,

Jennifer Glacel, Ashley Glacel

Interviewer: Kim Sims

Interview Date: June 4, 2016                    Duration: 01:27:28

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Kim:                My name is Kim Sims, and I’m the university archivist at the College of William & Mary. I’m interviewing three generations of alumnae from the same family. In the middle, Virginia Forwood Pate Wetter, also known as Dinny, a member of the class of 1940, and from left to right her daughters Barbara Pate Glacel, class of 1970, and Kennon Pate McKee, class of 1968, and Barbara’s daughters, Jennifer Glacel, class of 1998, and Ashley Glacel, class of 2002.  

Today’s date is June 4, 2016, and this interview is being recorded in the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. during William & Mary weekend. So my first question is why did you decide to attend William & Mary?

Virginia:          I want to be sure I got your question straight. Why did I come to William & Mary in the beginning?

Kim:                Yes, ma’am, as an undergraduate.

00:00:58

Virginia:          All right. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and my mother and father preferred that I go to a coed institution. And a friend of Mother’s had told us about the College of William & Mary. To tell you the truth, in those days it was not as well known as it is today. We drove down into Virginia to visit the college and see if I liked it.

I did not want to go to college in the state of Maryland because I didn’t want to be so close to home I ran home every weekend. I felt that I didn’t get a true college experience if I did that. So we went to Williamsburg and arrived at the very time they were constructing the sunken garden. It really wasn’t a very attractive sight. [Laughter.]

00:01:58          All kinds of equipment, dust and dirt, and it was hot. But a very interesting young woman who was a student showed us around the campus, and she had such enthusiasm about the school that you could see beyond the construction that was going on.

And so I decided I wanted to come to the College of William & Mary. And I was very fortunate in having a recommendation from the superintendent of schools in Maryland, who was a graduate of William & Mary. His name was Dr. Thomas [Pullen]. And so I was accepted, and I…let’s see, I was a junior in high school when I saw the college, so that would have been in June, and so a year and a half later I came to William & Mary.

Kim:                And Kennon and Barbara, how about you?

00:02:58

Barbara:           You go next.

Kennon:           Well, Mother, from the time we were seven, it was our seven-year-old trip to come to Williamsburg. So she and our father brought us singly, wasn’t it?

Virginia:          Yes.

Kennon:           Yes.

Virginia:          We didn’t bring your siblings. You got the trip alone.

Kennon:           And so we were sort of, at seven, introduced to where we were going to college, and hopefully we would get in. [Laughter.]  

Barbara:           Yeah, when I came, Kennon actually was already a student. She was two years ahead of me. And so I never even looked anyplace else. I think you did look at some other schools.

Kennon:           Yeah, I applied to Duke also, yeah.

Barbara:           You applied to Duke. I didn’t apply to anyplace else. I applied early decision and it was the only place I wanted to go, and yeah, never regretted it.

Kim:                And Jen and Ashley?

00:03:58

Jennifer:          I grew up knowing that my mom and my aunt and my grandmother all went to school there, and so that’s what I was going to do. And I never considered any other place. I also applied early decision. I had an experience, we were living in California my senior year of high school, and somebody had the audacity to tell me I couldn’t get into Stanford, and I thought for a brief moment about proving them wrong and then I thought, mm, no, that’s a lot of work. [Laughter.] I know where I want to go. And so I did.

Ashley:            Yeah, growing up for us—maybe it was the same for you two—William & Mary was just in the atmosphere. There’s artwork in our house of the Wren building. There’s a William & Mary rocking chair. Just it was always around. And Mom was an active alum, so she would go back from time to time. I remember going for homecoming one year. I remember taking a solo trip with Mom there at some point when she had meetings.

00:04:58          So it was just always kind of a magical place, and I don’t know, we just heard it. The idea of college and the idea of William & Mary were the same for me. Maybe for you as well.

Jennifer:          Mm-hmm.

Ashley:            I think that—I also applied early decision. I think that there was maybe half a second junior or senior year where I was like I’m going to be a little rebellious and act like I’m not going to William & Mary. I think it seriously lasted half a second. I didn’t follow through with that thought at all.

And as an Army brat—Jen and I are both Army brats, so we moved around growing up—what was so special about William & Mary and Williamsburg to me is that it was the first place—and maybe this is like everyone, even if you grow up in the same town your whole life. But I guess because we moved around, it just felt so special. It was a place I got to choose to be as opposed to the Army telling us where we were going to be. So that was really significant to me. It felt like home in that way.

00:06:04

Virginia:          I’d like to add something at this point. There’s another member of this family who went to William & Mary, my brother, who was four and a half years younger than I was and was a member of the class of 1945. And everybody knows what happened between ’41 and ’45, ’46. So he did not get to finish. But he was a very active member of the class of ’45. He was a KEA. He played in the college band. But of course he got drafted and he ended up in the European theatre of the war. And another member of our family was accepted at William & Mary in the generation of my granddaughters, a grandson.

00:07:02          I don’t know whether he would have really come or not, but at the time he needed scholarship help. There was very little scholarship help for William & Mary in those days. And it’s one of the things that I commend the college for now because they’re working so hard on that. So he did not come to William & Mary. He stayed in Maryland and went to Loyola. But we’re not the only ones that were accepted at William & Mary.

Kim:                And that’s important. You have a very strong tie, your whole family, to William & Mary, absolutely. So what are your memories of your first days as a student? I mean, you all have a previous connection, except for Mrs. Wetter, short of her first visit as a junior in high school. But for her daughters and granddaughters, you had exposure as children. So coming in, having that familiarity already with William & Mary, what are some of your first memories? You’re like I know this place, or was it still, because it’s more than just a visit, it is now your life for the next four years?

00:08:14

Barbara:           You know, when Kennon and I came in the ‘60s—is that right?

Kennon:           Yes.

Barbara:           There was still the very strict atmosphere for women, not for men. We had to…there was a very strict dress code. We had to wear dresses. We couldn’t wear pants or shorts. And so I remember packing to go to William & Mary with all of our very special matched skirts and sweaters, and packing a huge big trunk that was sent by railway express to be delivered to the dorm. But as out of state women—we both came from Maryland—there was not room for us on campus.

00:08:58          We actually were segregated. Out of state women lived in Ludwell. And in those days Ludwell seemed very far away because the campus was that much smaller. And so we had a bus, the Green Machine, that drove us in and out from Ludwell.

Kennon:           Yeah, right.

Barbara:           But it was an interesting indoctrination. The out of state women became very close to each other because we were segregated. And the in state women lived in Jefferson.

Kennon:           In Jefferson.

Barbara:           And they became a group and we became a group. And it took a while, actually, for the two groups to merge as we went through the year or two years, first two years. By the end of the second year maybe we were a little more mixed, I think.

Kennon:           Right.

Ashley:            And we were issued, on the first day, with little beanies called duck caps. We had to wear them around and curtsy to Lord Botetourt when we went by. And didn’t upperclassmen get to ask us questions or something?

Kennon:           Mm-hmm. Whatever they wanted.

00:10:00

Barbara:           Yeah. We were supposed to know the campus priorities. I don’t remember what else. What do you remember?

Kennon:           I don’t remember anything else of the requirements of being a freshman. But Ludwell made an incredible impression just because of the being segregated, not being part of the campus. But as Barbara said, it formed a very strong tie amongst those of us who were out of state students, and that tie really stayed throughout. But you weren’t segregated, were you?

Jennifer:          We were not segregated. [Laughter.]  

Ashley:            I was segregated from men.

Barbara:           That’s right.

Ashley:            I was a Barrett girl. I don’t think they exist anymore because Barrett is cod, and I think upper class now. But for decades and decades, Barrett was all women.

00:11:02          And I arrived having all the expertise of my sister, who had just graduated, and she knew…she told me where I should live, and I requested to live in DuPont, and that was like, rrr, so I was in Barrett with, you know, probably—there were six halls on Barrett—probably one and a half halls, maybe, were filled with girls who had requested single sex residence hall. Everyone else was pretty salty to be there.

But we had…I mean, I am best friends with some people from my hall. I’m staying with one this weekend. One flew in from Georgia and I was just hanging out with them before coming here. Yeah. There was no… Another impression of my, of just getting on campus is it was hot. It was hot. It’s August in the Burg.  

Virginia:          No air conditioning.

Ashley:            You know what that’s like.

Barbara:           But you all got air conditioners, as I recall.

00:12:01

Ashley:            Second semester—

Barbara:           You had to have permission to have an air conditioner.

Ashley:            Right. You…one could wise up and get the doctor’s note about allergies and get an… And then you got really popular if you had an air conditioning unit in your room. People wanted to hang out.

Jennifer:          The thing that I remember are the people. I was in Monroe, and I actually chose to be there because I was a Monroe scholar and could choose to live in the dorm. And I decided to because that way I would know where I was living and wouldn’t be subject to the potential dangers of other dorms.

And I just, I remember the people on my hall, and meeting all of these new people for the first time, and doing all the orientation activities together. And I had in my mind, before I got there, somehow that we would be all playing Frisbee. Now I don’t play Frisbee. I don’t know where this idea came from. But that we would be playing Frisbee in the sunken gardens.

00:12:59          We didn’t ever, but I didn’t. But we did a lot of things together as a hall, and getting to know people.

Barbara:           And Jen, Monroe was a coed dorm, wasn’t it?

Jennifer:          It was, mm-hmm.

Virginia:          And by the time you two were there, your mother and I had bought a house in Counselors Close. And what I remember is both of you coming over to do your laundry. [Laughter.]  

Jennifer:          Absolutely.

Barbara:           We didn’t let them live there at the time.

Ashley:            I don’t think we had keys even for a long time. [Laughter.]  

Virginia:          Well, Pop and I would come and stay in the spring and the fall for, you know, a couple months at a time, so it was convenient then.

Barbara:           To do your laundry.

Virginia:          Yeah.

Jennifer:          Didn’t have to save quarters.

Barbara:           That’s right.

Kim:                So I’ve spoken with a number of alumni who have all pretty much said the same thing, which is while they were the top of their class in high school, they weren’t completely prepared for how challenging the academic studies were going to be at William & Mary.

00:14:01          They’ve said they realized that they weren’t as smart as they thought they were. So I was wondering what can you say about the academic challenges that you all experienced at William & Mary? Do you think the workload and the expectations have…did you expect it to be as challenging as it may have been for you?

And also do you feel—and this may not be something easy to answer, depending on how closely associated you’ve remained with the college, with the curriculum—but do you feel like the workload and the expectations on the students have gotten harder or easier compared to your time and your experience?

Virginia:          I was completely unprepared for how difficult the courses were at William & Mary, and I had been valedictorian in my class in high school. Boy, I really had to work hard. There was no question about it. But your question is how it compares with today.

00:15:01          I have no knowledge. And I don’t know that any one of us would for sure, but I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Kennon:           Well, we all went to public schools, and the public schools were good where we were, but I was not prepared for William & Mary academics. And I struggled through probably all four years. I was an English literature major, and realized that I didn’t know how to write well, and just was not prepared in the way that a lot of the other students were. So it was quite difficult.

Barbara:           Kennon and I both had to make what were called rush grades if we wanted to join a sorority.

Kennon:           Right.

00:15:56

Barbara:           The sorority rush was not until second semester. And if I remember correctly, rush grades, you had to have at least one B, all the rest Cs, is that right?

Kennon:           That’s right, exactly.

Barbara:           And both of us, as freshmen, in our respective years, took chemistry, which was the big question, were we going to get a C in chemistry.

Kennon:           We also had the same chemistry professor as Mother did.

Barbara:           Dr. Guy. Yes, as mother did.

Virginia:          Dr. Guy.

Barbara:           Yeah, that’s right.

Kennon:           And the same history professor, Dr. Fowler.

Barbara:           That Mother did, yeah.

Virginia:          Mm-hmm.

Barbara:           So I think first semester was just incredibly hard because we had this motivation to make rush grades. And I got my one B and you got your one B.

Kennon:           Absolutely.

Barbara:           And by the time I was a junior I would get a few more Bs each semester. I think in four years I might have gotten one A.

00:16:55          And the only time I really regretted that—because I had a wonderful four years at William & Mary, and a great social life, and lots of extracurricular activities, and I felt it gave me a really well rounded experience—the only time I regretted that I didn’t work harder was when I went to apply to graduate school. And I got into graduate school on probation and graduated with a Ph.D. with a 4.0 average. So William & Mary was hard.

Jennifer:          They still call you Doctor, who cares? [Laughter.]  

Barbara:           They still call me Doctor. They don’t know about my undergraduate grades, yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer:          I found it difficult, but I actually, just a couple weeks ago, got a new perspective on how difficult I found it, because I did find it hard. And I had gone to high school in Virginia my first two years, but then to a school in California which was just not near the quality.

00:17:57          And I took, my first semester of my freshman year, an international relations seminar, which I wouldn’t have been prepared for in any case, I think, because I was a first semester freshman, but it was taught by Dr. Alan Ward, who had been my mother’s advisor, and, you know, I had to take his class first off, because I had to get it done.

And that was the class that I realized I’m out of my depth here. This is…you know, I’m not where everyone else is. But I really put that down to the fact that everyone else was sophomore, junior or senior, and so I didn’t internalize that at all. I just didn’t do as well, and I got a C, maybe a C minus. And I’d never experienced that before, but that was okay. I learned just a couple weeks ago that Mom had a conversation with Dr. Ward about ten years ago where he said to her it was clear I had not been a Virginia high school student, that my writing was not at the level that it needed to be, that I got there, but I came in unprepared.

00:19:00          And that was an interesting perspective for me, that I really wasn’t prepared for William & Mary when I got there. But I got to the level from classes.

Virginia:          You worked hard.

Jennifer:          I did, and—

Virginia:          We all did.

Barbara:           We all did, right.

Virginia:          Absolutely.

Jennifer:          So that’s kind of reframed for me some of my academic work at the beginning.

Virginia:          Well, you can see that we did work hard, but none of us made Phi Beta Kappa.

Jennifer:          Right.

Virginia:          And we have two members of the family who did. Barbara’s middle daughter made Phi Beta Kappa at Lafayette, and my oldest grandchild and grandson, who did not come to William & Mary because they couldn’t give him a scholarship that would help him, went to Loyola and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Barbara:           And we claim that’s their affiliation to William & Mary. [Laughter.]  

00:19:57

Ashley:            So when I came to school, I came with either a really great or a really bad attitude that was instilled in me by my mom. [Laughter.]  

Barbara:           Thank you.

Virginia:          Oh?

Ashley:            She said they don’t do grade inflation at William & Mary, so anything you get, just add a grade point to it and that’s really what you earned, so—

Barbara:           Oh, I believe that.

Ashley:            I believed it then, and I believe it now, so I was never concerned about grades. I didn’t ever consider that it was because the workload was too hard or that I was not up to the challenge. I just thought that class wasn’t what I thought it was going to be about, that class wasn’t as interesting as it should have been. I got a D the first semester, my only D, but I got a D in archeology. Aunt Kennon actually had, at some point in the year or two before, said, you know, Ashley, I think you would love being an anthropology major. [Laughter.]

00:20:58          Where that came from I don’t know, but I bought it, and so I took in anthropology, and the most interesting one seemed…I thought archeology, sure, you dig for dinosaur bones, that sounds fun. No, you sit in the lecture hall, and a woman shows you her slides from digs she’s been on, and then she passes the same rock around week after week after week, or the same pot. So I’m sorry I got a D. I don’t consider that my problem.

Barbara:           We probably don’t want the Anthropology Department at William & Mary to hear this, right?

Ashley:            That was my first and last anthropology class. Sorry, Aunt Kennon.

Kennon:           I know.

Jennifer:          I will argue that your Ph.D. in American Studies is directly related—

Ashley:            Kind of related to that.

Jennifer:          —to anthropology, and therefore, she was right all along. [Laughter.]  

Ashley:            Interesting. But there was nothing about rocks in my dissertation.

Jennifer:          Right.

Ashley:            Not one rock was described or mentioned. But my grades got better as I was there. And I think…I think I probably became a better writer. I’m sure that’s true, just through practice, right?

00:21:59          But also the longer you’re there, the fewer requirements you’re doing. They were called then GERs, general education requirements. I think they’re called something different now. But, you know, I had to fulfill stuff that I didn’t want to take, and I’m the kind of person that, if I don’t find it that interesting, I can’t make myself care, so…

But by the time I got to senior year, I had enough credits so that I could take some cross listed courses. And I knew I wanted to get a master’s, so I thought if I take some cross listed courses and get grad credit, that’s fewer classes I have to take in grad school and fewer dollars I’m paying to take those classes. And you had to have a 3.0 GPA to even be considered to do that, and I did not.

But what I did know how to do was make spreadsheets on Excel, and so I made some charts that showed that in relevant classes I had above a 3.0, and if you took out all the GERs I was just fine, and they let me do it. So I can’t believe they bought that, but they did. They let me take the grad courses. So it all worked out.

00:23:11

Kennon:           Well, I have to give a nod to Dr. Fowler in this question of yours, Kim, because… So Dr. Fowler was in the History Department. He was a legend in the History Department. And Mother had become quite a good friend of Ted and Jimmy’s after the war, but—I’ll tell my story first and then you can have it.

Virginia:          Okay, all right. [Laughter.] During the war.

Kennon:           So I was struggling writing at William & Mary and I got a paper back from Dr. Fowler in this first freshman year history class, and he had written across the top of it, “Kennon, you have a knack for always choosing the wrong word.” [Laughter.]

00:24:08          And I now tell psychology students, because I ended up with a doctorate in psychology, and at the Jung Institute, where I train psychoanalysts, so many of them aren’t good writers. And so when I’m criticizing their writing, I always tell them that story so they don’t feel so, so bad.

Ashley:            I would say, though, since the theme of writing has come up here, not to toot our own horn, but we are all pretty good, right, we’re all, we’re exceptional writers. We’re a family of good writers. We just are.

Jennifer:          Toot, toot.

00:24:58

Ashley:            So something good happened at William & Mary to make that true. Like, you know, I don’t know. I’ve seen… Well, Nana has written memoirs, so I read those. But I’ve seen speeches she’s written. I’ve seen my mom give speeches. I’ve read things Jen has done. I’ve…there’s something I read of yours. [Laughter.]  It’s all, like every time I’m like this is real good. Like there’s something either genetic, but maybe it is alma mater.

Barbara:           Well, I think, you know, William & Mary gives a really great foundation for writing. Just a couple months ago I was on the Hill with a board at William & Mary and we were visiting some William & Mary alumni who work in senior staff positions on the Hill, and to a person, when we asked them what helps you here and what do you look for when you hire, the answer was always it’s the ability to write.

00:26:02          And when we hire, we want to hire William & Mary students because they know how to write. So I think we were the beneficiaries of that, even if it took us a few years to get there.

Virginia:          Well, I’m glad William & Mary got there. I went to William & Mary wanting to major in journalism, and there were no journalism courses. Were there when you were there? So I majored in English.

Ashley:            I still don’t think…there wasn’t—

Virginia:          And I had to do a fair amount of writing in English. But I really, I wanted to be a writer. So now I get it through my daughters and my granddaughters, because they all have things they have to write and do.

Kennon:           And writing your memoirs.

Barbara:           And your memoir.

Virginia:          Well, I wrote that so people would know how different growing up was in my time as to what it is today. I want to get back to Dr. Fowler.

00:27:00

Barbara:           You must.

Virginia:          Dr. Fowler was absolutely one of the most marvelous professors. Probably the best professor I ever had. And he became a good friend because of World War II. I had finished college. I was living back in Havre de Grace. My husband, their father, was stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground. We had one child, their older brother, at that time.

And I got a letter from Mrs. Fowler telling me that Dr. Fowler really remembers you so well from college, and he’s being sent to a Naval base nearby, and can I help them find a place to live. She wrote that letter without checking this out with him at all. He told her later on that she was lucky that he really did remember me. [Laughter.] But anyway, we became very good friends during those years. And then he went back to William & Mary.

00:28:01          And so because we were such good friends, their home was a place I felt free to visit when I was in Williamsburg, and sometimes stay with them. And he was very helpful with you all in your applications. But the thing for which he was really remembered was his speech, his talk on Henry the Eighth and all of his wives. Everybody on campus loved that speech. And he usually gave it every year. And people would leave their classes to go into his classroom to sit and listen to it. So by the time you were in school, both of you, I guess—was he Dean of Students?

Barbara:           He was Dean.

Virginia:          He was no longer teaching. Barbara was able to get him—

Barbara:           Well, he still gave the Henry the Eighth lecture.

Virginia:          Did he?

Barbara:           He was the Dean of Students, but once a year, for History 101, he came as the guest lecturer—

Virginia:          And gave that.

00:29:01

Barbara:           It was in Washington 300 or something, one of the big auditorium halls. And it would be packed, people sitting on the steps in the aisles to hear him.

Virginia:          Absolutely. But you got him to give it—

Barbara:           Yeah, I was the Panhel president, and so Panhel—

Virginia:          Okay, and you had—

Barbara:           —sponsored a lecture series, and we got him to do Henry the Eighth. And you drove down for it.

Virginia:          I drove down for it. I wanted to hear it. Because he would not let anyone…

Barbara:           Record it.

Virginia:          Record that speech. He said that speech was going to die with him, and it did. Nobody has a copy. Nobody has a—

Barbara:           I have the notes.

Virginia:          You have notes, okay.

Barbara:           Class notes.

Virginia:          Well, that’s good.

Ashley:            The library might—

Kim:                I was going to say the archives would be interested in it.

Virginia:          Wouldn’t that be something if you could find something? But it was, it was just absolutely amazing. And he made it so interesting, you ended up laughing through a lot of it.

00:30:02

Kennon:           Yeah, that was the brilliance of it. It wasn’t the information, it was how he gave the lecture. And people were spellbound listening to him.

Virginia:          Absolutely.

Barbara:           He was known for the history course he taught on Tudors and Stuarts. And he actually continued teaching that when he became the dean.

Virginia:          Did he?

Barbara:           But he limited the class size because it was 8:00 Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

Jennifer:          Oh, my gosh.

Virginia:          Yeah, we had Saturday classes.

Barbara:           And so, I mean, this kind of gets back to the dress code as well, because the only time women were allowed out of the dorm in shorts, not slacks, but shorts, would be if they were going to gym class, and they had to wear a raincoat over their shorts. So on Saturday mornings, the women who took the Tudors and Stuarts class with Dr. Fowler would wear their pajamas rolled up above the knee with a raincoat over it to the Saturday morning class and just say oh, I’m going to play tennis afterwards, and everybody would think they had on shorts.

00:31:04          You know, I think in your era people just wore pajamas to class.

Virginia:          Really?

Barbara:           Or pajama pants. Or maybe after your era.

Ashley:            Yeah, it might have been after.

Jennifer:          Yeah, I don’t remember pajamas. Not that we dressed up. [Laughter.]

Ashley:            Ponte pants from Express were kind of like pajamas.

Jennifer:          In your era.

Ashley:            Did you not have ponte pants?

Jennifer:          Not until my senior year.

Ashley:            Oh.

Jennifer:          When I went to school it was jeans and a small t-shirt that dwarfed you, no matter your size, and Doc Martens or Birkenstocks. And that was your class outfit, that was going out. Flannel in the winter. It was when you arrived that this would be appropriate wear for class. [Laughter.]  

Barbara:           Or pajama pants.

Ashley:            You know, people didn’t wear things as tight. Not to draw attention to my figure. Late ‘90s, early 2000s, tight…

Jennifer:          It wasn’t as tight.

Ashley:            It was not tight. Jeans were not tight.

00:31:58

Jennifer:          And this is…I’m going to go off topic a little bit.

Ashley:            Yeah, go right ahead.

Jennifer:          The difference between my school experience and Ashley’s was much more than a couple of months. I went back in the fall of her freshman year, so I had just graduated, and I went out with her and her friends, wearing my jeans—it might have been black pants at that point—and a top. They were all, all of them, in skirts and a cute top and knee-high boots to go to the fraternities.

Ashley:            No.

Jennifer:          Yes.

Virginia:          [Laughs.]

Ashley:            That was just [Jen Rooker].

Jennifer:          No, you were all dressed this way. She would—I didn’t understand. I was shocked. I’m going, you’re going to a beer covered floor with guys who think they’re more interesting than they are. [Laughter.] But they were dressed to the nines, listening to their MP3’s when just that spring I had made a mixed tape for a fraternity party, so…

00:32:54

Ashley:            My last mixed tape was made sophomore year, so that was 1999. That was my last mixed tape. And then I knew a guy who got a CD burner, and that was huge. And that was 2000 I had my first CD. So to continue briefly, and then to get back to the limiting class size thing, during my time the uniform was, for going to frats, TBPs, which are tight black pants, preferably from Express, a strappy strap, which was a tank top, in one color, like a pink tank top or purple, you know, and then some sort of platform shoes that were actually quite sensible for the frat floor dancing.

But in my day there was a class that everyone wanted to take and they limited it by making it Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 8:00 a.m.—and this will just show you how things change in 32 years. It was a psychology class called sexuality.

00:34:03

Jennifer:          I remember this, yeah, because it was the same year  .

Ashley:            And you had—I mean, there were a lot of people interested in that class, but not 8:00 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday interested. And it was full of seniors who had to get the seniority and wait and sacrifice that last semester their senior year like not going out very late on Thursday night. They had to be die hards.

Kim:                So we touched on this early on when you mentioned the Ludwell, experience of living in Ludwell as an out of state student. So I’d like to hear from all of you your experiences regarding relationships among women during your time at William & Mary. So for three of you, you didn’t have a choice. You lived in non-coed housing. That was all you had. Whereas the other two, there were some choices there. You had coed options.

And so I’m curious as to how your experiences not only differed in that respect, from having no option to having an option, but also how they were similar.

00:35:06          So your relationships not only with your dorm mates, but also sororities or clubs you were in or just class projects, how you developed these relationships with other women.

Kennon:           Mom, why don’t you start with that?

Virginia:          Well, we were friends. We went to class together and we came back and we sat in our rooms later in the day and talked about what had happened, or we went and studied together. And as a freshman, on the freshman hall, I lived in Barrett on the first floor, all of the women on that particular wing became really good friends, and every Saturday night, we’d have to be in at 11:00 or 12:00, depending on whether you went to the dance that night or not. And at midnight we got together in one room and had a bunch of snacks and talked.

00:36:06          And so we developed some lasting friendships, we really did. And I…it wasn’t a problem.

Kim:                I imagine it might have been easier, more organic, I guess, when you were living together. And Ashley, I know you lived in a women only dorm. But not having that be forced upon you, necessarily, I mean, was it…? I just, I don’t know if there’s much of a difference or was it still going to be organic, I mean, not being kind of forced into that situation, it just still happened organically, this relationship among women during your times?

00:36:53

Ashley:            I don’t know. I feel like Jen might be able to… You had guy friends from your hall. I mean, I didn’t. My best friends were the women on my hall. Still to this day. Still to this day. And I joined a sorority freshman year. That’s another group that I am tight with to this day. And then I joined Women’s Chorus, and I was like how am I meeting guys? Like I just kept doing these all female things.

And I didn’t really become friends with guys…maybe starting sophomore year. I knew them and would interact with them, but not anyone I would like say hey, you want to go have lunch. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m…I ended up sophomore year—this is kind of contradictory—but when I got to choose where I lived sophomore year, I could choose whether it was coed or not, right? And I ended up living again in an all girls dorm.

00:37:59          Now, it was an all girls dorm on frat row, so that was a little bit of both going on. Then junior year I lived in the sorority house, and I was like this is the third year I’m doing all…I can’t get away. And then fourth year I lived off campus in a house with all girls. But yeah, by then I knew a little bit more about how to hang out with boys. A little bit. But yeah, I don’t know, girls, I don’t know. Friends are everything to me, and most of the time they’re girls, so I guess that’s what I gravitated toward, even though I pretended like I wanted to fight it.

Jennifer:          I’m kind of fascinated by just thinking about this because I’m the only one who lived on a coed dorm my freshman year, and I am not close with my freshman hall mates. I wasn’t in school. I had a few I was friends with. My roommate and I stayed together sophomore year. But not in a close friendship way, more as in an almost more relative way, that we’re important to each other.

00:39:01

Ashley:            I cannot name a person that you lived with freshman year and you could probably name…

Jennifer:          All of yours, right.

Ashley:            Yeah. That’s really interesting.

Jennifer:          And I don’t know if that’s…how much of that is where I lived and how much of that is personality, because as I think about my William & Mary experience, I had a lot of friends in different groups, and I was kind of attached to them, but then I’d go attach to another group, as opposed to always being with the same group of people.

My closest girlfriends now are William & Mary grads, all sorority sisters. We were not super close as undergrads. We became close after we graduated. We all moved up to the Washington area and we started having dinner once a week, and now we’re very close. But it’s just different from what I’m hearing from everyone else.

00:39:51

Virginia:          I ended up living in a sorority house for three years, which was rather unusual. For some reason or another all the people who lived in the Chi Omega house for some… I don’t remember the circumstances. But as a sophomore I had the opportunity to move in the house, and did. Roomed with the same two girls. There were three of us in one large room for the next three years. So I look back and all of my friends at that time were with that particular group.

And of course we didn’t hang out with guys. We waited till somebody asked us for a date and then we went out with them on the date, and maybe we were with another couple or something like that. But it was an entirely different social order than what it was later on.

Jennifer:          Whereas I had many male friends who, they were just friends, and that’s all they ever were, and I spent a lot of time, probably as much time hanging out with guys as I did girls.

00:41:00

Kennon:           I think our social order was more like yours, and that there was tremendous closeness that came from all the women living together, and hanging out in each other’s rooms, and being able to run down the halls in whatever you happened to have on or not on, and not worrying about it. We just knew we had to have on a skirt by the time we were in the lobby, which was a little irritating, but… But that closeness among women was fabulous.

Barbara:           There was a kind of community that came, too, because of the social order, that when you were with a guy, you were on a date, okay, and not that it was your friend, because the phones were in the hall, and there would be a tablet of paper and a pencil next to the phone.

00:41:59          And so if a guy was calling, he had to call the phone for that dorm, that hall, and whoever happened to be closest would answer it. And then when you came back from class or wherever you were, you always went to the phone and the pad of paper to see if there was a message. And everybody wanted it to say Barbara, MCWCB, “man called, will call back.” [Laughter.]  

And that was so exciting. And that created a community among the women on the hall. And I guess when we were freshmen it said BCWCB, boy called. But then they became men. [Laughter.] And that created a community. The other thing I think around the sorority issue that’s really strong at William & Mary is the fact that the houses are small.

00:42:55          And it’s very unusual that someone like Mother would live there three years. Now seniors live there, and maybe not even all the seniors can get in. When I was the Panhel president in ’69-70, the college came to the sororities and said we’d like to build you new houses. They had already built new fraternity houses. And in fact I found it interesting when I was on campus just a few weeks ago now they have the second set of new fraternity houses since I was there.

But in ’69 the college said we want to build new sorority houses, and all the sororities voted, and Panhel discussed it, and we turned them down. No one could believe that we turned them down. But they were big houses and they would create a situation where sophomores, juniors and seniors could all live in the house. And what we liked was the fact that for three years before moving in the house, you got to live with girls from all different sororities.

00:43:57          And so for me now, 45 years out, I guess, my best friends are not all Chi Omegas. In fact I probably hang out with more Kappas from my class than Chi Omegas, and I think the truth—

Kennon:           So do I.

Barbara:           —it’s true for you, too.

Kennon:           Oh, yeah.

Barbara:           Because we could form friendships across the sororities, and that was really powerful.

Kim:                So the social restrictions that were placed on women drastically changed from when Dinny entered as a freshman in 1936 to when Ashley entered as a freshman in 1998. So in Dinny’s day women couldn’t ride in cars. They were limited as to when and where they could go off campus. There were strict curfews and house mothers. And that’s true of—

Barbara:           Of our—

Kim:                —of your generation. There were also…there were fewer social restrictions on women during your undergraduate years, but there was still the curfew and the non-coed dormitories and a lot of accountability for where you were and who you were with.

00:45:02

Kennon:           And car restrictions.

Virginia:          Oh.

Barbara:           When I was a senior that changed, actually. Seniors could have cars.

Kim:                So my question, specifically for the three of you, Barbara, Kennon, and Mrs. Wetter, is how did women navigate around those rules and restrictions? Because I’m…

Virginia:          Oh, I can tell you.

Kim:                We all know, I mean, people…you know, rules are made to be broken, right, sometimes. And especially being in Ludwell, where you are physically segregated from campus, did that provide more opportunity to maybe—

Barbara:           Break the rules?

Kim:                —try to break the rules, yeah. So in terms of, you know, sneaking in past curfew or, you know, when you had to sign yourselves out, the blue cards and the white cards, you know, or maybe some forging of signatures or something. Just how did you navigate around those social restrictions to still be your own person?

00:46:00          And then as a follow-up to that, Barbara, how did you feel, or what were your thoughts when your daughters went to William & Mary knowing that the housing was coed and that the school no longer served that parental role it once did?

Virginia:          You know, I don’t remember too many people who navigated around the rules in my time. There were little ways that you might, because I can tell you one that I did. In the first place—

Ashley:            And you should. [Laughter.]  

Virginia:          You couldn’t leave for a weekend. You know, maybe somebody invited you up to Richmond, to the University of Richmond or the prom on the weekend. And I had a friend there who was a Chi O alum that I could stay with. Well, if you didn’t have blanket permission from your parents that it was all right for you to do these things, you had to get permission each time this occurred.

00:47:06          But my parents, even in 1936, ’37, gave me blanket permission because they trusted me. And I tried to live up to that trust. But the one thing I remember I did one time, I went up to the University of Virginia for the weekend, and of course I was to go on the bus and come back on the bus.

So I had a chance for a ride back to Williamsburg, and I thought, you know, I’ll save the bus fare and so forth, so I came back in a private car with a friend, and when I got back to the campus you had to report in to Miss Wynne-Roberts. And I went in and she said, so you came back on the bus ?And I said, well, I got back at 7:00. That was the time the bus was supposed to get in.

00:48:00          So that was my answer. I got back at 7:00. I never told her that I came otherwise. But I don’t remember too many people… Besides, if you did you got campussed.

Kim:                Does that mean kicked out?

Virginia:          You had to observe all the curfews and the rules and you probably couldn’t get permission to study an hour longer in the library if you needed the extra hour to study, which you could get. And you couldn’t go to the Saturday night dance and so forth. That was prohibited. So I didn’t have too much of that. I mean, did that come…did you all have a lot of it, people breaking the rules and getting away with it, and how did they do it?

00:48:55

Kennon:           Well, I’m going to take this in a little bit of a different direction because this raises sort of a situation at William & Mary, in the ‘60s, that I found very difficult, and that was the world at that time was in turmoil. South America was having revolutions in all the governments, the Dirty War was going on in Argentina, Castro and Che Guevara and student revolutions. And that was coming into the United States. There was the Vietnam War, there were demonstrations.

Barbara:           The civil rights movement.

Kennon:           The civil rights movement, demonstrations on all these campuses. And William & Mary was like a bubble that was untouched by any of this.

00:49:57          And I found it bizarre. I had been an exchange student in Brazil in high school. Barbara and I had gone back—

Barbara:           ’67.

Kennon:           Yeah, between my junior and senior year and between your freshman and sophomore year.

Virginia:          That was when the U.S. ambassador to Brazil was a William & Mary graduate.

Barbara:           And his daughter was—

Virginia:          And his daughter was a freshman with Barbara.

Kennon:           And my Brazilian sister had become a revolutionary. She was a Maoist and had been trained in Cuba and in France and was in Chile. And coming back to William & Mary it was like where are we? I mean, there was no recognition of anything that was going on in the world at that time.

00:50:56          Except for finally—Barbara and I were talking about this the other day—the priest at Bruton Parish was named Cotesworth Lewis.

Barbara:           Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis.

Kennon:           Yes, yes. And Lyndon Johnson was in Williamsburg, and he was a captive audience at church one morning at Bruton Parish. And the Rev. Cotesworth Lewis lectured Johnson about the war. And it made the front page of the New York Times, and Williamsburg was incredibly embarrassed by what had had happened. But I remember thinking, well at least somebody spoke up. And it may not have been in the right situation, but I think it was a reaction to the fact that the whole campus was just out of time.

00:52:05

Barbara:           It was an interesting time. And as I said, it was my senior year that students were allowed to have cars, and so it was a funny time that the world had passed Williamsburg by a little bit because of this bubble, and so slowly the social rules were beginning, very slowly, were beginning to change.

And so I graduated the spring of the Kent State massacres, the anti-Vietnam protest there. And actually, that happened, I guess, early May, so graduation was just a few weeks off and exams were coming. And a lot of campuses, actually, across the U.S. closed their campuses and seniors didn’t graduate. And so the question came up at William & Mary what will we do.

00:52:56          And being very conservative and being in our little bubble, a little bit further along than your senior year, they decided to have a teach-in in the sunken garden on that day, cancel all classes, and professors came and they set up microphones. And I had actually gotten married in December, the prior December of my senior year, and I got married then because my husband was going to Vietnam and I wanted to be married to him before I might lose him. Luckily I didn’t.

But I had to move off campus immediately. A married woman, despite the fact that her husband was halfway around the world, was not allowed to spend one more night, not enter a residence hall. So I lived off campus and I was really interested in this teach-in in the sunken garden because my husband was over there, and my husband might lose his life, so I wanted to go see what professors and students were saying.

00:53:59          And I remember—well, I’ll never forget this. I had a lot of friends who were law students. Before I got engaged I had dated one for a long time. And so I’m walking down the sunken garden, and there was a whole group of law students, and they were all ROTC members, and one of them looked over at me and said, “Hey, Barbara, what’s a good Army wife like you doing here while you’re husband’s over there killing babies?” And I was devastated.

But William & Mary came grudgingly into the world in that era. And truly, it was the next year after I graduated in ’70 that things kind of blew apart in terms of social roles. I think they were all related. I think the whole thing was tied up together.

00:54:55          And so getting back to your original question, when you said how did I feel about my kids when my girls went and they moved into coed dorms, I really felt it was more real world. They’d lived all over the world, all over the U.S., traveled all over the world. They were much more mature than a lot of incoming freshmen, particularly Virginia in state students that might not have had those opportunities. I thought they would handle that well.

But I said to both of them, frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in a coed dorm because I liked the idea of being able to run down the hall in my slip. They didn’t wear slips in their day, but because we had to wear dresses, we wore slips. So they each had a different experience, but they had the opportunity to choose.

Virginia:          Well, the year that Kennon graduated, the weekend of graduation, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. So what did William & Mary do? They canceled the prom.

00:56:02          All I could think of was it’s terrible about Robert Kennedy. I’m sad. Everybody was. But that happened over in California. This is the East Coast. What difference would it have made if this small university had had the senior prom? No. I mean, it was part of this conservative attitude, and they canceled the senior prom. I thought that was sad. You missed your senior prom.

Barbara:           [Laughs.]

Ashley:            But Aunt Kennon is kind of saying she wanted the bubble to be pierced.

Kennon:           I wanted the bubble pierced. It was fine with me they canceled the prom.

Virginia:          Well, I don’t think the bubble was pierced when they did that.

Ashley:            So I would like to answer your question, in a way, about our time there. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last year and a half since the Rolling Stone article about UVA.

00:57:00          And that was a horrible… The sexual assault described in that article, whether it’s true or not, that didn’t matter to me when that came out. I remember seeing on Twitter a New York Times writer responding to the article and saying, you know, I would have a hard time sending my daughter to UVA having read this.

And I thought, you are an idiot. This is college. This isn’t UVA. This is college. This is what it feels like to be a woman going to college, certainly in our day. So one of my thoughts about the description of sexual assault and thinking about sexual assault, it made me think about my college experience. And I’ll talk about two things.

00:57:54          One is that as soon as I joined a sorority and met upper class women—and that was two weeks into school—it was part of your education, from the very first night you hung out socially with your new sisters, was this is how you protect yourself against sexual assault, this is how you use the buddy system, this is where you go, this is where you don’t go, these are the frats that we think are rapists more than the others. Don’t ever leave your drink. Carry your ID.

Rules, whether they were college written or not, there were rules, and we were taught them from as soon as we met an upper class woman. I don’t know if other freshmen who didn’t join sororities right away got that same education, but I was grateful for it and I lived by it. And then the second thing I’ll—

Jennifer:          Can I jump in there?

Ashley:            Yeah, yeah.

00:58:55

Jennifer:          Because four years younger, we didn’t get those even unwritten rules like that.

Ashley:            Really?

Jennifer:          Really. There was no kind of formal in this way. But I would agree that joining a sorority, having upper class women, I felt safe, I felt looked after, I felt like I had friends and acquaintances who knew me and who were going to look out for me. And I was actually just—I went to dinner just a couple weeks ago with my girlfriends and we were just talking about the fact that we didn’t feel unsafe, and wondering how that would be different now, today.

Kim:                Well, and it’s interesting because it’s like you’ve read my list. I mean, the student activism part, I won’t ask that question because you basically have answered it. But I was also going to ask about sexual assault, especially because the article that came out again about the William & Mary coed in 1990 who first kind of brought date rape to the forefront of American or national consciousness. And for women it’s a reality on college campuses.

01:00:03          And I’ve had some other alumnae that we’ve interviewed talk about it from the ‘60s and pre current time, about how it would happen. They knew it was happening to other women on campus. They would hear the women crying. The women would tell them what had happened, but they couldn’t go to the administration because they knew the administration would blame them, they would be the ones to be blamed. We’ve tried to keep you locked in your dorms. We’re trying to keep you in past a certain time of night. And yet still this happened.

And from looking at articles in the Flat Hat, the issue was it was going to be stranger danger and you needed to have a male presence to feel safe, which we know isn’t necessarily true. Sometimes your closest male friend could be your worst enemy. So there’s always an awareness for us now. And I wonder if it was—and it was interesting hearing you talk about different just in four years.

01:01:04          Was this an awareness that you all had in your time, the idea of being, you know, potentially victimized by, you know, if you were to leave outside those walls of William & Mary, was there this danger of assault against you? Because I’ve asked before women—I believe I asked you, Mrs. Wetter, in your first interview. I’ve asked other alumnae who graduated in 1949 or 1950 why were women so restricted, and they said it was to keep the men in place, to keep the men behaved you kept the women locked down.

Virginia:          Mm-hmm.

Barbara:           You know, that does not resonate with me at all. In my four years there, from ’66 to ’70, I don’t know of any woman who was assaulted. If it happened, I didn’t know about it. I don’t know…I can’t think of any time when there was a fear.

01:02:01          I mean, we had a curfew, so at 10:00. It was still dark, you know, walking back from the library or something like that. I don’t remember ever being afraid about that. We didn’t walk back to Ludwell. We had the bus. But we walked back to DuPont. And again, the campus wasn’t very big. DuPont was really out in the boondocks. Ludwell was even further. But we walked in the dark and I don’t remember ever being afraid about that.

Virginia:          No, I…

Barbara:           Do you?

Kennon:           I don’t remember that either.

Virginia:          No, not in my time, either.

Jennifer:          I don’t remember being afraid, but I remember thinking I’m probably kind of dumb for not being afraid. But I wasn’t.

Ashley:            Were there blue lights on campus?

Jennifer:          Yes.

Barbara:           Yeah, we didn’t have that.

Ashley:            So the blue lights. Do you still have them? I assume they’re still there.

Jennifer:          They’re still here.

01:02:54

Ashley:            Even just the presence of those kind of make you think there’s something to be worried about. The other thing I would say that is not a William & Mary thing, I think it’s a—because I read about this just recently, and this is one of my reactions when the UVA thing came out. I was like part of the problem is that fraternities are allowed to have parties in their houses and sororities are not, so by virtue of the fact that you are socializing together, you are always on the man’s turf.

And it’s an intimidating location, and you feel like you’re walking into a club that you’re not a part of, and therefore it’s not a level playing field. And I believe that those are national sorority, fraternity rules, so not a William & Mary thing. But that’s a modern day reality that is dated. It’s so ridiculously dated.

01:04:00          And I think it does make things, I don’t know. It allows for a little more danger. And so one of my reactions, because the subject of sexual assault is now in conversation nationally, is while I was not sexually assaulted and most of my friends were not also, I’m bitter that I spent four years fearing it. I’m bitter about that.

Kennon:           Well, in…at least…I was going to say in my class, but it wasn’t in my class. While I was at William & Mary, sexual assault wasn’t an issue that I was aware of. But an issue that I was aware of and that was an undercurrent at William & Mary was homosexuality. And there were a number of cases of women having relationships with each other, and the school really didn’t know how to deal with it, and dealt with it incredibly poorly. The women were more victimized.

Barbara:           They were kicked out.

Kennon:           And it was just a horrible situation that made everybody, especially their friends, feel terrible. And impotent because we didn’t know what to do to help.

Barbara:           And it was an issue that was not as open in society, and people were not as tolerant, and there was maybe…there was a fear of the difference.

01:06:01          When I think back on my four years at William & Mary, one of my very greatest regrets is that one of my Ludwell suitemates was in a lesbian relationship and that our friends—and we were good friends—didn’t know how to help her, and so we avoided her. I’m so embarrassed by that.

Virginia:          Yes, you—

Barbara:           I just think it’s really terrible what we did.

Virginia:          —you two were more tolerant of that situation because—

Barbara:           But we didn’t know what to do.

Virginia:          No, I agree with that. But we were more tolerant because we had a great uncle who was gay. Nobody used the word gay then. But we loved him dearly, and he came to see us all the time, and we… My mother was way ahead of her time in making us understand and accept that.

01:06:56          And I was thinking of the differences in our generations in school. The big thing when I was in college, I came from a small town where there were a number of Jewish families, and they were all just the same as we were. I mean, my…one of my best friends, who died two years ago, was a little Jewish girl that I adored all of my life, and we were friends all the time.

And I came to college and we were rushing for something, and there was this lovely Jewish girl, and I said oh, we must keep her on the list. Oh, you can’t do that. I said why not? She’s Jewish. And I said, what did she do? Oh, there’s a Jewish sorority, or there’s a Jewish fraternity. And so that’s what happened. They joined those. But they weren’t permitted to join the regular sororities or fraternities, so that, to me, was terrible in my time.

01:08:01

Barbara:           And that had not changed in our time.

Ashley:            Wow, that’s crazy.

Barbara:           And so again, when I was Panhel president, I just kind of put the word out, you know, Panhel at William & Mary doesn’t care what your national says, and—

Kim:                And see, this is what I’m…I’m sorry.

Barbara:           And if you want to pledge a Jewish or an African American girl, Panhel at William & Mary supports that.

Kim:                I’m glad you brought that up because, I mean, this is…there’s so much value in speaking with all five of you because you just see it as growth, maybe, and this consciousness of William & Mary like it’s not just, you know, let’s put on blinders and this is the way it’s going to be because during your time you had African Americans in residence. There had been African Americans who attended William & Mary, just they did not live on campus. They did not have the full undergraduate experience.

Barbara:           Right.

01:08:55

Kim:                And so in 1967 you had the first three who, by coincidence or not, we still do not know, unfortunately, if that was on purpose, but three women. And so what was the experience like being there at this time? Having spoken with them, they were like they had no idea that they were the first three when they arrived.

And I know there was an article in the Flat Hat announcing, hey, look, you know, we’ve got these three African American women who are living on campus now. What was that…was it just like okay, they’re new classmates, or was there this campus consciousness of, you know, there’s…there they are, you know, let’s, you know, because—

Barbara:           I don’t even remember them. I have no recollection.

Kennon:           No.

Barbara:           And I would attribute that to the fact that they had not become a critical mass.

Kennon:           Yeah, yeah.

01:09:54

Barbara:           So I don’t believe I ever had one of them in a class with me. I have no recollection.

Kim:                The numbers were really low, I mean, really low even into the 1970s we’re talking, just really low numbers. Of course you have many more nationalities represented—

Barbara:           Now.

Kim:                —by the time…now and then when Jennifer and Ashley came. So, I mean, things have thankfully really progressed over time, where it’s not quite such a culture shock.

Barbara:           No, I don’t remember any African American students at all.

Kim:                So kind of straying away now from social, because we’re getting, I guess, short on time, you’ve all managed to get back to William & Mary in several ways as alumnae. Why was it important for you to stay involved with William & Mary after graduation?

Barbara:           Do you want to start?

Virginia:          I’m sorry, I didn’t—

Barbara:           Why was it important for you to stay involved at William & Mary after you graduated?

01:10:56

Virginia:          Well, I had friends down here who urged me to come back. As a matter of fact, though, we did not have a fifth reunion. We were at war. I graduated in 1940 and in 1944 we were involved in World War II, so there was no celebration of our fifth year, having a fifth anniversary. So it was our tenth before we came back.

And I wanted to come back to see the friends that I had made or wanted them to meet my husband and tell them how many children I had at that point and all the things that you discuss with other people that you haven’t seen in a long time. And we had a good time, and so we kept coming back. And even when my first husband died—he died very young—and I remarried, I came back with my second husband.

01:11:59          And he loved coming back. And we even started helping out. Our class would always have, every year, a little celebration and try to get people to come for homecoming and so forth, so it was just… And I guess by coming back I got involved in some of the committees and some of the things that were going on, and it just took off in that manner.

Barbara:           And you can brag because my senior year Mother was awarded the Alumni Medallion, which is the highest honor a graduate can receive.

Virginia:          Yeah, I was the first one in my class to get it.

Barbara:           Mm-hmm. And then what, in 2002?

Jennifer:          2006.

Barbara:           2006, thank you.

Virginia:          Thank you.

Barbara:           She received an honorary doctorate from the college, so it’s been a symbiotic relationship for a long time, hasn’t it?

01:12:55

Virginia:          And I headed the fund drive one year. God, I can’t remember, back in the ‘80s, I’m sure. And then I got involved in our class’s 40^th anniversary, and its 50^th, so all those things were kind of fun things to do. And the more you come back the more involved you get. [Laughter.]

Barbara:           So we had a great role model there.

Virginia:          Thank you.

Barbara:           So I guess…so I just had my 45^th reunion. I’ve only missed one five year reunion in those years. And just loving my time at William & Mary, I felt like I wanted to give back. So I’ve been on the alumni board and on the annual giving board. And when we lived in Belgium my husband and I set up internships for William & Mary students at the U.S. mission to NATO. We had, over eight years, 24 William & Mary students who came and really did us proud.

01:13:57          They were the only undergraduate interns at U.S. NATO. All the other interns were graduate students. And they absolutely held their own. And they filled the positions of either junior military officers or junior State Department officers, foreign service officers, and were just wonderful. Some of them lived with us, and we just recently had a reunion of the ones that live in Washington. So it’s fun to be able to feel like I gained something from William & Mary, I can give back to these students because I want them to do the same thing.

Ashley:            I’m not terribly creative so I just do what my mother and grandmother do, so it was like a given that I was going to be really involved as an alum, and I wanted to be. I begged to be. I was on my fifth reunion committee, and a friend of mine was the chair, and I was like, why wasn’t I the chair? [Laughter.] So when they called to see if I wanted to be on the tenth reunion committee, I said only if I can be a co-chair.

01:15:03          And I think the development officer fell out of her chair. She’s like, would you really? [Laughter.] And I said, “yes.” And then I’m on a board now, and I talked to someone in the development office and I said get me on a board, I want to do something. So I’m not…

Barbara:           And you’re very active in L.A. with the alumni group.

Ashley:            Mm-hmm. I just think William & Mary is magic, and anyone I share that bond with, it’s instant, and so I like to surround myself with people who have that same love so we can feel lovey together.

Virginia:          Yeah, I think it’s special. It really is a special school.

Jennifer:          I have a little bit different reason, so I’ll throw it in because I’m not involved in the same way these three are. But it goes back to what Ashley said about why she went there, that we grew up with William & Mary in the air, and as a place that we visited.

01:16:01          And then, as my grandmother mentioned, my freshman year, just before, my grandparents and parents bought a townhouse close to campus, and so it was then easy for me to go back. My sister was an undergrad, there was a free place to stay. [Laughter.] So in the immediate years I could stay connected with friends I still had there. And then it became a place that I feel comfortable. I love to go down and walk to the coffee shop, and walk down Dog Street, and even if I never set foot on campus, it is a home.

Ashley:            It’s rejuvenating.

Jennifer:          It is.

Ashley:            My friends and I all talk about that. Whenever we go back to the burg it’s like oh, the Burg, you know, it just feeds your soul.

Barbara:           Well, that reminds me, Ashley, of something that you said to me—

Kennon:           What was that?

Barbara:           —some years ago. So almost 20 years ago, actually, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

01:17:00          And I was on the alumni board at the time, and we had a spring meeting coming up, and I was really struggling with whether, in the midst of chemo, I could come back to board meetings. I’d never missed one. And we were living in Brussels, and that was a long flight, and being pretty debilitated. And I was talking to Kennon on the phone and said I’m really struggling with this decision, and feeling pretty depressed about it. And she said if William & Mary is a place that enriches your soul, you should go back. And I did.

Kennon:           Yeah.

Barbara:           I didn’t miss a board meeting. And I had a friend who met me at the airport, the Dulles airport when I arrived and spent the whole time with me in Williamsburg, taking care of me, and it enriched my soul, so it’s just that kind of place.

01:17:54

Jennifer:          I also want to say that the fact that all five of us went to school there has increased the bond for me. My sorority initiation formal my grandparents came to. That has probably never, ever happened. [Laughter.] But they got dressed up and it was at the campus center, and we have an official Kappa Delta sorority photo of me and my grandparents at the formal. And so things like that, it was more than just a place to go and learn. It was family, the literal family and the friends that I made there. Family.

Virginia:          And your grandfather, who graduated from the University of Michigan, would rather come back to William & Mary. Never went back to Michigan, never. I used to threaten him that I’d let Michigan know he still existed. [Laughter.]  

01:18:55

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

Ashley:            At William & Mary or everywhere?

Kim:                Either/or.

Jennifer:          I don’t think we have enough time.

Ashley:            Well, we’re the majority now, right?

Barbara:           We are the majority.

Ashley:            How long have women been the majority?

Kim:                Well, it’s changed on and off. Now obviously during the war years it was almost a women’s college, pretty much, because there were no men. But I would say probably—well, looking at university records, it was a concern, which both amuses and frustrates me. Even in the ‘50s there was concern we’ve got too many women coming in. They thought it was very unbalanced, obviously in favor of women, which the administration did not like. And I think that has ebbed and flowed, or they tried to keep it majority men, at least in the mid part of the 1900s.

01:19:59          So as to…I don’t know that I have any data as to how long it’s been a majority…

Female:            It’s consistently since the ‘70s, and the gap widens a little bit more each year.

Kim:                We have yet to have a female president of William & Mary.

Ashley:            I was thinking about that yesterday.

Kim:                But there are definitely more women in top administrative roles than there have ever been. Before you had Dean of Women, but there still was the Dean of Students, who was a man. Then you had the house mothers, you know, and that was… And then you finally start getting female professors, finally.

But now you’ve got the Dean of Student Affairs is a woman. And they still don’t have as many females on the Board of Visitors as maybe they could. But how do you, I mean, what do you feel have been some of the major contributions of women just in general at William & Mary in terms of, you know, maybe philanthropy or giving of their time or money or their support to, you know, to supporting students like you did overall?

01:21:10

Ashley:            Well, Barrett was named for a woman who gave the money. Barksdale was named for a woman. There are now—

Virginia:          She was the athletic director.

Ashley:            There are now dorms on Barksdale.

Kim:                Barskdale was in the first class of women at William & Mary.

Ashley:            Oh, wow. So I remember as a freshman knowing that about both of those two things. Barksdale Field was supposed to be used for women’s sports. Now again, a couple years after I graduated they built dorms on it and I thought, hm, okay, well, that importance diminished. She’s been dead long enough, I guess, that someone decided that was okay. And Barrett, the money was given for an all female dorm. And so—

Virginia:          Kate Waller Barrett.

01:21:57

Ashley:            You know, when… I remember where I was when I found out that Barrett went coed, and I just thought Kate is rolling in her grave, you know. Again like I guess there’s a statute of limitations on how long you’ve been dead and whether your wishes are honored anymore.

Kim:                So two new buildings—well, not new buildings, but they’re two existing structures that have now been renamed for women. One is Lake Matoaka—

Ashley:            Oh, yeah.

Kim:                —has been renamed in honor of the alumna who has—

Ashley:            The amphitheater?

Kim:                The amphitheater. Who has supported a lot of the renovation and repairs. And then one of the Jamestown residences has been renamed for a long serving administrator in student affairs who passed away, one of the deans, Dean Carroll they called her. So women are finally getting some more—

Ashley:            Some more naming rights.

Kim:                —identity, you know, public identity on campus and not just kind of in the background.

01:22:59

Virginia:          I was very sad when Tercentenary Hall—and it’s nothing to do with a woman—was given another name. I thought the tercentenary of William & Mary was very important and that hall should remain as Tercentenary Hall. But that’s—

Barbara:           But I guess, you know, thinking about women and thinking about naming, there are a lot of William & Mary women who have done very significant things in their professions in the world, in their communities, but they may not have necessarily made a lot of money. And too often the naming rights go to people who make a lot of money and give a lot of money, and they may not necessarily be the role models that we would like them to be. That will remain anonymous.

01:23:56

Ashley:            Related to Nana’s comment about Tercentenary Hall.

Virginia:          Thank you.

Barbara:           But I do think it’s important for us, as a school that really produces fabulous graduates, men and women, but the majority are women, to look at what the women are doing and recognize it. It really bothers me, when we look at the history of things like honorary degrees and the Alumni Medallion, to see how hard it is for the nominating committees to find the qualified women who are there. So over and over it’s the majority men.

And I think that when I was on the alumni board I worked very hard to find the qualified women and to nominate qualified women, and some of them were not selected because there was just a feeling that the men who had gotten the titles and gotten the money deserved it.

01:24:58

Virginia:          That makes me think of a meeting some years ago of the endowment association before it was called the foundation. And they presented the slate of new nominees for that year. Every one was a man. And I was about to die. I was just fit to be tied. And I jumped up and got recognized by the…actually, it was a woman who was head of it that year and she recognized me.

And I looked at the man who was head of that committee and I said the last I heard William & Mary was still a coed institution. Would you mind telling me where the women nominees are? And he looked at me like he thought I was crazy, and literally his mouth dropped open. And everybody clapped. But that’s the kind of thing that happens.

01:26:01          And when it comes to women giving money to William & Mary, maybe when we start paying women the same as we pay men, they’ll be able to give more money to William & Mary.

Barbara:           She is a woman before her time.

Virginia:          No, I was a woman who was pushing things—

Barbara:           Before your time.

Virginia:          Well…

Barbara:           Before their time.

Virginia:          Whatever.

Barbara:           Absolutely.

Virginia:          But it’s true. Women should be giving more to William & Mary, but they don’t make the same kind of salaries that men do, so our civilization still has a way to go.

Kim:                Absolutely. No argument from me. [Laughter.] Well, lastly, you all mentioned that you had your minor tweaked version of the alma mater. Would you share with us what that is?

01:26:57

Barbara:           We have great fun whenever we’re at William & Mary events and the alma mater is sung, and there’s one line that we just insist on changing. And you should join me in saying this together, that we say,

Group:             Bless the college of our mothers.

Barbara:           And maybe that should be changed.

Kim:                Absolutely.

Ashley:            For the next hundred years. [Laughter.] All right, thank you.

Group:             Thank you.

Barbara:           We enjoyed it. Thank you.

01:27:28          [End of recording.]