The University in the Late Fifties

By Ken Ringle (College ’61)

To Be a Virginian, either by Birth, Marriage, Adoption, or even on one’s Mother’s side, is an Introduction to any State in the Union, a Passport to any Foreign Country, and a Benediction from Above. — “The Virginia Creed,” Anonymous

Elitism is a dirty word in academia today. At the University in the 1950s it was what we were all about. Not that our attitude was particularly justified. Though the law, medical, engineering and architecture schools were first rate, the College of Arts and Sciences was only so-so, many key professorships were held by stuffy old pedants living off past laurels and social ties. Academically the school wasn’t terribly demanding. Some students strung their years in Charlottesville out for nearly a decade.

Never mind. Wahoos defined themselves less by what they were, than by what they were not. We were not a “State U” – the dreaded apparition of proletarian banality occupied by VPI (nobody then called it Virginia Tech) and the V-necked, marching band megaversities of the Southeast and the Big 10.

We were smaller (the entire university, including graduate schools, was only about 6,500 students when I entered in 1957), we were older (1819), and we had both Thomas Jefferson and his architecture. Though we did most of the same stupid things college students have always done and do today, we considered ourselves more sophisticated and more adult. We had an honor code. We wore coats and ties to class. And we had fewer rules: almost the only one was that we were to “conduct ourselves at all times as gentlemen.” We could drink anywhere, even in class. Needless to say the student body was all male, but then so were Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most of the Ivy League colleges. We considered ourselves one of them, at least socially. The student government, fraternities and honor societies were dominated by graduates of Virginia boarding schools like Episcopal High, St. Christophers and Woodberry Forest, but New England schools like Choate and Kent were represented, too. I remember two of my classmates from New England telling me separately that their parents had sent them to Virginia because they had failed to get into Harvard and U.Va. was “the only other socially acceptable school.” What other state university had a polo team?

The late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt once wrote me a letter at the time describing a U.Va. diploma as “not only scholarly but patrician” – a distinction, he said, “that has always escaped Chapel Hill where I went to school.”

Part of this sense of exclusivity grew out of the self-satisfaction embodied in the only partly tongue-in-cheek Virginia Creed quoted above. In those days many Virginians, particularly old family Richmonders, took it seriously. I remember one of my classmates – otherwise quite a sane and genial fellow – telling me that whenever his family visited Europe and were asked if they were Americans, they replied “No, we’re Virginians.”

Yet if the University was unchallenged as the principal college in the Old Dominion (bumper stickers said simply “THE University”), nearly one-third of the students came, as I did, from out-of-state. This was less to leaven any sense of provincialism in the student body than to help pay the freight. The General Assembly was famously parsimonious in funding education, and out-of-state students paid twice the tuition of in-staters.

Obviously the Commonwealth then was very different. The Washington suburbs which so dominate it today were almost invisible at the University in the 1950s. The Old Dominion was still largely a state of rural counties and small towns. Most of the students, whether in-state or imported, had some sort of tie to the land.

One index of that demographic difference was the firearm. A great many Virginia students in the 1950s – maybe even most – owned firearms and kept them in their rooms. Most of these were shotguns or rifles used for hunting – I had two fraternity brothers who regularly went quail hunting after classes in the fall and I remember seeing a deer carcass hanging by its heels from the porch of the Sigma Pi house – but there were plenty of pistols around as well. These last were used for target shooting, beer can plinking and general hilarity. We still had a few World War II and Korean War veterans in the student body who would pack their service .45s on road trips and regularly shoot out the gate lights at Sweet Briar. A fraternity brother of mine from Savannah, “Crazy Harry” Strahan, disturbed one night by the glare from the light in the showers of the D.U. House next door, pulled out the .357 magnum he kept in his bedside table and shot out the offending bulb. When Dean B.F.D. Runk learned of that the following morning, Harry was instantly expelled from the University. Even such impressive marksmanship was NOT deemed “gentlemanly behavior.” But no rule was enacted to restrict firearms. Because, as amazing as it seems today – after horrors like Columbine and Virginia Tech – I never remember hearing of a single case, before, during or after my years at Virginia – not a single one! – when any student gun was employed – or even displayed – as a weapon. There were the usual number of drunken brawls then as there doubtless are now on party weekends. But using a gun to settle one would never have occurred to anyone. It would have been considered cowardly and unmanly. It was just unthinkable.

Another major difference between the University in the ’50s and the University of today was political. However lethargic today’s students may appear, they are bombarded constantly with news updates and media messages from TV, computers, cell phones, PDAs and the like, none of which, of course, we had. And aside from the usual tiny minority of campus Democrats and Republicans (most of them political science majors and/or budding lawyers), we didn’t have a political clue. We were scarcely a decade from the victory in World War II, Eisenhower, who had led that victory, was president and we were largely content to let him and the other leaders elected by our parents make all governmental decisions without input from us. A few impatient faculty members chided us for such apathy and compared us unfavorably to students in Latin America and Europe who always seemed to be rioting for some cause. But at the University – and in most other American colleges in that era – we were largely unconcerned with politics and public affairs.

That this was true at Virginia seems particularly bizarre now, since the state was then roiling with debate over school desegregation. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board decision had been handed down in 1954, and in 1956 U.S. Sen Harry F. Byrd, whose political machine dominated Virginia, called for “Massive Resistance” to the decision by closing any public school ordered to integrate. One of the first such locality was Charlottesville. But University students were largely oblivious to the political turmoil.

Most of us had been raised with racial segregation and were at least passively in favor of the system. Though few would have denied its legal injustice, its effects appeared largely benign to our socially myopic adolescent eyes. Almost all of us had grown up with blacks, but few of us had ever known any who weren’t servants or laborers or had any education at all. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to continue segregation: we just couldn’t imagine how society would function without it. It was all we’d known. Furthermore, the blacks we saw every day in Charlottesville seemed to accept it without complaint. I had an aunt in Mississippi where I had witnessed casual brutality and a bitter kind of racial hatred that I found as scary as it was repellent. But nothing like that was visible in Charlottesville or, for that matter, in the part of Louisiana where I’d grown up. Racism at the University manifested itself largely in Step’n Fetchit jokes and racial stereotyping. Plus tiresome Confederate flag-wavng at football games when the pep band at least once a half played “Dixie.” The cheering at this was largely pro forma.

Yet the University also was edging very, very quietly toward racial change. Though it was technically supposed to be segregated, we had a half-dozen black students enrolled, most, as I remember, in the professional schools. I don’t think they lived in the dormitories – I don’t remember where they lived – but they ate in the dining halls with us and otherwise moved around the grounds without apparent incident. One faculty wife, Sarah Patton Boyle, wrote about this approvingly for “The Saturday Evening Post” and received some subsequent threats, though not from any students. Her recently republished memoir – “The Desegregated Heart” paints a revealing portrait of this time of racial transition.

Boyle’s writing, together with Faulkner’s, finally helped awaken in me a shamefully-delayed understanding of segregation’s crippling effects. John F. Kennedy’s election as president in 1960 led me and others as well to a political awakening after which the University was never again quite the monument to apathy it had been for most of the 1950s. But when Ed Lovern of Lynchburg and I attempted in 1961 to charter a University chapter of the Virginia Council on Human Relations – an early but hardly revolutionary civil rights group – the student council turned us down and I was accused of Communist sympathies by a fraternity brother from Farmville. It would take the students of the 1960s to make the real difference.

The final and most obvious difference between the University of Faulkner’s day and today’s involved women. Essentially, we had none. Aside from a sprinkling of would-be schoolteachers in the education school, almost the only women on the Grounds were the student nurses who lived in McKim Hall. These were convenient but tended toward understandable resentment when dated only during the week and left behind on party weekends. In general, one had to go Down The Road.

Freshmen girls were bused in occasionally for “mixers” from women’s schools like Sweet Briar (62 miles away), Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (74) and Mary Washington (78) and road trips to these schools were a regular feature both during the week and on weekends. Hollins girls were considered highly desireable but, at 110 miles distant, required a more serious time commitment, particularly during the week. Longwood and Radford girls were visited as merry sports, but not always girls you would bring home to mother.

And that, in some weird way, seemed to be important. In the preppier-than-thou culture in which we operated, most dating was considered at least a quasi-courtship, particularly by the women involved, most of whom were far more interested – it was a sign of the times – in getting married than considering a career. And of course, since the birth control Pill was at least five years in the future, most girls made a fairly serious effort at staying virgin, and an even more serious effort at appearing one.

All the girls colleges had curfews – usually midnight, no boys on dorm – and surreal combinations of rules governing “ladylike” behavior. Randolph-Macon girls were forbidden to drink within 20 miles of the campus. Radford girls were forbidden to wear slacks, etc. Since Virginia in those days prohibited liquor-by-the-drink, the frequent date of choice was “boon docking” with a blanket and a fifth of bourbon at some woodsy place like Amherst Wayside or dancing to a jukebox at some filling station/beer hall like Brants near Lynchburg. If you think that sounds contradictory, you’d be right.

When invited for party weekends at the University, it was understood that girls would pay their own way to and from Charlottesville by bus, train or car as well as paying for their lodging at one of the chaperoned guest houses in town approved by their individual school. Motels were a no-no. Their date would meet all other costs of the weekend. Attire for the weekend was taken VERY seriously by the women, with the usual goal being to look enough like wife material so they COULD be taken home to mother. Such garments were considered so important in Virginia in those days that many big city deparment stores employed student advisorettes – “college boards” – to counsel girls heading off to college on the virtual trousseau of skirts, sweaters, blouses, dresses, overcoats, shoes and boots they would need for the anticipated social whirl accompanying their higher education. The de rigeur female uniform for informal dates consisted of a white blouse with a McMullen collar beneath a crew neck sweater, combined with a plaid kilt held together at the knee by a giant safety pin, knee socks and Weejun loafers. All set off by a circle pin and a scarab bracelet. And maybe a headband. This was a virtual uniform, particularly for Sweet Briar and Hollins girls. Wahoo garb was no less predictable – tweed sport coat, khakis, Oxford cloth button down shirt, rep tie and Weejuns.

As might be expected, the University’s social life involved a lot of drinking. In fact, alcohol and U. Va. have been intertwined since Edgar Allan Poe boozed his way out of the school in 1826. In the 1950s we drank bourbon over ice in the stands at football games, Scotch and soda while bopping to blues bands in sweaty, smoke-filled fraternity houses, gin and juice and bloody marys at Sunday polo games and we drank occasional wine and lots of beer with meals. We also drank an alarming amount while driving hundreds of miles to and from women’s colleges on winding, hilly two-lane roads, and why no student died in a car accident during my four years, God only knows. But one reason may have been that the culture governing drinking then was patently different than that governing it today. Not that students were always moderate in their consumption, far from it. There were always some students intent on wrecking themselves, throwing up, passing out, being obnoxious. It was a rite of passage then as it is today.

But the social ideal in those days was to be “able to hold your liquor” – to be genial and colorful and amusing, but still keep a rein on your self-control. For men it was a sign of machismo. For women it was both a sign of femininity and means of self-defense. Not everybody met the ideal. Women were generally better at it than men, in part because a woman reported to have been drunk and out-of-control would usually be put on “social probation” by her school and restricted to campus or even suspended. But the self-knowledge both acquired in the liquor-washed University of the 1950s had to do with learning one’s capacity and taking responsibility for oneself. That was the real elitism we cultivated on the grounds in those days. Whether that same ethos reigns today in Charlottesville, only those there can say.

©2009 Ken Ringle

Ken Ringle retired in 2003 after 33 years as a writer, editor, essayist and critic for The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in The National Geographic, Smithsonian, European Affairs and other publications, and he has been a writer-in-residence himself as a Washington Post Fellow at Duke University.