ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH Dr. CHARLES O. BURGESS Digital Services Center, Perry Library Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia Part 1: June 29, 2010 by Karen Vaughan, Old Dominion University Libraries   Listen to Interview Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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Vaughan: This is Karen Vaughan and its June 29, 2010 and I’m here interviewing Chuck Burgess – Dr. Charles O. Burgess for the oral history project about ODU history. I’m going to start by asking you about your background. Tell me where you were born, where you grew up – just a little bit about your family and your home life.

Burgess: I was born in New York City and my parents were typical people in New York City. That is to say neither of them was from the city. And they were people from very different backgrounds who would never have met if they hadn’t both been attracted to the city life. My father was from an upstate New York family. He was born in the Mohawk Valley in Little Falls, New York, but he grew up in Niagara Falls, New York and was a graduate of Lehigh in Metallurgical Engineering and came to New York to work for the Union Carbide Laboratories which were in Long Island City.  And my mother was from southwest Virginia -- Lebanon, Virginia in Russell County-- and from an upper middle class family there, although her father was kind of the n’er do well of the family.  And her mother took the children to Norfolk when--after my mother graduated from high school. She worked in Norfolk for a few years and became a bookkeeper.  And then with a friend – a female cousin – she decided to try New York City. And so they got an apartment above a restaurant on Bleecker Street in the Village. And I’m not exactly sure how my mother and father met because obviously they would not normally meet, but they were both interested in theater. They were both interested in literature and writers. And somehow or other they got together and had the wonderful experience from all I ever heard over and over again in my childhood – the wonderful experience of living in New York in the 1920s. And like I always said if my mother dies and goes to heaven -- has gone to heaven after she died, it would look a lot like New York in the 1920s. But…

Vaughan: Did you have any siblings?

Burgess: Yes, but I was the first, and then my sister Diana was born four years later, and my brother Dean was born four years after that. That was not a coincidence. It’s no longer… a need to be funny about it. My mother was a -- and father were -- was a follower of Margaret Sanger, and she had an obstetrician who believed that women should not have children less than four years apart… and so he performed abortions. And he performed abortions in a hospital - Sydenham Hospital -- and somehow or other got away with it, probably because it was a hospital in Harlem and nobody was looking.  And so my mother neatly had her children each four years apart. I have some early memories of the city. I remember the Museum of Natural History because my father of course is a scientist and engineer and he wanted to get me involved in all that kind of thing right early.  And I’m told -- I don’t remember it -- I’m told that I took my first steps in the Metropolitan Museum of Art [laughs] in the sculpture gallery, which later became the cafeteria and now has gone back to being a gallery.  So, I do remember a few things about New York. But I was born in New York in ’29 – 1929 and I didn’t really cause the stock market crash, I guess [laughter] but it occurred several months later. And it deeply affected my parents’ life. The Union Carbide closed its Long Island City labs and moved the research labs to Niagara Falls as it happens – coincidentally. And therefore, my father had to move or be unemployed. And my mother who had been very much involved with life in New York and as a matter of fact during the time of the crash she worked for J.P. Morgan, just as a bookkeeper. And she had lots of good stories about armed guards having to let them in and out and their being kept there all night at various times during the period of the crash. But they moved back to Niagara Falls, and the story is my mother cried for a year. [Laughter]  New York was always kind of the Mecca, I mean the Empire State Express from Buffalo to New York was the lifeline for our family, so that’s been something of a tradition in the family.

Vaughan: So your father wanted you to go into sciences, and were you more pulled then toward the humanities?

Burgess: No. I was convinced I was going to be a scientist. I was very interested in science, and I did a lot of reading in science and I took science courses. And when I went to college--actually I graduated from high school young. I was only 15 years old when I graduated from high school. So my first year in college I spent at the University of Buffalo, which was because I could commute, but then I went off to Johns Hopkins.

Vaughan: Okay now so you were 15 or 16 when you started college?

Burgess: I was 15 when I started college.

Vaughan: Wow! Was that unusual?

Burgess: It was quite unusual even then. And it was related to my eyesight as a matter of fact. I was born with albinism that affected my eyesight. And in fact there was a question about whether I would ever be able to read at one point, which was rather amusing since I got a Ph.D. in literature. But my parents sent me to a--essentially a kind of tutoring academy through the first… through the elementary and middle school years and I didn’t get into… I went into public high school in the 9th grade when I was much younger than anybody else there and graduated when I was 15.

Vaughan: So it was a lot more advanced – the tutoring school?

Burgess: Yes. Well… just people went at their own pace. I went faster.

Vaughan: But when you were younger then you probably did a lot of reading and how… did you have to have special equipment or…?

Burgess: No. I just had to have strong glasses.

Vaughan: Okay, and good light?

Burgess: And good light. But… and reading was just natural in the family. I mean we had… the front living room had a wall of books. And we always were getting new books and talking--the family were talking about books and it was just part of the life of the family. And so I… it just probably seemed natural to me.

Vaughan: So then you went from Buffalo to Johns Hopkins?

Burgess:  To Johns Hopkins.

Vaughan: And were you wanting to major in science?

Burgess: Oh yes. I started out as a biology major, even was thinking of pre-med which was one of the reasons I went to Johns Hopkins. And it was only after being there for a year or more that I decided that maybe science wasn’t my thing. And partially, again, it was an eyesight thing. I think I probably had the highest breakage fee in freshman chemistry that you could get. [Laughter] I couldn’t deal with this. I couldn’t see things very well. I remember in biology class, for example, looking into the… being expected to draw what I saw through the microscope. I couldn’t see anything through the microscope. So I’d study the textbook the day before, know what it was supposed to look like, and then draw that. [Laughter] But… so I got interested in the humanities and they had some good faculty there in English -- Don Cameron Allen particularly, and some others. And so, I switched to English and my parents were supportive. They didn’t think it was a bad thing.

Vaughan: And was it literature, or did you have any interest in creative writing?

Burgess: No, I never was into creative writing. I--you know from time to time I’ve done a couple of things for my own amusement, but I never was really interested in creative writing. So I went into literature and then the Johns Hopkins experience was also very interesting because I arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1945. And so here I was 16 years old and almost everybody else that I knew were veterans of World War II. So I was in a… I was learning a completely new life, of course, and it was definitely not the normal college experience.

Vaughan: Right. So what was your social life like? Did you have one?

Burgess: I didn’t have much of a social life, but… I mean I got along well with these guys, but I didn’t participate in a lot of the activities. Of course, I had a fake ID that I could use. [Laughter]

Vaughan: So did you live on campus?

Burgess: I lived on campus.

Vaughan: Did you have a roommate?

Burgess: Not initially, but yes after… in my senior year… actually they were in suites, so I had three roommates – all of them veterans.

Vaughan: Did you feel like you were somewhat protected at the school because you were so young or…?

Burgess: No, I didn’t feel I was treated particularly differently. It’s just the people around me were so different and had such a different group of experiences that they’d gone through in their lives. And we were of course completely scornful of anything that was “Mickey Mouse” -- we didn’t have the term at the time – about college life. I mean, somebody asked an ex-Master Sergeant to wear a freshman beanie, you can imagine what kind of response he got. But they were also extremely brilliant – many of them first generation college students – and in some ways like the students we have at ODU.

Vaughan: So you graduated with your English degree then.

Burgess: Graduated with an English degree, went straight on to the University of Chicago…

Vaughan: And why-- why did you pick the University of Chicago?

Burgess: Because of the great books movement. My parents were both involved in the great books movement and so were many of their friends. As a matter of fact, in the last few years of my father’s life, they jointly led a great books club.

Vaughan: Tell me a little bit more about the great books movement.

Burgess: Well it was…. I don’t know who it was started by, but it was organized by somebody named Mortimer Adler who was also associated with the University of Chicago and it became kind of the Chicago movement too. And he identified all of the great books of western civilization from the Greek classics through the medieval theologians and then on up into modern philosophers and writers and so forth. And it became basically the idea that if you studied these and knew about these you would be an educated person. And it became very popular to get a group of people together – “and this week we’re going to read Thomas Aquinas, a certain selection of that. Next week we’re going to read a play of Shakespeare. The next week it would be something else. And then we’re going to sit around and analyze it and discuss it as a group.” This was an adult thing. And my parents loved it and they would… it was kind of their joint activity in that during the week they would be… it was a two week period between the two of them, and they would be discussing it and making notes and preparing and it was preparing for a class basically, or a seminar. And it meant a lot to them. And because this was associated with the University of Chicago at the time – this was during when Robert Maynard Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago, and he essentially based the first two years of everybody’s education on the great books and then you specialized after the first two years. You went into a particular field. Well, of course, I was there as a graduate student so I didn’t participate in that, but actually the graduate program was rather traditional. But I did go through that and it was… it didn’t offer everything I had thought it would, but…

Vaughan: But you… it took you only one year to get your master’s?

Burgess: It only took one year to get the masters, yeah.

Vaughan: That was pretty quick.

Burgess: Because, well, I was a traditional student. I wasn’t working.

Vaughan: And I guess your parents were probably pretty proud of you for doing great books and going to Chicago?

Burgess: Oh yes. I think so, but then again at that point I was not sure I was going to go on. And my father was by this time -- they had moved to Cleveland, actually a suburb of Cleveland – Lakewood. And he was technical director of a trade association – the Gary Iron Founders Society. And one of his responsibilities was to write a handbook about everything you’ve always wanted to know about gray iron. [Laughter] And so he asked me I guess thinking of my academic training to some extent but maybe trying to get me back interested in engineering again. He asked me if I would take a year off and be his assistant in writing the handbook.  And I did that and it was--it worked pretty well. I spent a lot in the library learning about gray iron. And went on a number of visits with him where he interviewed people who knew different things about it, and drafted some of the material. Basically I was the research assistant for the book. But it came clear to me at that point that that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. He wanted me to go on with him. He had gotten the funding to establish his own consulting firm and go into business for himself. And he wanted me to join that and handle the business side of it and do that kind of thing. I wasn’t interested in that. I made the famous statement that my mother never let me forget to the end of her life. I said, “I can’t go into business. There’s too much politics in business.” [Laughter] “I think I’ll go into academic life.”  

Vaughan: Right. And then you discovered…

Burgess: Discovered what politics there was there. She never let me forget that. They supported me again with this decision and I made the decision to go--not to go back to Chicago, but to go to Columbia. And I don’t know why anymore exactly except probably because it was in New York. And the pull of the old hometown brought me there. It was the perfect decision to make. Columbia in the early ‘50s was an absolutely wonderful place. You had Lionel Trilling -- the people I worked with -- Lionel Trilling, Gilbert Highet, Moses Hadas, Mark Van Doren was still there and teaching. I was there for the last year of Joseph Wood Krutch. I just had all of these figures who probably don’t mean that much these days, but were major, major figures at the time, and just intellectually stimulating. Just all--all kinds of things going on. There was a stuffy organization called the English Graduate Union, which you didn’t even get admitted to until after you passed your doctoral orals. And so a friend of mine and I decided to start our own organization which we called the Graduate English Society with absolutely no blessing from the English department. But we somehow or other managed to get it established and then we brought in our own speakers. And of course we could get people to come and talk because Graduate English Society at Columbia University sounded so extremely important. It was just me and a couple of friends that did this thing. And so we had… we got a number of writers in there. When all else failed we could always get some of the editors and other people from the Partisan Review which was a little magazine at the time in New York. And they would always come. The high point of course was when we were the ones who sponsored Dylan Thomas when he was over here on his tour. It was one of his last tours. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. [Laughter] But once he got started that voice came forth. In my second and halfway into my third year there I got an apartment off campus with another graduate student – Karl Kroeber – and the reason I mention this is that his father was Alfred Kroeber, the anthropologist. In fact, people sometimes claim he invented anthropology. And he had retired from Berkeley, but he was spending the rest of his life on visiting professorships around the country. And he happened to have a visiting professorship at Columbia. And so I was kind of taken into the family. And Alfred is perhaps, other than my father, one of the major influences on me, because he was a genuine polymath. You would go over there for dinner and you could be talking about the latest plays. You could be talking about wines. You could be talking about fire pistons in Polynesia. You could be talking about American Indian languages. You could be talking about politics. I mean everything, everything was out there. Everybody had something to say about --because his wife was very similar -- to say about something. They took me out to dinner. I learned little French restaurants. I learned to eat all kinds of things I didn’t even know existed. That family was a total educational experience for me. I also dated Karl’s sister who was Ursula Kroeber who was a graduate student in French at the time there at Columbia. And she’s gone on to become the fantasy and science fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin. And… so it was just a wonderful time. Unfortunately, Karl died last year. I did get to talk to him. I had one nice conversation with him, went up to Park Slope in Brooklyn last fall, but we could reminisce a little bit but he had an extremely successful career – widely published, was chair of the English department at Columbia for many years, and just one of the interesting people that came out of that life there.

Vaughan: When you were at Columbia was that when you decided to become a teacher or had you always wanted to do that?

Burgess: You know, I can’t remember when I decided to become a teacher because it sort of just happened. What happened in fact was after I finished my course work and had passed my orals I really seemed the logical thing would be to get a job of some kind. [Laughter] And I had no teaching experience at all. Mostly, even then, graduate students in English would serve as teaching assistants to the undergraduate programs. But at Columbia, actually the graduate program was larger than the undergraduate program. Columbia College, the undergraduate unit was an extremely restrictive, and intentionally kept small – a group of really brilliant students. And they didn’t have the need for graduate students as teaching assistants. In fact, faculty liked to teach them. Lionel Trilling, as a matter of fact, gave up all of his graduate teaching and devoted the latter part of his life just to be teaching undergraduates at Columbia. So I had no teaching experience and however there was a kind of a pipeline from the New York City schools to, of all places, Ohio State University. Ohio State had a need for indentured servants to teach the masses of freshmen that were coming in from all over the state and they had found that they could get people from Columbia, NYU, City, Brooklyn College, wherever. They could get graduate students with very good training, bring them in for a couple of years and then replace them with some more in the position that was called “assistant instructor.” So since my parents were in Ohio this made sort of sense too. And so I took a job for two years at Ohio State as an assistant instructor and my companions up there were largely from New York or from other definitely not corn-fed Ohio. So we were sort of an enclave in there of outsiders in this group and I don’t think we communicated with our freshmen very well. And of course I was totally experimenting with teaching. I mean it was something I had never done.

Vaughan: But obviously you liked it.

Burgess: The first day I went in and I thought I’d prepared a class and in about ten minutes I’d finished everything I had to say. [Laughter] I didn’t know what I was doing. But it was kind of like being thrown in the water and told to swim because I gradually began to learn what worked and what didn’t work, mostly by trial and error. And I began to be able to relate more with the students and to enjoy the process more. Other things happened there. It would not make me popular today right here, but that’s when I learned really to detest big time college football because there was a pitched battle between the football program and the English department there. The wife of the freshman football coach was writing the themes for the football players. And they had a famous fullback named, Hubert Bobo, wonderful name, who was named sophomore of the year on the same year that he failed freshman English three times. It was a quarter system. He failed each time for cheating. So we were definitely… didn’t think that football was a positive influence. We’ll see what happens here. My Ohio State experience was valuable obviously but different.

Vaughan: And so did you go from Ohio State then to ODU, and what brought that about? What made you choose ODU?

Burgess: Well choosing is perhaps too strong a word. There weren’t a lot of choices at the time. That was kind of like now. It was a time when there weren’t many positions open. The veterans had gone through, enrollments were dropping, and they didn’t have the need for faculty. Also, I was an ABD. I didn’t have my doctorate yet. So I interviewed several places, but I never got any offers.  I did have family in Norfolk and I had been in Norfolk before. My mother’s sister had married here and lived here, and she and her children were here. And we had visited them sometimes in the summer, so I at least was vaguely familiar with the place. And actually one of her daughters-in-law, Marcia Lindeman, was teaching at the Norfolk Division in the English department. And so somehow or other they suggested maybe I should consider a job down here. And not having anything else I said “Okay, I’ll go down there for a year or two and then get a real job.” [Laughter]  So I did come down here for I think, I can’t swear to this, but I think it was a salary of about $3600 a year.

Vaughan: Oh, my God and that was for full-time teaching?

Burgess: That was for full-time teaching – very full-time teaching.

Vaughan: And that was 1955?

Burgess: That was--that was ’55.

Vaughan: What did you think of the state of higher education in Norfolk and in Virginia?

Burgess: Well, I learned this sort of over time, but it was a time in which there wasn’t much use for higher education outside of a few places. In Virginia I learned, there was “the University” of which you spoke with reverence – Thomas Jefferson and all that. There was “the College” which of course was William and Mary, and that was the college. There was really nothing else. And then there was Tech. And they were the powers in the state. There were also… to be spoken of with reverence was VMI, presumably because of a crying need to train confederate officers. And so that was kind of a holy, holy place. Other than that there were you know some teachers’ colleges in Farmville and Harrisonburg and places like that, that didn’t really matter.

Vaughan: So that’s why you thought this was just going to be a…

Burgess: But, you notice what I said, education was something that took place in the country. Cities were not serious places to go to college. You had to get away from the city to go to college. And so it just was assumed that you wouldn’t have a major university in an urban area. Now there were other things about the system too, naturally, the holy places were all white.  And with the exception maybe of William and Mary – I think it was an exception at the time -- they were all male. So you had to have -- a couple of places I didn’t mention -- you had to have places to keep the women that the men at college could date.  So that’s why you had Radford and that’s why you had Mary Washington, because they were the places that the women went to. It was a system I had great difficulty in feeling sympathetic with because of course I had gone to universities only in cities. The idea of the university being something that you go out into the hills to go to just didn’t make any sense to me at all. And William and Mary was at the time… ran a consortium -- I can’t think of the right word -- of institutions. There was the real one in Williamsburg, but then they had branches in Norfolk and in Richmond, which was RPI. It became Virginia Commonwealth later. And they had junior colleges in Petersburg, Richard Bland. And then Newport News, which of course has become Christopher Newport. But obviously those places didn’t need much support. It was the real college that got all the money. And the others were pretty badly starved.

Vaughan: Well did you think that it was okay to come here because it was a division of William and Mary?

Burgess: No. I didn’t know anything about William and Mary.

Vaughan: Oh, is that right? Okay. Okay.

Burgess: I mean you’ve got to realize I was a completely chauvinistic Northerner. As a matter of fact, I can remember that the standard thing to do when you went to the placement office at Columbia looking for a job and they asked you if you had any restrictions, you would say well anyplace but the South.

Vaughan: Right. [Laughs] South of New York?

Burgess: No. [Laughs] The former Confederacy. Any place but the South and then you could say, “Well I might make an exception for Chapel Hill.”

Vaughan: Uh-huh. [Laughs] Now what did your friends think of you going south?

Burgess: Well they were surprised, but they assumed it was something that wouldn’t last.

Vaughan: And you didn’t either, but look fifty-five years later. What did you think about Norfolk in the ‘50s, and did you think about settling there at the time?

Burgess: No. No. I began by being a boarder in my aunt and uncle’s house. And the… there wasn’t a lot here. There was virtually no art scene here at all.  The Symphony Orchestra and the Little Theater were here, but that was about it. And the Symphony Orchestra was definitely not world class. I remember one of my cousins and his wife taking me around to show me the city when I first got here and even they were being sort of denigrating about it. They showed me “the great white way,” which was 21st Street. [Laughs] And the Times Square of the South, which was Ward’s Corner. [Laughs] And of course there were no good restaurants, partially because they couldn’t serve liquor, which is where restaurants make their money. And it was a pretty provincial town. And of course I was snobbish. And that’s the way it was.

Vaughan: Yeah, so what about your first impressions of the campus and the students in particular?

Burgess: Okay, well two things, we’ll take them one by one. The campus consisted basically of three buildings:  the old Larchmont School which was where my office was; the what is now Rollins Hall which was then the administration building which had everything in it – all the administrative offices, the gymnasium, the pool, some classrooms, everything, and the student eatery “Bud’s” was all in the same, and the library, was all in the same building; and then a brand new science building which is Spong now. And then other than that, there was some army barracks.

Vaughan: There was a stadium.

Burgess: [laughs] Oh… and then all of it was completely overshadowed by Foreman Field, right. Some of the caves under Foreman Field were also used for academic classes and things like that. The students… we were at that point essentially an open enrollment community college, but not totally on the model of current community colleges, although we did have a technical institute which performed a lot of the vocational services that a community college would perform. But in the academic programs there was a feeling that our mission was to try to identify those people who had the ability to go on to William and Mary. Now this changed as we became our own bachelor’s granting institution more, but the mindset when I came, because that’s the way it had always been, was that this was kind of a prep school for William and Mary. And the students were all local. They were all commuter. But one of the things that I’ve come to really appreciate about Old Dominion and I think it’s a distinctive thing that matters a lot to me is that they’re all ages. I can’t imagine after my years here of going to an institution where all I saw was a bunch of adolescents. I love them, but the fact that you have people with lots of different life experiences, and lots of different backgrounds – all white at that time of course – but lots of different backgrounds has always been one of the strengths of this institution, I think. And I remember being impressed at how many of them may not have been very sophisticated about the use of the comma and things like that, but really had a lot to say. I remember a retired railroad man who was one of the best writers I had in my class. I mean this was what I was learning about these students and it really began to mean a lot to me. The other part of it was kind of painful because we had a lot of failures. Freshman English particularly was a screening class. And the idea that you could somehow or other bring people to success there, you know, you found out who could and who couldn’t and who would go on. And there were a lot of unhappy people too.

Vaughan: Was it on the semester system?

Burgess: At that point yeah. Later on things got really confusing when we became a division of VPI as well as William and Mary.

Vaughan: When was that?

Burgess: I can’t remember when that was. It was in the late ‘50s, I think, or early ‘60s. At that point, the same person could be teaching classes on both the semester system and on the quarter system, which means you never got a vacation for one thing. [Laughs] And that got very confusing, but when I first came it was all William and Mary, so it was all on a semester system. That’s when I really began I think… and maybe it went back to the fact that I was in college with people who were non-traditional when I was with the veterans there, I don’t know, but I’ve really come to appreciate very much that we are open to and even now are getting people who have stopped out of education for awhile and come back. We’ve got returning women, of course, a lot. And we get veterans a lot. And it’s a… it makes for a much different classroom experience for me.

Vaughan: For the students as well.

Burgess: For the students as well. They can learn from one another.

Vaughan: A lot of the former faculty have commented that there was such a sense of community among the faculty. Did you experience this when you came in the ‘50s and if so how?

Burgess: Well, I’ve been thinking about that since you said this is one of the questions. Yes, of course, part of it was a matter of size. We had meetings of the whole faculty three… at least three times a year. And the whole faculty could get into a small lecture hall and not fill it. Now, of course, you can’t get them anywhere near that, but… And everybody knew everybody else because there were so few of us. It didn’t necessarily mean we all liked one another. Everybody knew one another, and there were certain kinds of jocular traditions that happened. One that I remember that I haven’t seen anybody else mention, we always had a December faculty meeting, I’m not quite sure why, and everybody would come out really glad that the semester was coming to an end. And Lewis Webb, of course, would be presiding. And then somebody and I think it was Gerald Akers who was -- I’ll come back to later -- would get up to make a motion and he would move that the faculty would not, that the faculty not send Christmas cards to one another. This was the kind of important thing that was done in faculty meetings. [Laughs] The motion would pass unanimously, and Lewis would approve it, and then he would say, “But I’m afraid, Virginia and I have already sent out our cards.” [Laughs] This--this became a tradition. It happened at least several years in a row, I know. And there were a lot of things like that. There were a lot of faculty gatherings. Virginia Webb would hold afternoon sessions at their house definitely with absolutely no alcohol served of course. And I don’t want to sound as if I’m obsessed with alcohol, but… [Laughs] It was one of the shocks to me when I came down here, of course. I’d never been in a dry environment before. And departments were so small that really you sought friends, you know, across department lines whereas once we developed you would get people who didn’t know anyone outside their own department or at least their own school.  In those days you did. You were-- they were—they were all part of this little group.

Vaughan: Any interesting personalities among the faculty that you recall?

Burgess: Oh boy! I’ll go to my notes here. The… well I mentioned Gerald Akers.

Vaughan: And he had been here since they started.

Burgess: He was the earliest. He was the first faculty member to remain here. As a matter of fact in his later career he used to say he was the oldest object on campus, that he was older than the trees. [Laughs] Did anybody interview him before he died? Do you know?

Vaughan: He was interviewed in ’74.

Burgess: In ’74 okay. Because he’s got all kinds of background. He had all kinds of background that was wonderful. He was an interesting character– one of the few people with a doctorate. Of course, Bob Stern – Bob Stern was one of the remarkable characters of the time. He was a brilliant teacher. He was totally committed to students. He was totally committed to intellectual life. He was politically very active, in fact a thorn in the side of a lot more conservative people around here. He was known universally in the community as Dr. Stern. He only had a bachelor’s degree. But he was known universally as Dr. Stern and nobody corrected him. But he was a good friend of mine. He was one of the people that I really got along with, very well. We had a good relationship. The… perhaps the most important person who came in the year that I came, and the one who made the most difference at the university and in the community was Charles Sibley, who when he came there was no art department. And essentially he developed…

Vaughan: Did--was that his purpose for coming – to develop it or…?

Burgess: He was expected to, but at first there wasn’t any money to hire anybody else so he did everything himself. But he had a very sharp eye for talent – hired some very talented, sometimes rather strange, but very talented people in the department, and attracted to the university people in the community who had real artistic talent and hadn’t been able to really make much of it -- some of whom like Marjory Strauss ended up as faculty members. So perhaps in many ways, the first department that really was up to college, what I would call college/university standards, was the art department because he was… he just had the vision and the eye.

Vaughan: And he made it happen.

Burgess: And he made it happen. And he hired the right people.

Vaughan: And was this something that the administration, you know, approved of or encouraged?

Burgess: I can’t really say. I don’t think Lewis Webb was particularly interested in the arts, but he may very well have understood, being the sensitive community person that he was, that here was something that was attracting a group of people in the community that hadn’t been interested in the university before and they could be, could be supportive. They could be important because it was happening.  That was….oh, but there were so many I can’t… You could mention names to me and I probably could come up with stories, but…

Vaughan: Yeah, well who was the chair of the English department? Who hired you?

Burgess: Bill Seward. Bill Seward, he hired me… he really… he liked… I’m going to stop because I’m so snobbish again, but he really had no--very little background. He had…

Vaughan: In teaching or in English or…

Burgess: In English, in literature, he had written one book – a detective story – with a splendid title of “Skirts of the Dead Night.” But other than that there wasn’t much. He hadn’t - again like everybody in the English department with one exception I’ll get to in a minute – he just had a master’s degree and had never been anywhere near a major institution really.

Vaughan: So what about the size and makeup of the faculty in the English department at that time?

Burgess: I tried to remember. I can’t. There were somewhere between eight and twelve members of the department. There was one Ph.D. -- I wasn’t one yet at that time.  There was one Ph.D. – Jim Reese – again a good friend and a fine teacher and a fine, fine man. He had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins as a matter of fact. I hate to say this but I think the only reason he was here was that other institutions didn’t want to hire him because he was on crutches. He was paralyzed from the waist down and had to use crutches. That was, I suppose made him… there was no requirement to hire the handicapped in those days, and he was discriminated against because he was somebody who could have made it many places.

Vaughan: But they hired him here as… they didn’t have to pay him as much?

Burgess: They didn’t have to pay him as much and it was a job. His wife Joy worked for Vernon Peele as a secretary until she retired. So that you know they had to have two, two salaries in the family to keep going. The rest of the department were a very miscellaneous group of people with master’s degrees.

Vaughan: And what about men to women? What was the ratio?

Burgess: There were women. As I mentioned Marcia Lindeman my cousin’s wife was a member of the department. And I don’t know when Margaret Daugherty came. I can’t tell you but she was--she was in the department. But it was mainly male and there were… there was one good… one person that… that really, really was well qualified – Dan Wilson had an ABD from Penn. And he was a strong and good person; somebody that you know could continue to have a strong place. He’s no longer with us, but he’s. . .

Vaughan: How long did he stay?

Burgess: Oh, he was here into the ‘70s I think. And… but then there were people frankly who really barely had the qualifications to teach in high school. I mean they were…

Vaughan: Well what was the focus though of the curriculum? Was it mostly teaching composition and… ?

Burgess: Oh, when I came, again I came in ’55, and at the end of that year in the spring of ’56, we awarded our first bachelor’s degrees and none of them were in English. They were in education and business. So there really wasn’t a major curriculum developed at that point. And basically the English department was teaching composition and introduction to literature. Basically, introduction to literature in those days was a history of English literature. They… and that’s what existed at the time. Now one of my jobs when I first got here was to work with Dan and Jim Reese and others and on the development of a bachelor’s degree. And so I was involved with the establishment of the first upper level Shakespeare course I taught.

Vaughan: What year was that?

Burgess: And that must have been in, I’m not sure, but it must have been about ’56 or ’57 somewhere around there.

Vaughan: And where there many students? Did you…

Burgess: I had four students.

Vaughan: Four students, okay.

Burgess: One of them was Jane Batten, Frank Batten’s wife. And another one was a friend of hers from the community, and I can’t remember what her name was. And then there were two sort of scared undergraduates that were there too. And of course I--at this point I was laying on them you know in the way of a new faculty member. I found as Dean this was one of the things you got-- you just had to expect. I was laying on them all the stuff I had learned in graduate school. [Laughter] So it was really, really it was a very intense course, but it was fun. And then you know the process would develop a lot of other courses, but the curriculum was literature. We did not go into creative writing. We didn’t go into-- we did have--Marcia did a little bit on linguistics, but we really didn’t have anything in linguistics. We didn’t have anything in technical writing. We didn’t have any of the other emphases that now exist in the department. English was literature in those days.

Vaughan: Was there a focus on any type of… like Shakespeare? Did it focus on British literature? Or did it--was there fights…?

Burgess: Well in the early days it… yeah… the early days it was British literature definitely…. In fact, there--even into the ‘60s there were… in the late ‘60s there were big fights about including it then. I remember someone and I think it was Ernie Rhodes.  At one point when he was in one of these fights was getting pretty heated, he said, “There is no literature west of the Gulf Stream.” [Laughter] And of course it was all English and American, the idea… this was the fight I lost because I… in the ‘60s… I’m jumping ahead here... I lost the fight to include world literature in the curriculum. They didn’t see any reason we should read anything that wasn’t written in English.

Vaughan: Right. Right. Okay, well let’s get back to the ‘50s then.

Burgess: Okay.

Vaughan: One thing I didn’t ask about the faculty -- what were the hiring practices like back then?

Burgess: Hiring practices?

Vaughan: Hiring pra- [Laughter] I mean how did they decide… and you applied I’m sure, filled out an application or something… ?

Burgess: Well I was invited to apply.

Vaughan: And how did you apply?

Burgess: I don’t remember. I think maybe I just said, “Okay, yeah I apply” [Laughter] and sent in a resume, but essentially it was very haphazard and it varied from department to department. I remember… I don’t know whether this is true, but I was told, for example, that the chair of the foreign language department, Rogers Whichard, filled his positions by calling a friend in Chapel Hill and saying, “Is there somebody you’ve got who was a doctoral candidate who failed his comprehensives? Well, we’ve got a job for him here.” [Laughter] I don’t know whether that’s true, but that was the story at the time.

Vaughan: So did you have to come here and, say, go talk to Bill Seward or the chair or did you… ?

Burgess: Oh yeah, I talked to Bill Seward and I, but I interviewed with Lewis Webb as well. At this point the faculty was so small, Lewis interviewed every new candidate. And he told me by the way, I can still remember that he told me we are a teaching institution. We don’t expect research.

Vaughan: And did that appeal to you or did you… ?

Burgess: I don’t know. I just remember hearing it.

Vaughan: I did hear that from someone, another interview, that research wasn’t… they weren’t interested in that so...

Burgess: Which will become later, later in this discussion… it’ll become important.

Vaughan: Okay, that’s interesting. What about the facilities… where you said that the classes were held in the Larchmont School when you first started?

Burgess: It was the old Larchmont School. It was elementary.

Vaughan: And it was an elementary school.

Burgess: It was an elementary school. It was… my office was on the second floor. There were four other people in the office. It was a big room which made for some interesting things because people... It was only later that I learned that people were eavesdropping on others’ conversations. The classrooms were what you would expect an elementary school classroom to be – just basically a bare room with a blackboard. Remember blackboards?

Vaughan: Oh yeah, I do. [Laughs]

Burgess: And two of the rooms were on the ground floor, right on the ground floor, and had a tendency to flood in heavy rains. One of the interesting things… one of those rooms on the ground floor was “Room 0.” The other one was “Room 1.” And I taught in Room 0 fairly often. And basically it was just very elementary. The building was heated with a coal furnace – not very well but then again…. And of course there wasn’t any air conditioning. The state didn’t approve of air conditioning. My understanding, and jumping ahead, that when finally when what was Chandler Hall was built, it was air conditioned, but it had to be not with state money. It had to be with donated money. The state wouldn’t pay for it. In the real Virginia, it didn’t get that hot.

Vaughan: Uh huh. [Laughs] And then you mentioned the library. What kind of shape was that in? That was in Rollins Hall you said?

Burgess: Yeah, what is now Rollins Hall. Oh, well, it was pitiful. It was two rooms, as I recall. It was two rooms in what now basically where part of the admissions office is. And I think there was one librarian. I think it was… Elizabeth Debedts was there at the time already. I’m not sure.

Vaughan: Possibly, yeah.

Burgess: That was before she married. I can’t remember what her name was before it was Debedts, but… but anyway there was one person there and then some assistants and a very, very small collection. That was not something people would put money in.

Vaughan: Right. Was it--what about when you were teaching Shakespeare? Did they even have the books?

Burgess: I couldn’t make use of the library. It--there just wasn’t enough there.

Vaughan: So did the students… where… did they use any library?

Burgess: We… there were some things they could use, but basically they used the textbooks. It wasn’t that much. I have another story about Rogers Whichard who was a character. When we did finally get a little library money and they asked faculty to make recommendations of books that we needed, he made the statement, I remember he made the statement, “Why do we need a library? If my student needs… if any of my students need a book, I’ll lend it to them.” [Laughter]

Vaughan: Yeah, I understand that did happen a lot and in fact a lot of faculty donated their own libraries.

Burgess: Yeah. I think that’s what was in there – what faculty had donated – maybe from a sub-community. I’m not sure what the faculty had donated.  [I talk too much!]
I could end the discussion of the ‘50s with an anecdote from the beginning. As I said, the first commencement took place -- the first commencement of baccalaureate degrees -- took place in the spring of 1956, my first year there. The whole ceremony was held on the porch of what’s now Rollins Hall. And there was enough space there for the students, the graduating students, and the faculty. And the faculty procession in the--one of the traditional ways was led by the most junior person. And of course then Lewis Webb came up at the end as the most senior, so it was… So I as the new faculty member was in the first row, of the first two people to be marching in. Well I’m quite nearsighted. [Laughs] I really hadn’t been--of course had never been in any kind rehearsal or anything. We really didn’t know what we were doing and so I started to lead the column in the wrong direction. [Laughter] And the person behind me, and I think it may have been Virginia Bagley in biology, but I’m not sure. The person behind me grabbed my hood and turned me around so that I was going in the right direction. And that’s how I began my career as a rogue faculty member at this institution.

Vaughan: Oh, goodness. Okay, yeah, so let’s--we’re going to move on to the ‘60s. Tell me about what changes took place in the English department in the ‘60s.

Burgess: Well, almost from the beginning of the ‘60s we began to… we began to improve our hiring policies and actually began to look for qualified people. And we… we made a number of hires: of course, Ernie Rhodes came first -- he and Carolyn were not married at the time; then Carolyn Meyers, as she was then, and Jean Halladay joined the faculty; and Leland Peterson of course; and Jim McNally. And we began to get sort of a two-tiered faculty. There were the people who had been here earlier who were mostly the community college orientation. And there were these other people who were not necessarily the world’s greatest scholars, but they were definitely people who had ambitions for an institution – a strong academic institution – and had the background in order to bring it about. I was kind of in the middle. I was still an ABD but my heart was all with the new people. Then, and I don’t remember the year, I hope you can find it somewhere… then there arrived Ed Stephenson as chair. How Vernon Peele ever appointed him, I don’t know because they were obviously at loggerheads almost from the beginning. Ed was a linguist - actually we called him Steve - was a linguist. He was a linguist with some international repu---of some national reputation. He was one of the editors of the journal American Speech. And he came here very much with the idea of building a department that would be something that he could be proud of and that the institution could be proud of. He did some of this good hiring that I talked about. He raised the standard of what he expected of faculty. He definitely, and again not always to Vernon Peele’s joy, favored the new people when it came to salary and promotion and things like that and load. And he also told me that I wasn’t going to be of any use to him unless I went and finished my degree. And I did. [Laughter] In ’63, after rather intense periods of work and getting my sister to type my dissertation, because I wasn’t married at the time, and always that’s what a wife does.  According to past times, and the… and immediately I became very much involved with this whole process of turning this into a department that was a real, honest-to-god English department. We developed new courses. We did some active hiring, and we encouraged research. We developed a system of really beginning to check on how well our students were writing in the freshmen writing courses, and I spent one year as director of composition in that process. It was an awful job, but part of my job was to try to make sure that everybody was in fact teaching composition in a good way. And of course when the opportunity arose to establish a graduate program I was involved with him in that process. And I know that’s one of your later questions, but…. and the department really went through a major change at that point. That is the point really at which the department stopped being a quiet little place.

Vaughan: Uh-huh. So you were already… you were offering bachelor’s degrees by this time.

Burgess: We were offering bachelor’s degrees by this time, but… and we had again a mixed bag of students – some extremely good, some sort of funny… We had regular department meetings. We worked on the curriculum. We worked on all of the things that we should have been working on before. And of course I was delighted by all of this.

Vaughan: Uh-huh. Well now, the other question that I have is you… when you first came to the Norfolk Division, you thought you’d stay two years and get a real job, you said. Now this is more than five years later. What kept you?

Burgess: Well, I’m not quite sure. I think it was partially the fact that I kept thinking well I’ve got to finish my degree before I leave. And I also became – this we can talk about later – I became involved in a number of community activities and I began to get more and more involved with the community. And then with Stephenson and the changes in the department, I really began to think that maybe there’s something that can be--something exciting that can be built here. And it was this… working with him was kind of a preface to my later working with Jim Bugg in the process of building a university.

Vaughan: Right. So then by 1965 you became Graduate Program Director, so do you want to talk about how the graduate degrees evolved?

Burgess: Yeah. Actually, actually my involvement with it started earlier than that – probably around late… mid ’64 – when Steve appointed me as a person who would be drafting the degree proposal. So working with the new faculty in the department, and again there was a hierarchy and actually, potentially a pretty divisive split. Working with the new faculty in the department and with Steve, we developed what we thought was an extremely strong, credible master’s program – emphasis on literature, of course, almost entirely, very restrictive. In fact, we included something that lasted until the early ‘70s when finally it became too difficult to do anymore.  We included an extensive written exam as a requirement for the master’s, in addition to a thesis, and course work, so it was a very rigorous program when it first went in. Then in… then it was in ’64… it was in ’64 that the first graduate programs at ODU were approved. There were two in humanities – English and History – and then elementary education, and business administration.

Vaughan: And this was all in ’64? Those were the first graduate degrees?

Burgess: It was a package, yeah. And those were the first graduate degrees and they were approved by the--somewhat to the disgust of a number of other institutions in the state, they were approved by State Council and we began to become a graduate offering institution. In fact, at that point there were some people who at that point thought we should change our name to university, but Lewis resisted that and a lot of the faculty resisted it too as a matter of fact. So it, from that point the excitement became the graduate program. And it’s very similar to what I said about the art department. We attracted to the program some people in the community who had wanted to have graduate work in English and who were highly qualified. Of course, the main example I would give is Crow Tunstall – Caroline Tunstall – who was probably one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, and she could--she had read everything. She was capable of analyzing everything. I mean she was a--she was a brilliant person.

Vaughan: And did she get her degree?

Burgess: And she, oh she got her degree and she ended up teaching for us a little bit later on, but she was… she was the best example, but there were other examples at the time. Among them, I would put Margaret Simmons. She was a…. she was the wife of the chair of the history department at Norfolk State who had a Ph.D. from Duke. And she was--she was herself--I can’t remember where she got her degree, but she was herself a very well educated person. She was a good… there wasn’t any question of her qualifications.

Vaughan: She was a graduate student then?

Burgess: To come in as a graduate student, yes.

Vaughan: And she was the first African American?

Burgess: She was the first African American to get any kind of degree from the institution.

Vaughan: Was she the first African American admitted or?

Burgess: I can’t say.

Vaughan: Yeah, maybe not.

Burgess: I don’t know that. I don’t know that.

Vaughan: Okay and that was in--when did she get her degree? In the late ‘60s then?

Burgess: Yeah, in… no… in the mid ‘60s – ’64. She got a degree almost immediately.

Vaughan: Right. Well, let’s talk about that being a major issue in the ‘60s – racial desegregation happening in the public schools in ’58, ’59, and then at ODU. Do you want to talk about what the atmosphere was on campus?

Burgess: I was not here in ’58, ’59, because that was the year that I was on leave working on my… not completely successfully working on my dissertation. But the situation at ODU was, was… I don’t know quite how to describe it. At first, in the early years I was here, I don’t think anybody thought about it. I mean all higher education in Virginia was segregated. It was just “God’s way.” And the sense that something needed to be… that we needed to become an open institution was not really there, but then pressure began to develop… I did not know until many years later and of course now it’s well documented, that Lewis Webb was in fact turning away African American students and telling them we’ve got another institution across the city there that you can go to. I found that out from an African American friend later, that he had been one of the ones who had been turned away by Lewis in person. Gradually, as we became more and more sensitive to the situation nationally, the faculty, particularly the humanities faculty and the people in the history department, sort of took the lead on a lot of this, began to agitate and find ways to try to gain… get some African American students involved in the university.

Vaughan: Was part of that Webb’s response? Was that because William and Mary was segregated?

Burgess: At first he was acting under the direct instructions of Alvin Duke Chandler at William and Mary. And he simply was told that he could not. And then later after we separated, which is something I’ll come to a little bit later, later after we separated he was still concerned with community pressure and legislative pressure and partially from supporters of Norfolk State who were afraid that we would drain away the top level African American students from them. It… there was even an agreement – a no raiding agreement on faculty. When it became, you know, something that we would… many departments and Lewis himself I think wanted to see us get some black faculty, but we did have an agreement with Lyman Brooks that we would not raid faculty away from Norfolk State. And the only way we got A.B. Jackson was by some… some subterfuge I can’t tell you right now because I don’t know. But I think that somehow or other he was officially certified as having resigned from Norfolk State and therefore it was okay for us to hire him. But many of us were involved in activities and in groups that were promoting more understanding between the institutions and between the races. I can remember going to little meetings at people’s houses. I remember once being at a house where various people who had just been involved with the Freedom Riders down in Mississippi and Alabama were there and they were sort of the heroes of the group. And they were there talking about their experiences. And I went away feeling, you know, feeling that somehow or other I was not really doing the right thing. I was not really a good person, because I’d never been in jail. [Laughter]

Vaughan: Never been arrested.

Burgess: Never been arrested. Mississippi. So a lot of faculty members were involved in activities of different kinds. And I think again some of the usual suspects in the history department like Will Frank and others got under criticism because they had invited African Americans to their… to gatherings in their yard and things like that. But I can’t tell you what was going on in terms of student admission. I just don’t know.

Vaughan: That’s okay. So I mean there was lots more going on in the ‘60s, and do you remember things specifically on campus about protests or any unrest?

Burgess: Oh, other things going on, yes I do. [Laughter] Of course, these have been pretty well… pretty well documented. I know Sonia has a lot of material on this already. But one of the Students for Democratic Society, which was really about ten to twenty people on campus, was agitating in the mid-‘60s… ’67 is the date I have down here where they published a publication with a poem by e.e.cummings in it – “I sing of Olaf” which had some basic Anglo-Saxon words in it. In fact, the concluding line was “I will not kiss your fucking flag.”  And this was not taken easily by Lewis or much of the establishment around the city, and he was told, “You gotta do something about these people. You can’t have this kind of thing going on on your campus.”  And so the students who were involved with putting this publication out were suspended or were accused of something or other and about to be suspended. And actually there was a trial held between… a student judicial trial with lots of faculty and students and other people in the room and I can’t remember where exactly, but it was a fairly large room. And I was one of the people who testified.  I had a really terrible role. I had to testify that e.e.cummings really was a poet [laughter] and that this was a poem… and was in fact a poem that was in a number of the anthologies that were in the library. And they managed somehow or other to kick this down the road and then nothing definitely happened. Among one of the students, of course, as you know it’s in one of those things recorded, was Robert McCollough who later became a faculty member in the art department.

Vaughan: And David Johnson I believe?

Burgess: Was David in that too? I couldn’t remember.

Vaughan: I think I remember hearing that.

Burgess: I wouldn’t be surprised. Again, the people that Charles hired were not people who lived the standard bourgeois life, generally.

Vaughan: Right, right.

Burgess: And then of course the other big incident… the other big incident was “The Gadfly” incident, which I was closer to, because “The Gadfly” was the student literary magazine in the English department. Leland Peterson was the advisor. And they published a sacrilegious article, essentially attacking… immaculate deception was the title of it, attacking the virgin birth, saying rather nasty things about Mary. And word of it got to Governor Godwin who essentially, apparently got to Lewis Webb on this subject. And he was in his last year as president. And Lewis definitely got involved and cancelled a salary increment that Leland was supposed to get and essentially threatened that he might be separated from the university. And so this created a big stir. And at one point there were several different groups investigating it and several recommendations coming from the AAUP and elsewhere. And at one point I was chair of the committee to look into the charges. And not surprisingly the result of that committee was that the salary increment should be restored and that we did not find anything untoward and this was a matter of freedom of speech.

Vaughan:  Were you appointed to that?

Burgess: I was appointed to it, but I don’t know by whom however, but it was not… I think maybe by, maybe by the administration. I’m not sure, but it was an official group. And I have--I’m going to give it to Sonia as a matter of fact.  I have some correspondence concerning that in my files.

Vaughan: Okay. And so they agreed with your… or they abided by your recommendation?

Burgess: Ultimately yes. The board did. The board overrode Lewis on that. Frank Batten was rector by that time. And Frank of course was always a major supporter of freedom of speech, so it’s not too unexpected. Now the library wasn’t innocent in all of this, you realize.

Vaughan: Okay. Tell me.

Burgess: They… the library was censoring and there were certain books and journals that were not made available to the students or to the public. I remember a journal called the Evergreen Review, for example, which was this kind of radical journal of the time. And that was… you had to have special permission and go to the reference desk and show your special permission in order to be able to look at it. And I think Ben Clymer loved that.

Vaughan: Yeah. This was mid ‘60s? Late ‘60s?

Burgess: This was mid to late ‘60s. So you’re not going to get away from this!

Vaughan: No. I guess not. I wasn’t here. Okay.

Burgess: You weren’t here. You weren’t here. [Laughter]

Vaughan: Any--anything else? Any other interesting events?

Burgess: In the ‘60s?

Vaughan: Yeah.

Burgess: Well obviously in ’62 -- we’re going all the way back to ’62 -- the break with William and Mary was an interesting one and you’ll find as we get later into this I’ve got various things to say about Lewis Webb in different ways. In a sense, this was his finest hour because he really… he knew he had community support. He had built it carefully though, I mean he had his community board and all the power structure of Norfolk behind this. He had built it up. But he insisted that we were going to become an independent institution. And I remember Lewis saying at one point that Alvin Duke Chandler who was the president of William and Mary had said to him, “Well I don’t know what’s going to happen Lewis, but there’s going to be a separation next year one way or another” [Laughter] meaning obviously that if they stayed in William and Mary Lewis would be fired. He stood up to them. Sometime in the ‘60s, and I’m not quite sure, sometime in the early ‘60s, the university discovered tenure. Up until that point, nobody had tenure. Somewhere in the early ‘60s we got letters from Lewis Webb saying, “Oh, by the way, you’ve got tenure.”

Vaughan: So, no process.

Burgess: No process. Nothing.

Vaughan: You just had it because you worked here.

Burgess: Because we’d worked here long enough. And in 1965, the Faculty Senate was established and this was something that I became very much involved with, and this was a big deal. In ’66, the College of Arts and Sciences was split between the College of Arts and the College of Sciences. Again, it was kind of a slap in the face to Vernon Peele because Vernon really didn’t have any background in sciences and the science faculty as they began to develop was saying, “We’ve got to have somebody who understands this.” So they brought in Mel Pittman from William and Mary.

Vaughan: As the Dean of Sciences?

Burgess: As the Dean of Sciences, yeah.

Vaughan: And Vernon Peele stayed… ?

Burgess: Stayed as the Dean of Arts and Letters, yeah. I have a lot to say about John Johnson who came in 1964, but we may have run out of time for today.

Vaughan: Yeah.

End of Part I of Interview -- Part 2