Dickie Tayloe

GEORGE GILLIAM:     [00:00:00] Okay.  My name is George Gilliam, and I’m here with Dickie Tayloe to have a discussion.  We will be assisted by Phyllis Leffler and Annie Valentine.  Now, Dickie, can you tell me your date of birth?  I’m going to start with the hard questions.

DICKIE TAYLOE: [00:00:25] Date of birth, May 21st, 1942.

GG:  [00:00:34] That’s the same year I was born.

DT:  [00:00:34] Yeah, we’re about the same age.

GG:  [00:00:36] Yeah.

DT:  [00:00:37] Am I older?

GG:  [00:00:40] You’re older by month.  I’m July 26th.

DT:  [00:00:44] It was a good year.

GG:  [00:00:45] Yeah.

DT:  [00:00:46] War babies.

GG:  [00:00:48] Where were you born?

DT:  [00:00:49] Norfolk, Virginia.

GG:  [00:00:56] And what did your parents do?

DT:  [00:00:58] My father was in the Navy [00:01:00] when I was born, and my mother was a homemaker.  I think she did voluntary things, everybody did during the war.  I don’t remember anything in particular.

GG:  [00:01:17] As best you can remember, what were your parents’ attitudes on race?

DT:  [00:01:28] At that time, I don’t really have any recollection.  I think they were fine.  I know my father later was assistant director of the first housing authority in the country.  So he was involved with a lot of the Black community during those years, and got along well.  And, of course, in that day and time, [00:02:00] all the people that would work for you as nannies and housekeepers and everything were Black.  And we always thought a lot of the people we had working with us and took care of them.  They would go to our doctors.

GG:  [00:02:23] Did you commonly hear the N word used?

DT:  [00:02:27] Yeah, I heard used, but not -- it wasn’t all the time, but I heard it used.  And Norfolk was a big, rough city.  And it was a Navy town.  And the reason the housing authority got started there was it needed to be cleaned up after the war.  It was a lotta bars and all kinds of sin and corruption, so to speak, type thing.  And so the housing authority was the first one in the country.  I remember going up as a child on the [00:03:00] steamer that went from Norfolk to Washington to Baltimore.  My father would have to go up and testify before Congress about what they were doing.  And my uncle happened to be the city attorney, but he was a maritime lawyer.  And so he had to go to Philadelphia to see the utmost lawyer that knew city codes and what cities and municipalities could do.  And guess what his name was?

GG:  [00:03:35] So when you were --

DT:  [00:03:35] John Mitchell. (laughs)

GG:  [00:03:39] When you were first born, …your family was living in Norfolk.  When did you move away from Norfolk?

DT:  [00:03:49] We moved here in -- I think it was ’56.  My grandfather died.  My grandfather lived here in Charlottesville and had a farm outside Charlottesville.  [00:04:00] And he passed away.  And my father was his only child.  He had two stepchildren.

[Extraneous material redacted.]

GG:  [00:06:49] So let me shift back to sort of opening questions.  Where did your family worship?  And did they worship regularly?

DT:  [00:07:00] We were Episcopalians.  We were members of Christ Church in Norfolk, which was a bishop’s church and all the Acolytes wore red.  I grew up in that.  It was very military.  In fact, the Sexton was a Black Marine gunny, and he shaped up.  He said, “If that candle goes out, young man, I’m going to have your butt.”  (laughs) You know, we were carrying candles up there.  I don’t know, whatever.  You had to square the corners.  And so it was quiet with incense and everything was in Latin.  It was what they call the high Episcopal church.  I don’t think that exists much anymore.

GG:  [00:07:38] Were your parent’s activists in any respect?

DT:  [00:07:40] No. No. My father was in naval intelligence during the war and worked for Alexander Sands, the lawyer in Richmond who became a judge.  He was a part-time judge that had gone on to the Naval Academy, and a group was put together [00:08:00] because all these submarines was sinking the ships right off, the minute they left Virginia Beach.  Boom.  And Paul Saunier was in that group, Edgar Shannon.  My father always said I was the dumbbell of the group, but my father had been Merchant Marine for 10 years.  And that was how he was recruited into the group.  And he knew different ships from different countries and that sort of thing.  So there was no -- I mean, he applied for a job and was going to work for the OSS after the war, sort of like what you and I were talking about a minute ago.  It was tough to find a job, right?  Everybody getting out of the service.  And there weren’t that many jobs and getting back to a peacetime economy and what have you.

GG:  [00:08:50] Let’s talk about schools.  Can you sort of run through where you started schools and sort of what your progression of schools [00:09:00] was?

DT:  [00:09:02] Here in Charlottesville or back to --

GG:  [00:09:04] Well, forever.

DT:  [00:09:06] I went to Taylor Elementary School in Norfolk, which was in the West Kent section, where I grew up, and then went to Norfolk Academy, where my grandfather had gone, which is probably one of the oldest day schools in the country.  I think it was founded in 1790 something or whatever.  And then when we moved, we moved at a time in the year it was too late to enroll or get started or something at Blaine.  And I ended up going to boarding school at Episcopal High School in Alexandria for a year.

GG:  [00:09:49] And when did you -- what stage of the --

DT:  [00:09:50] And that was 1957 that I went, but my grandfather died in ’56.  And I was telling you about coming up in ’56, [00:10:00] sometime in the winter, and being invited to go to a Burley football game, which was an unbelievable highlight.  I mean, I’d never seen anything like that.  That was just unbelievable.

GG:  [00:10:19] So you graduated from high school in 1960 --

DT:  [00:10:22] Well, actually, I went to Episcopal.  I did not do well.  I repeated a year.  So I came back to Lane and repeated the ninth grade and then Lane closed with the massive resistance the next year.  I think there were only two counties in the state.  I can’t remember.  Prince Edward County closed.  And then the two schools in Charlottesville were Venable Elementary School because that’s where all the university professors’ kids all went, and Lane, which, of course, was the only high school.  [00:11:00] Burley stayed open.  And Burley was a brand-new school and had a great reputation.  The football team was unscored on and undefeated and unscored on.  I mean, that’s unbelievable to me.  And I know that whole team got to go out to Cooperstown or whatever.  I can’t remember which one’s the football thing.  Canton.  Cooperstown is baseball.  But I remember the fellow, I can’t think of his name, but he was the manager of the post office downtown.  Can you think of who that is?  Big guy?  His knees were all busted up.  He kind of walked with a gait, but he was the manager of the post office for years downtown, one on the Mall.  And he told me about they we’re taking this trip out to Canton.  I think Roosevelt Brown set it up before he died, and he had died [00:12:00] before they actually went on the trip. 

LORENZO DICKERSON:  [00:12:04] George Ferguson?  Could that have been it?

DT:  [00:12:07] Yeah, I think it was George Ferguson.  Yeah.

GG:  [00:12:13] I’ve got a hole here in the chronology.  I’ve got you at Episcopal ’57-’58, one year, then you went to Lane at that point.

DT:  [00:12:27] Then I went to Lane, and I got a year in at Lane.  And then the schools closed for that next year.  So not only was I one year behind, I ended up being two years behind just about by the end of that.  Well, although, we went to school.  Now, the Black school was open.  I mean, Burley stayed open.  And Lane played a couple of football games, I think, [00:13:00] and then didn’t play because I remember [Ralph Maine, Senior?].  I think they had a game and then they didn’t.  Since the school was closed, everything kind of disintegrated.  And half the kids ended up going over to Rock Hill Academy.  Some people went to Waynesboro, some went to Richmond.

PHYLLIS LEFFLER:  [00:13:25] What did you do when the schools closed?

DT:  [00:13:26] Well, my dad said, “Look.”  I said, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t go down to Christ Church.”  One of the [Vest?] boys was there.  He said, “You can come down here.  We’ll have a good time down here.”  And my father said, “Look, after Episcopal, you’re not going away.  You’re going to stay here and go to Lane.”  And so he felt strongly that I should be there.

GG:  [00:13:47] So what year did you formally graduate from --

DT:  [00:13:51] Sixty-two.

GG:  [00:13:52] Sixty-two.

DT:  [00:13:53] But the last year, I was in what they call -- I was telling Amy about it -- distributive education, DE.  I don’t know whether y’all remember that.  [00:14:00] Lorenzo may remember.  Where you took one or two courses, and then you worked the rest of the day.  And what happened with me is some of the biology when the schools were closed, we’d go to different churches for -- you know, you go to one of the churches for History and the other one for English and whatever.  And we went to McIntire for -- I can’t remember, which was, of course, a library.  It may have been History, which would have made sense being in the library for that.  But I know we went to the Greek Church, which was brand new at that time, because they had the best kitchen.  They had a huge kitchen.  You remember they used to do those things every year, make all the stuff, and sell it.  They still do that bazaar or whatever, I think, so that’s where Science was and you had the --

GG:  [00:14:54] Did you have a question you wanted to jump in on this?

PL:  [00:15:00] You said in ’56 you went to this football game at Burley, and it was fantastic.  So could you explain that a little bit more?  What was it about --?

DT:  [00:15:10] Well, I mean, the place was packed.  It must have been -- and the field was tiered, and they were wooden bleachers at the different tier levels.  And there were lines of people all the way around, and the band was unbelievably fantastic.  And the cheerleaders and flag wavers and everything else -- of course, I was like 14-15 years old.  And my father’s friend, who actually closed on the house, George Coles, who George knows. You all would remember him who was a judge here for a number of years, grew up out in the county, and played football, and played football at UVA.  He was a great, great football player.  So he called my [00:16:00] father when we were up here doing some business or something, we were here.  He said, “Look, you need to come down and watch this.  This is the biggest thing in town is watching Burley High School play football.”  And Roosevelt Brown was on that team at that time. A.P. Moore was one of the assistant coaches.  I don’t know whether you remember him, but a great guy, wonderful guy.  And so we went down to the 50-yard line to get good seats.  And the usher came down and said, “You all can’t sit here,” to the judge, said, “Judge Coles, you can’t -- he was a substitute judge.  He wasn’t a -- [Lit Waddell?] was the only full-time circuit judge at that time.  And he said, “You can’t sit here.”  The whites only section is down on the 10.  Of course, I was oblivious to all that, but I remember he started laughing and my father laughed.  And so we got ushered down.  [00:17:00] They took us down to the 10-yard line.  And there were all these people from Charlottesville that George Coles knew and my father knew some of them.  And Butch Slaughter, who was the athletic director at UVA, was there.  [Carl Dean?].  It was just all the luminaries, the mayor, Scribner.  Louis Scribner may have been in.  I think he may have been mayor at the time, but the whole Charlottesville crowd whites were down packed into this 10-yard line area and behind it and around it.

PL:  [00:17:33] So it wasn’t unusual for white families to go over --?

DT:  [00:17:35] Oh, no.  I mean, everybody was down there.  Everybody knew everybody too.  I could be down on Anderson Street, where the lady that worked for us lived, Catherine Ward was her name, and she was a Spears.  And the Spears is a very old Black family in this town, and they all grew up on Bernard Chamberlain’s family’s farm.  [00:18:00] And he did taxes for all of them for years, no charge.  But she was a Spears.  And her grandson is a guy named Mike Mallory.  I don’t know whether you all know Mike Mallory, runs the Ron Brown Foundation.

PL:  [00:18:18] I’m over there immediately after this interview.  Mike is one of my very good --

DT:  [00:18:23] Well, Mike will remember me.  His grandmother worked for my mother and father, and she raised me.  I said, “We’ve got the same grandmother.”  Because she used to keep me straight when my parents would be gone.  They went to Florida for two weeks.  She lived here with us during the week and had a little stone house on Anderson Street.  And I learned a lot from her.  She was quite a gal.  And she’s Mike’s grandma or great grandmother, I’m not sure.  Mike will know.

GG:  [00:19:00] When did you first experience having Black students in a class that you were taking?

DT:  [00:19:06] I never had them.  And, by the time I left, I should have graduated in 1965, if I’d have been age wise.  In fact, in the yearbook or the newspaper, went to the 50th high school reunion, and the thing said, “Dickie Tayloe will be the only one in our class who can vote.” (laughs) But, yeah, I had to take one course because the courses in biology or whatever weren’t certified.  And Mr. Nichols was headmaster.  He was sort of bald, red hair.  And they called him Curly Bill because he’d have two or three hairs sticking out of his head.  But Lane was a wonderful school, but it was falling down compared to Burley.  Lane was built way back in the ’30s.  [00:20:00] Burley was finished, I think, in ’51 or ’52.  And it went till about ’60 -- I think the school closed out ’67-’68.  Garwin DeBerry and that group would have been the last.  But, up until that time, I guess, it was the next year ’60 when the schools reopened. 

 

The only thing I can really remember about it is it was a big deal.  And all these reporters from all over the country came here.  And Roger Mudd was here.  And I remember him distinctly.  He was covering it for CBS News.  And Eugene Williams and his wife brought his daughter, and I don’t know whether it was the oldest daughter or not, to school.  Poor little girl was by herself, here she’s coming to Lane.  And he was head of the NAACP.  [00:21:00] And Eugene knew me because I’ve worked for the newspaper, and I used to deliver the papers, take them all to all the newsboys.  So he knew me when I took them over where he was.  And he brought the little girl to school.  And nobody -- it was sad.  Everybody went, “Gosh, I’d hate to be her.”  It’s just terrible.  Everybody was nice.  The kids didn’t -- it wasn’t that big of a deal.  Nobody really understood.  It was a political --

GG:  [00:21:35] Nobody spit on anybody?    

DT:  [00:21:35] The kids at Burley that I knew, they didn’t want to come to the Lane.  They said, “We’ve got a lot better high school and a lot better football team, better band, better teachers, better everything.”  And you couldn’t really argue with that.  The school was brand new just about and Lane -- and when you’ve got a football team that wins all the games [00:22:00] and everything else, you can’t really argue about it.  (laughs)

GG:  [00:22:04] You mentioned that there was press coverage?  Roger Mudd?

DT:  [00:22:10] Oh, yeah.  And the only incident, there’s a fellow named Donnie Stribling and I that ran track for Tommy Theodose.  We ran the half mile.  We were both terrible, but we tried.  But it’s a tough race.  But a reporter from the New York Times came up and saw us.  And we were both taller, and standing there, and older, and we’re leaning up against the railing there on the front steps.  And he said, “What’s your mascot?  What do y’all call -- and we said, “Black knights.  Black Knights.”  He went, “I don’t believe it.  You’re pulling my leg.”  And I said, “No.”  And he was scribbling down.  He said, “I got to get to a payphone.  Nobody’s going to believe this.”  I said, “Yeah, there’s a Black Knight Club right across the street.  And I guess it was next to Coggins Motor Company or whatever.  [00:23:00] But it was a little thing where people went after school and got a coke or something.  It was called the Black Knight Club.  And he went berserk.  He was just scribbling all kinds of notes.  And Donnie and I turned around, and he said, “What’s the big deal?”  He doesn’t believe it.  He thinks this is some kind of -- we’re pulling his leg, like it’s a prank.

GG:  [00:23:24] Did it ever make the news column?

DT:  [00:23:27] I guess it made the New York Times.  I know Life Magazine, I think, had some time at oracle and showed the Black Knight, the little bar in there with the Cokes, and the [lemon?], whatever they did.  And the two girls that were there were the [Barrett?] sisters, [Lil?] and Beth Barrett.  And I don’t know whether that name rings a bell.  Beth Barrett used to be the greeter down at Sloan’s, whatever the restaurant was after Sloan.  Lil married Roger [Vanlieu?].  Lil Barrett, she passed away years ago.

PL:  [00:24:00] Do you have any knowledge of why the team was called the Black Knights?

DT:  [00:24:09] It’s just what it was.

PL:  [00:24:11] And it still is, right?

DT:  [00:24:12] Still is.  Well, Burley was the Burley Bears as I remember.  And I don’t know the gals name has just written a book.  I think the Historical Society is going to have a thing about Burley and the tradition.  And I know -- well, you know, the football coach at Lane -- my first year at Lane was Tommy Theodose’s first year as a teacher and Dave Cook, who was the basketball coach.  And I played basketball for a short period.  I got cut my junior year.  He said, “I got to go with younger people, Dickie.  You’re not (laughter) -- I remember going to a wedding.  And he said, “Pass the salt.” And I knocked it over.  [00:25:00] He said, “You still can’t go to your left.”  (laughter) Now, David only coached for two years.  And I was getting football tickets for a group.  And I called the ticket office.  And Ms. Goodman answered the phone.  Bob Goodman was the equipment manager for UVA, but Lane used to get all the hand-me-downs, the jerseys and things, because UVA would only use them for a year.  So Lane would get all this stuff because the athletic director, Willie Barnett, has been at UVA and was a great boxer when he was there.  So she knew who I was.  She said, “Who is it?  This is Dickie Tayloe?”  And I said, “Yes, ma’am.”  And she said, “You’re the one on that team that won two games and lost 18.  I remember that.”  She said, “You come over here in person.  I want you to meet...”  And she said, “You don’t want eight tickets in a line.  You want four in one row and four behind, so you can talk to each other.”  I said, “Yeah, that makes sense.”  [00:26:00] She said, “Yeah, you know, you still (inaudible).”  (laughter) So I went over there to see her, but she said, “I used to go to those games.”  Doctor Strider was the team doctor at the time because you didn’t have a trainer in those days.  And Dr. Strider used to be on the bench like Joe May was at UVA.  He would come to all -- he started the rescue squad here, he and a group. 

GG:  [00:26:32] So you never had Blacks in class?

DT:  [00:26:34] Never had them.  It was only the young girl in school, and she started as a freshman or something.  And, of course, I was a junior or a senior then, and nobody else came the next year.  And Burley was still open.  And I wouldn’t have come if I’d have been at Burley.  Why would -- everything’s better.  You got a better team.  You got better everything.  And I remember the football -- [00:27:00] I felt bad.  The football coach, of course, Tommy [Theodose] got the job.  And the football coach when they closed Burley -- and I don’t know how that -- I think it was ’67 or ’68.  I was gone.  I was in the military then.  But A.P. Moore was one of the coaches that I knew fairly well, and he ended up at Albemarle teaching Driver’s Ed.  And I knew him from somewhere.  And he came in to get a loan at Virginia National Bank years later, which this is sort of introspective in a sense, I had just come back here, and I was working at the bank after that.  I mean, I’d been back here, but I was working for Thomson McKinnon and then went to open an office for [wheat?], that’s another story, and then came back here, couldn’t sell my house.  I was with [wheat?] down in the Northern Neck.  [00:28:00] But A.P. didn’t know anybody.  He saw me.  And he said, “I need to borrow some money.”  And I said, “I’m in the trust department, but let me help you out A.P.  I’ll get you over with somebody.”  And so I sat down and chatted with him.  He said, “I ended up being the driver’s ed teacher.  I wanted to coach football, but it just didn’t work out that way.”  And he said, “You know, we had a great school, and that was all destroyed with this integration thing.”  He said, “I’m not sure that’s good, the culture and the discipline and all that.”  He said --

GG:  [00:28:36] We’ve heard that from several people.

DT:  [00:28:37] -- that was all taken away.  I mean, he’s telling me this.  And he said, “You remember that.  You remember it being these things.  And I remember you delivered the papers when you were -- so, yeah, I thought it was sort of sad in a way.

GG:  [00:28:57] Do you remember which basement schools you attended?  [00:29:00] When the schools were -- when Lane was closed?

DT:  [00:29:07] Well, I just went to churches, all of them right close downtown.  Everything was downtown.  We went to Christ Church for something, and then the Methodist Church next door, and then Historical Society.  And then we went to the Greek Church, which, of course, was right across from Lane’s football field.  And its baseball field is still there across from the Greek Church for Science.  So all of it you could walk to any of the -- there’s no bus system.  And you either rode with a group of people -- and I’d get -- we had two cars.  Most families only had one, but we had two at that time because my father was doing some traveling and consulting thing for housing authorities.  [00:30:00] So I would get car one day a week and drive.  And George Fitzhugh, and I’d pick up Ven Minor, Ven Minor was back in school here and [Armster Browning?].  And we’d all carpool together and ride to school or go to the churches or whatever.  So it was just one high school in the county.  And when Lane was open, there would only be one summer school open each year.  It’d be at Lane one year.  It’d be at Albemarle one year.  And being the great student that was, I was in summer school every summer.  So I got to know all the teachers at Albemarle as well.  Ms. Birkhead, people like that.

GG:  [00:30:57] Phyllis, do you have additional questions?

PL:  [00:31:00] Sure.  I guess I’d like to just ask you whether you have any awareness, it sounds like you don’t have much, but when Burley closed -- we know that when Burley was open, there were a lot of Black students who didn’t want to come over.  When Burley closed, they had no choice.

DT:  [00:31:31] They had no choice, yeah.  Of course, I wasn’t here.

PL:  [00:31:34] You weren’t here.  So you had graduated?

DT:  [00:31:36] I had left.

PL:  [00:31:39] What do you remember about life in Charlottesville growing up during high school in terms of buses, public buses, restaurants, water fountains, you know, things like that?  Do you remember?

DT:  [00:31:54] The only thing I remember, Charlottesville was really small compared to [00:32:00] -- everybody knew everybody.  If I got in trouble, somewhere in the Black community, whoever was down there, whether it was Mr. [Trusco?], who had Trusco’s Store there on -- I don’t know whether it’s Page or whatever.  I can think of the street name, one down from Anderson.  They called my father and tell him.  Everybody knew who everybody was.  And everybody looked out for everybody. 

PL:  [00:32:28] Both folks within the Black and white [community?]?

DT:  [00:32:30] Yeah.  Oh, yeah.  The Spears family all knew me because their aunt or their grandmother or mother worked for our family.  So they knew who -- word of mouth.  Everybody knew --

PL:  [00:32:42] We’ve heard stories from African Americans that they, for example, wouldn’t go into Belmont.  And we’ve heard stories from white people who said, they were kind of ensconced in their own neighborhoods, [00:33:00] and they never went into the Black neighborhoods.  You’re telling us --

DT:  [00:33:03] No, that must be later.  Not when I was --

PL:  [00:33:07] So why would you have been in the Black community?

DT:  [00:33:10] I was there all the time because I was --

PL:  [00:33:11] Oh, because you were delivering newspapers.

DT:  [00:33:12] I was delivering the papers to the Black paperboys.  At that time, everybody had paperboys.  And so I’d deliver the papers.  And if it was a Black merchant there that he’d run an ad, I would know about it.  Take him the paper first.  Hand deliver it to him, and see if he liked the ad or he wanted anything changed when we ran the paper the next day.  That was part of my job.  I’d do that for White and Black.  So J.F. Bell’s Funeral Home, I knew Mr. Bell, senior.  And he was a power in town.  You wanted to find out anything about what was going on in the Black community, you’d call Mr. Bell.  Or if something went wrong somewhere and you wanted to find out what happened, [00:34:00] Black or White, Mr. Bell was the guy you went to.  He was sort of like the mayor of the Black community, so to speak. 

PL: So was the newspaper you were delivering the Daily Progress, which was an afternoon paper at that time.  The Richmond paper had two papers during the day.  And the morning paper everybody got here, and the Progress was in the afternoon.

PL:  [00:34:25] So do you think that your experience through the delivery of these newspapers was different than many other white kids or no?

DT:  [00:34:36] Most of the kids I knew who were at Lane with me probably went in the Black community.  There was no feeling about -- you could be anywhere in Charlottesville -- I could go anywhere.  I didn’t feel afraid to go anywhere in town, day or night, [00:35:00] when I was in high school here.

PL:  [00:35:06] And you had a bunch of friends (inaudible). 

DT:  I had friends.  And they were the friends that were here at school.  Now, I had some friends who were at boarding school that weren’t here.  And, of course, they didn’t know.  But being here, and going to high school here, and walking around -- people walked a lot more than.  You didn’t have a lot of public transportation.  You didn’t have he didn’t have the buses take you to school.  You had to get there the best way you could, either your parents dropped you off on the way to work or whatever.  So you knew everybody.  You knew the merchants.  And being in the newspaper business for a year and a summer, I got to really know probably more people than the normal kid would have.

PL:  [00:36:00] Yeah, it’s interesting.  It’s a different story --

DT:  [00:36:02] Yeah, it’s a different thing, but you --

PL:  [00:36:04] -- it’s a different story than what we’ve heard from a lot of others.

DT:  [00:36:07] Well, and things change later.

PL:  [00:36:11] Why do you think they change?

DT:  [00:36:14] Not being here, I can’t --

PL:  [00:36:16] Say?  Mm-hmm.

DT:  [00:36:19] I went off to college in 1962.  The minute I graduated; I was gone.  I went down to summer school at East Carolina.  There were some friends that had gone down there and said, “Dickie, come down here and go to summer school.  If you can get in summer school, if you can pass, you’ll make it the regular year.”  I had lived -- unfortunately, the summer before I graduated after I took some summer courses, I took a couple of courses at UVA, big mistake.  I had a friend that was a little bit older than me that was in the ZETA house.  And he said, “We’re open.  You can just live over here in the ZETA house and take your classes.  [00:37:00] Well, it turned out if you didn’t have a C average at the University of Virginia, you couldn’t have a car.  It was the year 1960-’61.  So here I am in the ZETA house with all these guys that don’t have cars.  And I’m the townie, “Hey, Dickie, take us down -- we’d go to Mary Washington one night and work our way down the state, Mary Washington, Mary Baldwin, Sweetbriar, Hollins, because UVA was all male.  And you weren’t allowed to go into the nursing school area, that was off limits, supposedly. 

GG:  [00:37:35] Well, they didn’t let you have any fun.

DT:  [00:37:36] So I ended up doing that.  And in the crowd, Bobby Davis was one of the luminaries that was a quarterback on the football team, wonderful guy, but that was a mistake.  And so I dropped the -- I mean, I wasn’t in -- I was so tired by driving these guys down the road every night and hung over by the -- (laughs)

GG:  [00:38:00] So you spent four years at East Carolina?

DT:  [00:38:04] I spent four years, which was interesting.  I majored in Geography, which is unusual.  Majored in Geography, but I was an Education major.  So the three things -- you had to have an area of concentration, they called it then.  And I took Geography, History and Government, which in those days they call Civics.  They don’t teach it anymore.  These kids don’t know geography.  They don’t know where anything is.  Of course, the countries have changed so much I don’t either, so many of the countries.  But Geography was a big course.  You had to take it high school.  You probably remember.  Phyllis, you may remember.  Do they teach it now?  I don’t know.  [A course in geog--?]?

ANNIE VALENTINE:    [00:38:51] At my school, I got really lucky, they did.  I’m not sure if that’s the same story everywhere.

DT:  [00:38:56] But you took you took History, Geography, and Government.  [00:39:00] I don’t think they teach Government.  A lot of these kids don’t know which house, representatives, senate.  But, anyway, that was when I was going to be a teacher, but I took -- my geography was what I loved, and I could travel during the summer in college and take a course and go to Europe.  I took all these different -- Russian geography, Chinese geo-- all this stuff, which when I went into intelligence, oh, you’re (inaudible) this sort of stuff.

GG:  [00:39:29] So when did you go into intelligence?

DT:  [00:39:33] Well, I needed to student teach my final year, and you couldn’t student teach during the summer.  But I’d used up the four years of eligibility because I was behind and the schools had closed a year.  So the lady that ran the draft board here, bless her heart, Dorothy [Godden?] was her name, called me on the phone, left a message at the fraternity house I was in.  [00:40:00] That was the only number -- my father said, “Well, here’s the number.”  And she called and said, “Dickie, you’re at the top of the Ts.  You’re going to be the first one I call in the Ts, T-A, T-A-Y-L-O-E, you’re going to be gone.  July of ’66, you’ll be gone.  I said, “Ms. Godden, all I need to do is student teach.  Let me finish in the fall and..” -- Nope, no way.  You’re going to be gone.  So she said, “I’m giving you a heads up,” which actually looking back on it was nice.  I mean, she didn’t have to, but I knew everybody on the draft board.  What would be on the draft board then?  Carl Dean told me he used to get hate, Barry Marshall was on the draft board, Bennett Barnes, Carl Dean, and they’d get people calling them in the middle of night.  I’m going to get you -- you drafted my boy into the Army, I’m going to come after you.  He’s going to go to Vietnam, and I’m going to -- hate calls and that kind of stuff.  [00:41:00] I remember him telling me that.  I never thought about it like that, but I can see that.

PL:  [00:41:05] Did you get a postponement for the draft?

DT:  [00:41:08] No.  No.

PL:  [00:41:09] (inaudible).

DT:  [00:41:10] So she told me, she said, “You better go home, talk to your family, and see what you want to do.”  Well you couldn’t get in a reserve unit anyway.  People would panic.

GG:  [00:41:19] That’s when you got into the intelligence?

DT:  [00:41:22] Then I came home and I said, “What am I going to do, dad?”  I said, “I’ve got four years of college, no degree, so I can’t go in the Navy.”  I’ll take the flight test.  And I did pass that to go -- the Navy had a nav cad, which was like a seven-year program.  And some lieutenant commander said, “You don’t want to do that.  You’ll be an old man when you get out.”  I was thinking about it, seven years.  I said, “Wow.”  So I said something to my father, he said, “Well, I was in naval intelligence.  Why don’t you ask the Army recruiter about Army intelligence?”  [00:42:00] So I did, and the guy pulls out his big three (inaudible).  Oh, I get extra points for this.  And he looked down.  He said, “You got a valid driver’s license?  You haven’t been picked up or anything like that?”  “No, no.”  He said, “Well, it’ll take six months to do a background investigation.”  He said, “You’ll be in by that time and you’re gambling to do it.”  And I said, “Well, my father was in intelligence.  They can go back to his file.”  And so, fortunately, I got through basic training and was about to get orders to go to advanced intro to basic training and all that, and I got orders for intelligence school.  All that as it turns out, I went to intelligence school, which was in civilian clothes up at Fort Holabird, which was in Baltimore, which was all the services together, and had a picture in my mind of being [00:43:00] Richard Burton and the spy that came in from the cold, and all this, chasing blondes and drinking whiskey and all that.  And the next thing I know, I’m shipped down to Fort Bragg with Special Warfare Center and attached to Special Forces.  And three weeks later, I’m in Vietnam with Special Forces.

PL:  [00:43:23] [So if we could go?] back for a moment to when the schools closed and reopened, and you said it was a big deal.  And reporters came in from all over the country and things like that.  At that stage of life, were you aware of why it was a big deal?

DT:  [00:43:38] I knew the school -- we all knew the Massive Resistance thing.

PL:  [00:43:43] What did you know?

DT:  [00:43:44] That the governor had shut the schools down rather than integrate them and all that.  It didn’t concern us, particularly.  That’s on another level.  [00:44:00] You were thinking about other things.  It was more of a political thing.  Now, the one thing I do remember because a lot of adults or older people would talk about is when Buddy’s Restaurant closed because a lot of people used to go there for lunch.  It was sort of like going to the Nook back in the early ’80s.  The banks would close at 2:00.  And everybody would go eat lunch at two o’clock.  Ed Gate wood and all that ground, we’d all end up at a table.  John and Mary would save us a table at the back of the Nook to have lunch and about 10 to 20 people would have lunch at 2:00 in the afternoon.  And a lot of attorneys would come and be there, just businesspeople in town and what have you.  And the Nook was sort of the place.  It was funny the celebrities that would be in there.  [00:45:00] I remember John [Badri?] and our group all sitting there, and the waitress came home and said, “Sam Shepard just came in here.  He comes in here for lunch a couple times a week, left me a big tip.”  And Badri turned around and said, “Oh, that’s the guy that went up in -- an astronaut that went up with a monkey.”  And he came down and hit [you?].  And he heard, Sam Shepard heard that and started to laugh because that’s Alan Shepard that was the (inaudible).  It was just funny things like that.

PL:  [00:45:33] So is that the Nook or Buddy’s?

DT:  [00:45:36] The Nook.  Buddy’s, I remember because my father used to have lunch there one day a week with a group.  And he said, “It’s a shame they got closed because Buddy wouldn’t serve Blacks.”

PL:  [00:45:53] Isn’t it true that the owner of the restaurant closed rather than desegregate?

DT:  [00:45:57] Yeah, the owner - the patrons didn’t have any say in it.  [00:46:00] He just decided he wasn’t -- Buddy did.  I don’t think my father would have cared.

GG:  [00:46:09] That was when our colleague got into --

PL:  [00:46:11] Paul Gaston.

GG:  [00:46:12] Yeah, got into a fight.

DT:  [00:46:14] But, I mean, it was a big deal because Buddy’s was a very popular place, like the Nook or Timberlake’s Counter where everybody used to eat too, which I understand it’s back open again now.

GG:  [00:46:29] It is.

DT:  [00:46:30] I haven’t been down there.

[Extraneous material redacted]

DT:  [00:47:05] Yeah, Buddy’s, that was a big deal.  And I remember people talking about that on both sides saying, “Buddy shouldn’t have done that or Buddy should have done it.”  I don’t think my father ever really -- being with the housing authority, he was with Blacks all the time.  Of course, back in those days, you call it colored people.  You didn’t say Black.  You said colored up until I don’t know when, but I never used the term Black.  And it was colored was the --

AV:  [00:47:41] Along these same lines, how did you notice people reacting to the Brown decision?  And did you feel like things were ever separate?  And did you feel like things were ever equal in Charlottesville?

DT:  [00:47:54] I always felt with -- and I guess it’s just because of Burley, I felt things were pretty equal.  [00:48:00] I always felt Burley was a better school because the Blacks I knew there would say, “Hey, we’re a lot better than you guys.  Name where you’re better than we are?  Certainly not in sports, not in band, not in music.”  It was hard -- you just, okay, I give up.  I surrender.  You’re right.  You do have the best football team.  And they were kids, Black kids, that wanted to go to Burley from all over state.  In fact, I’m not sure they didn’t recruit from some areas.  They wouldn’t have called it that then, but I’m not sure kids came here to play for the football coach at Burley because he built a -- I mean, that team was good for years.  The whole time that Burley was open, their football team was outstanding.  They probably wasn’t as good as it was the years that I remember.  [00:49:00] I remember hearing the stat people in the stands when Burley got a first, the center would come out of the huddle and do a flip and end up right over the ball.  And they’d cheer.  And I remember one of the Black guys next to me saying, “Watch it when they come out of the huddle.”  I said, “What?  What?”  He said, “He’ll do a flip.  The center will do flip.  He’ll end up -- he’s a gymnast as well.  And then he ends up right over the ball, snaps it on a quick count or something.  It was a show.  He put on a show. 

AV:  [00:49:40] And what about at Lane games?  Did you see members of the Black community there while you were --

DT:  [00:49:46] Yeah, I think they were -- when Lane was on the streak, I remember being home one weekend when Lane was on that 53 games streak, which is still a state -- I think it’s a state high school record, even now.  [00:50:00] And I’m trying to think of what year.  This is when Gene Arnette, and Jimmy Copeland, and George Foussekis, all that crowd were playing.  So I think I was in college.  I think it was ’63 or ’64.  And I think they were -- well, I know the Black coaches were there because I recognized a couple of the Black coaches were there watching the thing, but I think there would be a number of Blacks.  Not as many Blacks would be there as they were Whites coming to the Burley games, but more and more -- as they won more and more, everybody in town wanted to be there.  But things changed.  And I don’t know when or how during the time between I left to go to college and came back after the service.  That’s when I really could see a big change in Charlottesville because I didn’t come back here during the summers.  [00:51:00] I was either in summer school or traveling in Europe in a course.  So I was really gone from ’62 until 1970. 

PL:  [00:51:14] Those were certainly important.

DT:  [00:51:15] See, and that was a long time to be away.  And when I came home, things were changed.  I came home actually in ’69 because I was still in the Army.  I got a compassionate reassignment.  I think I may have mentioned that.  I’m getting a little mixed up.  I got transferred up here.  M.C. Wilhelm, Dr. Wilhelm was my father’s surgeon, and my father had liver cancer.  And it was funny because we think looking back on it that he got it -- he was the Harbormaster at Nagasaki [00:52:00] after they dropped the bomb.  He was there a week after they dropped the bomb.  And Max Smith was there in the Marine Corps flying transports.  And he died of liver cancer years later. Tyrone Power had been my dad’s roommate on the Destroyer going to -- and he was an air transport.  And he and Max were real close friends.  Tyrone Power used to come here and stay with Max Smith.  And he died at 46 from liver cancer, supposedly.  So looking back on it, it may be from radiation.  My father was 56 when he got it.  And chemo had just been invented.  Chemo had just come out.  And he got some of the first treatments.

GG:  So you were in your early 20s. 

DT: And I was 25 or so.  M.C. Wilhelm, [00:53:00] he’d gone to VMI and had been a combat surgeon in Korea.  And he said, “I know how to write a letter.”  I said, “I’m still in the Army.  I can’t get up there.”  He said, “Well, have you talked to your father?”  I said, “No.”  I was home for a week.  But he said, “Well, he’s got six months, and I’m going to get you transferred up here.  You need to help him.”  And I got transferred to run background investigations, which was very interesting for people that were getting top secret clearances.

AV:  [00:53:32] When you were at Lane, you’re saying that it was run down?  Did you also feel that it was crowded even before (inaudible)?

DT:  [00:53:39] It wasn’t really crowded, but the facilities needed some update.  It had been built -- I think Lane was built midway -- I guess Lane was built in the ’30s, probably the mid to late ’30s.  And Burley was finished in ’51 or ’52, or something like that.  [00:54:00] So Burley was brand new school compared to Lane.

AV:  [00:54:05] Did you ever hear any talk about people thinking that it would be a bad idea to close Burley and send all of those students to Lane?

DT:  [00:54:13] Because that was before that after -- Burley was still open when I left and going strong.  And there were very few Blacks that came to Lane.  I mean, in fact, Eugene Williams probably -- since he was head of the NAACP, politically, he had to send his child who would have gone to Burley and probably wanted to go to Burley.  But since he was head of the NAACP, she had to go to Lane.  And everybody felt bad for her.  We didn’t know her or anything.  But everybody went, “God, I’d hate to be in that position.”  If I was at Burley and I was the only white guy at Burley High School, [00:55:00] even if I knew people, still be -- it was more of a -- people weren’t mad or upset or wanted to be mean, it was just kind of this is tough.  This is a tough situation looking at it from a 16 or 17-year-old perspective, looking back on it now.  And I don’t know how long she stayed.  I don’t even remember.  She was lost in the crowd, but I think everybody was nice to her.  I don’t think she sat there by herself.  I think people tried to be nice, but it was just awkward, I think, for her and for everybody.

GG:  [00:55:43] Lorenzo?

LORENZO DICKERSON:  [00:55:47] I think the only question that I had was during the time that you were away, which would have been the early ’60s till ’68-’69, that was during the time where a lot of stuff -- [00:56:00] March on Washington, and Kennedy, and --

DT:  [00:56:04] Martin Luther King.

LD:  [00:56:05] Yeah.  What was that like for you?  Did you hear about these things in real time, or did it take a while?

DT:  [00:56:11] I’ll tell you a story.  I was coming back from Vietnam in 1968.  And you could only stay a year.  You can only stay a year.  But if you didn’t have your replacement, and being in intelligence, the guy that was replacing me didn’t show up or wasn’t there, so I ended up being there. 15 months.  I went over in February of ’67 and came home in May or June and flew into San Francisco in the middle of the night and was dressed in my [00:57:00] Army greens, beret, jump boots, all the stuff.  And the first thing I heard was, “You don’t want to be in that uniform when you get off the bus to go to terminal because you’re going to be confronted.”  I said, “What?”

GG:  [00:57:20] It was not like World War II?

DT:  [00:57:21] No. It was not.  And so I said, “Well, I don’t have anything.  I got a duffel bag with some stuff.”  They said, “Well, the minute you get somewhere you can change.”  I said, “Well, I was planning on spending a couple of days here in San Francisco.”  And they went, “No. You want to get on a plane and get out of here.”  And so, to fly, you had to be in the uniform -- to get your ticket.  I didn’t have any money.  I was sending everything home.  [00:58:00] So, anyway, got on the plane, was a red eye flight, left at midnight, got into Dulles at six or seven o’clock the next morning.  And I just missed the early flight to Charlottesville.  So the people at the counter said, “Well, Sergeant Tayloe, you can take a bus into Washington and get a bus down to Charlottesville.  There’s one leaving every couple of hours at the Trailways down at the bus station.”  And so, anyway, they had a shuttle bus taking people into Washington.  So I get on the shuttle bus and we get into Washington.  And all of the sudden, you could smell smoke and everything.  And the bus guy said, “I’m not going to the bus terminal.”  Well, the bus terminal was in a tough section in Washington, so the guy says, “I’m stopping.  [00:59:00] How many people get on the bus?”  Well, there were only about four or five of us on there.  I was the only one in the middle in a uniform.  So I get off my duffel bag, and I’m walking the four to six blocks to -- and things are on fire, burning, there’s smoke and everything there.  They were having -- this was during the time when Washington was set on fire.  I didn’t know.  I mean, I’d been in Vietnam 24 hours before.  So I’m walking with my duffel bag, and this cop car comes flying across the thing and stops, blocks my street, and two Black cops get out.  And they said, “Are you crazy, man?  What are you doing walking down the street like this in your uniform?  You’re liable to get shot.”  I’m serious.  And I’m going, “What?”  They said, “Get in the back of the car.  What are you trying to do?”  I said, “I’m trying to go home to Charlottesville.  I just got back from Vietnam.”  The guy goes, “Man.”  [01:00:00] These guys couldn’t have been nicer.  They said, “We’ll go in, don’t get out of the thing.  We’ll go in the terminal, get you a ticket, and you sit here in the car, and we’ll get you a ticket.  And the bus -- you’ll ride with us for a minute.  And when the bus comes in, we’ll get you on the bus.”  They were so afraid.  The guy said, “Nothing’s going to happen to you while this is my watch.  If something happens to you, I’m in trouble.”  He said, “So it’s sort of self-preservation.  I help you; you help me.  You do what I tell you to do.”  And I said, “Sure.”  I was hung over.  I’d been on a flight, and they were giving me free drinks.  Stewardesses, you called them then.  And red eye, and I’m -- so they got me on the bus.  And that’s how bad things were in Washington then.  Now, I can’t tell you what day or anything, I don’t remember.  And I get to the bus terminal here.  [01:01:00] And the manager I’d been in high school with -- [Ashby Johnson?] managed the Trailway Station.  His wife was Terry Holland’s sister.  She was a Pleasants, Carol Pleasants, Carol Johnson, she just died here not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago.  But that was my first experience getting home.  But Charlottesville was -- everything seemed the same.  I was in my uniform.  I left my briefcase in the terminal there.  I was such in a fog and everything and got a cab home.  And then realized I didn’t have my briefcase with all my papers and everything.  And I’d left it sitting there.  And I got in the family car and drove back down.  And somebody had put it in an office they had.  That wouldn’t have happened [01:02:00] anywhere else, but I mean -- and I knew a couple of the guys who were working there.  It was a Black guy and a White guy, both of them said, “Hey, you’re back here from the Army.  Weren’t you at Lane?”  That was my first experience coming home.  (laughs)

GG:  [01:02:18] Well, Dickie, I would say that you worked more good stories into this hour than anybody we’ve talked to (inaudible).

DT:  [01:02:24] No.  I don’t know about that.

GG:  [01:02:25] We’re going to give you a medallion.  Thank you very much.

DT:  [01:02:32] I’m happy to do it.  Any more lies I can -- no, as best I can recall -- I wonder is A.P. Moore, do you remember that name?  Is he still -- he probably passed away.

LD:  [01:02:45] I assume he has.  I heard the name, but I don’t know (inaudible).

DT:  [01:02:49] Yeah, A.P. Moore.  Those guys, they kind of got shafted.  Theodose was a heck of a coach, [01:03:00] and he had an assistant in Willie Barnett, who -- not Willie Barnett.  What was that -- the baseball coach at Lane.  Well, some of the guys did come over.  I think Garwin DeBerry ended up being an assistant and then he ended up being the head coach, but Garwin was after me.  But Roosevelt Brown, I knew as a child here because he would trim rose bushes for the lady that lived next door to my mother.  And he’d have a pair of shears they looked like tweezers, his arms and his hand, but his waist was like 32 inches and then he -- I remember Sam Huff.  You remember he used to do the Redskins games?  Redskins got a new name today.

GG:  [01:03:42] Yeah, Commanders.

DT:  [01:03:44] But Sam Huff talked about -- he thought he was a big linebacker from West Virginia.  And he went to the New York Giants training camp, and he said the first guy I meet there is Rosie Brown.  And he said, “You think you’re going to make this team little white boy?”  (laughs) [01:04:00] And he said, “I look at this guy with these huge thighs and physique like a (laughs) (inaudible).”  And he said Rosie was in charge of taking the rookies and making them workout and all that.

GG:  [01:04:13] I heard that Rosie asked one kid at that same situation, “Your mama know you here, boy?”

DT:  [01:04:23] Well, he was a nice guy.  I remember talking to him.  Yeah, I’m playing for the Giants.  All right.  Well, I remember the eulogy.  Frank Gifford gave one of his eulogy things.  And he said, “I wouldn’t have been the running back and the all-everything if it wasn’t Roosevelt Brown because he blocked.”  And he told me when I came up, he said, “You just follow me and you’ll be fine.  If you don’t follow me, you’re going to get your ass whipped.  (laughs) Follow me and you’re going to score some touchdowns.  You’re going to be a hero.  (laughs) He said that at his funeral.  “You don’t follow me.  You’re not going to be the hero.”

 

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