Oral History with Jerry Gaines, March 28, 2003 (Ms2003-011)

Kennelly: Would you just begin by saying your name and what year you were a student here?

Gaines: Jerry Gaines, and I was here from 1967 to '71 and a little bit of '72.

Kennelly: You're listed in the Bugle as being from Chesapeake Virginia. Is that where you were born?

Gaines: No, in the neighboring city-in Tidewater, Portsmouth, and it's just adjacent to Chesapeake, yes.

Kennelly: Would you tell me about your family?

Gaines: Well, I have two sisters and two brothers-two older sisters, an older brother and a younger brother, and the guys, at least, were the athletes of the family, and both of my brothers were professional athletes. One played professional baseball, and one played professional football.

Kennelly: What are their names?

Gaines: Jack and Gerald. Gerald did rather well at Western Carolina. He was an 1:00all American in three different sports, which was pretty good. And two sisters, Janice and Jackie. Janice is retired, and Jackie as well as my older brother Jack are now ministers.

Kennelly: What about your parents?

Gaines: Both deceased. As a matter of fact, we just had a funeral for my father yesterday.

Kennelly: I'm sorry.

Gaines: Not a problem,

Kennelly: What did your father do?

Gaines: He was retired, but he was a shipyard worker. In his day he was one of the old athletes as well, and he played baseball, and he also ran track up until he was almost ninety.

Kennelly: Wow, and where did he play baseball?

Gaines: He played-it was the equivalent, I guess, of the old Negro leagues, and so they played games in and around the area. He never played pro. That was a couple of years ago.

Kennelly: What team did he play for?

Gaines: There were no organized, formal, famous teams that were there at the time, so a lot of the names would be unrecognizable to anybody other than the 2:00players I guess.

Kennelly: Was your mother an athlete as well?

Gaines: Mom was not an athlete at least not during my lifetime. She was busy raising us, and that was full time, but prior to that no.

Kennelly: So did your mom work?

Gaines: No, mom just raised us. She was just a housewife, and she did a real good job of that.

Kennelly: That's a big job.

Gaines: Yes, it is indeed.

Kennelly: Did either of your parents go to college?

Gaines: My father did, because rules were different, and my mother went to Norfolk State. My father left tenth grade, and then went to Saint Paul's college where he played football for four years there out of tenth grade. Don't ask me how he pulled that off. I don't know, but he was able to do that back in the thirties.

Kennelly: As you say rules, rules were different. Did either of them get degrees?

Gaines: No. Neither did.

Kennelly: Did you grow up in an integrated community?

Gaines: I would say yes, it was integrated and segregated at the same time in 3:00that in the community there were different cultures white, black, oriental, but there were still limits as far as where you could and could not go. What you could do-There were still stores that you could shop at, and some that you couldn't.

Kennelly: Was that just sort of something that you grew up knowing, which ones you could go to?

Gaines: Yes, you learn after a while, and then a little bit later on, late in my high school years, that's when integration started in earnest, and all of those rules, of course, were dropped.

Kennelly: How did that happen? Was anyone you know involved in that, in changing that and going to perhaps a store that you wouldn't have gone to before?

Gaines: Actually, the first institutions were the schools, so that was where it 4:00was most evident initially. There was one black high school per city in the tidewater area where all the black students went-Crestwood in Chesapeake, and Norcom in Portsmouth, and Booker T. in Norfolk, and, with the changes, that black population spread all throughout the schools. I, for instance, went to the school in Chesapeake that was called Crestwood High through my junior year, and shortly after that, I spent my senior year at Churchland High School from where I graduated.

Kennelly: So in your senior year, you were integrating a white school, and what was the proportion of black to white students?

Gaines: Perhaps five percent black at that time. There were still a lot of black 5:00students in the neighborhood that were uncomfortable or skeptical about going to a predominately white school.

Kennelly: They chose to stay in the other school?

Gaines: They chose to stay. Yes.

Kennelly: How was that experience for you? It would be sort of hard in your senior year when usually you are kind of the kings in the school.

Gaines: What made it all tolerable was the ability to participate in sports, and even though you saw some of the biases that you normally saw out in the community in that arena, you could actually perform well. At least a few people would overlook the fact that you were a minority, but generally after you walked off the field, and you were in the halls or downtown, it was back to the same old rules again even after formal integration started.

Kennelly: Were there any particular incidents when you were in high school?

Gaines: There were always incidents, and you sort of lived with them. You didn't like them, but you felt almost helpless because it was a tough wall to break. 6:00You did what you had to do.

Kennelly: Were they violent or was it more subtle?

Gaines: Some were more overt than others. If you were walking down the street, it wasn't unusual to have things thrown at you. Things like that.

Kennelly: But on the other hand, when you were participating in sports for your school, the people would be cheering you, I suppose?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: As a high school athlete, did you do quite well in high school too?

Gaines: I drew enough attention to be approached by the then coach of Virginia Tech, Marty Pushkin. He contacted me and asked me if I was interested in coming up, and as you may know, Tech at the time had no black athletes, so I guess I was supposed to be the experiment, a little bit of Jackie Robinson I guess.

Kennelly: Did he come and visit your family?

Gaines: He did not, he gave me an invitation to come and visit the school.

Kennelly: When you came, were you prepared for what your experience might be?

Gaines: This environment was so alien to me. Geographically, I had never seen the mountains. I had been all up and down the east coast, but I had never been west far enough to see mountains, so it was, for me, absolutely impossible to properly prepare myself for what I was going to experience here. The cultures here were different; the geography was different. I mean, college itself was going to be a different venue for me. I had never been to a college to spend any amount of time, so I was not-I was hardly prepared for what I saw.

Kennelly: Were you considering other schools as well at that time?

Gaines: There were a couple of other schools interested. I looked at Wake Forest for baseball and also football for the University of Maryland.

Kennelly: So you had a choice really?

Gaines: Yes

Kennelly: Why did you choose Virginia Tech?

Gaines: I listened, and I read what the football recruits had to say about why they chose here when they had all the other options too, and again, I think a lot of the reason why I came here is Tech showed a lot of interest in me. So it made me a little more motivated to go out and say, "Okay, fine, if you show this kind of interest in me, I will see what I can do for you, and I will work this hard, and hopefully things will work out. It'll be a big deal for both of us."

Kennelly: You said the culture here was different. Could you say, talk about that, explain a bit more about what you mean by the culture being different than 9:00what you had grown up used to?

Gaines: Well, because Tidewater is pretty much a military area, there are a whole lot of people who are in and out, in and out getting stationed here and there. A high percentage of transient population, so here, when I got here, for the first time in my life, I met people who had never seen, in person, black people. People who had grown up and not in person, so to some, even my teammates, I was a curiosity. I thought that was rather strange because, technically speaking, I thought it was at least semi-modern times, and I thought everybody had had that kind of exposure, but I was wrong. There were those that lived in isolated communities for so long they just didn't know.

Kennelly: Would they express that to you?

Gaines: Yes, and not in a negative way. For the most part, it was not a bad thing at all. It was just a matter of fact. Especially amongst fellow team members who were quite open and honest about that sort of thing, but that's no reason to hold grudges against anybody. It's just; we were just ignorant of each 10:00other's cultures I guess.

Kennelly: Did you have white friends before you came to Virginia Tech when you were in high school or in your neighborhood?

Gaines: From the time I was a little kid, it was one of the tributes we paid to my father. My father started the first little league baseball team in our area. There was none, and it was a little bit of a twist of fate because he packed us up and got us started and took us to the site of our first ball game, and the team we were playing was an all black team, and they refused to play us because we had two white players. These were guys that we had grown up playing with-a kid named Frankie, and one named Herbie, and my father said, "Well if they don't 11:00play, we don't play," and so he packed us all up. We went back home, and he divided the team subsequently into two parts, and he put one of the white kids on one team, and one on the other, and we played each other every Saturday. But that changed rather quickly, and after a while everybody started playing us.

Kennelly: Do you think it was the adults or the kids who made the decision? I bet in that situation it was the adults who made the decision.

Gaines: It was. The kids wouldn't have minded I don't think, as kids don't tend to mind in sports. I mean it was just little league, so the adults were calling the shots, and it's a kind of story you don't generally hear. It's a little bit of a reverse story.

Kennelly: So those couple kids were kids that you probably played ball with a lot and hung out with?

Gaines: Yeah, and they were two kids from just down the street.

Kennelly: So would you go to their house, and they go to your house and stuff like that?

Gaines: Yes, that wasn't a problem, and at the time we were so poor. These guys had a little bit of money (their families did), so they had camping 12:00equipment-tents and all that, so they made great friends 'cause we didn't have anything like that. A tent to us was a blanket over the clothesline.

Kennelly: Were you living in the city?

Gaines: At the time, Chesapeake was not even a city. It was more Norfolk County. It was very rural, and you didn't, for instance, get roller skates for Christmas because there was no place smooth enough to roller skate on. Nobody had a driveway, and the roads were paved with rough gravel, so you couldn't roller skate on them either.

Kennelly: Did people live in-did you have like a house--you lived in your own single-family house?

Gaines: Yes. There were single-family dwellings. The home I was raised in was actually-at the front was a store, and the back of it was the house that we lived in, which had three rooms.

Kennelly: Did you have a garden back there?

Gaines: Everybody had gardens then. Everybody did.

Kennelly: So you could get some of your food that way?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: Were you or your parents politically active before you came to Tech in any civil rights organizations?

Gaines: None. My parents were just more concerned about things being done right. They were two very righteous people, and that's what they taught us. So that's what we grew up with, and that's what we got to be. I don't think it is real sophisticated. Everybody wants to make "Chinese Calculus" out of doing the right thing. It's not really all that hard. People are people, and you treat them as such. That's not always the viewpoint of everyone, but you don't go around with a grudge against people who may be ignorant about the humanity of others.

Kennelly: Was church important to your family?

Gaines: Church was always important. Yes. It was part of the "do the right 14:00thing" attitude. It was what we knew. We grew up with it. To this day, it is still true. My parents had five of us, and each of us, in one capacity or another, has been involved in a lay type of ministry. I'm an educator, and that's my ministry, and I have a sister and a brother in ministry, and another one in jail ministry. That's what they do. Another sister was a social worker for thirty years. She worked with kids.

Kennelly: So what would they tell you to do if someone was throwing something at you when you were a kid? Did they ever counsel you on how to handle things?

Gaines: They didn't really ever formally sit us down and tell us how to do that. It was just something I guess we knew. We had enough grit to not take a whole lot of nonsense. I mean don't be abused. Be tolerant, be patient, but don't take 15:00a lot of abuse. Fortunately at the time there was a lot of innocence and ignorance, and we didn't really experience a lot of that. What may have been there, a lot of what may have been there, we may have been blissfully ignorant about. You just went on and did your thing. All we knew was climbing trees and jumping ditches.

Kennelly: Were there any articles, or books, or films, or speeches, theater that influenced your thinking about race relations that come to mind?

Gaines: I would say no. Like I said, my parents were my role models. So we 16:00watched them closely as far as how they treated people, and that's how we treated people. We, of course, had the traditional people that you studied in history books. The Ralph Bunches and Jackie Robinsons of the world. Of course, we knew those, but they were distant names to us-nobody that we could really identify with. If we wanted people that we could closely identify with, it was generally our parents or uncle so and so up the street who did this, that, or the other and got famous or infamous. I guess all of us knew someone like that, but as far as formal political activism, no.

Kennelly: So there wasn't-you didn't have a hero as far as Civil Rights goes?

Gaines: No. Jackie Robinson and maybe other few sports people. Joe Lewis maybe.

Kennelly: When you came to Virginia Tech, did you participate in baseball as well as...?

Gaines: No. I was just a track athlete here. That's what I put all of my time into, the bulk of my time, and it took a lot of work. It started my freshman year where I had to get busy making sure that if I was going to be-if they would trust me to be the first to be offered a full scholarship-athletic-I had to make sure that the job I did was one that was representative of blacks-that was high quality, standard performance, hardworking, integrity, the whole nine yards. Because I knew that there would be others coming, and during my time here, I 18:00recruited a few other guys.

Kennelly: You recruited a few others. So you really felt that you had a special responsibility coming as a first?

Gaines: No doubt. I'm sure that maybe Jackie Robinson felt the same way and a few other guys that broke into professional baseball or football for that matter. You have to feel the same way. You have to perform. You have to do well.

Kennelly: Well one of your teammates from a 1968 newspaper article, a fellow member of the track team said, "He is the most valuable asset to the team. Other than his scoring ability, Jerry's spirit is contagious." So it really sounds like you brought more than athletic ability to the team.

Gaines: That was the influence I think of my parents. They're not with us 19:00anymore, but we felt that they charged us with the legacy, the responsibility to do well and to make sure that we hand that down to our kids. That's part of the reason why some of the guys I recruited have had their own children attend here and graduate from here, and as I said, my two daughters are here as well.

Kennelly: You really built something from being here. Did you feel welcomed when you came here?

Gaines: Yes, I would say. As for the negative incidents that I experienced, they were few and far between. They were hurtful things, and I recognized them. Some of the things were done out of just ignorance-people who didn't know what to say or how to say it, and things didn't come out the way they should have, and it revealed internal biases, of course. So I had to play the role of educator 20:00there, and say, even to teammates, "You know, you just don't say that," and, "You don't do this," and so it was part of educating guys as well.

Kennelly: What kind of negative things happened?

Gaines: I once had a football player... At the end of my freshman year, close around my freshman year, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and he walked up to me, and he said, "Well, Gaines, don't you think Martin Luther King was asking for it?" And I said, "Asking for it?" He said, "Yes, he was pushing us too fast." So I asked him then, "So justice should be on your timetable? You tell the world when the time is right to administer justice and treat people fairly?" 21:00His response was, "Well I see I'm not going to get anywhere with you." I said, "No not in that line of questioning." So things like that, and he was totally unaware of how he sounded. He just didn't know. But what I saw-those are the types of things you deal with. But for the most part, there were friends that I met that I will never forget. One of them is working for the government now, and he's been all over the world, and we just touched base again. I hadn't seen him in thirty years, and we are as close as ever. This guy, Chris Nicholson, was a guy who was on the track team with me. Another one was from Lynchburg, John Vasvary, and he became a big-time coach at the University of Pittsburgh, and I am still close with him. I met some of the best friends I've ever met here. That tempered things. That, along with the black community that I met here, and we 22:00had to be together. There weren't that many of us, and everybody knew everybody. So they became long-time friendships as well.

Kennelly: There was a demonstration in '68 when Dr. King died where-over the flag being lowered near Burruss. Were you involved with that demonstration?

Gaines: No. I found that where were several political movements that were going on at the time-as you know Vietnam was still hot, and the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and I immersed myself so thoroughly into my athletics that I didn't have time to be an activist. It would take too much away from the things that I knew I had to do. I had to make my statement otherwise. If I were just a 23:00student here who came to study and to gather worldly wisdoms, that would be one thing, but I had to establish myself as far as athletics were concerned and make sure that, in my own arena, I was able to do what I needed to do to further my movement. For me, it wasn't about a lot of demonstrations and standing or jumping on cars and things that were going on at the time.

Kennelly: Well, and you had a very successful career here in track I believe?

Gaines: It was an opportunity. That's something I give credit to my father both earthly and heavenly for. A lot of things could have gone bad. There were a lot of opportunities for things to go sour, and I was blessed enough that things actually went well for me, and I have no complaints about anything that 24:00happened, I have no regrets about anything that happened. If the opportunity presented itself, I would do it again, and I thank the then coach Marty Pushkin for having just giving me the opportunity to prove that there were some of us out here that might be able to make a difference in things.

Kennelly: Did you feel that there was good support from the coach and the coaching staff and that you felt that you were operating on a level of equality-athletes are not all equal? Some athletes are more powerful, but just as far as that you were given the opportunity to operate on equal grounds with 25:00everyone else?

Gaines: I look back in retrospect on some of the things that happened, and I found that my head coach was probably my strongest advocate, but above him, the people who called the shots above him were not really particularly interested. I look at our minority athletes today and see what they are able to demand and get. I qualified for the national championships during my freshman year in the long jump. The record had been set in 1927, and I broke that record. We didn't have the best track equipment, and my coach asked the athletic department if I could get a set of sweats, a top and a bottom. He was told that I could wear 26:00basketball sweats, that they would be good enough, and that's what they gave me. I didn't wear it, but that's what I was given to wear. If it was a matter of a request for contact lenses-no such luck. I had to wear glasses, which could shatter, and I did field events. I wasn't just a runner. I ran hurdles, I long jumped, and the safety thing was to put a strap on them, and that was that. But there were no extra, what I would have considered "luxuries," you know, things that student athletes today would consider expectations.

Kennelly: That's basics.

Gaines: Exactly.

Kennelly: Basic support to let a person do the best that they can do.

Gaines: I had to sneak to get an extra roll of tape.

Kennelly: That's wild. Who was the head coach? I think you mentioned before-

Gaines: Marty Pushkin. He was from West Virginia-actually went back and coached in West Virginia up until just a couple of years ago. He called me at school last year, in fact, and told me that he had retired. So he is still living in Morgantown and is happy.

Kennelly: He no doubt still remembered you.

Gaines: We still touch base from time to time.

Kennelly: Do you feel because of your team involvement that gave you a special sense of belonging at Virginia Tech?

Gaines: It was what kept me sane, and I say that because there were so many kids here. I couldn't have imagined coming to a school with that many people, and it 28:00made it difficult in two ways. It made it difficult because you very rarely saw another minority student. I was the only athlete, so I didn't see any there, and that's where I spend a lot of my time. Of course, your class time was in the morning, and your afternoon time was practice time, and so in my afternoon time, and on weekends when you were away at one athletic event or another, I didn't see minorities. They just weren't there. And there was a basketball player named Charles Lipscomb who I helped to recruit a year later. Charlie was from Charlotte, North Carolina, and so it was really really good to see him. It wasn't that I didn't get along with the kids that were there. It's just that it was comforting and reassuring to me to have some other minority kids around. That was probably the most difficult to me. The first semester, especially, it was like being on another planet. I got here early because freshmen had to be here before the regular student body during that time, a significant amount of time early. I got here, and I actually went out and started working with the 29:00cross country team which was here earlier too, so these were upper classmen who knew what was going on, here but I didn't know anything, so I would get up before sunup to go out and run and work with them. Just to have somebody to hang with because no one else was in the dorms. No one else was on this campus, and this can be a desolate place when there's nobody here. So I was feeling that in the worst kind of way being that far from home.

Kennelly: It would be difficult. Was it comfortable eating with the team? Did you eat with the team mostly?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: And was that comfortable?

Gaines: Again, there were little-for the most part yes. That was a time-it was a respite from the work. It was a respite from the garbage that happens in the run of a day. I don't mean racial things, although they were mixed in sometimes, but it was a time to just sit back and relax for a while. I would say, for the most part, dining with the guys was not a bad thing. It was pretty pleasant I'd say. 30:00I never had any bad experiences there to my knowledge-I can't remember.

Kennelly: So there wasn't a whole lot of time to socialize with the other black students?

Gaines: No. Its one thing as black students, you crave a togetherness and a social life, and that's what we're all about. It's a major part of our existence I think, so we want to be around each other and hang out and do just like anybody else I guess. But to be denied that it was really difficult, and it wasn't that I was denied. It's that the availability just wasn't there. 31:00Blacksburg has grown so much now. I mean there was one burger place, and no one ever heard of it. It was the only one of its kind. I'd never seen any burgers like that-a restaurant of that name. McDonalds wasn't there yet. Burger King wasn't there. Nothing else, and so you were very limited as far as where you could go and what you could do. Because I had no car here. You know, the guys, even my teammates on weekends would just jump into their vehicles, and they'd be gone, and that, I think, was probably one of the most obvious things to me was that you know, it's okay if we practice together, but on weekends we have things we have to do, and they jumped in their cars and went their merry way, and often times I'd be left in the dorm or go to the library for fun or trying to hunt down a few other friends, and after a while, you discover them, and you find ways to entertain yourselves.

Kennelly: You wouldn't be invited to your teammates' parties or their social...?

Gaines: That was not done.

Kennelly: Who were you rooming with at the time?

Gaines: My first roommate was-in the long run, he was the guy who ultimately nominated me to be inducted into the hall of fame, the sports hall of fame. A guy named Joe Painter. He was my first roommate. Joe was strange-he wasn't strange because-he was strange because he was a distance runner, and I found distance runners with their distance running mentality they tend to be a little bit eccentric and obsessive, but that was no problem. We got along fine, and it 33:00was no big problem at all.

Kennelly: So I think a lot of-from the reunion of the students from the seventies, it seemed like a lot of those students said that they were actually all put together on one wing of a building. But then you weren't rooming with those students?

Gaines: No.

Kennelly: So it wasn't like you could just walk down the hall and say, "What's going on?"

Gaines: I was in the athletic dorm.

Kennelly: The athletic students were kept in a separate dorm?

Gaines: Yes. At the time it was Miles Hall.

Kennelly: I see. Was it comfortable living there? Were there any problems about living there?

Gaines; No. The football team was separated from the other athletes. They were on one half of the dorm, and the other minor sports athletes were on the other half. We had the basketball players, the swimmers, the track athletes, golf, tennis; all of us were on the other wing. The football team was housed on the 34:00other half-all three floors, and then the rest of the athletes were scattered about on the other half.

Kennelly: You were the president of the monogram club your senior year which suggests that you were respected by your fellow athletes.

Gaines: Well, by then I guess once anyone gets comfortable and even more importantly has a little bit of a reputation as far as integrity, character, and has done a few things of note in someone else's eyes, then that wasn't that hard a thing, I would imagine, for them to see that I could do that without a whole lot of trouble. It was no big deal, and I never really thought of that as any major triumph. Perhaps some may, but it was something that I thought was in order, and I took it quite normally.

Kennelly: Sort of in stride as part of

Gaines: Yes, as part of the deal.

Kennelly: How did you find the classrooms here? The professors?

Gaines: There were interesting things that happened in classrooms. I felt coldly treated by a couple of professors at the time, but for all the cold treatment that I felt there was always one professor, one particular one, who I will never forget. His name is James Jarratt Owen. J. J. Owen was his name, and I will never forget him. Ironically enough, I was taught also by his wife who was teaching here at the same time, but there was an English professor here, and a social studies professor there, and a sociology professor there who obviously didn't care too much about me being in their classes. There was some-but I didn't really know what was going on until I looked back on it in retrospect to 36:00see what actually what the deal actually was there, but some of them were particularly tough on me. Like I said, I had to-there was no way that anyone was going to make me quit, and this I had to endure for myself and anybody else that was coming on, and so it is particularly gratifying when a Bimbo Coles or certainly a Michael Vick comes along or Lee Suggs, and I actually get chills as I watch them perform. It is particularly thrilling. Probably I think that outside of their immediate families I probably get a bigger thrill out of their accomplishments than anyone else.

Kennelly: People are thrilled by their accomplishments. How about the students in your classes?

Gaines: I had a student once in a sociology class. It was a large class in one of the auditoriums. I think it was maybe Pamplin or some place. He stood up and asked a question that implied that he believed that blacks and whites could not 37:00get blood transfusions from each other, and the professor apologized to me after. I was the only black in the class. He apologized to me, and to me it was the typical type of ignorance that I had seen. I don't think-I think this student-I thought about, wondered how in the world he got to college thinking that, but it let me know just how deep the ignorance ran. So along with the drive that I had to accomplish things athletically, there was some counseling, 38:00some schooling, that had to go on too because there were just guys that didn't know. I had guys on the team who didn't know that black people get darker in the sun; at the time, there was that kind of ignorance. "Why do you wear a stocking cap?" "Let me touch your hair." "I've never seen..." Those were innocent things. I mean they just didn't know. So that was part of the program too that you had to play.

Kennelly: So you wouldn't get offended so much as look at it sort of as a teaching opportunity to help people figure out...

Gaines: Sometimes, I rarely got any feeling that anyone was trying to be offensive with those types of things. Some were blatantly obvious, and I 39:00couldn't help but think about what Yates and Peddrew must have gone through back then even before I got here, but again I needed to kind of pick up where they may have left off and make sure that the advancement continued, so they became very important, and I guess you spoke about my having heroes. I guess they were home grown hometown heroes that I had to build off of as well. Guys that I never had any idea who they were before I got here, but all of a sudden their role takes on whole new meaning, and so you take it, and you run with it. When we get together now for reunions I am so thrilled at the success rate of the kids who were here. Overwhelming majority of them are extremely successful, and it says 40:00everything to me, and so I'm just an educator. That's what I do. That's my lot in life, but to see the heights that some of them have reached is just so impressive. To have been able to be a part of that, it was really quite a privilege, and it added some serious meaning to my own existence, I think

Kennelly: Why did you decide to study Spanish?

Gaines: I had a teacher back in high school-her name was Millicent Clark, and I was incredibly shy. I always was, and she was my Spanish teacher. I took Spanish by default. I wanted to take French, and the French class was full of upperclassman, and they didn't let any freshman get in there, so I had to take 41:00Spanish, and that's where I met Mrs. Clark. She gave me a whole new type of confidence, and it wasn't so much about Spanish. It was just in myself-confidence in myself to believe that I could stand up and do something that I never did before because Spanish was a very foreign language to me. She made me try and not be afraid to say things in front of people, not be afraid of being possibly laughed at, and it meant a lot. So I had more Spanish than anything else, so I actually thought I would major in Spanish and then just switch over to something else once I got here and got comfortable, but it never switched over so I made a career of it, and I ended up teaching Spanish, teaching Spanish and taking kids to Spain and Europe. It was what was supposed to happen. I don't believe in fate.

Kennelly: Taking them on tours of Spain...That's interesting. It seems like you decided pretty early on to be a teacher. You talk about it as a ministry. It 42:00seems like something that wasn't maybe I don't know if you consciously decided or you just found yourself doing it.

Gaines: That's a funny story because I had no intention of being a teacher. Once I left here I did a short stint in the army, then after that I came back home, and I said, "Here I am, you know. Why isn't everybody jumping up and down glad to see me and offering me jobs paying big salaries?" and such was not the case. I had to work very hard. Having been in the army, having graduated from here, and, I thought, and having gotten a little bit of notoriety, I thought that meant that things would be easier than they ultimately were. They were still 43:00very difficult, and the only reason, the only way that I got into teaching was an amazing set of circumstances fell into place for me. That is when I got out of the army in 1972 the school system had just built a new high school in my area. The guy who was the principle was my high school football coach. The guy who was the Spanish teacher who was leaving was a very good friend of mine, and he was leaving, and he said, "Why don't you come and apply for this?" I didn't take any education courses here because I had no intention of doing that. Those are things that I did after they showed an interest in me. The former football coach who was the principal knew me well, and he knew my character, so he said, "Okay, fine, I will give you this opportunity." Coincidently, they needed a Spanish teacher, a track coach, a football coach, and a cross-country coach. They weren't likely to find that combination anywhere. So that let me know that had to have been what I was chosen to do. So when I started, it took about five 44:00years to get used to the idea that that's what I was supposed to be doing, because it was not in my mind to be spending my career with a bunch of teenagers, but I know now that that was my calling. That's what I was supposed to do.

Kennelly: So you now teach in high school?

Gaines: Yes. I have a former student who is a professor here.

Kennelly: Who is that?

Gaines: His name is Dwayne Brandon. He's an accounting professor. The irony of all that is I also taught his mother.

Kennelly: Oh my goodness. Wow! Did you pursue track after you left Virginia Tech?

Gaines: I ran track, masters' track, but I did that later. I always played 45:00baseball in my life. From those little league games my dad started, I played baseball every summer right up through. I played baseball in high school despite the fact that I ran track in the same season. I did that. Then I came back home and played the same type of league that my dad must have played in when he was coming up. It was a little bit more developed then, and a few more people had a few more teams, and guys who didn't quite make it into the pros would go down and get into leagues and so forth. We played there.

Kennelly: So you played in that kind of league too.

Gaines: Yes. I got into masters' track later on in life because my father had started running track himself, and he was in his late sixties then, so he started running, and I started running just to be with him. It was my opportunity I guess to carry him around because he came and picked me up at all my practices, so it was my opportunity to take him to meets and so forth. So the 46:00Regional National Masters Championship at NC State and this sort of thing all over the place, the Penn relays of course, and I have a picture of him sitting with Bill Cosby who was the official starter of all the guys who were over eighty. [end of Tape 1, side A] [Tape 1, side B]

Kennelly: Oh my goodness. Did you bring that with you?

Gaines: I did not bring it with me.

Kennelly: Maybe we could borrow it and scan it sometime.

Gaines: I could send it to you.

Kennelly: That would be great to have. That's great. It's wonderful to keep that athletic thing going.

Kennelly: When were you inducted into the Hall of Fame here?

Gaines: 1990. I had a good year that year. I was also teacher of the year in our school system that year.

Kennelly: You've been teacher of the year a couple of times haven't you?

Gaines: I've been teacher of the year, coach of the year, and got inducted into Tech's Hall of Fame in the same year.

Kennelly: All at the same time! Wow!

Gaines: 1990 was a good year.

Kennelly: Were you the first black athlete to be inducted into the Hall of Fame?

Gaines: I would guess probably not. I would say probably not. I don't really know, but I would think not because I know that there were guys who came along shortly after I did who were tremendously successful. Bruce Smith was later on, but he-I'm a considerable number of years older than Bruce, but he's again a kid from down home, and his record speaks for itself, and everyone knows how well he did. So I was-I don't know-just somebody who maybe just cracked the door open a little bit for those guys. They're the ones who kicked it down.

Kennelly: Did you belong to the Groove Phi Groove when you were here?

Gaines; No. Several of the guys that I was here with started Groove Phi Groove, and I personally did not want to join a fraternity, and that started out early in life. The guys here needed that social outlet, I think. And there was nothing wrong with that. But I was a little bit cramped as far as time was concerned, and I didn't, I couldn't go and, say, work on building or doing repairs on a frat house or that sort of thing. I just didn't have that kind of time. For me it was tough enough to go to classes in the morning, to work out as hard as we worked out in...In all my years here I missed one practice, one, and so it was tough. And then in the evenings it was a matter of studying, so I just did not 49:00have that kind of time. I think too that there may have been just a little bit of resentment maybe from one or two people that I didn't join the frat because it was the only black one here. But at the time, I just did not have that kind of time.

Kennelly: Well what would you do for social life besides go to the library?

Gaines: My social life was virtually nonexistent. There was no social life, not for me. I longed very much to be with the guys. Some of them I had gone to high school with, but I just did not have the time. I see them today, and yet when I see them today we're very close today. A lot of them went to school down in the same Tidewater area with me, several as I said, from the same high school. But it didn't hurt our relationships. We're still good friends, but I wished for a 50:00long time that I could possibly get with them and just do some things. Time just didn't allow it. By weekends I was a lot of times out of state doing something someplace else.

Kennelly: Right. It's a big commitment I guess.

Gaines: With indoor track starting so early in the year, you started training about mid football season, and then you didn't finish until June. If you made the nationals, the nationals didn't take place until the first or second week of June. So your whole year was taken, and Pushkin was very tough. He insisted that 51:00you be at practice. He insisted that you work hard, and we worked hard. We worked very hard. Everybody who was a part of those teams knew we worked. We did not have a whole lot of gifted athletes, but we just worked, and we got as good as we did because we just outworked other people. They were good years.

Kennelly: Were you in the Corps of Cadets?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: How did you fit that in with everything else?

Gaines: Well they had a real interesting situation there. They had T Company, and even Frank Beamer would remember this because Frank was playing then. There was a company that was designated just for the athletes. We have an F Troop

Kennelly: F Troop?

Gaines: F Troop. Yeah, it's just a saying, you know. The Corps was regimented, regulations and all, in the sense that we didn't hold so tightly to all the rules. But we drilled and everything. Ironically enough one of my roommates, 52:00Will Carroll was T Company Commander our senior year, and see we kind of reversed roles there because I was the president of the Monogram Club, and he was vice president of the Monogram Club. He was T Company commander, and I was his executive officer in T Company. He was a fighter pilot, and Will was killed shortly after we graduated. He was flying a fighter. He was here in the U.S. He was on the West Coast, but his plane went down, and he was killed.

Kennelly: Vietnam?

Gaines: Vietnam was on, and he was tied up in all the training for that. But he was on a training mission here, and his plane went down.

Kennelly: Oh gosh. Well how did you find the Corps as, the climate of the Corps 53:00as far as race goes?

Gaines: The environment of the Corps was pretty much the environment of my athletic environment. It was essentially the same because we were not housed on the Upper Quad where the Corps was. We were housed down in the dorm where we normally stayed. The only exposure I got to the formal Corps was in class and just walking around people that you met incidentally, you know, walking along the sidewalk. So that rat year we didn't know anything about that.

Kennelly: So you didn't have any of the hazing?

Gaines: No, none of the hazing, and hazing was very popular at the time, but I got enough hazing as an athlete, so we didn't really need all the rat year stuff.

Kennelly: So you did get hazing as an athlete?

Gaines: Oh sure, but again it was not like the hazing that you got perhaps with the Corps, and you don't mind so much. There was initiation for the Monogram Club and all that, which is the usual stuff, but nothing really outlandish. So you dealt with it.

Kennelly; So I suppose then when you were the officer, the president of the 54:00Monogram Club you were hazing the ones that came after you in whatever way they do that?

Gaines: Good natured hazing, and as a matter of fact hazing got a bad name because everybody started getting real sophisticated in the things they decided to start doing to people. We didn't do those things. We-I'm not even going to suggest some of the things we did, but was not nearly as bad as some of the things you see that qualify as hazing now. We didn't put anybody in any danger or anything.

Kennelly: So at that time when you were here when you went to class would you be wearing the Corps uniform?

Gaines: Yes. There were certain days that you wore your uniform, and certain days that you didn't have to. Certainly on the days that you had class, you had to wear your uniform. Actually, I thought that would give me just a little more credibility and a little more status on campus, but one day I was walking out-it was by Lee Hall in fact-and someone threw an egg out of a window, and it 55:00splattered at my feet and splashed up on my pants, and I didn't respond very well to that.

Kennelly: Did you say something?

Gaines: I went up and talked to him.

Kennelly: What was the outcome?

Gaines: Well as it turned out, he was a very small guy, I looked up and saw him duck behind the window, so I saw which window it came out of, so it wasn't too hard to figure out which room it was. So I went up and paid him a visit, and when I saw him, it wasn't even any need to be angry because he was just a little shrimp of a guy, and it wasn't even worth getting upset over. Just one of those things you had to deal with I guess.

Kennelly: Yeah. Well what about the-I think during that period you were here that the Confederate flag was quite, very much in evidence. They were still I believe taking it out in football games I don't know about other athletic-running around football games, and also there was the playing of "Dixie"-

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: by some parts of the Corps.

Gaines: A lot of kids here, like I said, I was not perhaps the activist that I maybe should have been. I felt though-I objected to the symbolism that those things brought to the school. I delved into, I got deeper into what I had to do and tried not to let that be a distraction. That to me I felt would have been too much of a distraction, and I could have been easily drawn into that and actually caused myself more trouble than I could have been able to deal with. 57:00The people who got involved with that movement with the Confederate flag and Dixie did a great job, made a great statement. But I just could not risk what I had at stake. I had to make my statement in this area; those guys had to make it in theirs. And so I felt like mine was important enough too to hold almost sacred. Athletics was a big deal, and the proof is in the pudding. Now everyone knows what athletics has brought to this school now. I just drove past the stadium, and I remember what the old stadium looked like, and the south stands now you know there was nothing there but bleachers and the big score board with a turkey head on it. That's all there was, and for it to have come as far as it 58:00has, athletics has made a tremendous contribution to putting this school on the map. Now there are people on the West Coast who know where Virginia Tech is, there are people in Texas who know where Virginia Tech is, and I think even all those years ago, I could not risk being perceived as a trouble maker in any way even though it's good to make some noise every now and then about an injustice, but I think I had too much at stake.

Kennelly: Actually with the flag, I think it was the coaches who stopped the Confederate flag because of recruitment because they thought it would hurt recruitment.

Gaines: That came later. Initially the seeds of that movement started with the 59:00students many of whom were long-time friends. Yes. That movement started- We would meet in dorms and discuss what do you think about this and what might be done to see what we can do to change this, and there were some strong statements and some shouts went out about it. One of my friends Larry Beale who became a lawyer as a matter of fact after all of this, was a great noisemaker as far as that's concerned, and he made great statements about it. Jim Watkins-remember that Jim's a dentist today, and Jim made great strides, and they are just a couple of the names-guys who actually took charge of that responsibility of making that known, and they did a fantastic job. They did, so they kind of end up being my heroes too.

Kennelly: Different paths.

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: What about just as far as the community of Blacksburg? Did you get involved with people in the community much? I think you said there was only one hamburger restaurant. Was there any place you'd go to have a cup of coffee.

Gaines: No. I never ever felt comfortable in town. Never. Not, not, I say that basically, initially the first year to year and a half. I did not feel comfortable there. I felt alienated there. I felt at home with the guys that I knew. The guys that I knew were basically athletes, so that's who I was most comfortable with. That's who I spent my time with. I knew no place to go, and even on weekends when guys went their separate ways wherever they went, I didn't 61:00know any of those places. And to have gone into town would have just been another strange thing to me. I had no desire at all. I would just as soon have stayed in the dorm as to try to find some place to sit down and have a cup of coffee.

Kennelly: You didn't get involved in like church or anything?

Gaines: No, and for the life of me, I don't know why. I think again even though church had played such a big role in my upbringing, I didn't know initially the layout of the town. Like I said, it was much harder then. But I didn't know which church was which I certainly-to see a black person from town was rare enough. I couldn't imagine a church for blacks at the time here. I didn't have 62:00any idea where they were. So I just never went. My mother was not pleased by that.

Kennelly: She'd ask you I guess. I think we mentioned earlier about your being the teacher of the year, and I just wondered what was the secret of your success as a teacher?

Gaines: Again I have to give credit to my parents and my heavenly father that placed me in that position to do that. I think my father-we should have put it on the headstone for him-he taught us that in order to find worth in yourself you had to go out and give yourself to someone else. This man was all about 63:00helping people. It's all he ever taught us, and we have found fulfillment in that ourselves so that when we breathe our last, we can lie down and smile because we will have known that we made a positive difference in things for some people because we chose to care about them. I just had the same discussion with my children in my living room last night before we left, and they were talking about how needy people are, and indeed there are so many people it doesn't really matter people try to find their happiness in things, in money, intelligence, and causes, and that's not really where it's at until everyone starts seeing that in order to make it all work you've to go help somebody. That's why the slavery and the segregation issue was such a negative thing. If you're not going to help, you actually hurt yourself in doing that. If you would 64:00choose to go and put another people down no matter who they are, if they are people, and you put them down, and you keep them oppressed, you actually do at least as much damage to yourself in the long run. I look at this life-my brothers and I have a motto that life is just something to do until you live. So we deal with the issues now and make sure that no matter what it is we do no matter what career choices we make, we have got to get into the business of helping people, and for me a school environment was a perfect venue for that. It was perfect. Nine out of ten teenagers are needy. They don't know who they are. They need people to tell them who they are, and then you have to be skilled enough to convince them that you know a little bit more about who they are than they do. That's a hard sell, but after some years of doing that-it was easier to learn to hurdle than it was to learn to do that, but eventually you do it long 65:00enough, and now its been 31 years.

Kennelly: You've been an educator for 31 years?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: Now you're a principal?

Gaines: I'm an administrator. Yes.

Kennelly: In your professional career was race ever an issue?

Gaines: I don't think so. I would not-as a professional educator, I would not allow race to be an issue. I think with the injustices, and there certainly have been some, I try to be the one to come in and smooth that. I don't think you are going to get rid of racism in America. I think its always going to be there to one degree or another. It all depends on what setting you're in. I try to make 66:00sure that to the extent that I was exposed to those circumstances, I would try to make a positive difference in it. If I saw someone being oppressed to pick them up and tell them that they were indeed somebody and they had every right to their piece of the American pie as everybody else. I could not show biases as an educator to one type of kid or another. Because, of course, especially in that military area where I live, there were all kinds of kids. There were Hispanics and Koreans and Orientals as well as blacks and whites so I had to play the game. As a coach of that equal, and I guess I taught them that the best disguised blessing on earth was hard work. Work at it, and it doesn't always work out for everyone, but it sure gives you a little bit of an edge if you can learn to work and appreciate it.

Kennelly: So you were teaching in an integrated or very integrated setting?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: Like an urban setting?

Gaines: It wasn't urban. It was suburban. It was in the suburbs, a rather affluent environment as a matter of fact, but it was always-I don't think I ever taught at a school that had more than a twenty percent minority population. Those kids were worth something too and were worth saving too, and I knew how to play for success in that environment because I had already been through it. That was my own personal experience. That's what I knew, and so I could deal with them in the environment that they had to deal with, and so it was where I was supposed to be

Kennelly: Did you enjoy the coaching aspect?

Gaines: I always enjoyed coaching, and I didn't give up coaching until the birth of my own children. Again it was a time thing, and I knew that they needed the time too. Whereas I was coaching three sports, I had three kids, and each time 68:00one of them was born I gave up a sport, and the most time consuming, of course, is football. It just takes up so much time, then I gave up track, and then the last thing I did was cross-country. I eventually gave that up as well. I enjoyed coaching very much, and I always thought that it would be tougher to be the athlete than the coach, and it is not even close. It is much tougher to be the coach because you have to feel for all the kids on the team instead of just for yourself. If I went out on a track as a competitor and had a successful day, it was very gratifying, and that was wonderful, but it was just me. If I coached a team that went out and won a championship, that's the ultimate thrill. We won our share of championships, and it was very good, and I just put that all into the puzzle pieces that become a part of the makeup of what makes you you.

Kennelly: Are any of your children pursing athletics?

Gaines: They participated in athletics in high school. When they got to college, they realized what I already knew, and that is that these, days athletics at a 69:00university college level is business. It's not sport anymore. It's business-especially football-the big money making sports. It's business, and you are a commodity. So they had to make some tough choices. Do you want to give it the time that's necessary here, and then do the career thing as well? They chose their career so their high school years ended their athletic careers. That was the end of that. They were really good athletes in high school, but they chose to be better students once they got here, and they have been-I'm happy to say-very successful.

Kennelly: Did you go into the service?

Gaines: Yes.

Kennelly: Did you go to Vietnam?

Gaines: No, my orders were cut to go to Vietnam just as Vietnam ended. Just as the war ended. It was winding down, and as a matter of fact, I got out of active 70:00duty a little earlier because of that, because it wound down so suddenly.

Kennelly: Do you think that the Vietnam War affected peoples' thinking about race relations?

Gaines: There was a story I heard about some guys, one guy in fact, who was killed in Vietnam, and he wanted to be buried in the town's cemetery, but he wasn't allowed to be buried there because there were no blacks buried there. I wondered what were people thinking. Are all the white corpses going to get up and say, "Well there goes the neighborhood"?

Kennelly: It's crazy.

Gaines: It made no sense, but that was the thinking of the day, and as unrealistic as that is like black blood that was shed is somehow less precious than white blood that was shed. It's the same cause. But I think that sort of 71:00thinking as well as the treatment of all of the soldiers, all of them, who came back from Vietnam are what makes people go out and demonstrate in support of troops today. Because those guys-a lot of my peers, a lot of my friends-a lot of them didn't come back from Vietnam though some came back with one leg. Some came back blind and no arms, and they were treated like dogs, and I really, really have a hard time not being bitter about that. About the way these guys were treated. They did not elect to go there. They were doing what they were supposed to do just like soldiers today are doing, and I think that because of what America now realizes as a terrible injustice to our soldiers who came back from Vietnam, they are making sure that it does not happen again. And it should not happen again. I had a lot of friends who died over there. There were names all on the pylons on War Memorial of some guys who have given their lives over there 72:00too. It's an amazing thing. You go over and you fight for the freedoms that people exercise here, and yet it seems so against you. I just wish-even though I support peoples' right to demonstrate-it bothers me that they don't see the possible damage that they might be doing to the psyche of those soldiers when they're over there in those holes, and bullets are flying over their heads. I don't know if those of us here who exercise our freedoms here-I don't know, I 73:00sometimes wonder how they would respond under those circumstances. Demonstrate yes but support the troops.

Kennelly: I just wondered how or if the black power and black consciousness movements affected your thinking about race.

Gaines: I know I keep saying this, and I don't want to sound redundant, but my parents wanted us to think about justice. They called it righteousness. Righteousness meant fairness. If racism was an injustice, as we all know it was, then it was not a good thing, and it should end. So the black power movement as far as violence is concerned, I could not support violence because violence was 74:00wrong in any venue. I could not support the violent takeover of things, but at the same time I don't know what Martin Luther King, I think Martin Luther King probably helped gain us more advances than the Black Panther Party perhaps, but I'm not so sure that the Black Panther Party didn't wake up some people to say hey, maybe we are doing this injustice, and maybe we need to change it. Again it's something that I would put it-my brain is not even big enough, my intelligence not broad enough to make a judgment about why God chose to let those issues turn out like they did with Martin Luther King's being assassinated 75:00and the Black Panther Party's being just eradicated. Again the statement was made, and I hate to say it, but you don't want to see a Watts or situation like that, you know, the burning and the killing and the looting. It's appalling to see, but the statement gets made. I just wish there were better ways of doing it, so I stopped looking so much at race and started looking at the heart of mankind. If I read a bible, and the bible tells me that a man's heart is desperately wicked, then I see that, and I see that in all venues, all races. It's there. Everybody. There's mafia in Russia, and there's mafia in Japan as well, so I have to say, "Well, what then matters most?" What matters then most then is the heart that beats inside a person's chest, and so you try to develop the heart of people. That's why my life has been what it is. I started that in my family like my dad did, and I certainly have done that in the classrooms, in the schools where I have worked my entire career.

Kennelly: Powerful. Just a few more questions. How many of your children have 76:00attended Virginia Tech?

Gaines: Two.

Kennelly: I wondered how, if they made any comments about how they found the climate here as far as race goes?

Gaines: I don't know the details or the specifics-you would probably know more about this than I, but they're not happy right now with some of the decisions the board of trustees has made. They're not real happy with it at all. My oldest one who will be coming back to grad school is, would be the mouthpiece. She would be very vocal. She has actually talked to she discussed an issue that she thought was racially motivated with the president of the school. At one point, she communicated with his office. He set up an appointment with her through his 77:00secretary, and she went over to visit with him about it.

Kennelly: One on one.

Gaines: Yes. Which I thought actually was a great thing on the part of both of them. Now I don't know why this particular stance is being taken, but I know, and I'm living proof that you have to level the playing field, in whatever way possible, and I think a lot of people are ignorant as to exactly what that involves. They don't know, and so they'll make strong and, from their point of view, knowledgeable statements about it without really knowing really what's involved, how difficult it is. Because it's different growing up in America as a 78:00minority especially through the decades of years that I have seen, and I've seen some amazing transitions. Whereas we've come a long way, but all that these actions tell me is that the battle is far from over.

Kennelly: So what issues do you think still need civil rights advocacy?

Gaines: I think the world makes right and wrong "Chinese Calculus" when it's really two plus two. It's not really all that hard. I think that corruption has sneaked into every facet of what we do. If I went back to the Nixon era and all the shenanigans that went on then, ever since Watergate, if I look at the whole picture, everybody has been about being in everybody's business. Hence the 79:00growth of all the tabloid magazines, the growth in the number of different talk shows, the growth of everybody, the paparazzi, everybody wants to know what everybody else is doing. Everybody's in everybody's business, and so I again have to draw back and say, "Well what is the purpose of all of this? What difference does all of this make?" The corruption is there. I saw it then. I see it now, and so I have to stand up and say, "Well if it's there, if it's real, and we all know that it is, then what am I going to do about it?" I can stand up and scream and yell and complain at the office around the water fountain, but that's not going to help things, so the way I address it is I deal with it in my own little world in the realm that I can touch, and that's the kids, and I can 80:00share that with my audience which is basically faculty, my student body, the community at large, and that's where I'll make my statement because that's the most effective I can do. I'm not going to go on Oprah and yell and scream. It's not my world. That's for somebody else to do that. In my own little world, I'll make my statement there.

Kennelly: Is there anything else you'd like to add, or something that I haven't asked you, that you'd like to bring up?

Gaines: It's difficult to say. I get motivated by the questions that you ask. Are there any other questions you have?

Kennelly: Do you think the interview would be different if I was a black interviewer?

Gaines: No. No, I think I may have chosen a couple of different words, but the meaning would have been exactly the same. The couple of words would have been 81:00just that-just a couple of words.

Kennelly: Because of a different type of vocabulary?

Gaines: Exactly. It wouldn't have made any difference generally speaking. I don't even know why I've had so much to say. I didn't know I had all this in me to say. I never really gave it a thought. Like I said, I've been busy doing my career. I've been busy raising my kids and being the husband that I think I needed to be, and playing all my roles as properly as I'm instructed to. My bible is my owner's manual to life. So I have to go by it. So I have to change the oil and check the tires whenever it tells me to. And that's what I do. If anybody has objections about that, I'll be off of the scene in a little while. 82:00They don't have to worry about it.

Kennelly: Thank you very much.

[end of interview]