VT Stories Oral History with Curry Roberts, November 21, 2015 (Ms2016-015)

Jenny Nehrt: Hello.

Curry Roberts: Hello.

Nehrt: Would you mind stating your name and the date?

Roberts: Curry Roberts, November 21, 2015.

Nehrt: Great. So tell me about your family Curry. Where did you grow up?

Roberts: I grew up in a little village in the western part of Bedford County, about 18 miles from Roanoke, typical parents who you know, a baby boom baby. Both parents grew up in the depression, my dad on a really sizeable dairy farm, my mom just a small subsistence farm. Both of them were heavily influenced but that experienced and then my dad was in the Army and in Europe during World War II as an infantryman. My mom actually worked at the Radford Army Arsenal during the War, and then they met after the War. They married and dad became a 1:00machinist and mom worked in the same factory in Bedford that he did but she was in the Sales Department. And I have two older brothers, one is actually ten years old, Chester, who is also a Tech grad, and a middle brother Robin, who really enjoyed his freshman year here so he wasn't invited back. He went on and got an associate's in business from Virginia Western, and he's obviously the one that has been the most successful of all three of us financially. I have two children from a previous marriage. They are both in their 20s and both are Tech graduates. Currently my wife Irene and she's Mary Washington graduate and she has twin 7-year-olds.

Nehrt: Wow, it seems like a Virginia Tech family.

Roberts: Well, yes. I really didn't know I had any choices until I got to Tech. 2:00My case was a little bit… I always wanted to come here. The very first football game I ever saw Virginia Tech play was in 1963, and in those years they still played VMI in Roanoke. Now I wasn't in the Corps when I was here, but Thanksgiving Day Parade was a big deal in Roanoke when I was a kid and we went to the parade and went to Old Vector Stadium and watched the game. Probably came here to watch a football game the first would have been about 1967 or 8, so Lane Stadium was still new then. And had a family that lived in this area and worked for the University, but how I really ended up here, my oldest brother even though significantly older he left home and went off to college in '66.

And then it was sort of at the peak of the Vietnam War and the draft and he joined the Navy. And so he was really gone most of the time I was growing up as an adolescent, and then he came back, got out of the Navy in 1972, worked for a few years, a couple of years, and then decided he needed to come back and get a bachelor's degree, so he came to Tech. He had one year of credit. Some credit he could transfer from Virginia Western and then went into the financial aid office to get his GI Bill information all in order. There was a note in his file that he needed to meet with the head of financial aid; it was Frank Butler. Frank Butler is Sue Ellen Rockovich, I don't know if you… Sue Ellen is from Roanoke. Her husband John is on the Board of Visitors, well Mr. Butler was Sue Ellen's 4:00father and he was head of financial aid here for most of the 60s and 70s, and just a great guy.

But he called my brother in because as it turns out a man who had a large farm in our part of Bedford County who passed away in the 50s, when the farm sold he endowed a scholarship here for anyone from the little community that I grew up. It had been in place since the mid-60s and nobody had ever gone on it. So between the GI Bill and what is the Barry Clark Mosely Scholarship my brother was pretty covered for his four years. So as soon as my parents learned that any options I might have had to go somewhere else disappeared, but that was okay. I applied early, decision was accepted, of course fortunately enough to also be a recipient of that scholarship, and so virtually all of my school funding was paid for and then I worked the whole time I was there.

Nehrt: Wow. That's a great story.

Roberts: I was very fortunate.

Nehrt: Where did you work when you were here?

Roberts: I worked summers and then off and on during the year for a woman who is an interior decorator here in town and hauling furniture. I would haul furniture in high school, and then my sophomore year I began taking winter quarters. We were on a quarter system then and I would take winter quarters off and work for a state senator in the Virginia Assembly, Elliot Shull who was in Lynchburg, and it was a great experience. I'm a political science major and so it fit right in. That was being taught theoretically here and thinking of practical application of it both on the political side and in public administration, and so I did that for three years while I was here. And then one summer, I think it was my last summer here…

The first or second year I did that, I think it was the summer of my sophomore year I really didn't want to come back to summer school that year. So my dad said that's fine, but you're not going to just sit around the house, and so the only job I could get a high school friend of mine that married the daughter of a guy that had an asphalt paving business, so I spent all summer back in Bedford paving, which was quite an inspiration to come back to school. And then the next two summers while I was here doing all that I graduated a quarter late, but the last summer I was here I worked building apartments.

Nehrt: It sounds like your family had a real strong work ethic they gave down to you.

Roberts: Yeah, we didn't sit around much. Well and the other thing is we never learned that, our parents were great and they instilled a lot of very good values, sometimes we don't always live up to them as well as we should, but way 7:00before their time I was in a relatively gender-neutral household when it came to work. With three boys we didn't differentiate between doing the dishes, helping with the kitchen, doing the laundry because we're mowing the yard or working in the garden. It was all work and we did it all. Actually my dad was a pretty good cook so we learned to cook from him, a lot of just very practical dishes because he worked a different shift than my mother so by the time mom got home dad had already fixed dinner. Yeah, and that's a great lesson, and so we've never had trouble pitching in to do anything and never view any work other than something that's valued.

Nehrt: Cool. Was there a bit of a culture shock when you got here between the differentiation between work or it didn't really matter because you're on campus?

Roberts: Um, no. I can't say all of my work ethics spilled over to my academics. That was the first…you know, it's the biggest adjustment. There were 500 people in my village where I grew up, and so I walk into freshman geology and there are 400 people in freshman geology. It was an adjustment because back then the student body was about 15-16,000, and it had grown dramatically since the late 60s and was still in a growth mode. Housing was pretty tight on campus. There was already a lottery if you wanted to stay beyond your freshman year. And it was an interesting time to be here, but once you sort of settled in and you quit taking advantage of all this…it was like a kid in a candy store, you're out of this small village, you're out of your parent's house.

You've come to what effectively is a medium-size city, sort of that maturing a little bit on how to deal with that was probably the biggest challenge the first couple of quarters, but once you got through that it was… I was never overwhelmed by the place because there were so many people here just like me who had come from rural parts of Virginia and were adjusting and getting used to the place, so I never really felt uncomfortable or out of place. It was just a bigger version of what I was used to.

Nehrt: So thinking back to your first day what was that like? What was the experience of stepping on to campus knowing that you're a student now?

Roberts: Well, you know the first day is just move in, so I'm not sure I realized. I thought I was going off to camp. [Laughs] That's what the first day was really like. That probably hasn't changed any, but it's just such a mob scene. You went into your dorm. That was more like going to camp. I think it was 10:00probably, it wasn't until the first of class that it dawned on me that you were a student and that hey, this is very different than high school. They give you a course schedule and you really are on your own. And I think that's probably the biggest challenge, and also one of the greatest things that you learned when you come to a place like Virginia Tech, you really do have to grow up pretty quick if you're going to take advantage of it. It can both be daunting for some people, or it can create some self-confidence, that hey, okay, I can do this. I can deal with this. There are a lot of life lessons in that about responsibility and self-motivation. It's all laid out here for you, but nobody is going to make you do it, so you're going to have to be a self-starter to fully take advantage 11:00of it.

And it probably took a year to figure that out, and fortunately I was able to survive my freshman grades in order to get to the more enjoyable parts of the academic career, which I enjoyed more and more the last three years I was here. So the first year is just almost a maturation process and the remaining three years is when you really can take advantage of everything that a comprehensive university has to offer.

Nehrt: What drew you to political science for your major?

Roberts: Well, I grew up in a household where politics was always discussed. Both sides of the family have been politically interested and involved, and it was always the topic around especially Sunday dinner tables. We watched morning talk shows and we read the newspaper. As a matter of fact, we used to race to 12:00see who got the newspaper first, and not to get the sports section.

You also have to remember the era, had grown up in the 60s when so much was going on in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and student protests and then Watergate came along, and all of those things were intriguing. This sounds bizarre but there are good aspects and bad aspects of all of that, but it did create a certain political awareness. It was an era when government still could do things, so I was intrigued by that. You know political science is like a lot of liberal arts majors, it is what you make of it and I picked it because I was fascinated by it, and my oldest brother was a major in political science as 13:00well. And we were fortunate to have the same course advisor, Jim Herndon, who was just phenomenal, a course advisor and professor and had worked on Capital Hall. He came to political science with a very practical background. But, it was also a great major for several reasons. There's a all-empirical analysis of political science, you can apply that to anything. I mean it's all statistics and it's all levels of probability. You can use that in almost any walk of life, almost any occupation, so that was a great skill. Had to take back then what they call Computer Science, which you all would laugh at today, but you know, that was the first real exposure to technology and we sort of got over a fear of technology with that, which obviously is so critically important.

The other thing that was great about political science is it allowed you so much leeway for electives. So I took numerous economics classes. I took a lot of 14:00history as a matter of fact and I took a lot of English and Literature, and was fortunate to have… I had great professors who through different ways continue to emphasize a work ethic and attention to detail, and also for quality, quality of the product that you produce whether it's a physical product or whatever, a written product. So that's how I ended up in political science. I don't regret the major at all. It's come in very hand in every job I've had in and out of government, so I wouldn't have done it any different.

Nehrt: You mentioned a few professors. Would you consider any of them mentors?

Roberts: Well in different ways I would consider all of them.

Dr. Herndon was very good about both getting us aligned with what we needed to do to get through our major and staying on track with that, but he had a very practical approach to political science, a very analytical approach. One of the first, the first empirical analysis that we did with him was the ability to predict looking at past voting records how congressmen would vote depending on the topic. I forget which topic it was, but something in congress that was coming up and we went back and looked at three years' worth of voting records and within about 90% accuracy we predicted pretty accurately about the past behavior of congressmen and how they could vote. That's what you do with polling 16:00today. You look at past behavior of voters and go from there. But again, you can apply that to anything, racehorses, what sort of a calf is a certain cow going to have if mated with a certain bull. I mean there are agricultural applications to that sort of empirical analysis. Understanding that you could adopt that sort of theory across all sorts of disciplines was quite helpful.

Ann Chaney was an English professor here who I had one course, in whatever, Introductory to English is or whatever one of your base courses are, and ended up taking three literature classes from her. She was a fascinating character. She would come to class, back then you could still smoke in the classrooms, and so she would come to class with a pack of cigarettes and a thermos and she 17:00smoked the whole time. Drank that thermos, was the most hyper person I ever met in my life, but just an absolutely wonderful person to open up World Literature. We had one sort of unique thing in common, both of our grandmothers had been post-mistresses in small villages back before there was a civil service, so they were politically appointed post-mistresses. But I took three southern literature classes and then one on women writers that I wasn't signed up for and recruited for male students out of her classes because she didn't want an all-female class talking about women writers. She wanted to inject different perspectives and she did that, but she was great. She was terrific, and I still enjoy reading southern literature and especially southern women writers.

Nehrt: So you enjoyed the class?

Roberts: Oh I enjoyed all of her classes, oh yeah.

Her classes were highly entertaining. And yet the knowledge and appreciation of that genre of literature I still have and got from her. Two history professors stick out and come to mind. Larry Shumsky who taught a variety of courses here. I don't know if he's still teaching.

Nehrt: Yes, he is actually.

Roberts: He's a great guy. I took three history classes from him and two of the sections were on the History of Urban America, which was on the political science side you needed that for your public administration disciplines, because what the history of urban America was really about was how commerce influenced the design of cities. You could predict what the industry of the city was by its 19:00layout. He was a great professor, a great lecturer, but the most valuable lesson he really taught me, I guess I was a freshman, probably third quarter of my freshman year, I did a paper and I don't even remember what the topic was, and really worked hard on that paper and thought I had nailed the topic, which I did, but I made 22 grammatical errors and he caught them, fortunately. And so when I should have gotten an A on the paper I ended up with a B- because he took off for all the grammatical errors.

And so I went to see him during his office hours and said, "Dr. Shumsky you gave me a B-. I thought I had the subject pretty well covered." He said, "Oh no, you did, but you need to work on these grammatical errors, because if you can't 20:00write it you don't know it. So if you can't convey the knowledge it doesn't matter that you know it." And I don't write a letter today that I don't remember that. I am painful about it. I still make errors. Spellcheck was the greatest thing that ever happened to man.

Nehrt: Agreed.

Roberts: That was a great life lesson and I've had a chance to tell him that. He was an excellent professor. And then there was a Russian history professor here then, Wizinsky, Joseph Wizinsky who was the son of Polish immigrants. He had again, one of these people with a very practical background who came back to teach here, he had worked for the CIA in the 50s. He was fluent in Russian and they put him in a CIA radio monitoring station on the Turkish border. And so he had a very interesting, especially being Polish with all of the history of 21:00Russians and the Polish disputes and he just had such a wonderful…

He was a tall man with a very deep voice and could be quite imposing. I think he intimidated most students, but when you would go to his office he just could not have been more gracious and more open, especially if you were curious about the topic. And given, I also took a class on Soviet political systems that was not from him, because it really was…another political system to look at, but he was great, and I still read Russian history. It helps you put in perspective when you look at it. It's very easy to predict. It's interesting how much the old saying is that the best way to predict the future is to study history. 22:00Vladimir Putin is absolutely doing nothing different than Czars had done in Russia, or every leader of Russia has done for thousands of years. Very predictable, and a lot of it born from… And this is a hard thing I think in this country, I'm not excusing his behavior, but it's hard for us to appreciate how overrun the Russians have been in history, how many times they've been invaded, how many times they've been subjugated to Mongol rule or European influences.

And a lot of it very tragic and a lot of it is what forms or always forms their foreign policy. They are absolutely paranoid about their borders. If I hadn't taken these classes I never would have had an appreciation for that. And sort of again that kind of practical knowledge that lets you look at a situation and predict well they're really not doing anything different. Now in history how do 23:00you cope with that or how do you deal with someone like that.

The other thing you quickly learn is Russians, and I don't mean this badly, but they only respect power as a people, so any… That doesn't mean you go bomb them every time you don't like something or whatever, but any time you look like you're going…weak with them is a mistake. Anyway, those are some of the professors I had.

There were people I did meet and deal with here who did not teach me, but oh, there was another professor that I really enjoyed his classes and used what he taught, not in my major. I took, it was three sections of environmental law, and back then that was over at the College of Agriculture. The professor that taught that was Jake Looney, whose dad had been a Supreme Court Justice in Arkansas. 24:00And Jake ended up going back to Arkansas and becoming Dean of the Law School at the University of Arkansas, and then ultimately the President at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. And he had great classes. Again, environmental law back then was sort of an emerging discipline, but very very helpful in terms of thinking through. I didn't go to law school, but looking at environmental issues and he created quite a different perspective at that point.

Nehrt: Did you remain in contact with any of these professors after you graduated?

Roberts: Off and on with Dr. Herndon. I don't think I ever saw Dr. Wizinsky again after I graduated. Ann Cheney I did, she passed away a few years ago. I came back and was on the alumni, I've been on the alumni board twice, once in the 90s and I came back on it in 2003 I think. In the first couple of years the 25:00second time I was on the board the faculty rep to the alumni board was Dr. Shumsky.

Nehrt: Oh, that's nice.

Roberts: Great chances, and I had an opportunity to tell him that story and how appreciative I am now of that. I don't think I appreciated it all that much at the time, but just what a big influence that was. And then Dr. Looney I did, in a job I had there was a very technical tax case for an employer that I was working for that was an arcane piece of agricultural law, a tax law related to agricultural enterprising. The attorneys representing the employer sent over two names and just simply asked, these were two national experts on this topic, and one of the two names was Jake Looney, so I called him just to see. He was not 26:00available to come and consult on that, but we had a great chat and talked for about an hour and a half, but that was gosh, probably '93, '92 or '93, but I haven't talked to him since. And Dr. Herndon I think is in a nursing home.

Nehrt: What were your other favorite memories about Tech besides classes? A good social environment?

Roberts: Yeah, it was a good social environment. It's a big social environment, but you sort of make your friends around who is in your freshman dorm, who's in your major, and then by working winter quarters in Richmond I stayed in a boarding house where there were a lot of Tech co-op students who were out of engineering or forestry who were co-oping when I was in Richmond. Actually I still stay in touch, my roommate when I moved off campus when I started working winter quarters, and had a roommate in an apartment and he and I are, in fact I 27:00talked to him this week, we're still friends and we get together several times a year. He lives outside of Philadelphia.

So you would have one or two really close friends that you stayed in touch with, then there was a broader universe of people that you see and you know. You also to remember the drinking age was 18 when I was here, so it made a different atmosphere at the bars. Unfortunately, disco was the music of the day and so that had a different…

Nehrt: So you boogie-oogied all night?

Roberts: Not very well. I'm not the dancer in the family. I didn't get that gene somehow. Both my brothers did and my parents had it, but you can't get it all I suppose. But no, it was a fun time to be here. I think the biggest difference then to now, I mean I'm not sure we won ten games in four years when I was here 28:00in football. Basketball was the big thing. And what you see in Lane Stadium today you saw in Castle Coliseum in a smaller atmosphere. Castle was a rocking place then. We had good teams that had come off winning the NIT in '73 and we went to post season all four years I was here. Not because I was here, but just…

Wayne Robinson who is now on the Board of Visitors he and I were seatmates in two sections of geology when we were freshman and then ended up back on the alumni board together. A great guy, and I had seen him off and on over the years. But it was obviously in so many more ways kind of an… It was not the school it is today; it was much smaller, and that's not a criticism at all. The good news is I think a lot of the friendliness and small-town feel the 29:00University has retained even though it grew, and I think that the culture that was created then…

It was an interesting time also to be here because the Corps was at the smallest because of the hangover from Vietnam, I think the Corps when I was here was 4 to 500. They had only created the Marching Virginians about two years before I got here, so they were not nearly what they are today. There was not as much hype around the football program. Beating UVA was the big thing. I could care less. I think we lost to VMI twice in the four years I was here.

The biggest thing I liked was especially being here in the summers. It's such a beautiful natural area and I like to fish and I like to hunt and I like to hike. The whole area there's so many opportunities to do that. Even though I had grown 30:00up close by this is a little bit different topography here, so you just took advantage of all this stuff.

Nehrt: Did a lot of students stay over the summers?

Roberts: No. Maybe a couple of thousand. If I took, I'm trying to remember the course that I took that would normally if I had taken it in cycle the class would have been 200 people and I think there were 21 or 22. I don't remember what that was, probably a history class of some kind or an economics class -- macro, it was macroeconomics, which would typically be a much bigger lecture. The good news out of that is that is not an easy course, so having a little bit of a smaller class was helpful.

Mentioning culture, it was sort of an interesting blend of cultures over that four years. Came out of Vietnam so you had returning veterans, Vietnam veterans. Then you had people who had been very active and even traveled in the anti-war 31:00circles, so you still had… So you've got Vietnam veterans coming home. You've got 60s hippies who didn't finish and now they're coming back.

And then you've got those who sort of grew up in the 60s and there's a whole just cultural change with us. We're almost, you're almost viewing the world through three very different prisms of influences, and that created lots of interesting discussions. But, they were mostly civil, unlike today when no one can seem to have a civil disagreement about anything. It was still a pretty good level of civility even though there were some very deeply-held views by people who had been so active in the 60s on both sides of the war.

Nehrt: Did these very different groups of people were they able to come together and create a community on campus?

Roberts: Over time, yeah, I think they did. Again, I think people are also sort of tired, tired of the heated rhetoric of the 60s. They were tired of how much invective had been thrown around about the war. I think people wanted a little bit, they didn't want to go back to the 50s in sort of an overly structured life. It was a freer time in a lot of ways, coming out of the 60s in some ways. So I think there was a little bit of just sort of we're kind of tired of this. We're tired of fighting over this stuff, tired of arguing about it. We can just have a civil discussion, but I don't hate you and you don't hate me and you're not evil and I'm not bad. Yeah, by and large, I don't remember any real 33:00invective being thrown around.

Two very different issues came up here. The Iranian hostage crisis occurred and in those days we had a fairly sizeable Iranian student body, because they had come here for engineering or architecture or one of the art sciences. And I had two Iranian students who were in my major and then had gotten to know two others who lived on my hall. Well I'm sure there was some of it, I'm sure they ran into hostile… I remember calling them because two of them were in an apartment and just saying, "I know you're here and you didn't have anything to do with this." 34:00They couldn't go home. Their parents told them not to come home during that time.

While there was a release the hostages rally I don't remember it being like a reaction to what's going on. I just don't remember it being that open and hostile. You would run into some people who would make comments to these guys, but I think by and large they never felt uncomfortable here. I don't recall anybody particularly blaming them for what was going on.

But the other really burning issue that went on, it sounds so trivial now, but you know we only had the one campus bookstore in those days and so there was a monopoly on textbooks.

Nehrt: No Amazon.

Roberts: Right. And then, and I don't know if it's still set up this way, but 35:00the bookstore was actually leased by the University Student Aid, and so the profits of the bookstore went to help fund the athletic scholarships. Now there's a good side to that in that we have very little activity fees, with very little activity fees then in a relative sense. Well, none of that was open. You could not get, it was not subject to…the Student Aid Foundation was not subjected to FOIA, Freedom of Information Act. The student government and some of us who were active in different organizations thought it should be, and I'm working for a state senator so they called me in. I wasn't in student government, but I talked to a couple of the officers about it, so there were maybe eight or ten of us who were working for this legislator.

Well, my oldest brother was interning. Ray Smoot was the treasurer of the 36:00University in those days, and any governmental relationship flowed through Ray. So my oldest brother is working for Ray whose whole goal was to make sure that the Freedom of Information wouldn't be extended to Student Aid. So we send a whole… We had an interesting Christmas before the legislative session. The bill got introduced and even now my brother and I we still debate that topic. It's funny how all these years later it still comes up, but we lost. We didn't get it extended. I think we started chipping away, not very competitive nature of how books were handled in those days. There was actually a write-in at the library, a thousand students showed up to send cards to their legislators to support making them open the books on the bookstore. So that was our bit of social activism.

Nehrt: A lot of people were involved, thousands, a lot of people.

Roberts: It was about 1,000 signed postcards.

Nehrt: So 1,000 people came, signed.

Roberts: Well that's my recollection. You've got to remember that's now 37 years ago.

Nehrt: Your brother who worked for Mr. Smoot did he agree with Mr. Smoot or was he just in an awkward position?

Roberts: He's never going to admit he didn't agree with Ray, even after all these years.

Nehrt: Even now?

Roberts: Even now. He would never do that. Even if he didn't he wouldn't say it. I mean they had an argument that you can't, the principle of opening [00:00:44] for every auxiliary service, which is not state-funded, there's a legitimate argument about that. I'm not debating that. The issue we had was how do you 38:00lease a publicly-built building to an auxiliary service and then we don't understand how much that auxiliary service, if for no other reason are you charging enough rent for them? You could make that argument. But there is a legitimate argument that that's a slippery slope if you start requiring opening the books for every auxiliary service. I didn't happen to agree with it in that scenario, but that's really what the debate was around.

Nehrt: Yeah. Well, [00:01:32] bookstore prices, so I'm on your side. You can restart this.

Roberts: [Laughs] Some issues never changed.

Nehrt: That's true. It sounds like overall you had a really good time at Tech. you were active in the community. Did you have any difficulties you would like to share?

Roberts: You know, nothing really sticks out. Well I'm sure it did. I'm sure 39:00there was something, but I really can't think. I don't recall ever having a bad classroom experience. I don't recall… No. I really can't think of anything that in any way was a huge negative.

Nehrt: Well that's great.

Roberts: Nothing.

Nehrt: I'm glad there aren't.

Roberts: I mean you know, my traffic tickets or whatever. No, I don't really recall something that sticks out that just tainted the experience. You have the normal bumps in life, but nothing about the University itself. It was a normal 40:00yes I want this class now but I can't have it, the typical cycle stuff you just do and have today. So no, I can't think of anything that was particularly negative. It was a great time to be here.

Nehrt: So you graduated in 1980, right.

Roberts: Hmm.

Nehrt: By 1986 you were already appointed Secretary of Commerce I believe?

Roberts: I was deputy secretary and in those days it was Economic Development, and I became secretary in '88 for the remaining two years of Jerry Blouse's administration. Then I was the Deputy Secretary to a Tech graduate. I had worked on three statewide political campaigns when I left here. As a matter of fact, 41:00just as soon as I graduated, just before I graduated I started working for Jerry Blouse who went on to be Governor, but he was running for Attorney General in '81 and won. And then worked on the U.S. Senate race in '82. Dick Davis was the Lieutenant Governor. Paul Trible who is now the President of Christopher Newport University was the Republican. He had been a congressman from eastern Virginia.

The most interesting thing about that race, we lost, but the most interesting thing about that race was who, I was the finance director and the campaign manager was James Carville. You still see the pundit today of James Carville who ran Bill Clinton's campaigns. He's an interesting character. Coming out of Louisiana he had a very different brand of political style than…brought up here. And then worked on the gubernatorial race again as the finance director in '85, and then went to work in the administration. Had no real, you know the one 42:00thing about having been finance director you learn a lot about sales and marketing in a way, and so Economic Development was sort of a natural place to go.

Dick Bagley who was a Tech graduate from Hampton, a very prominent one, he had been a Corps commander when he was here in the 50s, subsequently went on the Board of Visitors here. Dick had been for ten years the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. I didn't know him well. I had met him several times and when Jerry named him secretary he specifically asked for me to be his deputy, which I took as a big compliment because I had not worked with him all that much, and he was great. I mean he was a great guy to work with, but he had a health issue in '87 that ultimately he ended up having to retire and that's how I became secretary at a way too young age.

Nehrt: That is a fast turnaround.

Roberts: That was a great experience. It was a fun job. It was a great administration. Up until two years ago it was the last time there was an [00:06:12] transportation package. We got that passed in '86. It was the last time the gas tax was really raised in Virginia. There are a lot of issues today about transportation that you couldn't foresee back then. Nobody foresaw that it would take 30 years to get another transportation package. It was a good time in Economic Development. If you go back and look in the early 80s we were still coming out, both we had a recession and then we had incredibly high interest rates. When I graduated unemployment was 7 or 8%, which doesn't sound bad, but we were coming off of year over year over year of being less than 5 and then interest rates were in the double digits. So if you think about zero interest 44:00rates today effectively I think the interest rate when I graduated was 16½%. So in the mid-80s when things started correcting it was a good time to be in Economic Development.

In those days it was a little bit different, much more structured than it is today in terms of a Governor's influence over Economic Development. It was more traditional as a cabinet secretary. There were 15 agencies I think. When you think about it Economic Development was only one department under that cabinet secretary. Ultimately Forestry became a separate agency, or was a separate agency, is a separate agency, and then the Port Authority was under that secretary, but then we had Labor and Industry which does all the OSHA inspections on facilities. Commission for the Arts of all things was in that 45:00secretary, so it was a very wide ranging broad secretary, but relatively small in terms of the overall budget of the State. Several thousand employees. I forgot what the size of that budget was at the time. It was a great time. He was a great Governor to work for. We had an excellent cabinet, and it was a good General Assembly. You had people there who would still make the tough decisions if it was in the long-term best interest of the State, regardless of the consequences. It didn't mean they didn't play politics because they did, but it was just a different climate.

Nehrt: It sounds like a huge position to have and a relatively short turnover from graduating.

Roberts: It was. Up until I guess the Warner administration I was still the youngest cabinet secretary, and then he named some Tech guy who was 27 years old, some wiz, and then the current, had to laugh, the current Secretary of 46:00Commerce who was a Rhodes scholar, the joke is boy that job has gotten tougher, you have to be a Rhodes scholar, Maurice Jones. He's got a wonderful story of his own and just a great guy.

Nehrt: What did you do after you left this position?

Roberts: I went to work for a man named John Kluge. John at the time was #2 on the Forbes of wealthiest Americans. He had made his money in broadcasting initially in independent radio stations, and then he actually built Metromedia Broadcasting, which you know today as the Fox Network. It was public when he had it and then in the late 80s he took it private, and it owned a lot of other stuff. At one time it owned the Ice Capades, the Harlem Globetrotters, part of the Philadelphia Eagles, I mean just a massive thing. And in those days you 47:00would take stuff that was public that you thought you could get more value out of it by busting it up and selling off the parts, and he did that. He took the company private and sold off parts and pieces, and ultimately he sold Metromedia Broadcasting to Rupert Murdoch who was the founder of Fox.

John, he had grown in Detroit, a great story. He had come to this country, a great immigrant story, had come to this country right after World War I as a German immigrant when Germans weren't all that popular in this country because of World War I. Couldn't speak the language. Went through Detroit public schools, got a scholarship to Columbia, a totally self-made guy. Started out as a paper product salesman after World War II, or during the depression and then got into the radio business and food distribution business after World War II. But he had lived in Virginia since the 50s. He had had a farm in northern Virginia and then he had come down and accumulated about 10,000 acres outside of Charlottesville. He had this operation of about 150 employees and several 48:00different departments trying to manage 10,000 acres with 50-something buildings and 22 residences and four registered landmarks and it was like a town. And he had nobody centrally managing it, and he also owned a farm on the eastern shore. He had bought a business in Danville and he wanted to invest in other agri-business related enterprises, but he wanted to do all that on his personal side and not out of his corporate…

So in late '89 I had decided that I really didn't want to work, I wanted to do something other than just work in government and politics. I was out doing what you do, I was self-networking and I was entertaining a job offer from Hampton 49:00for helping a guy set up a finance company. I was talking to a real estate developer in northern Virginia about being a COO in his company. I got a banker in Charlottesville who asked me if I would be interested in talking to John Kluge about a job. So I went up on one Saturday afternoon and spent Saturday afternoon talking to him about this job, left. It was fascinating. He was a fascinating guy to just talk to and at that point John was already in his 70s. He called about a week later and wanted to know if I would come back and talk to him again, which I did. This was in the spring of '89. Still we didn't leave office until January of '90. He made me an offer, but he wanted me to come right away and I said I can't do that. I had committed to Jerry Blouse that I would stay through the end of the term when he made me secretary. John even said, 50:00"Well I will call the Governor and talk to him about it," and I said, "No, no you won't. No. This is about me having given him my word and Jerry and I have a lot of background in common." He was from Patrick County originally and I said, "No, I'm not going to do it."

And so I left thinking well that was nice, but I'm not going to take that job so I can concentrate on these other two offers I had. So about a week went by and I got a phone call from John's secretary and she asked if I could slip up and meet with him again. So I did and he said, "Okay, I can wait until January but how soon can you be here?" So I thought it over for a couple of weeks and called him back and took the job. It was a great experience. It was like somebody paying me to get an MBA, when you work for someone who has been so successful in that business. I learned about businesses I didn't know anything about. We got into 51:00the meat-packing business. We got into the peanut-shelling business, the business he had bought in Danville. John ended up being the proud owner of the largest chain of coin laundries, a nice size coin laundry business of about 70 stores. By the time I left working on that stuff in '97 we had grown it to about 160 spread over three states. And that was an interesting business, because you had to learn about cash security and that sort of stuff, so I ended up working for John until 2003.

Nehrt: Neat.

Roberts: Hmm.

Nehrt: Throughout this time, you had been active with Virginia Tech still, right?

Roberts: Hmm. I was on the alumni board in the 90s and then came back on in the early 2000s. I can't remember when, '03. You probably know, but '03, '04. And then was fortunate enough to be asked to be President of the Alumni Association in the second cycle, and that was a wonderful experience. I served on an 52:00advisory board for the Vet School. I was one of the people that was asked to serve on a focus group during the search for the current Dean of the College of Agriculture, and then I'm on an advisory board now for the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, which is the first time I've really been asked to do something for my own college. And that's great, I'm really enjoying it. But yeah, even when I was secretary I worked on a couple of things that were important to Tech. One that sticks out is indoor aquaculture was an emerging technology then. Purdue had done some work in it and there was a big push in Virginia to expand aquaculture exterior, exterior ponds. Virginia State and Petersburg already had a very good program in that, but they were still trying to work the bugs out of doing it indoor. So got the administration to put, and 53:00this is not because it was Tech, I was working with a lot of people on this including the speaker at the time and it was very interesting. But we helped find the funding to set up a recirculating water aquaculture system here indoor. That was about in 1980…I guess that thing got set up in late '89-90. And it's hard to imagine that's basically the state of the art today, or the way it was done, but back then it was a completely new theory. I mean it was oversized aquariums, but you had to start somewhere.

So I worked with Tech on that and worked on a couple of issues that the College of Engineering needed when Paul Torgersen was the Dean of Engineering. And I had actually known Dean Torgersen when I was here, not because I was taking any engineering classes, but his daughter Karen was in the Young Democrats here with 54:00my brother-in-law and she and I ended up on the board together.

Nehrt: That's nice.

Roberts: Yeah, very good.

Nehrt: You must notice every time you come back the constant change, construction, bigger student body. How has it felt to keep returning and see things different?

Roberts: Good. You know, I don't know where you risk the community atmosphere based on the size that you have, and I don't know where that is, and there are people smarter than me that can think about that. I've never seen that as a particular risk. I think if we got to a big [10] size I think you run some risks where you've got multiple campuses. As long as it's still in a contained campus I think it's great. It creates a vibrancy of, I was listening last night to Tom Tiller, the Head of the Alumni Association is retiring, and when he became 55:00executive director of the Alumni Association in the late 70s… That's not right, it wasn't the late 70s, it was the early 90s, mid-90s, and when he first came to work for the Alumni Association in the 80s there were only 40 or 50,000 living alumni and today there are over 200,000. Well that's obviously going to create a vibrancy, and as you can see from surveys there are so many of us who had such a wonderful experience here we would really like our children or people we know to come have that same experience, and so there's a demand. Tech has got duly warranted demand for admission. I think it's great, because there's so many universities struggling with excess capacity, and yet we continue to grow and 56:00persevered and stayed relevant in a lot of ways across all curriculums, not just the vocational curriculums, which is not the right word, but across the hard curriculums, the physical curriculums like engineering or architecture, which are in high demand, but all the programs are in high demand. As long as the University can continue to provide a quality service and not lose that community atmosphere that it has then I think growth is fine. When growth starts damaging either one of those then I think we need to take another look.

What I really like is how they returned to the stone, because the growth was so fast in the late 60s and early 70s some of the buildings went up with brick, and not particularly architecturally pleasing, and the fact that they've been a lot more disciplined about it I commend them.

Nehrt: To wrap up is there any question that I should have asked you that I 57:00didn't or a story you would like to tell?

Roberts: No. I think you've done a very good job ferreting out. Is there anything…?

Nehrt: I think we're okay. It was a joy to listen to.

Roberts: Oh, thank you. Be sure you take that part and send it to my brothers, absolute joy to listen to me. This has been a lot of fun, thank you for asking.

Nehrt: Great.