VT Stories Oral History with John Frasier, May 19, 2016 (Ms2016-015)

David Cline: So today is the 19th of May, 2016. This is David Cline from the Department of History at Virginia Tech. I am here on behalf of the VT Stories Project with Mr. John Frasier. John, the only time I will coach you at all, but if you could introduce yourself with a full sentence, I am or my name is, where you were born and your year of graduation.

John Frasier: Okay. I am John Frasier. I was born in 1933 in Washington, DC. I 1:00grew up in Arlington, Virginia. I came to Virginia Tech and I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering in 1954.

Cline: Okay, great. Thank you. Can you tell me a little bit about your family? You said a little bit about where you were born, but a little bit about where you grew up.

Frasier: I grew up in Arlington, Virginia. I went to the public school systems there. I was in Arlington, Virginia because my mother was from Minnesota and had moved to the Washington area to work for the 1920 census, met my father who was from Lowden County and they married. I have one sister who is older than I am. We were both born for anybody who might be a history buff in the Washington 2:00Hospital for Women in Washington, DC, but my parents were living in Arlington at the time. I had a nice childhood I guess like most young kids. It was depression years. We lived in a neighborhood, but there were a lot of people who had chickens in their backyard, and it was understood that the reason people had chickens was to have meat. But we were I think well off, adequately well off, in a neighborhood where everybody was employed, most everybody was.

Cline: What kind of work did your family do?

Frasier: My father was head bookkeeper of a bank in Washington, DC and my mother 3:00had worked as a civil servant in Washington, DC. In about 1937 or 8 my father who had had polio as an infant fell and broke his hip and spent the rest of his living years on crutches with a heavy brace on his leg, and at that time my mother went back to work. So certainly during junior high school and high school, I never thought of it that way, I was in some sense a latchkey child. But the neighborhood was close enough that that really wasn't a major problem, particularly once I was in junior high school. I got home at 4 o'clock and my mother probably got home at 5:30 or quarter to 6 or so there was a time when "I was unsupervised".

I had always understood that I should be headed towards college. There was never any question about that. My mother had planted that seed I guess early on yes you're going to college. And at some stage it turns out that I was good in math and things like that. Washington Lee High School in Arlington was the only high school in the county, but it was a very good high school. There were a lot of kids in it. My graduating class was close to 500 graduating seniors. That's a big high school.

Cline: Yeah, certainly.

Frasier: So anyhow, since I had this interest in sort of technical things I had decided at some stage to be an engineer, not quite knowing what that meant, and 5:00decided to be a civil engineering, knowing even less about what that meant. But nonetheless… I graduated from high school in '50 and somewhere along the line it was sort of understood, maybe sometime in my late sophomore or junior high school year that Virginia Tech is the place to go. In the church we went to there were other families that had children at Tech.

Cline: Oh okay. So there was a little bit of a pipeline.

Frasier: Right. In Arlington, from the standpoint if I said names I don't know whether you know any of these, but they were all from either Washington Lee High School or George Washington High School in Alexandria.

There were like Ed Buntz and Larry Ayers and Eddie Orangeberger, and me, and 6:00Mack Rein, etc. The point is it was a relatively compliment of young males who were headed off to Virginia Tech in my high school class, and there was a number in the classes before and after us I'm sure. So anyhow, off we went.

Cline: And mostly interested in engineering of one kind or another or some different?

Frasier: Engineering -- no. Ed Buntz ended up actually in the biosciences. I don't know whether you know Ed, he's retired.

Cline: I don't.

Frasier: I guess emeritus faculty member, I guess he was biochemistry or something like that. It was a relatively broad spectrum. The ones I named I don't remember any in business. Most of them were in I guess engineering or 7:00sciences. None of them went into agriculture or something like that. We had a bunch of the guys from the neighborhood who grew up on an eighth to a third of an acre, city or suburban lots. There wasn't much farming background there.

Anyhow, I came here. I had a very good background particularly in math, but just educational background coming out of Washington Lee High School. It was a good high school I think when I look at things.

Cline: Can you tell me about first impressions of campus when you first got here? Did you visit before you came as a student?

Frasier: No, no.

Cline: Or you just showed up?

Frasier: We had an orientation week and they were pretty good at showing us 8:00around, a lot of meetings and we got together. We didn't sing Kumbaya, but you know, I guess initial bonding process or something, or familiarization process. That went well. Now a feature was I knew I was going to be in the Cadet Corp. In those days unless you were 4F or a veteran you were in the Cadet Corp for the first two years. I had signed up, we were asked somewhere along the line what part of the Army do you want to be involved with? Well I said I want to be an engineer. We also got to make a…given the option of a roommate we would like to be with.

So I had agreed with a guy named Mack Rein who is deceased, R-e-i-n, and we had been in grammar school, junior high and high school together. It wasn't like I was coming down here alone and didn't know anybody. I knew a variety of these guys. But anyhow, we arrived and some friends had driven me down and dropped me off at a motel in Christiansburg and then Mack I guess came down with his folks and we stayed at Robert's Motel in Christiansburg. People old enough will remember Robert's Motel in Christiansburg. We arrived one afternoon I guess and spent the night, then the next day we were to be here and go through our business, which I'm sure we had to appear at various tables confessing who we were and they would send us in the right place. I think mostly associated with 10:00getting to dorms and being put in the right place for what Cadet company we were going to be in.

It turns out my first introduction to the Army related things, they said, "You asked for engineers; you've been assigned to ordinance." Okay. Hmm. I didn't know what ordinance was but I had been assigned to it. And Mack who was to be my roommate he was assigned to I guess artillery, so we were assigned to different Cadet companies. I remember walking back and forth carrying a mattress, because one of the things you had to do when you came was buy a mattress. So I walked 11:00off to where I expected to be quartered, but no, you're not going to be quartered there. You're not going to be an engineer; you're going to be in ordinance, so this wasn't an incidental event. This was upper quad to lower quad carrying my mattress down.

Cline: Your gear and all that.

Frasier: But anyway, that got sorted out and in turns out that I was put into a company particularly at my class level, which were just outstanding people to be with. No future presidents of the United States, but really very decent, right, intelligent enough people. And on top of that, I don't know whose idea it was, a large number of us in that Cadet company, it was Company I, were civil engineering students, so we had many classes together during the day and we 12:00lived together actually.

I made very strong friendships that are lasting to this day, and so as an aside that I think was a feature of the being in the Corps.

[Someone comes in for next interview]

I was just extoling the Corps. I thought the Corps was…

Cline: Since we have a break let me quickly just ask you about did they call it the rat year back then?

Frasier: Yes, oh yes.

Cline: How was the rat year experience?

Frasier: Um…

Cline: I can't tell you how many people have said they called their parents on day 1 and said, "What have I done?"

Frasier: I guess I had a little bit of inkling upfront from the fact that, probably my mother fed this to me, she had friends who had sons who had been to Tech and in the Corps ahead of that and had a little bit of an idea of what it was like. He's passed, but I have an uncle who is a West Point graduate and they 14:00have, I don't know whether they call it a rat year, but sort of like a plead year where, I guess Naval Academy, but anyhow first year at West Point where you go through I'm sure a certain amount of hazing.

But the hazing, there were some I guess a good word for them for the purpose of an interview were not particularly pleasant people who in the system were likely to be…or not likely, were above you, like when you're a freshman then there are sophomores there and some if not all sophomores feel like they can tell you what to do, and you actually learn a lot about the personalities of people when that's going on now, how people handle certain interpersonal skills. 15:00But all in all…

Cline: So it was a trial.

Frasier: All in all, yes, a trial, but all in all I was with I thought a very good group. We were very cohesive, so in some sense we insulated ourselves from the hazing part that you might find very unpleasant, but you know, there are certain things you sort of live and do and do it you know. When you walked just in the hallways you had to square all corners. You walk down a hall and if you're going to the restroom you walk down a hall and take a sharp left and walked in through the door, and I don't think I had that. I didn't have to march up and salute the urinal or anything like that, but you had to do that.

Cline: You still do have to square the corners by the way.

Frasier: All in all, there were things, but I quite frankly for me with the way, 16:00I guess a combination, I handled it and the people around me handled it, it turned into a very strong bonding experience for me with my classmates and the ones who were in the Corps. And I think you see that to today, until today. I mean you look at we're back here for our 62nd Reunion, and you look and you see that typically probably you could get a better statistic on this, but in classes from my time and before around probably 80% of the people who are here are within the Corps, and when I was here it was about 50%, because when I was here 17:00there was still a relatively large number of World War II vets here on the GI bill, so it didn't make sense to make them be in the Corps. So you had a large number of those people. I guess some transfer students who might come in after they had two years' worth of credits so they didn't have to be in the Corps, that type of thing. So anyway, my recollection was a student body was about half and half.

Cline: I'm really interested in that time period when there were so many veterans here, and still here even then.

Frasier: Yes, and before us there was even more. I showed up in the fall of 1950, and so that's essentially 4¬Ω-5 years after World War II ended.

The guys that got out right away they were in college and graduating maybe, but there were still a fair number of them around. You got to know them. We got along well with them. I never experienced any friction between the Corps and a civilian student body. It was two groups of people both here to get an education and so it was the conditions.

Cline: Did you have classmates or friends that went off to Korea? That would have been summer of '50.

Frasier: Friends, yes. No classmates that I… That's not to say that there weren't some. There must have been some, but not ones that I know. The ones I know mostly went off to Europe. Our situation was we came in here in the fall of 1950. Korean War was going on.

Cline: It just started, yeah.

Frasier: We had student deferments and I can remember thinking my choice when I go to college is I go to college and I'm a Cadet Corps and I graduate and I get commissioned and I'll go to Korea, I'll be an officer. Or, I cannot do that, go off and try to be a bricklayer or something and the Arlington County draft board nobody slipped through their fingers. I remember the woman's name. Her name was Payne, maybe Alice Payne. You didn't slip through the Arlington County draft board, so I would get drafted and I would go off. So I've got buddies I grew up in my neighborhood and a lot didn't go off to college, they went off to Army and ended up in Korea or ended up in the Navy and went on ships and some of them out 20:00to sea and all that kind of stuff.

I forget now what brought that question on.

Cline: Because we were talking about the veterans of World War II, but I was just thinking your time period is right in the War, yeah.

Frasier: You asked me whether I knew any that went to Korea, yes, my best buddy from when I was in high school. He was a very talented capable guy, but he was into being an automobile mechanic and he ended up being an HVAC designer/repairmen, but he was off in Korea. But continuing my story which I diverted from, in '53, no '52 I guess right, Eisenhower got elected. In '53 he went out and they signed the truce for Korea, so I was among you know Virginia 21:00Tech like many ROTC systems, so essentially was a second lieutenant production facility, okay. So I was on the assembly line or production line and then after Eisenhower took office and the "truce" or "peace accord" or whatever you want to call it occurred, all of a sudden I guess the services, the Army in particular sits there, it's like Lucille Ball if you remember when she's doing something on the production lines with the cakes. This is my vision of the Army all of a sudden, what are we going to do with all these second lieutenants?

So their solution to that was they came through and said some of you, because all in my class had signed the contract for the last two years to get your 22:00commission. For some of these they basically, oh slipsies, not so sure. We would like to have you that. I don't know what they told them, we'll write a letter to your draft board or something. Based on your training you should be made a sergeant or whatever. But anyhow, the consequence of that I was in this production line and the Army all of a sudden figured I didn't need all these second lieutenants right off, so I decided to go to graduate school. So the faculty member in the Civil Engineering Department got a letter from a faculty member or a head of a department at Penn State, etc., etc., so I went off to Penn State in '54 and got a master's degree in engineering mechanics in '56 and a PhD in '58.

And all the while once a year I filled in a report that said I wanted an 23:00extension in my date of call to active duty, as long as I was in good standing, and I don't know whether my department head or a dean or somebody I think had to sign off and say it was okay. But regardless, come I forget now whether it was June or July of 1958, I reported out Aberdeen Proving Ground and my PhD was awarded while I was standing inspection on Saturday morning inspection at Aberdeen Providing Ground.

Now, from the standpoint of talking about my career if I can do that, summarize it in 2¬Ω minutes.

Cline: Please, and then we can come back to Tech, yeah.

Frasier: I reported to Aberdeen Proving Ground for duty. They assigned me to a research laboratory, Ballistic Research Laboratory. I worked there essentially a 24:00year and a half or 20 minutes and liked it after I had gone through the Army schools at Aberdeen. Then I had wanted to teach. I went off and I got an assistant professor position at Brown University in the Division of Engineering, and went there with the idea I would have an academic career, and I didn't like it, which was a bit of a surprise because I had taught as a graduate student and enjoyed it. So since I had worked for the Army for a year and a half or 20 months and enjoyed it, I went back to work for the Army. That would have been in 1962 and continued to work for the Army in one way or another until 1996.

Cline: As a civilian?

Frasier: Director of a laboratory and things like that.

Cline: What did you mostly focus on in your career?

Frasier: Guns, bullets, explosives, propellants, and armor, ordinances. Well ordinance is about that, and ordinance is about trucks, I mean logistics stuff, and I was more on the…I would call it the war material side.

Cline: So the Corps was prophetic when they assigned you to ordinance.

Frasier: That's right. It turns out the decision to stick me in ordinance with no idea about it ended up had major consequences on my professional career, right. Who is to know when you're 17? How are you going to figure that out?

Cline: So looking back at your years at VPI were there any particular professors that you had that were mentors or that you have particular memories about?

Frasier: Yes. I guess it was in our senior year civil engineering, a man named 26:00Grover Rogers came in and taught and we essentially all liked him as good as…and he made structures, highway, bridges, buildings, football stadium stands, all that kind of stuff, an interesting topic. He was a young man at the time, could probably relate to us. He was a Tech graduate, had done his PhD at Harvard. Yeah, I could think of him. Professor Brinker who was head of the department, was a good guy. He taught surveying. I spent a summer surveying. But 27:00I had I guess always good math teachers. We had a guy once named McGeechie who taught I think economics. A guy teaching economics to engineers, but you know, he had a job on his hands but he was interesting. But I would say Grover Rogers is the one that I knew and I kept in contact with. He went down to Florida State and was some sort of a dean or associate dean or something after he had been here.

One of the most influential people for me actually was when I look back on it I think of this, was my roommate my senior year -- I'm sorry, my sophomore year…

In my freshman year my roommate was a man from Roanoke that he and I sort of got along, but before the freshman year was out I changed and roomed with a different old lady named George Palmer who is a wonderful guy. I really liked him, a good guy. And I made adequate grades. I had a good high school preparation, so I did well particularly in the math courses. I had gone through at least College Algebra in high school, so the math courses freshman year were a repeat to a certain extent of the things I had in high school, and I had a good high school math program. But anyhow, my roommate my sophomore year was a 29:00man named Tommy McDaniel. I can remember to this he said to me, he said, "Let's make all As." Now it hadn't occurred to me to make all As, but Tommy thought let's make all As. So I had come out of my freshman year, in those days a 3 was a full A. I think it's 4 now probably, but 3, I probably came out of my freshman year with a 2.0 or something like that. And there were times when I hadn't worked near as hard as I should have, so Tommy said, "Let's do that," and I said, "Oh okay."

So sure enough I did that, except I probably got a B in military or something like that, but I ended up with a 2.85 or something like that. So, being in a 30:00Cadet Corps provided me an environment where you could study. You didn't have people running in and out of your room, at least not after 8:30 or 8:40 or whatever it was where they had that. So when you needed to study you could sit down to study. In fact, sometimes there wasn't a whole lot to do other than sit down and do that. So anyhow, I really learned how to sit down and study then and found out that if I studied I could make good grades, right. So I ended up with a degree with honors. I think underneath my name the with honors is kind of small. Probably they didn't want to do that until the last quarter was over.

Bert Kinzey: When I was teaching here they didn't know who got with honors until almost the day of graduation when the grades come in, so the registrar would get me on graduation morning in her office in Burris Hall to announce…[00:31:27] with honors myself. [Laughs]

Cline: For the record that's Mr. Bert Kinzey, Class of '42 speaking. That's great.

Frasier: And that was helpful, because then I went off to graduate school and I did that, you know. I mean you have to work at graduate school, but I did that, I don't want to say it was so much with ease, but you know, I never had a hazard 32:00about getting through graduate school except when finally you have to sit down and write your dissertation. And even though we had English courses and had to write stuff, I never sat down and easily wrote something out. It's work for me to write things. Anyhow.

Cline: In what ways do you think Tech, looking back and either from in terms of graduate school or later prepared for what you later encountered?

Frasier: I think it was a very good basic education and technical disciplines. I think it was great in as I said, teaching me a little bit how to study, and the fact that I could do well academically, intellectually, that kind of activity. You come bebopping here when you're 17 years old and you know, I had… I 33:00graduated like 125th out of a high school class of 497 or some such number. I just being in the upper quartile by some two or three guys or gals flunked out and didn't arrange to graduate. Probably at the beginning of the year I was in the top quartile. By the time the year was over and we had gone from 502 or 3 members of the graduating class to 497 I understand. So it was good for me to find out that I could sit down and study and do well. Sometimes probably even you would say excel, but I did well in an academic environment, so that was good.

I learned a certain amount about how to get along with people and how to handle 34:00people. In the Cadet Corps the system in those days is as a freshman you were a private. As a sophomore you're either a private or a PFC. As a PFC you had a responsibility sort of as an assistant squad leader, okay. If you were a junior you were either a private or a corporal. A corporal would be a squad leader. So there was a certain amount of leadership learning going on there. I don't know that we were trained much. They train now, which I think is very good, but there was a certain amount of learning about what you could and couldn't do with 35:00people. By the way, part of the learning experience as a rat, when you saw what people did to you you know what you liked and didn't like, right. And depending I guess on your sensitivity, if you found what you didn't like you could decide I'm not going to ever do that to people that I saw that SOB do to somebody, and generally do something to them. It's almost all verbal. There was no corporal activity at all. I'm just not going to do that. So I think that's a good learning experience.

Senior year I was a battalion commander. So again, there was a certain amount of leadership responsibility you're handed there. I didn't think about it like that so much, but being there with three previous years you sort of saw how things 36:00are done and I learned how I like to deal with people. I found that a meaningful learning experience.

Cline: Did you ever see anybody drummed out?

Frasier: Yes.

Cline: How did you internalize that experience if at all?

Frasier: How did I visualize it?

Cline: What lessons did you draw from it?

Frasier: One of the first things we were taught about when you got here was the honor system, that and how to tuck your shirt.

Cline: How to iron the shirts.

Frasier: You were never a Cadet here or anyplace?

Cline: No.

Frasier: Before we're done… You were a Cadet, were you ever? I'll show you 37:00how you put on your shirt.

Cline: [Laughs] I always laugh because we just had graduation and my office is over by all the barracks, right, and there's always this enormous pile of ironing boards when they graduate. That's the first thing they want to get rid of.

Frasier: Oh.

Cline: They never want to see that again.

Frasier: And pressed, if they had Duck pants or something you would want those to be pressed, but no, we were not pressers. We would send them over to the cleaners.

Cline: Right.

Frasier: Let me see, you got me off on…

Cline: So honor system, I had asked about drumming out.

Frasier: Yes. Anyhow, I quite frankly liked it and bought into it. The whole business like the Cadets if you face Owens Hall on the right hand side is where the Cadets stay. On the left hand side is where civilians stay. But you know 38:00when you went to lunch if it was a nice day you are carrying… I carried a clipboard or a notebook with your stuff on it, a slide rule and stuff like that. You just put it down on the steps and you walked in. Came back 30 minutes later and you expected it to be there, and in my four years of experience it always was. Now there's a lot of places where you couldn't do that right. You would have chained your bicycle to a post or something like that. So I liked that. I never saw a guy cheat the whole time I was here. Now I didn't spend a whole month taking exams like that, but you know, after a while you got to a place you mostly minded your own business when you're taking an exam. You've got stuff to do, you've got to take it. But if people were doing dicey things you probably, 39:00they are probably going to be seen by somebody somewhere looking up.

But getting to the drumming out, I've got two examples, only one drumming out, but I know of two other dismissals. There was, I think this must have been my rat year, the first year. I'm pretty sure it happened on the lower quadrangle. One night the bugle calls, there was a bugle call at about 8:30 or 8:40 or something like that, which might have been named Call to Quarters or something like that.

But basically at that time you were to be in your room doing what you're supposed to be doing in your room and there wasn't supposed to be wild parties going on. And no problem if you wanted to study with another guy you went and did that, right, but somebody had to know where you were. So anyhow, there was a bugle call then, then at 10:30 there was a call called Tattoo. Have you ever heard of Tattoo?

Cline: Hmm.

Frasier: I always thought it was the prettiest bugle call, and then Taps was at 11. I don't know whether it was around the time of Tattoo or some other time. Maybe they blew assembly, okay, but let me pretend it was 9 o'clock or something. What's going on? "Fall in everybody." I don't remember whether we had 41:00to be in uniform or not, because most of us were probably sitting around in our khakis or pajamas or something studying. But anyhow, my recollection is it was dark. But anyhow vrrrumm, the drummers were there and they drummed and somebody read something out in a loud voice. Had a full battalion, four companies around to watch it. I guess, I don't know whether they ripped his buttons off or what. Not quite as dramatic for those of you who have watched [Jakus 00:41:36] where they ripped everything off of [00:41:39 Dreyfus], but he was clear. He was drummed out.

The other events I know of is honor court, actually I know of some others, I sat on some honor court juries, but another one, there was a… It might have 42:00been my junior year, the guys ahead of us. A guy who had been in the company with us all the time I was there, the same company, he got caught stealing, taking money from I think his roommate's… His roommate was the treasurer for some activity. It might have been some event that just within the company we were going to have and he collected the money and we were going to have a dinner together or something. But anyhow, one evening again, we were told, "Okay, everybody fall in." Marched us down probably to the holding hall, which was where probably mineral sciences or something like that was there.

You had to go in and were told, "Bring your wallet." So we did that. Went in, 43:00and under a UV light you had to hold your hands out and open up your wallet. They had seeded, dusted, whatever the right word is the cash in this drawer where the cash was disappearing and put it in there. Apparently he went and opened it up and it lit up light the 4th of July or something, so he was out of there.

And the other one was a classmate of mine who was, I think he might have also been studying metallurgy or something like that. He cheated by copying on like a 44:00mechanical engineering or something like that lab report, and boom, he was out of here. And I guess there was a trial for that or maybe he came in and was accused and said, "You got me red-handed." I don't know how they decided that, but that's a long answer to your question. Yes, I saw a drumming out very early on. I know of two other dismissals for honor court violations. And there were probably, I think I knew of some who were like some suspensions or something like that, but those three stand out. They were close by. Two of them involved guys who were in my Cadet company, so we knew about that.

Cline: So did the honor code and the ethics inherent in the honor code did you carry that with you from Virginia Tech?

Frasier: Yes, yes, and I suspect most people do. I don't know that for a fact, but you know you can combine certain things. I know I'm not a very good liar, so in most cases it's cheaper to tell the truth. But also from an ethics standpoint I don't like it. I worked for the government for a long time, and have the same system there. Some people are…well you know, I take pens and pencils home, and I wasn't against that, but I lived in a rural part, semi-rural part of Harford County when I worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground. They had a school principal there that I only met once and he was sort of a hard-nosed guy.

But everybody knew him and I think liked him and respected him very much, but he was sitting there and he had, in his class he had the children of professional employees of the Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground, mixed with kids who were rural farm workers, or workers on a farm, and he had a sense of propriety. He said, "If your kid comes in here (you a parent of a child) with a pen that says United States Government on it…" It's not the way he said it, but was very clear what he meant was I'll have your ass. He said, "I'm not going to have those kids 47:00of some sort of privilege in here with this kids from rural farm workers who their families, the honest trustworthy hard working ones have trouble buying their kids pencil and paper to come to school." I agreed with him with that 100%. I didn't mind a government employee if he went out and puts a government pen in his shirt in the morning and comes home and the next day to work and pulls it out and writes again with it. You can waste more of the taxpayers' money than it's worth trying to make everybody check in their government pens at 3-cents apiece before they go home.

Cline: Let me ask you too about, obviously I'm a historian and what I focus on is change over time. Can you reflect a little bit about change at this place and 48:00on this campus? An enormous amount of change that I'm sure you've seen over the years.

Frasier: I guess the fact that the Cadet Corps is not a bigger factor in the student body. When I was here it was at least half of the student body. Now how many students are on campus, 20-something thousand?

Cline: Hmm.

Frasier: I was told there's like 1,000 Cadets, so that's a big change which you see. You certainly see the change in the physical plant, all the buildings. You see the change in the athletic facility in the standing of the athlete's teams.

I mean you know, I would have to go back and look at it, but my freshman year I 49:00wouldn't be surprised to find out that the Virginia Tech football team was 2 and 7 or something like that. We didn't go to football games expecting a win. And somebody mentioned last night at our dinner, and I had forgotten this, but it might have been our freshman year. Somebody mentioned that we played William & Mary and the score was 54 to nothing in William & Mary's favor. So as a member of the class of '54 nice things were not said to us over that.

Cline: That's funny.

Frasier: Humiliating I guess, I don't know why we should be humiliated by it. So 50:00anyhow, the fact that you have this team and everybody is so rah rah about it. It wasn't like that to my awareness in the 50s. I knew a civil engineering classmate of mine was a man named Hunter Swink who was captain of the team in his senior year. As far as I can tell and he was a classmate in the civil engineering classes for four years, he never got anything special, and I can't imagine that's the case anymore with the athletic situation we have here at the time.

In my freshman year there was a number of, in the first quarter I remember there 51:00was three or four guys clearly who were here on football scholarships, big guys that have bruises and scabs where they had been beaten up playing football. Most of them were gone certainly by the end of the freshman year. I presume that was because of academics as well as, it might also had a little bit to do with athletic performance. So anyhow, that's a change, that role of athletics. I don't keep up enough with the academic program to say much about it.

It appears to me there's more research going on now than there was when I was 52:00here. Basically I saw it as an institution dedicated to turning out good bachelor level people to meet the needs of the State. It was similar… I did my graduate work at Penn State. Penn State when I first went there was much more than Pennsylvania's is willing to pay it to be now…very clearly responsible for meeting the development needs of commerce and industry in the State. Pennsylvania with all those mines and stuff up there had a very good mineral industry program. Mining here I guess was a good mining engineering program, a good geology program for going out and figuring out what riches were 53:00underground in Virginia.

I guess it appears, I don't get to really see it, observe it, there's more attention to the arts now. Here engineering and I would say and science, agriculture business, I don't know if there was much of a home economics program or not. There was a small number of female students, but I thought most of them were likely to be in an agricultural program, ag economics or agronomy or feed, seeds and fertilizer, whatever you call those agricultural programs.

Cline: What did you do for a social life? Were there dances?

Frasier: Oh yeah.

Cline: Were there girls brought in or dates?

Frasier: Yeah. The main dance events each quarter were put on by two organizations, a German Club and the Cotillion Club. Had you heard of them?

Cline: Absolutely. Yes.

Frasier: I was in the Cotillion Club, got inducted in I guess my junior year and that was nice. It was a lot of work actually. There was a near disaster I had. I got the job of being in charge of decorations, which had to do with decorations and party favors and all that stuff. So we decorated the whole War Memorial gymnasium. I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of the decorated gymnasium.

Cline: Well I've seen it for a ring dance. I've seen those pictures.

Frasier: Yeah, a ring dance is the same thing. We decorated the whole business. You would put crepe paper. We bought it in big rolls about that wide. Covered the whole ceiling, etc. Anyhow, I was in charge of that and we were all organizing. One of the big expenditures for it was for all this crepe paper. So I forget which way it went, but I think they were ordering the crepe paper through a place downtown Blacksburg. And then I found out that, I don't remember the name of the company, but an outfit Everett [Wady] in Roanoke. You could order it from them as well and we would have gotten it for less from them, so 56:00being of Scottish heritage I was figuring out how not to spend that money. And this turned into close to a disaster.

So anyhow, the shipment comes in to decorate for the dance. And this would have been spring formals in probably in 1953, because there was a theme for the fair, it was called Spring at the Fair. And I went down and you go down into the basement of the gym and there's an area there where they put the packages that had been delivered, boxes like this. And so I went down and I opened it up, it 57:00was the wrong order. I remember the first box I opened it up I couldn't believe it, because we didn't order anything that was less than this wide and a roll that was this big around. And this box is filled with things about toilet paper size roll of red crepe. Oh my God we've got the wrong stuff. So I go back trying to figure out well how do I get the right stuff. Can't do that. You have to get the order right we're sending and you have to ship the other stuff back. And maybe a day or two or something went by, not much. I went back down into this place where this stuff was stored, it's filled with water. All these wrong boxes of the wrong stuff are down there covered in this water. The sub pump had broken.

Cline: Oh no.

Frasier: So I'm in a panic. I forget, I had literally only a few days to get this working because we had all these people ready to come in because it was, I don't know what you want to call it, it was like a blitz when it came time to decorate the gym. The people in charge of athletics aren't going to say, "Yeah, go ahead and take three weeks." When your dance starts Friday or whenever it was and okay, on Wednesday you can come in or something like that.

So I was in a deep kimchi. The president of the Cotillion Club was a classmate, a civil engineering classmate of mine Bob Bass, and the man who ended up being, I guess he was president of the Corps of Cadets, Frank Fuller, both of them also were in the Cotillion Club, they went to work and got this stuff ordered and 59:00shipped in by air. It came I guess on a DC3 that landed in Roanoke and somebody went down there and picked it up and brought it out. I'll never forget one of the guys on the decoration committee, because we were no longer in any position, we took the colors that they had available that sort of could have been described by the same color blue, one of the guys on the decorating committee I remember, I don't remember his name, a tall thin guy, he said it was a technicolored nightmare. [Chuckles]

But everybody enjoyed the dance. It didn't make much difference. But you know the tickets were sold. There was a tradition of years standing of this gym is going to be all decorated up for this. Anyhow, those were some social activities.

There were also hops and the likes. I did very little of those. We would go to Radford and see the ladies of Radford on occasion. There would be some sort of event, or they might come over for a hop or something like that.

Cline: Anything that I didn't ask you that I should have asked you about?

Frasier: That's one of my last questions as well. [Laughs] No, I can't think of anything. I thought it was a very good experience. I felt myself very fortunate to be here. I felt myself very fortunate to be involved, put together with the set of people that I was involved and put together with.

Lived on a day to day basis, studied, worked, laughed, got in trouble with, etc. The get in trouble with you can read that thing and see a little bit about that. We were on the verge of being expelled. The event was we were involved in painting the water tower which was a [01:01:30] at one stage. So that's all I have. You can just run this through the copier if you need two copies. Or do you need me to do something to this?

Cline: No. This one's for me. This one is actually for you to keep and I will just sign it myself and then you can fill in the rest if you want to.

Frasier: I will put this in my old gold folder, old guard folder.

Cline: Well thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it.

Frasier: This was 19th we decided, right?

Cline: Yeah.