Well, I was born in Wake Forest, August 29, 1906. My father was Professor
of Physics at Wake Forest College. So I grew up there under the shadow
of the college. As to what it was like to grow up in the little town of
Wake Forest, I guess I can just summarize it by just saying it was a
wonderful privilege. Wake Forest in those days was a very remote,
isolated, little country village centered around the great college.
There were no paved streets, and there were, in those days, of course,
no paved highways in the state of North Carolina. There was a dirt
public road leading from Raleigh to Wake Forest and then on north
through various and sundry detours to Richmond. But there were virtually
no automobiles anywhere in 1906 and for several years thereafter. When I
was growing up, as a child, the passage of an automobile along the road
in front of the house was an event which called for all the children to
run out and look at it. Now we don't even bother to look at a jet plane.
[Laughter] But Wake Forest was, as I
say, a very isolated, little town.
The only practical way in or out was by the passenger trains of the
Seaboard Railroad. Seaboard ran a train called the Shoofly which left
Wake Forest, rather came through Wake Forest,
Page 2 from
the north about ten o'clock in the morning. It arrived in Raleigh in say
forty five minutes, and then it returned from Raleigh at six in the
afternoon. So anyone who had business in Raleigh or wanted to go
shopping in Raleigh would ride over and spend the day in the capital
city and come home. There was also a train which arrived here from the
south at twelve o'clock. Its companion train arrived going south at
about three o'clock in the afternoon. There were two fast trains, as we
called them, that did not stop at Wake Forest. If one wanted to go on to
Richmond, Virginia, one had to take the local train, change in
Henderson, and then board the fast train, and then go on to Richmond,
Washington, or wherever, and, similarly, if one ever had to go south.
There was also a train which would pass through Wake Forest about
midnight. I never was on that train but the students used to use it. The
students going and coming to and from Wake Forest had to use those
trains, or, as many of them did, catch a ride on a freight train as they
slowed down going through Wake Forest. They would then, to come back,
catch a train, freight train, going north. Sometimes they had difficulty
in getting off because the train was going too fast for them to get off.
They would go on up the railroad about eight or ten miles where the
train had to stop to take on water. Then they would alight and catch
another train coming south. I use that to illustrate that Wake Forest
was indeed an isolated. little village.
The students would come to college in September, and with rare exceptions
they would not go home until Christmas. Many did
Page 3 not
go home then. The result of that isolation was that the students, when
they came to Wake Forest—and we had in those days about 450 or 500
college students—would remain. The students became very well acquainted
with and closely associated with the inhabitants of the village, not
only the professors and their families, but the town people generally.
There was in those days no church in Wake Forest except a Baptist church
which, in the early days, met in the college chapel, which was burned by
an arsonist much later on. The present church was built in 1914. It
served as a place of worship for all the community of all denominations.
There were a few Methodist and Presbyterians, and except for the
football team, we didn't have many Catholics, but they came too. The
students would go to the church in large numbers. The church was always
filled. It was a large auditorium.
One of the fine things I remember in those days was the singing in the
Wake Forest Baptist Church. Dr. Hubert Poteat was the son of the
president of the college and himself a very highly regarded, nationwide,
classical scholar, a professor of Latin. He also played the pipe organ
in the church and was an accomplished musician. Later on, to show his
versatility, he became the Imperial Potentate of the Shrine. He and Mr.
Earnshaw, the Bursar of the college, had, in student days, won the
tennis championship of the South. So Dr. Poteat was a versatile man.
There were other remarkable men on that college faculty. I suppose, I've
forgotten the exact count. I think at the time of
Page 4 my
young childhood there were about twenty-three-or-four members of the
faculty. It was a great privilege to grow up in this community because,
by virtue of the conditions I have described, we children became well
acquainted with the college students and well acquainted with the
college faculty. That old faculty of the Wake Forest College. under most
of whom I had the privilege of studying when I later went to college,
was one of the most, if not the most, remarkable group of cultured,
Christian gentlemen and scholars I have ever known. I have, of course,
in my later years, in my graduate studies at Harvard and Columbia and,
in my teaching days, going to various educational association meetings,
had the privilege of coming into contact with many better known
scholars. I'm sure many of them were equally as cultured and capable,
but I have never known an entire group so devoted to causes of culture,
Christian living, and community service as those men under whom I had
the privilege of studying, and with many of whom I later taught. They
were my friends when I was a little boy running barefoot along the dirt
streets of our village. They were a great benefit to me culturally and
otherwise.
I thought, until I went on to do my graduate work, that all college
professors were that way, but I soon found that they were not. These men
had a very close association with their students. The students never had
any hesitancy about going to visit in the homes of the professors,
either socially or to get further assistance with their college work.
There arose between the Wake Forest faculty and the students a close
comradeship which lasted
Page 5 throughout the life of the
two. I was also the beneficiary of that situation when later I became a
professor in the Law School of Wake Forest College.
Before going to that, perhaps I ought to give you a little description of
the public schools which I attended. Now we have today—and to some
extent I'm in sympathy with it—we have today a rather hysterical
determination that public schools must be given an unlimited quantity of
money and palatial buildings in which to operate. I know from my
experience that that is not true. I do not belittle the importance of
buildings and equipment. But I know that the important thing in any
educational institution, whether it be the kindergarden, grammar school,
an undergraduate college, or a graduate school in the university, the
important thing in the institution is the faculty. That is what made
Wake Forest College great.
Now the public school that I attended was about three blocks, not three
blocks, about one block from my home. There were of course, no school
buses in those days, and usually the parents of students lived within
the village. The building had five rooms, plus one room across the
street in which the first and second grades were taught by a single
teacher. There were five rooms in the, shall we say, the main building,
which was a very dilapidated wooden structure. One room was devoted to
the high school. We had in one small room, I suppose about fifteen to
twenty feet square, the entire high school of Wake Forest. It was taught
by one teacher. Sometimes the teachers came in platoons because the
college students sometimes filled in if the
Page 6 teachers
were unavailable. For example, I had in the fifth and sixth grade, I had
one room. So I, you might say, I repeated every grade from the fifth
grade on up through my stay in the high school. That gave me an
opportunity to learn the subjects a little better perhaps.
The high school was, even by the standards of those days, so deplorable
in equipment that most of the people of Wake Forest, who could
financially afford to do so, sent their high school students to Cary,
which had a very fine high school under Mr. Drye, I believe. It was a
boarding school. They went there to finish their high school. I stayed
at Wake Forest. There were only eleven grades in the school curriculum.
That was the entire school curriculum in those days. When I was in the
tenth grade, I was the only student in the tenth grade. That being true,
I did not want to be the only student in the eleventh grade, although
that would have given me a very fine opportunity to be the valedictorian
of my class. [Laughter] That was the only
way I would have made it, I suppose.
The college entrance requirements in those days were not quite so
rigorous as they are now. So Wake Forest College agreed that if I would
take a fourth year of Latin in high school without college credit—in
those days you had to have four years of a foreign language to get into
college—if I would take a fourth year of Latin without college credit,
they would let me in. So I entered college at the age of fifteen. One
reason I entered college at the age of fifteen, in addition to the one I
mentioned, that I short-circuited the high school curriculum, was
Page 7 that I was a very delicate child. My parents did not
feel that I could go to school. So my mother taught me at Wake Forest,
taught me in our home. So I was a beneficiary of the most exclusive
private school I know about, one teacher and one pupil. My mother was,
of course, a cultured, educated lady. I had excellent instruction in
between her duties as housekeeper and lookng after the rest of the
family needs. But I studied under her. I do not remember learning to
read. I don't know how old I was, probably about four. But anyhow, that
circumstance enabled me to enter, when I did go to the public schools,
the fifth grade at the age of nine. So for that reason, plus as I say
bypassing the last year of high school. I got into college at the early
age of fifteen. That was not due to my exceptional ability. It was due
to my exceptional handicaps and having other educational opportunities.
So I went to Wake Forest and graduated.