When I received an invitation from the Atlanta Chapter of the Washington and Lee University Alumni Association to attend a dinner party honoring the Women's Lacrosse Team, I replied:
I'll be delighted to attend with my son, Martin. . . .
I entered W&L seventy years ago. On the day after Pearl Harbor, about half of the student body enlisted, and we freshman and others soon followed. Our football team, once nationally ranked, was left without a single letterman.
We were so hard up that, before reporting for active military duty, I played guard (at 160 pounds) on our 1942 team. Coached by a Lexington lawyer, we had an unbroken record: not a single win.
Our last game, against Maryland, was the closest we came to a victory (26-28, or something like that), thanks to a last quarter strategy engineered by a W&L linebacker from Baltimore, Lud Micheau, Captain of the Lacrosse team.
We put in a nine man defensive line to exploit the Terps’ extremely limited repertoire of line plays, pouncing on the quarterback before he could do his tricks with the new, complex T-formation backfield and end play with which Maryland had dominated East Coast football that year.
I'm sure W&L Women's Lacrosse Team is every bit as resourceful, and I look forward to meeting them.
After attending the dinner party, I reported to a dear friend:
I had a long conversation about you, your mother and your father last week, a kind of acausal connection, I suspect, to prepare me for your birthday. The occasion was a first of its kind event: a Washington & Lee Alumni party in Atlanta with its Women's Lacrosse Team.
When I entered W&L seventy years ago, there were no African American students; the closest female companionship (other than our elderly, civilizing fraternity house mothers) was fifty miles away, and the Lacrosse team was a bunch of burly boys that had at each other with sticks. I knew that sport was very popular in Baltimore; so when I greeted W&L's Lacrosse ladies, I asked how many of them were from that city. Sure enough, there were several, including Emmy, a charming senior midfielder that the team coach seemed to regard highly (as she did everyone of her players).
Emmy and I exchanged a lot of Baltimore stories, including the love I developed for your mother as my 7th grade English teacher, then for your littérateur father and last, but far from least, for you, Clarinda, my tender hearted poet and muse.
The last time I visited Lexington was shortly after returning from WWII, but I have often pondered how the Southern traditions we inherited from our once president, Robert E. Lee, have weathered the radical social changes of the last seventy years. The answer is clear, "Very well, thank you."
In any event, we all seem to have survived beautifully!
W&L Women triumphed over Sewanee the next day, as Emmy promised, 21-13.
photo of junior attacker, Britten Mathews, Washington and Lee Women's Lacrosse Team
