Roger Mudd returned on March 10 to the school that he left 52 years ago to share memories of students and time spent teaching here and highlights of what he has experienced in the next 52 years.
The Class of 1953, led by Mike Luxenberg ’53 as class agent, brought Mudd to campus as the first speaker in its Class of 1953 Lectureship, established in April 2003 to commemorate the class’ fiftieth reunion. “We wanted to contribute something to the School that would broaden and enhance students’ education,” Luxemberg said about his class’ decision to raise money to endow the lectureship. “There was no question about who the first speaker would be, because Roger Mudd is very well known nationally and either taught or coached almost everyone in the Class of 1953 at one point.”
After Mudd’s talk, Payton Bradford, junior; Xaivier Ringer, senior; Alex Palmour, senior; Mary Katherine Branham, sophomore; Brian Albury, sophomore; and Skip Saunders, Upper School English instructor, asked Mudd questions in a panel discussion format. Mudd also met with students and faculty from English II-H, AP US History, and Publications Practicum classes during fifth and sixth period lunches.
Roger Mudd’s Talk, Inaugural Class of 1953 Lectureship, March 10, 2004
I’m delighted to be here and honored to have been asked to come by the Class of 1953.
So, it was 50 years ago this spring that Darlington sent the Class of ‘53 out into a new world. And look at you now–you’re all about 67 or 68. Fifty years didn’t take too long, did it?
Looking over the 1953 Jabberwokk, I found you all–20 out of a class of 90. There you sit, right down front – Charlie, Ebbie, Sammy, Buddy, Bodiddy, Razor, Snoot, Jimmy, Bob, Mike, Jerry, Chico, Judge, Packer, Tram, Marshall, Gilbey, Greasy, Shack, Ott and Bouncy.
When Mike Luxenberg extended this flattering invitation on behalf of the class, we talked about what I should say. I asked if there was anything I needed to prepare especially for this morning’s talk, anything I ought to be informed about Darlington and Mike said, “No, no. Just be yourself. You don’t have to be informed about anything.”
Because this is the first time I’ve been asked to speak at Darlington, we'll all know in a few minutes whether it will be my last.
And also, this being the first in the Class of 1953 Lecture Series, we can all look forward to the quality of the succeeding lectures as going nowhere but up.
But coming back to Darlington is a pleasure because it means remembering the days of your first job. And my first real job—other than being a camp counselor or having a paper route—was as a teacher at Darlington.
I arrived here in August 1951, fresh out of the graduate school at the University of North Carolina with a master’s degree in history.
I could not wait to start teaching. I felt lucky to have been hired. True enough, I was a veteran of World War Two but a very young veteran. By the 1950s, the older veterans had finished getting their doctorate degrees and were way ahead of us in claiming their old jobs back.
So I was lucky to be teaching anywhere.
I do not remember what my Darlington salary was back then but I do remember that my contract with the school forbade me from—and these are the very words— “ partaking of spirituous liquors while a member of the Darlington faculty.” It was during this period of my life that I learned that a Coke would hide just about anything you put in it.
I taught seventh and twelfth grade history and eleventh grade English and helped Dick Yankee coach the JV football team.
The varsity coach, “Son” Sammons, asked Dick to install a single-wing offense because he thought it would be less complicated than a T-formation and good experience for the younger players.
That fall of 1951, we played Georgia Military, McCallie, Cedarville High School and a couple others whose names I cannot remember. We were undefeated. Sam Moss— at my request—went back through the old Darlingtonians and found in the Dec. 14, 1951 issue the following account of the return game with McCallie:
“Miller, Luxemberg, Fleming, Johnstone, Carraway, Taylor, Chandler, Anderson and Wellons played outstanding ball for the locals. Bennett, Hill, Willis, Burts, Morris and Kirkland crashed enemy lines, tearing them to shreds. Fine blocking and tackling, superb running and passing and ball handling were nourished by both squads…The junior varsity of 1951 is to be congratulated on its fine season.”
Boy, is that journalism at its finest?
But I must say there were a couple of times when I had to resort to a locker room talk during half time that was heard in downtown Rome.
One of our JV players from Atlanta came to me and asked to be excused from the McCallie game. I asked him why. He said his parents needed him at home. I asked why. He said it was a social thing. I asked what social thing. He said it was the weekend of the Fall Cotillion at the Piedmont Driving Club. I said, “Turn in your jock.”
As a new teacher in 1951 and a bachelor at that, I was also a dormitory counselor. I had the room on the third floor at the end of Old Main. Worth Moser, who taught Spanish, was at the other end but he had a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room and a telephone.
The Darlington I came to in 53 years ago bears little resemblance to the Darlington I came to yesterday. Back then there were about 350 students, all boys, grades 6 through 12. More than half of them were day students from Rome and about a hundred were from out of state, mostly North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. There were four Yankees but no foreign students.
Darlington was run by a president, a headmaster, three associate headmasters, a business manager and a director of athletics. There were 16 teachers and they taught English, history, French, Spanish, Latin, science, chemistry, physics, mathematics, Bible and band—and that was it.
Back then Darlington played football, soccer, basketball, track, tennis, golf and baseball. Today, it’s those seven plus eight more: lacrosse, swimming, crew, softball, volleyball, equestrian, diving, and wrestling.
The athletic program sounds more like Michigan State than the Darlington I knew.
The yearbook was and still is, of course, The Jabberwokk. On the cover of the 1952 Jabberwokk was imprinted the school seal which read “Darlington School Rome Georgia 1905 Unselfishly Dedicated to Young Manhood”
Young women of the Upper School, I’m sure they fixed that one in a hurry.
As you can imagine, I was very nervous during those first few weeks as a teacher. I knew my stuff but I also knew somebody would try to challenge my control of the classroom and I knew that if I backed down from that challenge my life at Darlington would miserable.
The challenge came that very first week and it came in my junior English class and it came from an oversized eleventh grader and the challenge was direct. I had about five seconds to decide what to do. I did not remember his name until they told me last night.
I did not say a word. I simply grabbed him by the seat of the pants, lifted him up out of his chair and walked him out of the room.
It was a memorable moment for me—and for him, as he confessed to me years later. Tossing him out of class that day, he said, was the biggest favor I could have done him.
Lord knows what would have happened if I had been too puny to lift him up.
I’m sure all the teachers at Darlington have perfect control and maintain total authority but if there are any who need a little help, I’ll be glad to meet them after and show them in private how to grab an eleventh grader by the seat of the pants.
But in my young life 1951-52 was a watershed for me. It convinced me that helping young people understand the world around them, developing a core of values that would see them through was a life worth living.
But through an unfortunate turn of events my time at Darlington was cut short and I was the one who did the cutting.
I’ve never told this story before, except to my parents and later to my wife.
It was in the spring of 1952 when President Harry Truman was faced with a major strike by the steel workers union at the very time the United States was fighting a war in Korea and needed all the steel it could get.
The union refused to lower its demands for a wage increase and management claimed that to give in to the union would mean a huge price increase. A crippling strike seemed imminent.
So President Truman ordered the Army to seize the steel mills. It was in the opinion of many an outrageous use of presidential power. There were 14 separate congressional resolutions calling for his impeachment.
Editorials around the country denounced Truman as a dictator. One of those critical editorials that April was published right here in town in the ever-vigilant, ever mindful Rome Tribune. A few days after the editorial appeared The Tribune published a letter to the editor taking the newspaper to task for its attack on Truman.
The letter was signed “Bill Walker, Darlington School.” Bill Walker was, indeed, an English teacher at Darlington. He was from Savannah and was from a labor family, if memory serves. He had graduated from the University of South Carolina and had his master’s degree from Harvard.
But you can imagine the explosion that must have rocked the president’s house when the President read that letter in the paper that morning.
The President summoned Bill to his office and told him that writing “Darlington School” after his name was an inexcusable mistake that readers might assume it reflected an official view of the school, which it certainly did not, and that never again should Bill and any other teacher sign their names with Darlington School attached. That seemed reasonable enough.
But then the President went one step further. He told Bill he was forbidden from writing any letters to any editor about any subject as along as he was on the faculty.
It took a while for the implications of the Walker case to sink in, but in due time the Administration got three resignations and one of them was mine.
I made mine effective at the end of school year because I did not want to leave my seniors in the lurch because they were heading into their final exams and sweating out their college applications.
But I made clear why I was leaving. Under other circumstances I might have stayed, although I must say the administration did not make such of an effort to talk me out of leaving.
Just think, if I had stayed, I might have had John Hine or Jerry Dunwoody or Shack Wimbish in twelfth grade history and might have been able to walk them right out of class by the seat of their pants
It was a difficult parting but I have never stopped remembering the exquisite pleasures of teaching the young men of Darlington.
It took another 40 years before I was able to return to the classroom—first at Princeton and then at Washington and Lee—but the magic was still there, waiting for me.
That senior class—the Class of ’52 —by the way numbered 93. I looked over my ’52 Jabberwokk the other evening, wondering whether those young men have had happy lives, productive lives, married terrific women, fathered sensational children and wound up doing what they said in the yearbook they planned on doing: A lot wrote “undecided” but also a lot put down such vague terms as “engineering” and “medicine” and “military”. But there was one young man who seemed to know exactly where he was going. He had written simply: “Meat Packing.”
I left Darlington not really quite sure where I was heading. I had written my master’s thesis at Carolina on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relationship with the press and figured that if I were to keep on as a history teacher I ought to go back to graduate school for a doctorate degree. My adviser at Carolina thought the subject of FDR and the Press was worth pursuing and I thought that I should at least go to work for a newspaper first so I would have some understand of how newspapers were put together.
So my first stop after Rome was Richmond, Virginia, where I was hired as a cub reporter on the evening paper, The Richmond News Leader.
Looking back now, I think I can see why I went from history to journalism—chasing the truth, using primary sources, accepting only eyewitness accounts, always pushing to be present at the creation.
Phillip Graham, the later publisher of The Washington Post, once called the daily paper "the first rough draft of history."
So journalists and historians might be from parallel branches of the same tree of truth.
Russell Baker says, however, there is a difference- that whereas it takes the scholar 20 or 30 years to get it wrong, it takes the journalist only 8 hours.
During those first days as a newspaperman, I sat on the re-write desk, wearing a headphone, taking dictation from The News Leader's stringers around the state - obituaries, short items on the oyster harvest, a promotion at the DuPont plant, a speech at the local Rotary Club.
It was a painful experience, having to ask everyone to slow down, not knowing really how to type, knowing that my fingers were hitting the wrong keys or two keys at once, jamming the typewriter, feeling the editor standing at my shoulder, watching me botch one story after another.
But on June 23 I finally got a by-line story on the front page. The revolt of the Mau Mau tribes in British East Africa had cut off the world's supply of calabar bass fiber which is used by city sanitation departments the world over for push brooms for their street sweepers.
My source was Henry Brizzolara, president of the Old Dominion Brush Company.
The headline on my story read: “Revolt Brushes City.” And there was my first by-line in bold face type: “By Roger Mudd.”
A few weeks later, the city desk told me to check with Mr. Brizzolara to update the story.
The secretary at the Brush Company answered who answered my call said,
“Oh, I'm so sorry. Mr. Brizzolara died over the weekend.”
I wrote the city desk a note: “Broom source dead.”
The desk wrote back: “Then write an obit, dummy.”
Needless to say, I did not last long at the Richmond News Leader.
So I became a broadcaster - across the street in Richmond—at the radio station which the newspaper—and one night the announcer said:
“The Reynolds Metals Company presents Roger News and the Mudd.”
Well, I got to laughing, but unfortunately that was the week the Holy Father, Pious the 12th, was gravely ill.
In those days, radio in Richmond was non-union and news broadcasters were free to operate their own tape recorders and mike switches and volume controls.
On the table where I broadcast was a cough box with a toggle switch on it for use when you had to cough or clear your throat or laugh.
But I was brand new and didn't quite have the hang of it.
Well, I launched into the latest news about the stricken Pope and to my horror heard myself saying:
“The condition of Pipe Poeus has grown steadily worse and they have summoned to the Vatican bedside three Italian doctors and a Swish spesulist.”
Well, I got to laughing again and frantically tried to hit the mike switch.
But as I told you, I didn't quite have the hang of it.
So for the next two or three minutes, what the listeners to Roger News and the Mudd heard were bursts of insane giggling followed by six and seven seconds of dead air.
I left Richmond and headed home for Washington in 1956. I had gotten a job with Channel Nine, then owned by the Washington Post and known as WTOP. Sometime in 1958 I started doing the Eleven O' Clock News on TV—I was your Esso Reporter. Standard Oil wanted to have a little Esso sign on my desk during the newscast but I refused and the news director, bless his heart, backed me up.
Life was relatively uncomplicated back then. I wrote all my own copy, picked out the still pictures I wanted to use, chose the film clips I thought appropriate, and refused to wear make-up until the years passed when I really needed it.
On Wednesday mornings when President Eisenhower held his regular press conferences, I would go and stand in line at the old State Department with the Giants of Journalism—May Craig of the Portland Press-Herald, Richard Wilson of the Des Moines Register, Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Bob Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, Eddie Folliard of The Washington Post, James Reston of the New York Times.
I never said a word to any of them. One morning, Scotty Reston looked at me and said, “How are you?” and I almost died.
In the late 50s there really weren’t any television stars in Washington, other than David Brinkley and that was because he was the co-anchor with Chet Huntley on NBC.
The only weekend talk show was “Meet the Press.”
Back then, presidential press conferences were not televised. President Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty finally did allow film cameras into the room but the film had to be held until Hagerty had made sure Ike’s tongue had not slipped.
After five years at WTOP, I got hired by CBS News and I thought I had gone to Heaven.
When you were a reporter in the Washington bureau of CBS News, it was like being a New York Yankee in the days of Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Lefty Gomez and Joe DiMaggio.
When you were on the Hill or at the White House or on the road, you just knew you were going to win.
ABC was seriously understaffed back then and was a weak competitor.
And NBC, I think, rather enjoyed being second; it seemed easier that way, not having to be up and running at the crack of dawn; not having to explain why you got beat again by CBS.
But being a CBS News correspondent meant that you were among the best; that you were a reporter of skill, that you knew your trade; that you tried each day to get as close to the truth as you could get or were allowed to get; that your head was on straight; and that you were, in fact, a cut above.
Live press conferences didn’t begin until 1961 and what swept into power that year was not only the young and vigorous John Kennedy but also the young and vigorous television medium which changed American culture and politics.
It was also about this time that that journalism began to change. With television everywhere and anywhere, ordinary events grew into crises; press conferences became command performances; presidential debates became a matter of political life or death.
First, came one of the government’s spokesmen lying to the press. Those old hands—Brandt and Wilson and Reston and Craig—who had been through campaigns and wars and everything else you could think of—were furious, were incredulous that a spokesman of their government would deliberately lie.
The lie was uttered in 1960 by Lincoln White, the press spokesman for the State Department, who had been instructed by his bosses—mainly John Foster Dulles—to describe Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane shot down on a pre-planned mission over the Soviet Union as a “weather research plane” that unaccountably drifted off course.
The Washington Post has called that lie the “first big blow to the relationship between the government and the press.”
Lincoln White’s falsehood shocked the Washington press corps because most journalists at that time were trusting and uncritical of the government; they tended to be unquestioning consumers and purveyors of official information.
Today—44 years later—it would be hard to find a Washington reporter who does not believe that official statements are basically lies or half-truths until proven otherwise.
And as the relationship between press and government was changing so was the pace and pulse of communication.
When I came back to Washington in 1956, the presidency was recorded by stenographers and typists; secretaries listened in and took notes during telephone calls. The press was using things we never see anymore—carbon paper, stencils, mimeographs, vacuum tubes, flashbulbs, film, cameras and typewriters.
Within five or six years, there were transistors, T.V. sets in almost every home, Xerox machines and tape recorders in all the offices and jet planes that brought London to within six hours of Washington.
And within another 10 years, videotape, satellites and up links and down links and computers and laptops made the jet plane obsolete and no place in the world beyond reach. We had become indeed a “video village.”
Look what technology has done to politics. When Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, there were two news cycles a day, morning papers and evening newscasts; CNN had just started. There were no satellite phones, no USA Today, no Fox News Channel, no CNBC, no Comedy Central, no Weekly Standard, no Rush Limbaugh show, no Slate, no Salon, no Google, no Yahoo, no Drudge Report. Now, campaign stories change hour by hour.
And as The Washington Post has said, “In today’s news universe, stories, allegations and gossip bounce from Web site to Blackberry and back again while being played in an endless cable network loop.”
Politicians now live and die by the Internet. The very Internet that raised up Howard Dean has brought Howard Dean down.
So with so much going on the tube, with video games and DVD and MTV, is it any wonder that so many of our young people have lost whatever grip they had on their own history.
Most of us are familiar with the dismal results of the standard achievement tests in history being given in America’s public schools.
Such questions as, “Who was the ‘Father of the Constitution’? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin or Madison?”
And “Who was president at the beginning of the Korean War? JFK, FDR, Eisenhower or Truman?”
And “Identify Snoopy Doggy Dogg: a Charles Schultz cartoon; a mystery series; a rap singer; a jazz pianist.”
Guess what? Only 23% knew Madison was the Father of the Constitution; only 35% tied Truman to the Korean War; but 98% knew Snoopy Doggy Dogg.
And if you don’t believe that, maybe you would believe that not one of America’s top 55 universities and colleges requires its students to take a course in US history before graduation. Not one. And only 22 of the 55 require a course in some sort—any sort—of history.
So is it any wonder?
I, for one, believe that there is more, much more to history than dates and bits and pieces of data and that life is not a multiple choice but is more like an essay. I think reasoning and analytical skills are just as important as encyclopedic knowledge.
But neither do I think we should be afraid of facts and dates or hesitate to require our young people to develop some muscle memory about who the people were who shaped this country and when it was they shaped it.
I do not think Americans are uniquely uninformed. Several years ago, a survey by Gallup and the Daily Telegraph in London found that only 40% of those polled knew that Britain had lost the American War for Independence and 53% thought the 13 American colonies were never under British rule.
Will Rogers once said that “everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
I do not think Americans are an ignorant nationality but I do think we are prone to intellectual lassitude; I think this tendency has not been helped by the cultural pervasiveness of television and the Internet. I think we demand instant gratification and I think we are suckers for quick and easy solutions, which is, I suggest, what accounts for the widespread belief that all it takes to solve our education crisis is some standard of learning tests, some teacher certification and some school accountability.
I think learning is hard and requires discipline. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Colonel Roger King, who is an Army historian, says, “We’ve found that history teachers are spending just a day or two on World War Two. It’s really kind of sad,’ he said, “because it’s the pivotal event of the century. It’s fallen off the education scope.”
How could that have happened? Could it be that America’s school teachers have, in fact, relegated World War Two to one day?
Having taught twelfth grade U.S. history right here, I suspect that is true. I can remember trying my best to cover the ground—from the Aztecs to the Atomic Bomb—but—this being a school in Georgia—spending too much time on the Civil War, and then running out of gas just as we hit Pearl Harbor or D-Day.
And I remember how incredulous I was to learn that my students had no idea who Mussolini was. The year was 1951 and Mussolini hadn’t been dead but six years. But then realizing that when Mussolini had been shot in April 1945 and then strung up in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, my students were only 10 and 11 years old.
And then I remember rationalizing that recent history really wasn’t history but was more current events and hoping that my boys who had been taught by me to be curious and to ask questions would take it upon themselves to learn about Mussolini.
I think the teaching of recent history suffers because nobody much teaches history as history anymore. They teach it as social studies with history getting sliced into little pieces of labor history and gender history and folk history and black history and gay history so that the teacher has to cope with and satisfy these constantly shifting academic loyalties in such a way that the grand sweep of America sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.
So let’s take our own little history test this morning.
Of course, this will be a lot tougher than the test Coach Jim Harrick Jr. used to give his basketball student athletes at the University of Georgia … like how many points does a three-point field goal account for in a basketball game or like how many halves in a basketball game?
My test will put the Georgia Bulldogs to shame.
I’ll ask the question and you raise your hand when you hear me read what you think is the correct answer.
Ready for the First Annual David Hicks Collaborative Examination and Short Cut to the Honor Role Quiz?
#1 The name of the famous economist who wrote “Value and Capitalism”: Alan Greenspan? Thorstein Veblen? Sir John Hicks?
#2 The name of the radio broadcaster who covered the D-Day landings on Normandy in 1944: Edward R. Murrow? Dan Rather? George Hicks?
#3 The name of the star who was on Star Trek IV and many soap operas: Nicole Kidman? Jennifer Lopez? Catherine Hicks?
#4 The name of the 19th Century folk art and landscape painter: Grandma Moses? NC Wyeth? Edward Hicks?
#5 The name of the Washington Redskins’ running back from the 1999 team: Stephen Davis? Ernest Byner? Skip Hicks?
And finally a trick question: The name of the most beloved prep school president between Cedartown and Calhoun: David J. Hicks? David Q. Hicks? David V. Hicks?
See how easy history tests can be and how much fun they are?
Well, I’m about finished. I have loved being here. You’ve got a great school and a proud tradition.
Perhaps you do not know exactly what it means to start a school like Darlington and keep it going and growing for 100 years … turning out young men and women year after year with a sense of loyalty and pride … through a half a dozen wars, a depression, several recessions, 18 presidents, cultural upheavals, street riots, drug wars—but with selfless men and women remaining at their teaching posts, knowing that to fail would be to fail all those generations that were here before or were on their way.
As I told the Class of ’53 last night, being seen and heard by 18 or 20 million tv viewers cannot compare—ever—with the thrill of being in a classroom with 15 or 20 young people, locking eyes and explaining something they didn’t know in a way that causes them to say, “You’re kidding.”
May I say finally, that soon enough that the seniors who are with us this morning—more than 100, I guess—The Class of 2004—will be graduating in a month or two from Darlington and probably packing off to college.
If Darlington—your alma mater, your friend and companion, your shaper and your molder for these past few years—hopes you learned one thing—just one thing—perhaps it would be that the truth, that honesty and the ethical life can set you free and keep you free. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Martha Stewart.
Truth is a very small force but it can move a very great weight. Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, with all his levers and screws and pulleys, once said he could move the earth if he had place to stand.
You will soon have a place to stand and each of you can help move the earth.
