Rockbridge Vignettes

09/10/2025

09/09/2025

Randolph McCall Pate served in the Army even before he enrolled at VMI in 1918. He was commissioned into the Marine Corps, and eventually rose to become the Marines’ 21st commandant (1956-59), succeeding Lemuel Shepherd, who had graduated from VMI four years before Pate did. Pate earned Distinguished Service Medals from both Army and Navy, the Legion of Merit and a Purple Heart.

09/08/2025

“Art Work," Sally Mann's first mostly prose book in 10 years (ever since her memoir “Hold Still” became a finalist for the National Book Award), has attracted eye-popping advance notice, including from the New York Times and all the mavens of the literary and art worlds, even though (so it seems from the publisher’s own inability to describe it succinctly) it’s more than a new memoir, not quite an advice book for aspiring artists on how to learn from one’s mistakes, nor just a collection of well-told tales (some of them about Lexington). The two most often used words, it seems, are funny and entertaining. It's officially due in bookstores on Tuesday (Sept. 9).

09/08/2025

Monday Sept. 8: Pam Simpson turns 79 today. She arrived in Lexington in 1972 from Omaha as a fresh-faced youngster to teach art history, W&L’s first tenure-track woman. Has she ever left a mark! Before she was 30, she had written, along with Royster Lyle, the still-in-print, peerless “Architecture of Historic Lexington,” without which our two historical organizations and this site would be feeble indeed. W&L, being a smart place, chose her to be the assistant (later promoted to associate) dean of academics and twice appointed her head of the art department. She was president of and gave new vigor to both Historic Lexington Foundation and the Rockbridge Historical Society. Her classes were jammed with keen students and townspeople. Eventually her scholarly focus broadened to include “vernacular” architecture, which means self-taught through observation, imitation and improvement. Her books included one on linoleum and similar finishes which us riff-raff could use to imitate the upper crust and another on the art you’ll find at state fairs, like butter sculptures and cow palaces. It’s usually a platitude to say a person will be remembered until time runs out, but once in a great while it’s not.

09/07/2025

In the 1970s, Lexington undertook a massive project to rebuild the central streets and sidewalks and bury the utility wires. (Until then, downtown had been a depressing-looking, dilapidated eyesore that people wanted to avoid if they could. Imagine!) The utility work dragged on and on, with Main Street intermianbly closed — provoking Professor J. D. Futch, the idiosyncratic and hilarious W&L history professor, to write a letter that was published in the News-Gazette, demanding to know when the new subway system would be finished and how much the crosstown fare would cost.

09/05/2025

Mayling Simpson is a cultural anthropologist who married a 1968 Virginia Military Institute grad, and now she has dissected her husband’s alma mater and his brother rats in a book called “Lives Guided by Honor.” Rather than a polemic, her book is based on data — her survey of the entire class, with 44% of its surviving members participating. Her key finding will surprise no one: discipline, Brother Rat-hood and the honor code are the driving forces in alumni lives, 50-plus years later. The author will give a book talk next Friday (Sept. 12) at 3:15 in the auditorium of VMI’s Nichols Engineering Hall, and you’re all invited.

09/04/2025

There was a time, readers, back in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Deep South was at the forefront of progressive decision-making in the federal judiciary. And at the forefront of the forefront was one John Minor Wisdom, a New Orleans native who graduated in 1925 from Washington and Lee. He was a Republican who delivered Louisiana to Dwight Eisenhower who, as a reward, named Wisdom to the Fifth Circuit. Bill Clinton gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. W&L, where he was a board member from 1957 until 1975, awarded an honorary doctorate and the Fifth Circuit headquarters building is named for him.

09/03/2025

William W. Pusey III (1910-94) was W&L’s academic dean in the transition years (from regional to nationally respected) and taught German from 1939 to 1981. He was as sly and witty as you could ever hope a professor to be. In a memoir, he recalled one of his first impressions when he came to Lexington for his job interview: “On my way to Washington Hall, a ‘Herb the Dog Man’ tried, unsuccessfully, to sell me a dog. What kind of a place had I come to?” Is there anyone out there who remembers Herb?

09/03/2025

Right before the Civil War, the nation’s architects began to challenge the dominant Classical approach, and that rebellion trickled down to Lexington. The Presbyterian Manse on White Street is possibly the most familiar early application of non-Classical Gothic architecture, echoing the Middle Ages (hence the moniker Gothic Revival). Look at these two “miniature” buildings at Rockbridge Alum Springs in a similar style, the barroom and the post office.

09/02/2025

Leonard T. Gerow (1888-1972) was the first American corps commander ashore on D-Day and the first general office to enter Paris after its liberation in 1944. Not surprisingly, he was a Virginia Military Institute alum (class of 1911). In 1954, four years after his retirement, a special Act of Congress awarded him his fourth star.

09/02/2025

Annie Jo White is one of those historical characters we wish we had known. She was Washington and Lee’s librarian in the post-Lee years, which might suggest a dour spinster always shushing people who were trying to have a good time. But in fact she was apparently a party girl. As early as 1876 she organized a “fancy dress hop” that became the fabulous, famous Fancy Dress Ball. Here she is, dressed as Pocahontas for that first dance. Need we say that the students adored her?

09/01/2025

Rockbridge elders will remember Charley McDowell, our homegrown newspaperman with a national following thanks to PBS. But is anyone old enough to remember his dad, Charley Sr., who taught at Washington and Lee’s law school? In 1954 he wrote a well-reviewed novel called “Iron Baby Angel.” (The title refers to a horse-drinking fountain in Danville, Ky.) The New York Times review used the phrases “tongue in cheek,” “philosophical,” “eccentric” (referring to lawyers like the author) and “clownish” (referring to politicians). “Highly anecdotal, airily inconsequential and seldom dull.”