For Gentlemen Minks

Lexington, Va. and its 3,500 inhabitants had seldom had such a busy week. Every time the daily "Virginia Creeper" crept into the station, it spilled out more notables onto the platform. They included some 90 deans and presidents from colleges all over the U.S., come to help celebrate the 200th birthday of Washington and Lee University.

Even the Lexington postmaster was swamped. The U.S. Government had just issued a new 3-c- stamp in honor of the occasion, and collectors everywhere were writing in for first-day covers. One Swedish philatelist added that he had been a lifelong admirer of "Sir Washington and Sir Lee." That was a fairly universal sentiment around Lexington this week.

Big Boost. Washington and Lee started out in 1749 as Augusta Academy, when early settlers of the region decided to plant Scottish-Presbyterian learning in the Valley of Virginia. In 1798, the year before he died, George Washington handed the school its first big boost: $50,000 worth of canal stock, that had originally been the gift to Washington of the Virginia Legislature. The school gratefully changed its name to Washington Academy, later to Washington College.

The college had other benefactors. A roistering Irishman named "Jockey" John Robinson, who had made a fortune out of the "finest, fruitiest, most ropey" rye whisky in the region, gave $50,000 too. That did not mean the college's troubles were over. The Civil War left Washington College in desperate straits. Four months after Appomattox, it invited Robert E. Lee himself to be president. He was the one man, the college thought, who could save the day. Lee agreed to try, at a salary of $1,500 a year ("if that sum can be raised"). He started the schools of law, commerce and engineering, raised enrollments from 97 to 410. After he died, five years later, the college bracketed his name with that of the first great Virginian; the school became Washington and Lee University.

Today, with its stately colonnaded campus, W. & L. is essentially the college Lee planned. Its 1,200 students like it that way. The "minks" (as W. & L. students refer to themselves, with determined superiority--their next-door V.M.I. rivals are known as Brother Rats) affect a high degree of collegiate courtliness, are seldom seen without coat and tie, still abide by the strict honor system Lee set down for them over 80 years ago. Though they come from 39 different states, most are from the South, where W. & L.'s college of arts and sciences and its schools of commerce and law rank high. Unlike most Southern colleges, W. & L. refuses to indulge its athletes, provides no athletic scholarships.

W. & L. boasts of a sound faculty, without world-famous names. "There are no [Harold] Ureys or [William Lyon] Phelpses on the staff," explained one professor, "but it is good and solid." There are some famous names, however, among its alumni: John W. Davis, Democratic presidential nominee in 1924; Newton D. Baker, Wilson's Secretary of War, three of the last four governors of Virginia, and two of the last three of West Virginia.

Surrounding Tradition. Today, W. & L.'s first gentleman is a suave Southerner named Francis Pendleton Gaines, who arrived 19 years ago from North Carolina's Wake Forest College. President Gaines has done nothing to change the smooth flow of campus life--including the round of fraternity dances leading up to the annual Fancy Dress Ball for Washington's birthday.

Now, a plump 56, Gaines still rises at dawn, still likes to promenade about the campus swinging one of his 30 canes. He himself never forgets the traditions of W. & L. ("You may not be aware of it," he tells dinner guests in the president's house, "but Lee died in this room.") Nor can his minks, surrounded as they are by a statue of George Washington on the cupola, the bronze plaques that mark the places where Yankee cannon balls hit during the Civil War, the tomb of Lee himself, and the polished skeleton of Lee's favorite horse Traveller, scarred here & there with old minks' initials.

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