How It Happened

FTER getting out of the navy in the summer of I946, I went home to A Louisville, in middle Georgia, and began teaching in my old public high school of ninety-odd pupils. I taught English, history, biology, and "general science," ran the lunchroom, and coached both girls' and boys' basketball, all badly but with great satisfaction. But to teach well a teacher has to have something to teach. I was aware that Harvard, where my father had studied law, was a good school, and so in the spring of I947 I took the train to Boston. I told the lady behind the counter in the admissions office that I had decided to "come up here" and study either English or history. (I was drawn to the study of literature because I liked to read stories, to history because I liked to tell them.) With remarkable kindness she found a professor for me to talk to. The professor (tweed coat, patched elbows, crooked pipe, horn-rimmed glasses-office windows and bookcases up to a high ceiling) suggested that the four years away from my studies might make it advisable for me to spend a year at Duke or Carolina before venturing quite so far from home. On my way back south I stopped off in Durham and enrolled at Duke, where the year before I had taught celestial navigation to naval cadets. The ensuing six years in graduate school set me free. I learned that the point was for me, not others, to judge the value of what I did. The month my dissertation was done, Richard Lee Morton, chairman of the history department at the College of William and Mary, decided that greater balance in his department of four could be achieved if its fifth member were to be a non-Ivy League southerner. He knew and liked Charles Sydnor, whose apprentice I had been during his writing of Gentlemen Freeholders, and he accepted Sydnor's suggestion to hire me. The years of teaching William and Mary undergraduates were very happy ones. The college, which I loved, and particularly some of the people in it such as Jimmy Fowler, Bruce McCully, Professors Guy and Morse, and Dick Morton himself taught me to be what I believe I have been if nothing else-a good citizen of academia. The Institute of Early American History and Culture, still quite new with its offices over a store on Duke of Gloucester Street, widened my world and gave me a wife. It was pretty heady stuff for this young teacher to work on the William and Mary Quarterly in the I950S under Douglass Adair, Whit Bell, and Bill Towner, with Lester Cappon or Lyman Butterfield, aided by Jane Carson, directing the operation, Jim Smith and his people down the hall editing books, and young historians like Wid Washburn, Mike Hall, Gene Sirmans, and Len Tucker in residence, to say nothing of the annual