Washington and Lee University - Calyx Yearbook (Lexington, VA)

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WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY LEXINGTON VIRGINIA ; !;; ' SYD BUTLER DITOR JEROME TURNER • BUSINESS MANAGER

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Cable of Contents BOOK I Academic Heritage BOOK II Athletics and Organizations BOOK III Social Traditions Calpx taff EDITOR Sydney J. Butler ASSISTANT EDITORS Barry Green. Dick Coplan, Jay Kaplan MANAGING EDITORS Art Sher, Dick Kreitler. Vic Galef ASSISTANTS 3o3 Frost, Steve Lunde, Alex Taft

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EDICATION He was a man, take him for all in all, 5ins S 1914 ' ' ' ' Mpon J5 like again. —Hamlet, I, ii, 187-8 No one who ever studied under Dr. Fitzgerald Floumoy is likely to for- get him. For nearly four decades at his alma mater, where he returned after a brilliant record at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he was one of the most familiar figures on campus and one of the Washington and Lee professors for whose courses — covering the astonishing range of Chaucer, Shakes- peare, Milton, Elizabethan and modem drama, the English novel, and Romatic poetry — there was great demand. To hundreds of students he made literature come alive for the first time, and in hundreds more he stimulated an appreciation and understanding they had never enjoyed before. Though his classes were intellectually exciting, it was not intellectual excite- ment that made them memorable. Nor was it precisely what he said that one remembered longest. It was rather that one felt in the presence of a deeply human man, a man who knew life firsthand as well as through books, a man who passionately loved the subjects he taught and who felt in every fiber of his being the poetry he read, a man who talked in so inter- esting a manner and who laughed with such ethusiasm that merely to sit in his class was a pleasure not to be missed. He was of the old school of dedicated teachers, and he was a very great member of that select group. To him teaching was, quite simply, a way of life. But he never thought that teaching could be divorced from life any more than literature could, and the secret of his uniqueness was that he succeeded in fusing the three. He was a simple man, a modest man, a man perennially young. There was never in him a trace of the false, the artificial, the pretentious. He unaffectedly found pleasure in mystery stories as well as in Shakespeare, and his sheer exuberance and vitality could transform the dullest sound- ing work into something pleasurable. He was above pettiness and incapable of malice, and toward his students he had the kind of humility that made them think they were teaching him as much as he was teaching them. He had a young man ' s love for the writers that youth always finds appeal- ing — for poets like Shelley and Poe — and he had a young man ' s thirst for new knowledge. One of the last summers of his life was spent in study- ing the Theater of the Absurd and the plays of Tennessee Williams so that, as he put it, he would be able to teach what my boys are reading. We will always remember that familiar, lumbering, Johnson-like figure, that magnificent voice whose power could not be contained within the walls of Payne 21, that massive index finger drawing an imaginary pic- ture in the air, that irresistibly contagious laugh, that Falstaffian zest for life. And it is to that memory of him that we affectionately dedicate this 1964 CALYX. —DR. S. M. B. COULLING