Ole Miss

I registered at the University of Mississippi on a Monday  in September 1953 in the School of Commerce.  Having gotten out of service at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas on the preceding Friday I was in for a heck of a shock.   My first impression of Ole Miss and Oxford wasn’t too good.  When I got my mustering out pay from the Air Force I purchased a money order. No one on campus would cash it.   Our classes were held in the Lyceum Building which is the oldest building on campus.  It was very difficult for me to adjust again to college life as I missed the Air Force.   

I took accounting, economics, money and banking, and some insurance courses during my year in the School of Commerce.  I also took industrial management and made an A in that course. During the second semester I was honored at Fulton Chapel on Honors day by the Mississippi General Insurance Agents Association with a scholarship.

The University of Mississippi also known as Ole Miss then had an enrollment of about 2200 and now has nearly 20,000. My wife, Cleo, worked in registering the students and then worked in Engineering. I got a part time job working in the Library earning the stupendous sum of thirty cents per hour.

A few weeks after I enrolled I was contacted by Doc Knight who was track coach at Ole Miss. Doc wanted me to run track.   A friend of mine who had attended Hinds Junior College when I was there in 1948-1950, named Jack Robinson, who is now a multi millionaire, told Doc that I was at Ole Miss.  Jack had run track at Ole Miss the preceding year.  Doc told me that he couldn’t promise me anything other than getting me on the training table with the football team. I accepted his offer and ate many delicious steaks.  The football players also gave me food to take home.  Doc wanted me to get on the track team and the run the 880, which is one half mile.  Consequently I started running track again and getting in shape.  Those steaks on the training table were well worth the effort. I ran the half mile.

Our first meet was at Memphis State. They had several runners and they were all good.  I didn’t place first.  Our next meet was at Vanderbilt University at Nashville. It was a dual meet and as I recall most of the schools then in the Southeastern Conference were there. A guy named Bertram won the 880.  He was from Georgia Tech. He ran a 1:58. On the first lap around I ran in the 50s. I was next to last.  I then decided to give it my best and on the back stretch I started passing a lot of fellows including the guy from Texas on a scholarship for Ole Miss. It then got down to three of us in the end.  As Bertram passed the string I was not far behind. I nearly passed out from exhaustion. A Doctor listened to my heart and said I was ok.  That was my greatest run. Bertram won the Southeast Conference 880 that year.  The trip to and from Nashville was by bus.  The driver had the initials “T.H.” and Slick McCool was constantly hollering “Let her eat T.H.”

We lived in Veterans Village.  It was a bunch of tarpaper army barracks.  When we got to Ole Miss we didn’t have any furniture. We went downtown and purchased a table from Shine Morgan at his furniture store for $15.  When we got a bed, couch and TV we were on top of the world. We had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen/dining room combo. Our rent was $12 per month. 

I raised a black tom cat and named him Buster.  He was huge. One day he apparently followed me to the law school. For several weeks I didn’t see him. I looked for him all over the campus.  One day the milk delivery man stopped and told me he had seen a black cat fitting Buster’s description. He was at Ross Barnett’s apartment in Vets Village.  Ross was the son of future Governor Ross Barnett.  I went to Barnett’s  apartment and there was Buster. Ross had found him at the law school.  They thought it was one of their old cats.  I had taken evidence and there was a case that said an animal who had belonged to someone that got lost would always return to his feeding place if you found him.  I told the Barnetts about this case and we took the cat to our apartment which was eight blocks away and put the cat in at the front door and he went straight to his old feeding place.  That ended the matter. It was Buster.    

While working in the library, I learned a lot about the Dewey Decimal System as I put books in their appropriate place in the stacks. I have read that Herbert Hoover attributed his success in the FBI to his knowledge of said system.

I also took statistics in my second semester at Ole Miss in 1954. It was very difficult for me.  At mid term I made the lowest grade I ever made in college, a 33. This was an F and then my father fell and busted his gut.  I went to the Methodist Hospital in Hattiesburg where he was a patient hanging on by a thread.  I also took my statistics book with me. I studied statistics every spare moment and the next test was my final and I scored 98. It was the second highest grade.  John Satterfield from Jackson, Mississippi beat me with 98 1/2.

In the meantime Cleo gave birth to our oldest daughter, Rebecca Tutton. Our income was $160 per month from the GI Bill plus what I made in the library. I applied for work with the USDA measuring cotton at Bassfield and got a job as soon as the second semester ended. However, this job only lasted two weeks.  I then went to New Orleans and was hired as a vacation relief roughneck by Humble Oil and Refining Company (now merged into Exxon) at $350 per week.  From then on things got much easier financially. My wife also got a job teaching commerce at a country school called Blackjack about 15 miles from Oxford near Sardis Dam, the largest earth made dam in the world   I was employed three summers for Humble Oil and Refining Company. My work was on oil rigs drilling for oil in the marshlands and wetlands of South Louisiana. I was a roughneck.

My work on the oil rig was interesting.  I labored on Humble’s Rig 29. It was diesel powered.  I worked with the back up tongs.  Our driller was a nice guy from the Cajun country of Louisiana.  We called him Peanut.  Going back in the hole I would throw the chain and the driller would pull it with the cathead until the pipe was tight. Then we would let down three joints of pipe of about 90 feet, and throw in slips to catch the pipe and pick up three additional joints and repeat the process until all pipe was in the hole or vice versa coming out of the hole. I would have to grab the pipe and place it in the piece of pipe going into the hole so that it could be screwed in after being greased.  During that time we did not know that some pipe could be radioactive.  

On my second night on the oil rig, I picked up 440 sacks of mud weighing 100 pounds each as it was needed to keep the gas well from blowing out.  At that time I knew nothing about mosquito repellant. Consequently I had over 500 bites when I got back to Bassfield which itched like the devil. My Daddy had some liniment and I put it on the bites and it hurt so bad that I thought I was going crazy. Thereafter I used a repellant religiously.

We actually worked 8 hour shifts called towers on the rig.  The worst tower was the morning tower which was 10 p.m. to 6:00a.m. We were quartered in a quarter boat adjacent to the barge rig.  The cooks were great. We had good food all the time. Also we had a private room on the quarter boat where we slept when not working.

Sometime it would take over an hour for us to get from land, where we parked our vehicles, to the rig. We would ride boats to and from the rig.  The marshlands of South Louisiana are very desolate. There are plenty of snakes out there too. I was on the rig 3 and1/3^rd days each week.

We got a relief driller named Ray Quarles. Quarles was very ambitious.  On one of our towers, he said, we were going to make record time going back into the hole which was then 11,000 feet.  A few minutes later he made record time. He erroneously released the slips and our pipe and drill bit fell 11,000 feet in a matter of minutes.  However he was lucky in that he was able to screw in the pipe and we pulled it out and inspected it and everything was ok.

LAW SCHOOL

After completing three years of college I was admitted to Law School.  There were 75 of us who entered and 18 graduated. I was one of the 18.  We graduated in the spring of 1957. Law school was very challenging.  We had a professor whom everyone feared. His name was John Fox.   He spent the first three weeks asking students “What is a duck? My first course under Professor Fox was contracts. He told us that about half of the students would flunkout.  He nearly flunked me.  I misspelled statute “statue”.  He gave me my first and lowest grade, a D minus.

The next year I took bills and notes under Mr. Fox and made sure that I spelled everything correctly on our exam. I knew I had a good paper and handed the paper to him and told him that it was a good paper. He then took the paper and gave me a D plus without reading it. He then told me that he was going to teach me to be respectful. He thought my attitude was that of a smart a-- and one day might anger a Judge and hurt my client.

During my first year I took personal property. My teacher was Leslie Darden, an attorney who had a good practice in New Albany, Mississippi. Mr. Darden gave a mid term test and gave me an A and stated that it was the best analytical reasoning he had ever read by a student. Joel Bunkley taught domestic relations and Federal Practice and Procedure. He later became Dean of the Law School.  After taking a test under Bunkley he called me to his Office and wanted to know if I was cheating. I told him “no”.  I then asked him why he was suspicious and he said that I was the only student who had cited cases in response to his test questions and gave the Book and Page number. I told him to orally give me a question and I responded and cited the correct case and Book and Page. I guess I had a photographic memory.

Due to the bad grade I made my first year I did not make the law journal.  He then asked me if I would assist him in doing  research on a book he was writing for West Publishing Company on Divorce and Separation in Mississippi and asked me write a chapter on Conflict of Laws and I told him I would. He gave me credit and put my name in the book.  So having a photographic memory and writing the chapter ultimately gave me a greater honor than being on the law journal.

I got elected to serve in the associated student body campus Senate while in law school. Everything was run of the mill until we got notified that the rents in Vets Village were going to be tripled.  The basis of the rent increase was that extensive repairs were being made to the old tarpaper barracks in which we lived. This was an outright lie and we all knew it and further verified it with one Veteran’s wife who worked in the comptroller’s office.

We formed a Vets Village committee and met with Dean Guest and Chancellor Williams and they declined to do anything.  Then I encouraged our group composed of James Dukes, Sonny Upton, Fred Morgan and myself to talk to Governor J.P. Coleman and we went to the Capitol at Jackson and discussed our protest with him He then told us that we should appear before the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning and got us on their agenda for their next meeting.

We appeared before the Board of Trustees at their next meeting in Jackson.  The Board listened to our complaints and then voted to hire an expert from Florida to review the matter and report to the Board.

The expert came and we met with him and took a Court Reporter with us and requested he answer our questions under oath as we had a protest about our rents going up and he said wait a minute, I wasn’t told that this was about a rent increase protest and I am disappointed that I was mislead by the administration and am returning to Florida.

That ended the meeting with the expert.  I then called Mr. R.D. Morrow who was a Board of Trustee member whom I had observed paid close attention to my presentation before the Board in Jackson and he said that he and some other member of the Board would

Meet with us in a few days. Three days later campus Chief Tatum of the campus police came to the Law School and got me out of class to meet with Mr. Morrow and Tom Tubb, another Trustee, of West Point, Mississippi.  

When I again explained that the reasons given for the rent increase as stated by the administration were bogus and that the expert had not been told of the purpose of his  visit,  Mr. Tubb said if you don’t like Ole Miss why don’t you leave?  I told him that I didn’t believe that I had gone to Korea in 1950 for my Country and that anyone could be so aloof to our problem. Mr. Morrow then told Tubb to shut up.  That he thought we had a legitimate complaint and that our protest was being done in a dignified manner and that he was going to stand with us.  That ended the meeting.

A few days later we got a letter from the administration about when the rent increase would go in effect.  It never did. Mr. Morrow and the Board of Trustees met and overrode the administration. In subsequent years at State Bar meetings Dean Farley of the Law School would introduce me to other lawyers and tell them I was the only student he ever knew who also was also acting Chancellor of the University while in school.

Later the administration called a meeting of over 300 students to meet in the auditorium and explained that they were going to raise tuition.  Everything was carefully planed.  The band played martial music. The Chancellor gave his reasons and continually harped on that school in South Mississippi encroaching on funds for Ole Miss. Several students in Law School had attended Southern Miss and were seated behind me. They were Michael Haas, Jimmy McKenzie, and Dorrance Aultman. I lived 33 miles from that school in South Mississippi which is now known as the University of Southern Mississippi.

Certain Administration pets arose and supported the tuition increase.  Brad Dye, who later became Lieutenant Governor of the State supported it. They then moved that the tuition hike be backed by the student leaders present and opened the floor for discussion. I arose and stated that I had never attended that school in South Mississippi, but named the gentlemen behind me who had and said that we were being very disrespectful to them and everyone from South Mississippi. That I came from South Mississippi. That few of those in attendance came from the Mississippi Delta who spent their time drinking mint juleps on the front porch. That I had observed that a quarter of a million dollars was then being spent on an office building for the physical plant from money obtained from the sale of timber on land then  owned by Ole Miss in South Mississippi and other money for the construction of an airport. I pointed out that Harvard said give us a good teacher and an oak tree and we will educate our students to be thinkers. That we should focus on paying our teachers a good salary and let state taxes pay for capital improvements. I then turned to the Southern Graduates and asked them if they would like to say anything and they declined.

A vote was then taken and most of the students supported my position.  When we returned to the Law School one on the students, Dorrance  Aultman, said he agreed with me but wasn’t I afraid that I wouldn’t graduate.  No, I am not worried about it having any repercussions.   I said “Dorrance, didn’t you take constitutional law and he said “yes.”  I said one of our vested rights is freedom of speech. No one is going to be expelled for exercising it.               

Years later Bill Stewart, who later became a Chancery Judge, on the Gulf Coast, who was a lower classman in Law School, later worked in Congressman William Colmer’s office in Washington D.C.,  attended a meeting of the Mississippi Congressional delegation honoring retiring Chancellor J.D. Williams of Ole Miss and one of the congressmen commented to the effect that I guess when Meridith, a Black, who entered Ole Miss, was your biggest crisis and he said, “no”, it was dealing with Bobby Garraway.

A week before graduation, the faculty invited me to their meeting and told me that on two previous occasions they honored William Winter and Boyce Holleman by specially recognizing them as outstanding law students and were now so honoring me.