Oral history interview with George Dickieson, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: George Dickieson
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: March 20, 1990
GD: —1938, and I retired in 1977. Are you getting it all right?
WL: Yes.
GD: During the 1920s through 1930s, Wade Brown had been the dean of the School [of
Music], and it was virtually a piano, voice, organ conservatory with no instrumental
program. In 1960—get my dates right—no 1936, Wade Brown retired, and Altvater—
Hugh Altvater was appointed as the next dean. He came here from Manhattan, Kansas,
where he’d been the head of the department of—the college there. 1938—he employed
me with the idea that we’d develop an instrumental program.
WL: Where were you coming from?
GD: I was in Winston-Salem [North Carolina].
WL: I see.
GD: But I was young; I was only twenty-six. In 1939, he organized an orchestra, which he
called the Greensboro Orchestra. It was a college community orchestra, and the reason
for doing that—it was a women’s college, and there were very few girls at that time who
played wind instruments. Today it’s different, but that was the only way you could get an
orchestra.
WL: This was composed of faculty members?
GD: Townspeople, faculty members and students, and I was the concertmaster, of course, of
the orchestra. As time moved on—let me refer to that—
WL: Sure.
GD: Altvater, when I came here, had a group of strings which he called the string choir, but
there was no orchestra as such.
WL: Was that the predecessor to the orchestra?
GD: Yes. And then in 1939 he organized this college community orchestra. He brought me
here with the idea of developing an instrumental program in the school because there was
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nothing. Also, we had a faculty string quartet, and I played the violin, of course, and we
had a piano trio later, which was a faculty group. About that time I organized a group of
students and faculty, and it was—we called it that Woman’s College [of the University of
North Carolina] Chamber Music Players because we played concerts here, but we also
did some traveling around the state for public relations and it was a very good group. In
1950, Altvater became ill, and so I took over the conductorship since I had been the
concertmaster and all those years had done a lot of so-called dirty work, if you want to
call it that—not dirty, but getting the thing moving and developing. When I took the
orchestra, there were forty-two players. When I finished with it in the 1960s, there were
ninety players, so it did develop into a large orchestra, you see. During the 1960 period,
there was pressure in the town to take the orchestra out of the school and make it a
community orchestra—so-called professional orchestra—of course, it isn’t a professional
orchestra because in a professional orchestra, people make a living playing in it.
[laughter]
WL: Don’t do that now?
GD: And they still had kids and amateurs and so on as well as some professionals, which we
had because the faculty we had by that time—also that was part of the job, to play in the
orchestra. When that went out of the school, then I organized the first University
Symphony so we could continue, and at the same time I organized a chamber orchestra,
which we called the Sinfonia. During my tenure on the faculty I taught violin, viola,
chamber music literature, symphonic literature, music history, music theory, music
appreciation, conducting. When the graduate school was developed, that was my primary
work.
WL: Let’s go back to when you first arrived.
GD: Okay.
WL: Back to 1938. What sort of impressions did you have about the campus—Woman’s
College campus—when you first got here? [unclear]
GD: This school had a good reputation. It was a good reputation, but it was limited in what
they were doing as far as a full conservatory-type program was concerned and—
WL: A small school—was it a school at that point, music?
GD: Yeah
WL: —and it, the department—the school small—the number of faculty were small?
GD: Nothing like it has developed, certainly. In other words, they had three or four, maybe
three or four piano teachers. And Altvater was a violinist, but he mostly did the
administrative work, and I was violin teacher and, of course, then they had fewer
teaching people. People doubled up on theory and so on to make it go. In other words,
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they couldn’t afford a specialist in everything in those days.
WL: What kind of students did you get? What sort of students would be music majors?
GD: Largely, the school was an education school. That is music education was really the
primary function as it was with the total school. It began as a teacher-training school,
really, and [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, I think, never had any desire for
it to be anything but that for a long time. [laughter] That was what they wanted it to be,
and I suppose it was raison d’etre [French: reason for existence] for getting the money
for it from the legislature, but we had some good students, but primary ed—primary
purpose at that time certainly was music education.
WL: Did the faculty in the School of Music interact a lot with faculty in the other academic
programs?
GD: Oh, yes. Those were good days in that respect because when we would have recitals,
faculty recitals, many people from the academic department supported—I mean, there
were people from English and history and math, and it was all very closely knit in that
respect. And I would say this—and I certainly didn’t have anything to do with it—but
this school was built into a good school by the dedicated people that were here because
they didn’t make any money [laughter], as you well know. They had to have interest in it
and love the place to do it, and so it was a good atmosphere, very friendly, a lot of social
life within the group. And, of course, later on with the [Chancellor Edward Kidder]
Graham [Jr.] situation that pretty well fell apart because there were friends and enemies
[laughter] on each side of the thing.
WL: That affected social situations?
GD: Oh, absolutely. It affected everything, and when you think that in the music school alone
in one year there were 102 majors, and one year they lost fifty-two students who just had
enough of the place. So it was wreckage.
WL: They left because of—they were fed up with the—they didn’t come back the next year?
GD: Yeah, it permeated the whole campus. It was vicious, and there were character
assassinations, as you can imagine, and many careers were destroyed—no doubt about
that—and when it was all finished—a good number of the people who had supported
Graham just had to leave. They had to go. And so it permeated every aspect of the school.
WL: Was most of the school against Graham—most of the school in opposition to Graham?
GD: Well, the whole thing, the basic thing—a lot of people never understood it and don’t
understand it even today. The real basic fight was over what the school was going to be.
Harvard [University, Cambridge, Massachusetts] had promulgated general education,
what they call general education. By the time this school got to that, Harvard had already
abandoned it [laughter], and they had a misinterpretation, I guess, of what it was anyway
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because in biology, for example, they did away with the labs and the head of the
department, a woman by the name of [Lois] Cutter, taught all classes with closed-circuit
television. In music, they wanted to have mostly music appreciation courses, in other
words, this specialization. They didn’t want a conservatory, they said. They wanted just a
little smattering of what I call a smattering of ignorance in the final analysis. And that
was the basis of the real fight, and it was a fight. [laughter]
WL: So it affected music directly in that sense?
GD: Oh, it affected everything—drama, music, science. I suppose the only people that stayed
out of it were the education people and the physical education people. The physical
education people had a head of the department who played along with Graham. The
education people just hid, I think [laughter], and we never heard from them since then,
except for [Franklin Holbrook] McNutt, who had been the dean there [also dean of the
graduate school], and then he finally got into it and took an active part against Graham.
But the academic people were just beside themselves with the whole thing, and some of
them even became ill because of the problems that they had to face. But you always have
the pragmatic people who think, “Well he’s going to come out on top, so we are going
with that,” whether they believe it or not.
WL: Did he have most of the administr—his own administration with him?
GD: Yeah, he had—well, he had Katherine Taylor, who was dean of women [Class of 1928,
dean of students, director of student services, director of Elliott Hall] at the time, and he
really had [Mereb] Mossman [sociology and anthropology faculty, dean of instruction,
dean of the college, dean of faculty, vice chancellor of academic affairs] too, who he
appointed to be the vice chancellor of academic work, and that was another faculty fight
because they had to vote for her, and a lot of people didn’t think it was a good move.
WL: Oh, I see. She had to be elected annually?
GD: Yeah, he appointed her, but then it had to be approved by the faculty council. And we had
Gordon Gray who was the president of the [Consolidated System of the] University [of
North Carolina]. Gordon Gray, son of a tobacco tycoon, had become secretary of the
[United States] Army, and I always said he was trying to run this whole university like a
cross between a tobacco factory and the United States Army, and you don’t make a
university run on that basis, in my opinion. And he came up one time to talk to the
faculty, and it was about Graham. And he was defending Graham, and he said, “My
advice to each and every one of you is if you don’t like it here, get out.” Well, you’re a
professor. You just don’t tell a professor to get out. [laughter] I mean, you can tell them,
but they’re not going to do it. So then finally he had to go because he had taken this
strong stand defending Graham, and so then they had these other investigations with
[William] Bill Carmichael [acting president of the Consolidated University of North
Carolina System, controller, vice president and finance officer of the System], who is
now dead, and, of course, [William] Bill Friday [became president of the Consolidated
University of North Carolina System] who was Gray’s assistant, and so they had to get
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rid of Graham. And so before that happened—the way I figured it, Gordon Gray just
couldn’t be wrong. He had been backing Graham up, and so he got out before it fell apart.
WL: And Friday stepped in and—?
GD: Friday stepped in. He was young.
WL: How did he handle it, do you think?
GD: Friday was a good man. He had a successful career in the university, and I think he was
very fair.
WL: Do you think he was fair in this instance with Graham?
GD: Oh, yeah, and Billy Carmichael, of course, was the one who really had the burden of the
thing. Did you ever hear of Billy Carmichael?
WL: Oh, yes. What kind of person was he?
GD: Very good man. He had a terrific sense of humor, and I remember one occasion he was
talking to the faculty up here [laughter], and he said, “One never knows what the
academaniac mind will do next.” [laughter] But he knew Graham because he had been
Billy Graham’s, I mean—not Billy Graham—Ed Graham’s scoutmaster in Chapel Hill.
So he had known him from the time he was a kid. So this was a difficult thing for him to
have to do, but it had to be done.
WL: So he did more of the dirty work or—
GD: But he did it. Yeah, he did it.
WL: While—Friday was president actually when he left?
GD: Well, then they made Friday the president.
WL: I see. And Carmichael was president at some point?
GD: No, he was vice president. Carmichael was a man who was very wealthy, and he was
there primarily to raise money for the university.
WL: Why did people feel attracted to Graham? He had a—he had his group of supporters.
What sort of people were supporting him?
GD: Well, let’s see. There were people who were personally ambitious. [Gregory] Ivy was the
head of the art department. [Marc] Friedlaender was a professor in the English
department. Katherine Taylor, of course, was in the administration. Friedlaender and Ivy
had personal ambitions. They wanted to put drama, music, art in one school. Each one of
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them had ambitions, undoubtedly, to be the dean of the new school. And I told
Friedlaender—and that was one of the last times we ever had a conversation—he—at one
time I thought he was a good friend of mine [laughter]—but I asked him about the School
of Music, the plans and so on and he said, “Well, George, we have plans.” I said, “Well,
Marc, I will tell you one thing that I shall fight to the end to keep the music school from
being destroyed.” And that’s the last conversation I never had with him. He saw then that
the chips were down as far as he and I were concerned. [laughter] Katherine Taylor had
ambitious to be the chancellor. She—Charlie [Charles Wiley] Phillips [director of public
relations]—. Do you know Charlie Phillips?
WL: Yes.
GD: Charlie was a good friend of mine, and he told me this: that Katherine Taylor came into
his office, slammed his desk, and she said, “The first—when I am the next chancellor, the
first person whom I shall fire will be George Dickieson.” [laughter] And Charlie told that
to the investigating committee. You see, that last committee—they had stayed almost a
week on the campus. They had a public stenographer take down all the evidence, and
there were some in groups and some private, but it was—when they finished with that, I
understood they had six hundred pages of documentary evidence—well, together six
hundred pages of documentary evidence and verbal testimony—and that was the thing
they used to get Graham out. Well, they put all that on his desk and told him that if he
would resign, okay, but they would publish if he wouldn’t—that they had it all published.
WL: What kind of evidence did they have?
GD: Well, all of this documentary evidence and all of the testimony of all the faculty people
who testified before that committee.
WL: To what effect? I mean, what was the evidence? What did it say that he was—was it a
question of incompetence?
GD: No. It was—as I understood it, it got involved with finances, as usual, and sex. When
they started bringing the sex part out, I said “Well, let’s don’t fight it on that basis,” but
there were people who said, “Well, that’s the quick way.” But I hated to—I thought there
was enough otherwise [laughter] to delve into that, and I didn’t understand about the
money, but George Joyce, who was the bursar here, had the evidence and he—
WL: Financial irregularities?
GD: Yeah, and he had to take the books to the committee to show them. I mean, there was
proof there. So it was a tragic thing all around.
WL: Right. How—?
GD: Friedlaender left. I don’t know whether he ever got another job or not. The last I ever
heard of him he was reading in the Harvard Library. See, he was a wealthy man,
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independently wealthy, and his father had been a—had a factory that converted cotton
bags they wrapped cotton bales in, and there was a lot of money in it. It’s like junk made
into something. Then his wife was from New Orleans. She was a very nice person. Her
father had been American Fruit Company. They was [sic] very wealthy, and so there was
a lot of money involved here.
WL: The others left? Ivy—I suppose, he left?
GD: Yeah. Ivy had to go, and Friedlaender left. Katherine Taylor was still here, but from there
on out, she—they made her—gave her a title or something, but she had no more power
here at all.
WL: Her power was diminished as a result?
GD: She was in charge of Elliott Hall, I think that was [laughter] her job. She had no more
power in the administration.
WL: Before this she was—? What was she? What did she do?
GD: She was the dean of women.
WL: Dean of women, which was more powerful than—?
GD: Well, in a women’s college it was, because Harriet Elliott had been dean of women [and
political science professor], and when she died, why she had been—Katherine Taylor had
been one of her favorite counselors, dormitory counselors, and so she moved into that
job.
WL: I see. She was sort of a protégé of Elliott’s?
GD: Harriet Elliott, yeah.
WL: How did the opponents of Graham organize themselves? Was there—?
GD: Well, there was no real organization, as such. There was just a lot of faculty who were
just completely dissatisfied with the whole thing and—
WL: Did it come up—did the opposition come up at faculty meetings?
GD: Some of it, yeah. A man like Randall Jarrell [associate professor of English, American
poet, writer, literary critic]—you’ve heard of Randall Jarrell?
WL: Yes.
GD: [laughter] He made an almost-historical-now speech at one of those faculty meetings, and
it was tense. It was just under the counter, it was tense. The way we finally got together—
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Bob Hanes who was the president of Wachovia Bank had been appointed by the
governor—this was before Carmichael’s committee—he had been appointed by the
governor [Luther Hodges] to look into it.
WL: By the governor?
GD: Yeah, and you see, the governor was the chairman of the board of trustees, you know.
WL: Right.
GD: And he was up here, and then he decided to have a meeting with the dissidents. That was
one afternoon about 2:00 [pm], and someone called me and told me what was going on.
So I got on the telephone because I knew most of the people who felt the same way I did,
and I got on the phone, and the switchboard operator heard the conversation I had calling
these different people to tell them to go to the Church of the Covenant because that was
where they were going to have the meeting. And [Richard] Dick Bardolph [history
department head] got on the line, and he said, “Well, George, just tell me who you want
in the Administration Building,” because a lot of them were in the Administration
Building because they were academic people, and he said, “I’ll get them.” So by about
4:00 [pm] we had a pretty good group of people there to talk with Hanes and his
committee. And then, of course, he passed it on, so that later on Billy Carmichael had
another committee. That was the final committee. The first time, I guess—and I didn’t go
to that—Gordon Gray and Bill Friday came up to interview people—and as I say, I tried
to stay out of it. [laughter] I don’t enjoy fighting, and so I just didn’t go to that one at all.
But then the next one was Hanes’ committee and then Billy Carmichael’s committee. So
you see we had a number of investigations.
WL: Yeah. This was over a certain period of time?
GD: It lasted for five years—from 1950 to 1955.
WL: Right.
GD: To give you an idea of how Graham thought—he came to town in July 1950, and there
was an article in the paper where had spoken to the Rotary Club, I think. And he said that
he had inherited a bad faculty, and he was going to have to clean it all up. Well, he hadn’t
even met the faculty [laughter], so that he came in with a lot of prejudice from someplace
before he ever started, and, of course, a lot of people on faculty read that and said, “Well,
what do we have here?” [laughter]
WL: He was personally—he had an irritating quality to him?
GD: Oh, yes. I think he did. He was a little fellow and very cocky, and I found out that he had
his office wired. And so I warned a lot of my friends to be careful of what they were
saying in his office because it was wired, and the reason I knew that was because
superintendent of the grounds had told me that he had wired it [lots of laughter]. It reads
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like a novel, but it’s almost too much to believe. It’s that incredible. [laughter]
WL: So he would tape record all that conversations that were held—?
GD: Yes, which against—that was illegal, of course. [laughter]
WL: Right. Didn’t stop him though?
GD: Couldn’t stop him. Not many people—only the superintendent of the grounds and a few
people knew it. Of course a lot of people knew it after I told them but— .[laughter]
Excuse me one minute. I’ve got to get a pill. I’ll be right back; you can ask me some
more questions.
WL: You mentioned in the thing you wrote there that the whole Graham episode was pure
hell.
GD: Yes, it was.
WL: That was the word you used, “pure hell?”
GD: A lot of people—some of them just became ill over it.
WL: —added a kind of tenseness to the whole—being on campus?
GD: Oh, the campus was very tense.
WL: Did it affect students at all?
GD: Oh, tremendously, because it was the kind of thing, I suppose, they couldn’t keep out of.
Well, they couldn’t because they had student publications, and they were—the Coraddi.
Do they still have that magazine?
WL: Right. They do, yes.
GD: That was a propaganda thing. See, Friedlaender was the advisor for that [laughter], and
he was using that for his purposes.
WL: Using it as a mouthpiece?
GD: Yeah. So it was involved.
WL: So students were drawn in and—?
GD: Oh, yeah, and when you get—students don’t go to school to get caught into the
machinations of faculty fracas.
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WL: There were a lot of things that you did at Woman’s College, as you mention, that you did
together. I guess you had these assemblies and a lot of things that involved the whole
campus at one time didn’t you?
GD: Well, yes. It was smaller. When I came here, I think there were about 1,500 students, and
it was either the second or third largest women’s college in the United States, and it had a
good reputation. Now when coeducation came, I was for it because I thought it would
expand our—I thought it was a healthier situation, generally, and there were many alumni
who were heartily opposed to it, of course, and still are, I think.
WL: Yeah. Alumni, in particular rather than faculty? Most of the faculty in favor of the—?
GD: Well, some of the faculty were not enthusiastic about it, particularly some of the older
ladies [laughter] didn’t like it so much, I think. But I saw it as something that could be a
good thing. The bad thing about it was this—that in order to get male students, they
lowered the entrance standards for men so that they could get the men. Of course, that is
always a disaster when you do that, I think. That was the bad thing about it. Of course, I
guess they are over that now since it’s developed pretty well.
WL: Right.
GD: —particularly with business. I imagine that’s made a lot of difference to the [unclear].
WL: More attractive to men. Tell me a little bit more about the other chancellors that you—
GD: Well, let’s see, Gordon Blackwell—he just couldn’t handle the situation. He was a nice
person. In my conversations with him, he would come out with the right answers—what I
thought was a good answer—maybe not the right answer, but a good answer. Two or
three days later, he’d call me on the phone and said, “Well, George, I’ve changed my
mind about that.” Well, that meant that somebody, mostly Mereb Mossman, had gotten
into his ear and told him that wasn’t a good idea. So it was a weak, watery type of
administration. Following Blackwell, I had—
WL: Was Blackwell—that there—do you think Blackwell came into a bad situation and still
had the aftermath of the whole thing?
GD: I think if he had had a different personality, he could have handled it. If [William
Whatley] Pierson, who had already retired from Chapel Hill, had been younger, it would
have been great. He handled it well. I think Pierson pretty well had calmed the waters, so
to speak, by the time Blackwell came in.
WL: Did he make an effort to heal the breach and listen to faculty and—?
GD: I think he did.
WL: Yeah, how did he?
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GD: You mean Blackwell?
WL: No, back to Pierson.
GD: Pierson was—as I say, he was almost like a military governor over there. He—there were
many people who went to see him. I know there was a group in—of about fourteen of
them, a couple of them from the music school, and he handled it very well because he
said, “Well, I talk to individuals, but I don’t talk to groups. If you want to make
appointments to come individually, I’d be happy to talk to you.” But those people who go
in groups are always chicken anyway, so none of them made appointments. [laughter]
That was the kind of administrator he was in that situation, and I think that was probably
the best way to handle it. He wasn’t going to have mobs coming in trying to influence
him.
WL: That worked fairly well?
GD: Yeah. And then following Blackwell, he was a former admiral in the [United States]
Navy. I don’t know his name so well.
WL: [Otis] Singletary?
GD: Singletary. Singletary was a good man, I think. He was a tough guy. What I mean, he had
a rapier-like tongue. In faculty meetings, he would really cut heads off. And some of it he
did with a sense of humor, and I always thought I am glad that I’m not at the butt end of
that [laughter] humor. He left here because he said that he didn’t want to have to do what
had to be done—and that was Mereb Mossman—because in fact he told one member of
the faculty who had some files with him. He said, “Take those files with you because my
office is open too much—in other words, it’s not protected.” So he didn’t like that.
Then—
WL: Do you think that he felt a little uneasy with Mereb Mossman?
GD: Well, he knew that it was a problem, and he didn’t want to have to do the hatchet work
that would be necessary to straighten—
WL: You mean, to sort of take on Mossman?
GD: Let it go. He got out. He went over to the University of Kentucky where he became the
president.
WL: Right.
GD: And then [James] Ferguson, who was really a very good human being, a nice person. He
and Singletary had known each other in Millsaps [College, Jackson, Mississippi]. In fact,
one of them had been—I think, if I remember correctly, that Ferguson had been his
instructor down there.
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WL: That’s right. Singletary was a student of Ferguson’s.
GD: But Ferguson as a very fair man, and he moved, as he told me one time, he said “George,
I move slowly, but I always get there.” [laughter]
WL: Was Singletary popular with the faculty?
GD: No. He was a little too severe for them. As I said, he’d been an admiral in the Navy.
[laughter]
WL: Moved quickly?
GD: Moved quickly with decisiveness. I liked him personally, and I got along with him quite
well. In fact, he came back here for some kind of a celebration, and I had a conversation
with him at that time. He was interested in the orchestra and so on.
WL: A person that keeps coming up is Mereb Mossman. Wonder if you could—?
GD: Well, Mereb Mossman started—had been the president of a college in Manhattan—not
Manhattan, Kansas—Winfield, Kansas, and she had lived quite a long time in China. Her
father apparently had been a missionary in China, and she was a sociologist, which I
don’t know how you feel about it, but to me that’s an ersatz science, and I have very little
personal feeling—. [laughter] But she was in the sociology department—but I guess
being a friend of Laura [Weill] Cone’s [Class of 1910], she had a way in with Graham
because she—. Actually, I think Laura Cone had a lot to do with Graham coming here.
WL: Laura—who is—tell me more about Laura Cone.
GD: Laura Cone was the wife of—widow of Herman Cone, who had been the president of
Cone Mills [textile manufacturer]. Other than that, I don’t know a lot about her, except
that she had been at one time on the board of trustees, and apparently then the legislature
reappointing—didn’t reappoint her, and she was very angry about that political—all state
schools have that political situation. Other than that, really didn’t—the only thing I know
is that she supposedly was the one who was really behind a lot of the administration.
[Walter Clinton] Jackson [professor and head of the history department, dean of the
faculty, chairman of the social sciences , dean of administration, chancellor] was her
appointee, and Harriet Elliott was a good friend. See, Harriet Elliott went to Washington
[DC] during the war—in the [United States] Labor Department, not the Labor
Department—I don’t know which department, but the reason she was—got that job—the
Cones had a summer place in the Adirondacks [mountains in New York state], and
[Henry] Morgenthau [Jr.], who was secretary of the [United States] Treasury, was their
neighbor, and so through that connection they got Harriet Elliott [unclear]. What kind of
a job she had up there, I don’t know, but she was in Washington quite a while.
WL: Yeah, during the war.
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GD: Yes.
WL: So Laura Cone was sort of an important figure behind the scenes?
GD: Well, they had the wealth. The Cones were some of the wealthy people in the state.
WL: It must have been something of a surprise—was it something of a surprise to have Mereb
Mossman appointed to this important position by Graham?
GD: Oh, yes. Well, Graham said that he wanted to do it, and then he had a faculty council to
vote on it, but they had a lot of debate about it, and people who knew her definitely said
that they didn’t want her in that position because she was in the position then to make
appointments and so on, but they got a majority vote.
WL: How did she administer programs over the years, do you think? What was her style?
GD: Well, I’ll give you an example. [laughter] After [George Welton] Marquis, who had been
the dean of the school when Graham was here—he had been appointed by Marquis, by
Graham—they had an interim committee of which Birdie Holloway was the chairman.
Birdie Holloway was music education and was just really like putty in Mossman’s hands.
For two years, she was really in the dean’s chair. But to give you an example of how she
operated, all the letters that Birdie Holloway wrote had to be approved by Mereb
Mossman, if that gives you an idea of how she operated? [laughter]
WL: She was very direct—in other words, liked to control things?
GD: Oh, yes, she appointed her—she appointed Holloway?
WL: Every letter she wrote had to be approved?
GD: That’s right.
WL: So she liked to be in control of the details?
GD: Well, and so multiply that by other heads of departments and so on. Now the one dean
who bucked a little was the one in home economics. Apparently, she really bucked her. I
forget her name, now. She just died.
WL: [Naomi] Albanese [dean of the School of Home Economics]?
GD: Albanese. Apparently she didn’t bend the knee, but the others did. And it comes down
always to money, and the one who controls the money, controls. You know that.
WL: Sure. So did she—she must have had friends and enemies on campus?
14
GD: Oh, she had a lot of enemies. Yeah, I guess she had some friends; I didn’t know them.
[laughter]
WL: What sort of changes came to the campus between say the late 1950s and the time that
you retired? What would you say the most important changes—?
GD: Well, it was completely different by the time I retired. For one thing, they had the
Graduate School, and that made a tremendous difference to the school. I enjoyed it. I
found it stimulating to be teaching more mature students—
WL: Right.
GD: —but a lot of those students that came in that program were really not prepared to be
graduate students, particularly those from A&T [North Carolina Agricultural & Technical
University, Greensboro, NC]. They just didn’t have the background. The courses I
taught—chamber music literature, symphonic literature, I taught—it was—they had to
write in it because it was that type of a course. I mean, it was sort of pathetic. They just
didn’t have the background even for that. I don’t know whether that still goes on or not,
but [laughter]—
WL: You noticed a big change?
GD: Oh, yes, a big change in the whole school. Also, the school now was about 10,000
students or something.
WL: Right. 11,000.
GD: It became much more impersonal, particularly your administration, as I see it now. And I
don’t go back to the campus, but you’ve got that top hierarchy of the chancellor and then
all of these vice chancellors and deans. A dean used to be a big job in the school. Now,
it’s down on the totem pole, so to speak, as far as the hierarchy is concerned. Now, a lot
of that, again, was developed by Gordon Gray when he was the president.
WL: Oh, yeah.
GD: In fact, he paid a lot of money to have some industrial engineering outfit come in and
make a full chart of hierarchy really because he brought it up here for everybody it see it.
In other words, just like the Army, you’ve got a secretary of the army, you’ve got the
generals, and so on down.
WL: Very clear lines of authority.
GD: To show you how Gordon Gray operated—the dean was ill, and there was a problem that
came up, and we didn’t have a dean really, and so I wrote him personally about the
problem. I didn’t hear from him for a long, long time, and finally I had a letter from him.
He wondered whether I had gone through channels. Well, that’s the Army, you see, the
15
military—go through the channels—
WL: Chain of command.
GD: —you have a second lieutenant, a first lieutenant, captain, go on up through, and the fact
that I hadn’t gone through what he called channels, apparently—he just wasn’t interested.
Now the difference between that and his predecessor, who was Frank Graham—Frank
Graham was—anybody could talk to Frank Graham just the way you and I are talking.
He didn’t have any front at all or anything like that I guess. He was just a good human
being, and he didn’t have a lot of pomp about him, and so on.
WL: He liked to talk to people too, didn’t he?
GD: Oh, yeah. Frank Graham, as you know, he was classified as a liberal. I always felt that he
was really a pretty good-hearted man who pretty well got sucked in, so to speak, with a
lot of organizations that he didn’t really know what he was in. And people got it—they
needed his endorsement. And—
WL: He was just so personable and he liked [unclear]—
GD: Yeah, that’s right. That was my opinion of him, and I may not, of course, be right, but I
think I was—the businessmen in North Carolina became terrified of him because they
thought he was a Communist [revolutionary socialist] and so on. And of course I don’t
know, maybe he was, but he didn’t impress me that way.
WL: No.
GD: And so that’s the reason they got him out.
WL: Did—on this campus did—was there much contact between faculty at Greensboro
and faculty at Chapel Hill?
GD: Not much. I knew some of the people in the music department down there. They had a
whole different purpose at Chapel Hill.
WL: But there were only three campuses in the Consolidated University—[North Carolina]
State [University, Raleigh, NC], Chapel Hill and Greensboro [Woman’s College of the
University of North Carolina]. Was there a closer feeling, do you think, or not much
contact?
[End of Side A—Begin Side B]
GD: Not much contact, not between the faculties that I knew of.
16
WL: Yeah. What about the [O. Max] Gardner Award [University of North Carolina Board of
Governors Award for faculty member that made greatest contribution to the human race]
Dinner. Was that something that—?
GD: Well, now that was passed around to different campuses.
WL: And that would be held on campus?
GD: Yeah, when they gave it to Randall Jarrell, I had that chamber music group play as part of
the program for that. In fact, that group played for the inauguration of Graham.
WL: Or Friday, you mean? Or Graham? You mean Edward Kidder Graham.
GD: —the musical part of that inauguration.
WL: I see. Did the presidents spend much time here, President Gray and President Friday?
Were they—?
GD: Not much.
WL: So they weren’t much of a presence really?
GD: All the contact, of course, was with the chancellor and the president. I am sure that there
was not allowed a lot of other contact. Pierson was an interesting man. He had been that
dean of the Graduate School at Chapel Hill, and when they wanted to have a graduate
program here, he said, “Well he would just as soon give a graduate degree in
blacksmithing as in music.” [laughter] That was his opinion of it. Before he left, we had a
session, and he said, “I have changed my opinion.” He said, “I have decided that music is
something that has a discipline, having been here and observed it.”—which was pretty
big of him to be willing to say that.
WL: He didn’t have to say that either.
GD: He didn’t have to say that, but he’d been wrong about that. It did have a discipline. Of
course, that was his argument—it’s a pretty good argument—the reason for having any
kind of degree is to have a discipline. If you don’t have that, there is not much point in
that.
WL: Did the music faculty—at some point must have gone through tremendous expansion.
Were you—did it expand that much when you were here?
GD: That’s come pretty well since I was there. There was some expansion when I was there.
When I say that, they began to get a few specialists in wind instruments and that kind of
thing, but, of course, thirteen years makes a difference. And from what I see now, they’ve
got a specialist in all the winds and all the brasses, which I would have liked to have had.
But we began the orchestra, and so we had one woodwind man who was a clarinet player,
17
and he had to teach the other woodwinds; and we had a horn player who had to teach the
brasses because they played in the orchestra. But that was the beginning, and it stayed
that way for a long time. We had some good students over the years though, I mean, good
players.
WL: Did the faculty, music faculty, get along well? Was it a collegial environment?
GD: When I came here in those early years, it was, well, as cohesive—It was really a pretty
wonderful place to teach because you didn’t feel jealousies and that kind of thing, which
later on you did feel more of, and it got involved. [laughter]
WL: Having Aycock Auditorium—I was told that Aycock Auditorium was one of the
largest—in its day was one of the largest facilities in the state, if not the largest, perhaps.
GD: That’s right. Well, that’s where we played the concerts, of course, was in Aycock. We
had developed a good audience. I know about what the audiences were because I had the
programs printed. We had probably a thousand to twelve hundred people would come to
those concerts. And, of course, it became a part of the commencement activity—we
always played a concert on Sunday night before commencement. It was a good feeling
for many years.
Of course, this Marquis, we called him Marquis—[laughter] there was an
interesting story about him too. Graham was on the television one night, and he had
Marquis with him. He said, “This is George Marquis. He’s the new dean of the School of
Music. He said he has been a composer and conductor in Hollywood. He said we found
him in the highway patrol of the state of Washington [laughter]—and when he came here
for an interview, somebody asked him, he says, “What is your instrument?” He said, “Oh,
the banjo.” Everybody thought he was joking. It was true. [laughter] But he was, well,
just a puppet for Graham. He just did exactly what Graham wanted. And Friedlaender
captured him, particularly.
WL: So he didn’t—not last long after? Did he not sur—?
GD: Well he had to go with Graham, because he was too—
WL: —too close to the situation?
GD: Too close to the—yeah, they eased him out. He got a Fulbright [program of competitive,
merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers,
professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William
Fulbright] I think, to Norway for a while and then went over to British Columbia—a new
university in British Columbia. And then he took these faculty people who had been his
puppets with him—which was good. [laughter]
WL: Did the music department survive all of that fairly well, or was it divided?
GD: It was divided then, and those were not good days.
18
WL: So it affected the department here?
GD: Yeah, and we had [Dr. Lee] Rigsby, who was appointed by Blackwell. Rigsby came here
from Tallahassee [Florida State University]. He’d been in Michigan and Texas.
Unfortunately, Rigsby was a homosexual, and he began to build what they call a nest, so
that these people were coming in. And after a while they were the inner circle, and
everybody else was outside looking in, [laughter] and, of course, that just couldn’t go on
forever—it was not—
WL: These were faculty people?
GD: Yes, it was faculty, and so he had to go. We’ve had a long string of bad luck. Rigsby was
probably the most intelligent dean we ever had. We had several good years with him. I
did everything I could to make him a success—took him around the state and introduced
him to people in music and so on, but he had this blackmail problem with the homosexual
business. Today it wouldn’t make any difference.
WL: Public exposure—he couldn’t be—?
GD: Yeah, but there was a band director at Grimsley High School by the name of [Herbert]
Hazelman [1953 master of education]. Well, he and [David] Helberg [band, orchestra,
choir teacher, assistant superintendent of Greensboro elementary schools] and a fellow by
the name of Decker, who was in the city schools, visited Rigsby. Rigsby told me this, so
it’s not hearsay. And Hazelman said, “You are a homo. I can get rid of you any time I
want to.” And he says, “We want the orchestra, and we want George Dickieson out.” He
said, “I’m going to give them the orchestra because I want to get them off my back.” I
said, “Well, you can give them the orchestra, but that will not get them off your back.”
And so that’s the reason he—and there were other forces in the community that wanted it.
WL: That’s when the orchestra separated from—?
GD: That’s right.
WL: I see.
GD: And it’s just—it was tragic because if Rigsby hadn’t had that problem, he could have
been a success in the school and made progress with him because he was intelligent.
WL: Very talented?
GD: I don’t know how talented he was. I never heard him perform.
WL: But possibly a good administrator?
GD: But I think that he did have some good ideas, and so, again, that was an unfortunate
19
experience.
WL: So in contrast to when you first came here in 1938, when there was unity—
GD: Yes, it was completely different.
WL: —passed through the Graham years—
GD: Yeah. To give you an example of—now this [Dr. Lawrence] Hart, the last one that came
when I was there—to show you how he operated— of course he was right under
Mossman’s thumb all the time—but he told new faculty members not to have anything to
do with George Dickieson. Can you imagine the head of a department creating that kind
of situation to begin with? The result is that I could sense it anyway. They were just
afraid of me; I was just like some poison for them. I mean, they were just afraid. So, I
shrugged my shoulders and went on doing my job and was really glad to get out.
[laughter] But it’s just incredible that for three years Hart had me teaching orchestration,
which I had always taught, and music appreciation, which was not in my area really, and
he had taken the university orchestra away from me. So I had a lot of time to practice in
those years [laughter]—but when Mossman retired, Ferguson told him he had to give me
back the orchestra and my courses because they were graduate courses. And Ferguson
told me that Hart had lied to him. He said, “One thing I can’t stand is for somebody to lie
to me.” He said Hart said he was taking me out of that because he just wanted me to be
doing graduate teaching, which I wasn’t.
WL: Right.
GD: And so, as a result, I got my classes back, and I started this one we call a—a chamber
orchestra. Well, about—during the summer after those three years, Hart came to me. I
saw—I never went into his offices unless I had to, frankly. I mean, if he wanted to see
me, okay, but I never voluntarily stopped by to chat. [laughter] He said he wanted me to
start another chamber orchestra, and I said “Well, I don’t know that it’s possible.” I said,
“The whole orchestra program’s just gone.” He said, “Yes, I know it.” He said, “I don’t
know whether it’s possible either.” But, you see, Ferguson was telling him I had to do
something, and so we got it going again—find we had another good orchestra. My wife
[Anna Bell Dickieson, Class of 1943] has never forgiven me for taking it—for doing it.
She said I should never have done it over again after the circumstances. Of course, that
was her opinion, but in a way I guess she was right. But it was a good orchestra. When I
retired, he dissolved that orchestra [laughter]—didn’t have it any more.
WL: So it was created to satisfy Ferguson. Ferguson had been applying the pressure?
GD: Yeah. Yeah.
WL: When you retired in 1977, did you have good feelings or bad feelings about the
university?
20
GD: I had resentment, as I told you. I think if you read my record and realize that I was never
made a full professor, and many other people who I didn’t think had contributed very
much had been. I have resentment today, that’s true, but you could say well, why did I
stay? I stayed because I had become involved financially with the retirement system to
such an extent that I just couldn’t afford to get out—to leave it.
WL: Once you were sort of locked into that financially—
GD: Yeah, it cost too much, and so I gritted my teeth and did the best job I could.
WL: Do you think this lack of promotion was a result of some of the conflicts that you’ve just
described?
GD: Oh, sure it was—definitely, because you see Mossman had a lot of control over those
promotions—well, she did. As you know, it goes up to that office and, as I say, she
fought me for twenty years.
WL: And that goes back to the Graham—?
GD: The Graham [unclear]. However, if I had to do it all over again, I’d still do what I did
because the school was gone. If Graham had won the thing and stayed here, I don’t know
what in hell would have happened to it—with the policies.
WL: It would have been a disaster, you think?
GD: It already was a disaster. [William] Raymond Taylor [professor of theatre and drama]
was a fighter. Raymond had a private business, a scenery business, nationally known—
made scenery for the Ford Theater in Detroit [Michigan] and a—theater in Toronto
[Canada], Seattle [Washington], all over the country. He did it in his backyard. He had a
barn or something back there. So he had some money to work with. And when it looked
as if Graham might not go, he said, “Well, I’ve got the money.” And he said, “I’m going
to put paid ads in every paper in North Carolina and expose this thing. [laughter] And he
got to that point, but we were the only ones in the trenches for a while. Some of my
friends said, “George, you can’t beat it; you tried too many times, and with all these
investigations, and you can’t beat it.” And I didn’t really believe them. After all, I put my
head on the chopping block if I’d lost. I knew that. If I had lost, Katherine Taylor would
have been right. I’d have been the first one fired.
[End of Interview]