This is an oral history interview with James H. Finch, class of 1936, conducted by Marilyn Summers on July the 3rd, 1997, at Mr. Finch's home in Alpharetta, Georgia. The subject of the interview is Mr. Finch's life and his days at Georgia Tech. Thank you so much for your patience and for being here, allowing us to be here with you today. You're quite welcome. You're quite welcome. We look forward to hearing your story, please. I'm one of the few, I suppose, existing Atlanta natives. Everyone else now is from Chicago. 

I was born in West End in Atlanta at 24 Dargan Street, a little house at 24 Dargan Street on December 5th, 1913. My father was an Atlanta city fireman. My mother was a housewife. 

And we lived in that location briefly and then moved to a little house on Ormond Street, 81 Ormond Street, between Washington and Crewe Streets. 

And then moved from there to another house on Ormond Street at the corner of Ormond and Conley, a house that had two different street numbers. At one time, it was 106, and then the number was changed to 278. And from that house, I went to a school about three or four blocks away, James L. Key Elementary School. And after finishing James L. Key Elementary School, I went to Hope Smith Junior High School. And from Hope Smith Junior High eventually to Tech High School, which is long to cease. 

We're still having our Tech High reunions, but the school has been out of business for 45 or more years. 

And then at the end of my Tech High career, I was awarded the Georgia Tech Scholarship, which was a thing worth about $150, $175, which got me started at Georgia Tech. 

So that helped you get started. 

Well, did you know you were going to go to college? 

Yeah. Oh, that was determined. 

And I knew I was going to study architecture because in grammar school, I could draw a little better than some of my contemporaries. And so all my teachers kept telling my mother, you've got to send this boy to architectural school. 

So that's why I've been burdened with the architectural career. the die was cast early yes and uh when i was 15 my father was killed on duty and at the mutual clothing company fire in downtown atlanta on broad street and leaving my mother and me to make our way as best we could and he was killed in september of 1929 which was just the month before the depression started and the crash was in October of 29 and the stock market meant very little to us because we didn't have any but it it meant a lot in the unemployment and as a youngster I would try to cut grass and do that sort of thing and the people would tell me we'd be glad for you to cut the grass but we need to save it for mr. 

Brown to cut because he's got a wife and two children and he needs to quarter more than you do so it was it was a really early you had a grasp of what it was to do without oh yeah yeah and and although i never did i told my mother later i guess i was out of college for some time i told her i said i never realized we were poor because everybody else was poor too ivan allen brought his lunch to tech in a brown bag just like i did and rode the bus and uh so i felt i felt uh no deprivation in that sense but uh and we moved from our little house on ormond street when i was a junior in high school we moved to 1150 cumberland road in morningside where i lived until i got married got married too early i got married at 38 years old which is wrong for a bachelor because bachelors ought to wait till they're 40. then they know everything about bachelorhood and everything about marriage and then if the marriage goes awry they can go back to either one you see so you you could go either way yeah but anyway we moved to to out to morningside and i commuted to georgia tech from that house in Morningside. 

Well, how did you commute? 

By bus? 

By bus, uh-huh. It cost a nickel. The red ticket, the student ticket, was a nickel. The regular other ticket was a dime, so I was saving money on that. And at Tech at that time, when I enrolled, the freshman class was about just a few, over 400. 

So that was in 1932. and the we were having a in the assembly hall in the administration building I don't know what you call it now the main thing there were the 400 of us sitting there and whoever the registrar or whoever was talking said you people look at the chaps on either side of you because one of you is not going to make it to graduation. And that was true. And my class eventually in architecture graduated about eight or nine people. Out of how many to start with? 

Not a great deal more than that. Architecture was a small part of the 400. And I think most of us that got started in architecture made it through. Some, the people that dropped out of architecture dropped out after the first year. I don't mean dropped out. they transferred to one of the engineering disciplines because they realized their particular thing wasn't going to be architecture and i didn't have sense enough to make that transition so i stayed in and at that time harold bush brown a great great man i like harold uh was head of the Department and Doc Gailey, Herbert Gailey was the second in command and we had Jack Rowland and Maurice Siegler was the freehand teacher and later Paul Heffernan, and before I got through Paul Heffernan joined the staff after coming back from the Paris Prize in Paris and Richard Marinus. 

The faculty was small and now we were on the third floor of the physics building on the corner of 3rd and Cherry Streets. The senior drafting room where the juniors and seniors operated was at the north end of the building. 

The freshmen and sophomores operated at the south end of the building and in between were the offices of the faculty and the library which was a little room about 30 feet long and about 10 feet wide and there was a full-time librarian there the entire school was all in one place yes the only the only part of the instructional area that was on another floor in the physics building was mr. 

Siegler's freehand drawing studio which was out on the third on the floor below us on the second floor and it was a strange thing in those days you could you could park in front of any building on the campus freely because the number of cars was minute and nobody on the faculty had a car and a few of the students had a car we had two two chaps in there Spooks Robinson and and one other chap had had cars and they could drive and they could pull right up at the physics building and get out and walk in and marinas whose nickname was foggy foggy marinas came to work one day through his normal schedule and went on home on the bus and when he got home his wife said richard where is the automobile he said oh my god i left it parked in front of the physics Billy he forgot he had it but those he must not have been used to driving no no you always his wife probably wouldn't let him drive we know those things those days were exceptional for two reasons one was the depression which made everything dirt cheap the hot dog which is the same today as it was not not as good today as it was in the varsity when frank gordy had just started hot dogs were a nickel hamburgers were dime cokes and coffee were nickel you could kill yourself in there for a quarter and there was no parking it was a 16-foot wide walk-in situation and the counter frank gordy the owner who had been a tech student, a man named Fat Bell and a fellow named that was called Monk something, I forget what it was, they managed the counter, the serving. 

You went up and got your hot dog and your Coke, turned around, and on the other wall was a shelf, and you set your Coke down, and you stood there and ate your dog and left. 

Then he had the idea of buying the house next door and tearing it down and doing parking, And he had the parking boys that would jump on the then running board of your car and take you to your parking spot and then bring your food out to the car. And if he was not the first of the drive-in restaurants, he was among the very first of that. And in those days, ladies didn't go into the varsity at all. That was *****. You were sullied for life if anybody saw you in the varsity. Really? 

And some of them would die of necessity without going in there. They just wouldn't go. 

But it was a great place. How do you suppose that started? 

I don't know. It was just a thing that decent women just didn't go in the varsity. 

So you didn't take your dates there then in those days? 

Oh, you took them in the car. They stayed in the car. You see, you did all the eating in the car, and then you drove on off. and but that was the depression had the effect of you know of keeping well it kept incomes down and of course prices down too and then along with the depression was prohibition and I had never had neither my mother or father drank and so I never had had a drink until I joined the fraternity and then it got to be such a macho thing and it was so easy to get booze in much easier now because all you had to do was pick up the phone call the bootlegger and say Charlie bring us three bottles of crab orchard and two bottles of four roses and blah blah he'd drive up and bring it into the fraternity house or better than that he would drive up and bring it to the third floor of the physics bill he would indeed and we would keep it in our drawing board drawers until we emptied it and then behind the big stone sink that we washed that we wet our stretches to do our drawings on was a big pipe chase about a foot of 14 inches deep you know six or eight feet high and there was a door on it and so when we got through with the booze bottles we'd throw them in the pipe chase and Doc Galey, who was a religious man and a nice, lovely man, the second in command there, would come in the drafting room periodically on inspection to see the police of it and all that. And he was a tiny little man, just not much over five feet. 

And one day, and in enthusiasm for checking everything, he opened that door to the pipe chase and about a hundred liquor bottles came out and covered him up and it was **** to pay for out there for that and we had a chap in the class who's who is deceased now from Fort Valley Georgia and he was he was a drinker when he came he didn't have to be taught and professor Bush Brown called him in to discipline him to chastise him for his drinking habits. And he called him in and said, Mr. Hauser, you've got to straighten up and quit drinking. And John said, Professor, I'm not drinking to get drunk. I'm drinking for my health. And he said, what do you mean, Mr. 

Hauser? 

And John said, my grandfather habitually drank about a half a glass of peach brandy every night before he went to bed and one night he skipped his peach brandy and the next morning we found him dead in bed and that ain't gonna happen to me so uh and hauser he he had some kind of a propensity for accidents and he got in the infirmary which was right next to the architectural building there a little bill small building and he ended up he was on crutches And he ended up carelessly breaking every crutch they had in the infirmary. And finally, he went over there one night. He'd had another accident in the drafting room. He'd picked up a cot that was a lot of night work, and so we had cots in there. He picked this cot up and held it up vertically and hit one of the big glass enclosing globes. 

It fell down and cut him all up, cut his face all to pieces, and he looked like a butchered chicken or something and so he ran over to the infirmary and when the nurse came to the door and saw who it was she waved him off she wouldn't let him in the cliff and his reputation yeah it proceeded they wouldn't have it been there again and there was a lot of drinking in those days a lot of drinking in the stands and they had a marvelous man I think icon at Georgia Tech George Griffith George was Dean of the students and one of his chores was to go around and check on the fraternity houses and he came to our fraternity house on one of his routine calls at a very unfortunate time we had been making homebrew in the upstairs bathroom and it had gotten away and had flooded the bathroom it was coming through the living room ceiling dripping him down fairly steadily and George came in and we greeted him in ****** thinking this is the end of the us and the fraternity to on the campus he came in and greeted everybody and walked around very carefully around where the stuff was dripping down never said a word about it never mentioned it said goodbye fellows I'll see you on the campus and we never heard another thing and he could have nailed us to the cross you see but it was it was typical of those times and the reputation for the College of Architecture is that y'all worked really long hours well we don't we did we did this because we goofed off early on on the problem the problem you'd get a problem to design a boys school a design whatever and you'd have three or four or five sometimes six weeks to do to design it with personal criticism from your design critic and And you would mess around and mess around and go up to Ray's Buffet during the Bach beer season or whatever. And you wouldn't get much done at the front end and it would pile up on you. 

And here was a deadline that was completely inflexible because we were in what was called the Bozar Institute of Design. 

And our problems had to be sent to New York to be judged up there after having been judged at Georgia Tech. 

So the last few nights, more than a few sometimes, we would work late hours and many nights all night. 

And Paul Heffernan, who came as a senior design critic and later became dean of the School of Architecture, was known as Captain Midnight. He would come over to the school, to the drafting room, about 11 or 12 o 'clock and crit the student. And if you wanted a criticism, you'd better be there at midnight when Captain Midnight came in. Do you remember them as good times? 

Yes, I remember them as very good times. I remember them very pleasantly, and I remember the people. 

Who were some of your classmates then? 

Well, **** Eck was one, and Willard Lamberson, and James Doom, who went into the ministry, Presbyterian ministry, and became the Presbyterian church architect. And he was a crackerjacker and a very fine student, I mean, you know, an honor-type student. 

And a fellow named Edwards and Rosamond from Mississippi and Arthur Robinson, whose father was an architect. His father did the Christian Science Church there at 15th and Peachtree Street. And they were known as Spooks 1 and Spooks 2. It's a beautiful building. Yeah, and Arthur and I were in the same fraternity. He was a single new as well. And it was a small class, and a fellow named Harold Rosenberg. There's about eight or nine of us. 

So you got to know them all fairly well. Oh, beautifully. And a fellow named Richard Robert. 

And they all, except for Doom, I think they all went into architecture in some form, and most of them later had their own practice or principles in other firms. And Lamberson was with Bodine and Lamberson, and **** Eck had his own firm. 

And we were with our classmates in architecture, I think, more than some of the other schools because we took the same subjects and we went from one class to another all together. 

And then we were in the drafting room from 1 o'clock in the afternoon till midnight or till 6 o'clock or till whenever. 

So we were always in there together. You weren't going off different ways. It was very concentrated. Did you get to know any of the upperclassmen that were architectures? 

Yeah. 

Well, see, Hugh Stubbins was, I don't know, a freshman, I mean, when I was a freshman or sophomore, he was still a senior there, and he went from there to Harvard. 

And what we would do when the problem was due, some senior would have a problem due, he'd get three or four of us to help him and I can't tell you now and under politically correct what we were called it was the n-word and then when we had a problem to do we'd solicit help from other people and sometime from a higher class sometime from a lower class and there's a lot of camaraderie there oh yeah more so than you would find in the other I think so because we had we had need for multiple hands in these things to make models and to you know to do all the flunky work and to do them because and these drawings of course that we were doing well you know two and a half or three feet by four or five feet long we'll get with huge sheets of drawings and did you feel like you were in the right place yeah yeah I did I thought I thought this is where I belong that's And we sent our drawings into New York under that system, and they were judged in New York. And some people got X, some people got a mention or a half mention, some people got medals. And, you know, it was competitive with the other schools. And in those days, University of Illinois and New York University were really hard to beat. 

In New York University, I don't know what happened in Illinois, but New York University did away with their school of architecture. They don't have architecture anymore. 

Well, you were competing with each other, too, then. Oh, yes, yes. Because everybody was individually judged. 

Yes, and then the problems were all hung on the wall and graded by the faculty, and you could sit in on the judging, all the students were required to, and hear the remarks about your problem and what they liked about it and what they didn't like about it, and they would keep moving them up and down the line until they got them in in order this was problem number one this is this is the poorest and so you knew where you stood there and then the grades in new york were similar they weren't identical sometimes a problem that that was not too well thought of at tech would do better in new york sometimes the other way around so uh it was it was a good system I think and one that they may not have now I don't know what they do now but it it compared our work to the work in other schools and if other people were consistently doing better in New York than we were we were doing better than they then we would know it you see and be able to evaluate our progress and our competence against other good schools and their schools were from all over the country West Coast University of California was one and all the dates pretty much held its own didn't pretty much yeah yes if we look at the people you mentioned everyone was very successful very good and in a I got out of I got out of the got out of school is as you know in 36 and I went to work there was no architectural work and I went to work for the georgia power company in the commercial lighting department and at the same time i was still going to tech taking the the problem taking the the projects and being created by paul heffernan and so we decided i was going to take the princeton prize problem princeton prize and architecture so this was an annual event yeah yeah they posed something and then you responded to it that's right they they sent send the same problem out all over the country and in this case It was a boys' school, a multi-building, you know, big campus, athletic facilities and all that stuff, you know, a campus like you'd have for a school like Lovett or Westminster or something. And a site plan was provided and all that. And it was about a four -week problem, maybe less than that. Maybe it was more sketchy than that. 

But anyway, I took it at night after working in the daytime, and Paul helped me. And we sent the thing in, and I won one of the two prizes. I won one, and a fellow named Everson from New York University won the other one. 

So you won it from competition over the whole country. Yeah. 

So that was a really big deal. 

Well, yeah, I thought so. 

And what did that entitle you to? 

It entitled me to go to Princeton under the condition I'd not be a candidate for a degree but it paid my room board and tuition so well for the same night of 37 38 and so all that was really all I had to do was get up there you see and have a couple of dollars for a hamburger you know or something on the side and Everson and I roomed together in the graduate college we had nice nice suite of rooms we had a little living room with a fireplace in it and we could pay we could get firewood I think it was 30 cents or something for a big load of firewood that the that the porters would bring up and put on the hearth for us and great dining hall in the grad college and we ate in our you know gowns you know our academic gowns oh in those days it was very oh yes yes and we walked across the The graduate college was across the golf course from the architectural building, and so we'd walk back and forth, and we would, on our trips, we would pass Albert Einstein, going back and forth from his house to the college of the, whatever they call it, College of Advanced Studies or whatever it was. And he was a delightful guy. Really? 

Yes. 

You talked to him? 

No, we didn't talk to him, but we spoke, and he spoke, and he was always very cordial and gracious and all and as i remember he never wore he wore his shirt collar buttoned up but no necktie and the rumor was he never worn his socks but i never was able to prove that but uh he was just one of the um one of the landmarks there at the college and fumi kanoya who was the prime minister of japan's son was it was captain of the golf team while i was there he was later killed as a kamikaze pilot in the world war ii so that was a very very rich experience for you to very very nice very nice yeah and i came back to atlanta from princeton and went to hence adler and shutsey who mr adler had uh coached us and taken us on the class at tech had taken us every saturday to one of their jobs and explained what was going on I went and asked him for a job and he said we're not busy we're not doing anything couldn't pay you I said well I'll come anyway so I worked eight months for nothing zero 44 hours a week worked a half a day Saturday 44 hours for nothing then mr. Adler came to me one day and said mr. Fitch we're putting you on the payroll I said thank God mr. 

Adler how much am I gonna make he said $20 a week $20 for 44 hours that ain't a **** of a lot of money and I went down we were on the 13th floor of the Candler building I went down to the first floor where the full old Fulton National Bank was and opened a saving account and every Friday I'd go down and put $5 in my saving account and have $15 to take me from one Friday to the next Friday so those were were quite trying to we talk about the good old days huh there was mr. 

Finch tell me a little bit more about your life during the time you were at Georgia Tech your social life for instance you were living at home I was living at home but as a member of a fraternity we were invited to all the various I mean one fraternity is inviting each the other fraternity so we were invited around to parties and and picnics and inter-fraternity council dances and all that sort of thing. 

So you had kind of a busy social life, would you say? 

No, my social life wasn't very busy. I was so painfully thin that I had problems with the women. I didn't, I had, my social life was not all that. And then the architectural thing. 

But you were so involved in things in school. 

Well, I was president, eventually president of the inter -fraternity council. You belonged to every club on the campus. 

Well, almost, I guess. 

Well, how did you find time for all those things? 

Well, I don't remember them being very demanding. I think it was very simple. I just neglected my work and went ahead with the activities. What was the city like? 

Now, this is depressing times. People didn't have very much money. They had no money, so most of the things we did were things that didn't cost anything. or cost very little and there was no uh movie theaters cost you know 25 50 cents and so did you go to the fox went to the fox a good bit and uh the the sporting thing the sports then they were the atlanta crackers were playing in the old spiller field which is across from and what was then C. S. Roebuck is now the City Hall East. 

And there was nobody that had ever thought of a professional football team or a professional basketball team. What about Georgia Tech's teams? 

Georgia Tech's teams were... Did you find yourself going to those games? 

Yes. Oh, yes, you had to go. There was no question about that. And Tech teams held their own, and they were played with students. I had a fraternity brother named Shorty Roberts, C. H. Roberts, who was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 138 pounds. 

He played safety on defense and quarterback on offense, played 60-minute football, and was a crackerjack. Did a good job. he did a fine job and a tiny man tiny man but one of the hardest one of the greatest players if he had been if he'd weighed 200 pounds there'd been no stopping him anywhere and they were good good people on i had another another fraternity brother named peewee williams from arkansas a lot of our fraternity were from arkansas and so you had a shorty and a peewee Shorty. Shorty was five feet tall and Peewee was nearly seven feet tall. Oh, his name was the operator. Yeah, he was a great big guy. He weighed 230, 40 pounds. Oh, my goodness. What was your nickname? 

Bill. Just Bill. They didn't call you anything else but Bill. 

Well, they called me a lot of other things, but we won't go into that. You don't want to tell me about that. 

And we had a boxer, an Olympic -type boxer in the fraternity, also from Arkansas, named Elmo Fryer who was it was a crackerjack boxer of medium size and weight. 

I wanted to ask you when we mentioned the Fox if you remember the architect who is credited with designing the Fox Olivier Veneur. 

Veneur yes and I knew the knew the firm by reputation Marie Alger firm which Veneur later had joined as a full partner in Murray, Algin, Vanua. 

And he designed, he was on the faculty at Tech at the time as a design critic and caught a lot of flack from his students because he was always designing the fox when you should have been critting the students, or they thought so anyway. 

So he wasn't around very much. Not much, and I don't remember him well because I was not at his level of instruction at that time. and I just saw him in the hall and around but passing yeah maybe he was like George B. 

Burdell people only just yes just saw him going out the door yeah but he was he has enjoys with architects primarily I suppose only for the design of the Fox a great reputation as a really worthwhile architect he really didn't do much besides that just that well I think not and because I think the firm when when Marie had to leave Atlanta because of health reasons I think the firm disintegrated and here again for them to have had the Fox at that particular time you see was just very fortunate because the Fox opened on Christmas Day of 1929, right after the crash, market crash. 

And I don't know that for a fact, but I understand that many of the people involved in the production of Fox were not paid. They never got their money. They went broke. And I don't know whether that's what happened to Marie Algenpreneur or not. Maybe they never even got paid. Architects are always the last ones to get paid, I find. 

Now, is that true? 

Yes, and they'll pay the carpet installers and the furniture people and the painters and the architect. 

I talked to an architect at the gym the other day, and I said, how are things going? 

He said, I'm having a **** of a time collecting my money. He said, I've got a warehouse I built. I've gotten so far 45% of my fee, and they're in there operating the warehouse. 

And, of course, the times of the fox and the time I was in school were trying times economically for people who were trying to hold businesses and professional offices together. 

And yet it's interesting that consistently, if you talk to Georgia Tech students, they had a good time. Oh, yeah. You were having a good time regardless. You can have a good time without any money. You proved it. Yeah. Yeah, sure you do. 

And I think one of the reasons, and it may have nothing to do with money at all, I think one of the reasons we enjoyed Tech at that time so much, it was quite small. There were only about 1,800, less than 2,000 students in the school. And there was an ironclad rule at Tech that you spoke to everybody you met on the campus. 

If they were coming up out of a banhole in the sewer, you said good morning, and they said good morning back to you. 

So it was a very civil environment. 

Yes, and we spoke to each other, students to faculty, students to maintenance people, and students to students even, you know, as strange as that would be, and it was a... 

Do you remember your graduation? 

Yeah, it was at the Fox Theater on a morning, like at 10 o'clock in the morning, and I I was in my, under my scholastic gown, I had on my Navy uniform because I was getting my commission in the Naval Reserve. 

Okay, so here's another story. You didn't tell us. You weren't doing ROTC at the same time. Yeah, I was in the Naval ROTC. 

And Fred's story, as I mentioned to you earlier, was also, and he was an officer in the thing, and as was several of the other people of that era. And I got my commission with a waiver of something like 38 pounds of underweight. wait I had to go take off my clothes and appear before the the commander the Navy commander let him look at my body to see if he thought I was really alive and so they gave me that commission you really must have been very thin then I was so thin that when when I got a new suit of clothes which was quite rare and they altered the pants the two hip pockets would touch it was I was pretty Oh my goodness. 

But you got your degree. Got my degree. Did your mother come? 

Yes, my mother came and very proud. I was the first person in my family on both sides of the family who ever set foot in a high school. Oh, isn't that wonderful. What a gift you gave her. Yeah, and I ended up going to three colleges. I went to Tech and to Princeton and to Georgia State. 

I took a night course at Georgia State, a thing called Urban Life, which would qualify me to live in the city if I passed the course. And we designed the Urban Life building at Georgia State, as a matter of fact. Let's go back now to your first job. 

You opened your first savings account, which must have been a really big deal to you to actually have money to put away. 

I had really had a previous account with that bank that I started in 1922 When I was in the second grade, they had a thing called school saving, and you took your dime or your quarter on Friday, and the teacher helped you enter it in the book, and then they sent it into the bank. 

So I'm a longtime banker, and the thing went from Fulton Bank to Bank South, and now it's Nation's Bank, and I still got a thing. I still got $1,000. You kept that account all this time. And with living at home and only having to spend $0.25 or $0.30 for lunch and a dime for $0.15 for a bus for a street car fare, it didn't cost me anything to work. 

So you could afford to save 25% of your wage. Yeah, yeah, and I never have been able to do that again. I think not. 

But I worked there, and Mr. Schutze, of course, was the design partner. And Mr. Adler was the production partner, and Mr. Hintz was the business development person. He played poker with Mr. Woodruff of the Coca -Cola company and all that. You were traveling in high cotton there. 

Well, I wasn't traveling with them. I was just working for them. And Mr. 

Schutze, see, I was, when I started at Georgia Tech, modern architecture was just kind of on the horizon. 

And at that time, you could do, if you were given a church to do, you could do it Gothic, you could do it Georgian, you could do it modern, you could do whatever you wanted. Modern was just another style. by the time I got to Princeton everything had to be modern it was modern modern modern but mr. 

Schutze who's one of the great classic architects of America had no patience at all for modern architecture or modern painting or modern anything else and he used to come to my board when I was laboring over some trying to design something and look over my shoulder and say oh mr. 

Finch surely you're not serious and he was a he was a grand man to work for he would come in the in the drafting room at least once a day and just lay you cold lay you out with a one-liner just something that would kill you and there's a chap that a Mike Williamson who also went to tech many years ago and *** said we ought to pay an amusement tax to work for these people because Schutze is so funny. He was that amusing. 

Yeah and then as I worked for them it was 38 and I worked for them for a couple of years and as the World War II thing was shaping up the firm was selected to do the inventory replacement camp at Macon Camp Wheeler, which had been a, Camp Wheeler had been in the World War I camp on the old Harry Stillwell Edwards property there. And I was elected to go down with Mr. Adler, and I was to be the designer for the layout of the camp. 

All the buildings were canned buildings, you know, they were standard army buildings, but a master plan, a site plan for the buildings and the warehouses and the clubs and all that sort of thing had to be done in the hospital And also, I went down to Macon with Mr. Adler and Gordon Elliott and two or three others from the office to do the architectural stuff. And we set up in the Lanier Hotel there in Macon to do it. And it went on for a number of months. And in the course of events, I met a Marine officer there named Rat Pendleton, a major. And he asked me about my military connections. connections, and I said, well, I'm an insulant in the Naval Reserve with four years of rank, and he said, well, you sure don't want to be in the Navy. 

I said, all those people do is walk around in blue serge suits with briefcases under their arm, and so he talked me into joining the Marine Corps, so to get out of the Navy and join the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps would have to accept me before the Navy would let me out, not that I was all that valuable, but that was just their rule of thumb, and And so I got accepted by the Marine Corps, and the Navy was gracious enough to let me out. 

Well, I lost my four years of rank because I was at the top of the incident's list. I went to the bottom of the second lieutenant's list. 

I almost immediately got called to active duty, and I got called to the Marine Corps in September of 1941, and I was in the Marine Corps schools as a second lieutenant in the officer's class up there at Quantico when Pearl Harbor happened, so then I did six years in that war. Wow. That was a big interruption for a career. 

That was quite an interruption, yeah, and I ended up, after the hostilities ceased, I was in the occupation of Japan, and that's where I was released and came back to inactive of duty from Japan as a as my final tour of duty and during this whole period of time you practice no architecture at all I practice infantry I was in the hard school and did it the hard way I was in I was in the did you ever forgive the man who talked to it no I loved him for that the Marine Corps has been the greatest thing in my life it's anybody that has missed the Marine Corps has missed a gorgeous thing and the Marine Corps schools is right at the top of my list I put it right up there with tech in Princeton maybe I put it a little over Princeton what they do in the Marine Corps schools they tell you about the thing then they make you read about it then they demonstrate it to you then they make you do it and when they get through it by God you know it you know it and you can do it and you can do it and you can do it so I taught in the Marine Corps I taught the rifle company and defense in the Marine Corps schools and I later and I served with some of the same people in both World War two and Korea when I went to Korea it was like old home week they were the people I left the war Marine Corps like Tech at that time the Marine Corps was small so you knew everybody I thought you did Did you know General Davis Raymond Davis? 

Yeah, see Ray Davis went to Tech high when I did I was Georgia Tech yeah, and he was skinny like you were yes Yeah, Dave I never served with him in either of the wars, but I knew about him and I served with a man named Lou Walt who was a great admirer of ray davis and he would always say well now ray davis wouldn't have done it that way or ray davis likes this or doesn't like that and i i had the good fortunate good fortune to be in what i think is one of the great battalions in the marine corps history at iwo jima i was in the second battalion 28th marines and we were the people that put the flag up and my runner is one of the guys in the flag-raising picture a fellow named Renee Gagnon he's dead they're all dead now three of them were killed on the island the other three have died since Renee died several years ago up in Boston the Indian boy Ira Hayes they made a movie about him he's been dead for a long time and the Navy corpsman a fellow named Bradley died more recently a year or two ago so you were right there when that was all I was there and I'll show you a piece of information about that battalion the battalion going in was reinforced a battalion is about 1100 men it was reinforced to 1400 men then they got 277 I believe replacements during the course of the battle, which took the 2nd Battalion, about just under 1,700 men went through that battalion. And when we got back to the dock at Hilo, there were 177 of us left. You must have felt mighty lucky. I was mighty lucky. And of that 177, half had been wounded. Oh, my. Light wound. And you were not wounded? 

Never touched. And I went through the Korean thing untouched. Lucky Bill. Lucky Bill. so when you mustered out you came well when I came back and I didn't go back with him saddling shut see I went with Bergen Stevens and they were down on Lucky Street and I went down there as a designer and worked for Bergen Stevens for about two years and a chap they moved their office from Lucky Street down to a building that they designed and built next door to the YMCA building on Lucky Street. And we moved down there. And in the interim, Burge had died. He had a heart attack and collapsed on the tennis court. 

And the firm changed from Burge and Stevens to Stevens and Wilkinson, Jimmy Wilkinson, who was an Auburn graduate. Miller Barnes, who had graduated from Georgia Tech about 1930, I guess, or 29, was in the firm. 

And after a couple of years, Miller and I decided to start our own office and we got a little ***** job of some sort and went out on 64 15th Street it's about where the side door to the to the Woodruff Arts Center is now but it was the old servants quarters for the high museum or the high house with JM high live there so we've had we did that over and had a little drafting room not as big as this living room and at the first were just Barnes and I and then we got got enough work going we needed some help so we got Carricka Paschal who was also a Georgia Tech graduate after my time so we had three of us and the two partners and Paschal and some paydays there was not enough money for anybody but Paschal he had to be paid because he was an employee so barnes and i got no money so we said to **** with that we'll make him a partner and then we'll split the thing so the firm became finch barnes and pascal and then in the 50s about 56 or 57 we merged with another small firm alexander and rothschild and it became Finch, Alexander, Barnes, Rothschild, and Paschal, which is an impossible name for a firm, and so it was corrupted to the acronym FABRAP. The famous FABRAP. FABRAP. It sounded like a detergent, you see. It did. 

And we were fortunate enough to get the Georgia Power Company job, which was our first office building. 

It's down on the corner of Peachtree and Baker Street there, and I think it's Atlanta, the department of the, of the Georgia Power Company. 

But that was our first flyer. Your first major, major skyline. Yeah, and we thought that was, it was 22 stories high. We thought that was big stuff. 

So, uh... And what year was that built? 

What year was that in prison? 

I got no idea. Was it before the Korean War or after the Korean War? 

You really don't remember. It was after the Korean War. See, that was in the late 50s. 

Okay, that's what I thought. See, I came home from the Korean War in early 54, late 53. 

Now, didn't something significant happen before you went to the Korean War? 

Yeah, I got married. I thought maybe that's when that occurred. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Well, it was a strange event, really. 

I had gone out to the Lundeen place out in DeKalb County with John Lundeen a friend of mine to look at the lake and to do him a little lake house out there on their property they had a couple hundred acres out there and his father had the largest Great Dane kennel in America at the time about 200 Great Danes and so I went out with John to see the site and I met his sister Bess and And she was very attractive, although quite young. And she was about 20. I was about 35. And we started dating at that time. And then two years later, we got married. And we got married at 9.30 in the morning of the day I left, that we left to go to the West Coast for me to go to the Korean War. 

So you took her with you? 

Yes. We went out and lived at Laguna Beach for several months before I went overseas. 

So you were a dyed -in-the-wool bachelor. Yeah, yeah. And you succumbed to the charms. Yeah, and I hope my next wife is kind of enriching me. Shame on you. 

What I really hope is, but I hope my next wife, I do as well on my next wife. You should be so lucky. I wouldn't go through that again. We've been married 45 years. 

So you took Bess out to the coast with you and why you went to Korea? 

Yeah, and she went up to San Francisco and I shipped out. 

I flew out, and her mother came out to ride home with her, you know, bringing our household effects such as they were or whatever. And I kept getting these letters from Charlie's Snake Farm in Texas of the Grand Canyon. I thought I was going to beat her home from Korea before she got home from Laguna Beach. She was taking it. She did a little tour. Oh, yeah, and I'd get to say, we're somewhere, and then they went to New Orleans. they took it took them forever to come home it really did and I came how long did it take you to come home well it took me I was there I got two stars on my ribbon for being in Korea two winners and I wasn't there the whole two winners but the day I got there was 31 below zero so it was pretty rough and when I came home finally my mother and best were going to meet me at the old Hartsfield Airport which was a big Quonset hut looking thing I got off the plane nobody and I thought well this is a **** of a reception here I am with my sea bag over my shoulder you know and my ribbons on and all that stuff and I walked into the big lounge the big lobby they're sitting there talking blah blah blah blah blah and they never thought that didn't occur to them that my plane I had to tap them on the shoulders and say, fellas, I'm home. 

Well, that way you didn't get a big head, did you? 

No, no. I was not impressed at all with my importance. And we had had our oldest daughter had been born while I was still in Korea. Oh, so you had a baby. Yes, so we had a baby to come home to, which is a very frightening thing for a professional bachelor. 

And so, and we lived in a little house up in the middle of the dog kennel at Calmar Farms, the Lundeen dog farm. 

And we lived there until our oldest, the child who was born when I was in Korea, was ready to start the school. And then we had another younger daughter, four years younger. And the girls were Ann and? 

Llewellyn. Llewellyn is the older one, named after her maternal grandmother, and Ann is named after my mother. 

And so we moved into Atlanta to take advantage of the excellent schools and sent, bought the house in Ansley Park on the Inman Circle. Got Llewellyn set up in the Spring Street School, which was one of the top schools. schools there they had a marvelous principal lady I don't know whose name I long since forgotten but the school had a marvelous reputation and then two years later there was a big flap integration flap about and they were about to close the schools down there was a threat that they would close the Atlanta schools and so we took Lou Ellen and Ann is not old enough to start at school yet we took Lou Ellen sent her to Lovett to school and then when Ann came along of school age she starts so they both went to love it now where in this part did fabric come to be this would be the end of the 50s so when you came back from korea about 56 of something when i first came back it was still finch barnes and pascal then we merged with alexander and rothschild i'm guessing 56 it might have been as late as 57 and so when were you invited to come to georgia tech and serve before then, I think, before that merger, in the early 50s. 

So you came back, no more wars, now you're going to settle down to being an architect. 

I was going to settle down to be an architect and a professor of architecture because Paul Heffernan had conned me into coming over there as a professor. And so I was doing both. and when we merged the two firms we each of course had separate offices we we got a little office space down on Fairley Street and right downtown yeah merge right behind Robert and company and we moved our two office staffs which were about seven or eight people each we ended up with a firm of about oh 16 18 people and very impressive and we we got we were fortunate enough to we got some work at that time and not too long after that we got to Atlanta Stadium and then we set up a separate office for that because we were associated with hearing firm for stadium work in the setting up of our new office down there on Fairley Street, which we thought was pretty amazing stuff, Henry Tomo office was in the same building. He was up on the fifth floor, and we were on the second floor. 

And Henry had done a lot of very nice work and had done the little White House at Warm Springs with President Roosevelt and was a very nice fellow. 

But anyway, in setting up our office, we had five partners. and so we broke the function down into five different functions so each partner would have a responsibility. And Cecil Alexander was business development. I was designed. Rocky Rothschild was specifications. 

Carrico Paschal was production drawings, and Barnes was what was then called supervision, that's construction phase. and so we each had a bailiwick of our own and we of course all participated in the other people's roles as when required and we were fortunate enough at that time to to get some major some major work and Ivan Allen was mayor and And when they were stealing the Braves away from Milwaukee and realized they had to have a stadium, he wanted us to do it, and he appointed a stadium board which had Arthur Montgomery and Mills Lane at the head of it, and Arthur wanted George Heary's firm to do it. 

So Ivan's solution was to put the two firms together in an associated thing. 

So we were associated for stadium work. And we did the Atlanta Stadium on a separate floor in that same building on Fairley Street. 

But later, when we began to get other stadiums, because we got the Cincinnati Riverfront before we finished Atlanta, And we set up out at Pershing Point in the little office building there, we set up a separate stadium office where both we and Heary furnished people to the office. And I was sort of the partner in charge of it. I didn't move out there. I went out back and forth between the two offices. 

And Henry Teague from our office was our permanent representative out there, head representative, and Will Ferguson from Heary's office. Those two of them worked together on it. 

That stadium was unique in that it came in on time and under budgeted? 

It came in a week ahead of time because they told us in the last, we had a year to do it, and they told us in the last gasp, they said, we've got bad news for you. we're playing an exhibition game in here a week ahead of your 52-week schedule and we'd already the steel fabricators had already been working three shifts 24 hours a day and we got it done but when the first customer came in the grandstand people were still in the outfield putting down sod so it was touch and go and we were before we had before that exciting moment we'd been contacted by the city of Cincinnati to see if we wanted to submit they were considering other people as well submit for their stadium there and we were fortunate enough to get it and we did that one and then we got to the Buffalo Bill Stadium in up there in New York and then we got the New England Patriots Stadium in in outside of Boston do you get attached to the first like that do you get attached to it emotionally attached I mean how did you feel about that when you got finished with that stadium well well yeah but you're glad to get rid of any of them because you've gone through so many headaches and so It's not just the finished product. How do you feel about them tearing it down? 

I have no regrets. It served its purpose. They got a bargain. That stadium cost $14 million. The Olympic Stadium cost $250 or so. 

So that stadium cost $14 million and there were about $4 million other costs in roadway diversions and land cost and fees and permits and all that sort of stuff. 

So for about $18 million, they got a stadium that served them for the better part of 30 years, so I think they... Got their money. And that stadium, you see, was built at a different period than stadiums now. Nobody would do that stadium now because that was a dual-purpose stadium, football and baseball. 

Ivan and the Mills choked on doing moving grandstands which would have changed the configuration in which we did in Cincinnati so that that resulted in playing a pie-shaped sport and a rectangular sport in a circular field so it means you've got some compromises with each sport that you don't have in a stadium where you can change from a pie shape to a rectangle simply by pulling the stands around and that can be done in 20 minutes by you know a little yes it's all on railroad tracks and you just pull a thing around so we did those professional stadiums and then we got started getting collegiate stadiums and we did about old more than 20 college stadiums Kentucky and southern Mississippi and Iowa State and you name it South Carolina and they went on and on and on and on so you build a reputation yeah well anybody that's done one is an expert because most people haven't done yeah none at all you see it so we became stadium experts and the old firm what was left of it it's disintegrated now but what was left of the old firm worked on the on the Georgia Dome and on the Olympic Stadium they were part of the the thing there And I think that Henry Teague and Chow and the rest of them, the Fragment, there's nothing left of Fab Rapids that's been absorbed by the engineering firm that they merged with. They're working on the new basketball stadium or arena. 

I think not on the arena, but I think they're doing the parking deck, which is more profitable anyway. so my thing I kind of slouched off from from office building and commercial stuff into the sports field what's the first thing you did for Georgia Tech did the did a gateway down there on 3rd Street with it with arches over the thing has probably been knocked down there the president at that time had was got very security conscious and he wanted to check everybody as they came in the gates you know and all that sort of stuff and so we set up a little little gateway then we did the we did the ceramic engineering the chemical engineering ceramic engineering building and we did the upper deck at the west stands and that I think that's about it student well we did the students in a And what about ***? 

Didn't you do the Fuller-Calloway Student Athletic Complex? 

It's on your credential list. We've got the swimming pool and all. Oh yeah, whatever. Oh yeah, that. It was super critical to Georgia Tech. The things always run together. You forget what you have done. How many years did you stay as a faculty member? 

Sixteen. Sixteen years. 

Did you feel you were in a position to influence students coming up the ranks? 

I think so, yeah, because for one reason, so few members of the faculty had ever done anything except teach. 

They had not done the practice, and I think people that had been in the practice and knew some of the pitfalls and some of the of the nitty -gritty about it were helpful to students and and I get that feedback from some of the some of the people that I've taught that it was worthwhile to who are some of the people that you thought that we might know of or some of your students did you hand me that thing right there this right here yeah that's it that's still my stadium and that's somebody else's somebody else wouldn't put that other one in there yeah I was thinking about some of your some of your students who went on to to fame well went on to whatever they went on to oh **** but anyway that there are a bunch of them that well you I know you mentioned well Portman was one here he was one of both of them who were extremely successful yeah and both of extremely hard to deal with maybe that's why they're successful did you not tell them the reality of tried to yeah but neither one of them deals in reality at all so I thought I had a well Rufus Hughes and And Houseworth is one, and Beck Maloof, I think. Those names will come to you, like you said, tonight. We don't want to know anymore, right? 

Yeah. 

Tell me which building you feel the strongest about of all the many things when you drive around Atlanta or the Tech campus. You'd be the strongest from your own pool that you feel was really a fine. fine piece of work you're the proudest stuff or maybe it was the least hassle well they were all hassled I don't know that I have a I don't know that I have a a real favorite I think that I think my real favorite was a John A white swimming pool which is an Atlanta public swimming pool and bathhouse in West End that I I did, it's the only job I did the design, I wrote the specs, and I did the supervision on it. 

So it was your 100% job? 

It was 100% mine. 

So that's the only one. And God, I hope, I expect they've torn it down by now. Oh, I hope not. 

But we did the Coca-Cola headquarters, and the Coca-Cola USA, and the Southern Bell Building in association with the Skidmore's and Barrel. See, those are real, those are landmark buildings in Atlanta. and the Benjamin Mays High School, the Five Points Martyrs Station, you know, stuff like that. Stuff like that. You can't even walk around anywhere and we don't see what you did. Oh, and we did the Richard Russell building. Oh, yeah, that too. 

And the firm after I left did the Fulton County thing down there, which I don't like particularly, down by the county building that had the palm trees in the lobby and all that stuff. Oh, the glass, Mr. Lomax's glass building. Yeah, yeah. 

The, if we were to erase all the buildings that you put in Atlanta, there'd be some mighty big holes around. 

Well, Atlanta has a reputation of erasing buildings, and they've erased a lot of buildings a lot better than mine. They've erased a lot of Phil Schutze's buildings, which is a, it's a sad thing. and they came within an inch of destroying the lobby of the old C&S Bank building, which is a great room itself. And Mills Lane was going to put a mezzanine in there, cut the height of it in half. That could have killed him. Fortunately, he didn't get it done. No, I don't, I don't. You don't get attached to your buildings. 

Well, you always hope you can do better, and there's always stuff about them you wish you had done better, you know. You see, the thing about design, you're limited by so many things. You're limited by your own talents, obviously. You're limited by the client's taste, which is sometimes pretty horrendous. You're limited by the client's budget, the money that the client has. You're limited by restrictions of zoning codes and building codes and all that. 

So there's a lot of things that you have little or no control over that restrain you from doing what you believe ought to be done. It can't be done this way because of a code. It can't be done this way because the client can't afford it. Sounds very frustrating. Or it can't be done this way because the client's wife doesn't like it. 

So whatever. 

So you can get real frustrated. Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

We did that original Georgia Power building where Jack McDonough was the chairman of Georgia Power Company. And that was a very pleasant job to work for just because he was that kind of client. We had the same kind of client at the Cincinnati Stadium. The city manager and the city engineer were delightful people, and that was great. 

And we had just as bad a client at the West Virginia University, not with the university but the Board of Regents. You've never seen a bunch of sharks like those people. 

So we've had good clients. It's always a draw. You never know how you're going to. You never know. You never know. And architecture is a difficult field. it's a fascinating thing to do because you like you're creating something and you're expressing yourself and you're doing all that but it also has has so many limitations one is you never make any real money and the other is the other is you always liable for so much money because somebody falls down a stair in your building sue you for 20 million dollars when we were doing over Lebs restaurant up at Lucky and Forsyth Street there, some woman fell down on the sidewalk outside of Lebs, had nothing to do with Lebs. She sued us, she sued Lebs, she sued everybody in sight. We were dismissed from the case, I don't know what ever happened. It had to do with the city of Atlanta's sidewalk, not us. 

And when we were doing this since the Buffalo Stadium in a football stadium they put in cables to pull a net up for after the point after touchdown to keep the ball from going in the stands they don't want to lose their football so in putting up those cables a workman lost a couple of fingers on his hand through through I don't know what sort of misadventure he sued us he sued the contractor he sued the County of Erie he sued the Buffalo Bills and he sued the city of Buffalo and finally he sued US Steel who made the cables and so that's the kind of thing of course nothing happened I mean it was thrown out of it's a lot of money for lawyers yes yes and so I had good advice I used to talk Paul had me talk to the fresh incoming freshman at Tech architectural freshmen and I would tell them in the outset of my remarks I would say the best thing you can do to ensure a successful career is get out of here and marry the richest woman and after the girls came oh man that you can delay your hands on and then you won't have to do junk you can do what you want to do become financially independent and then do what you want yeah that's right you do well and see if you pretty much done what you wanted to do though fairly much yeah money fortunately money I never had in it so I don't know anything about it it hasn't bothered me I don't give a **** about money but but you were able to follow all your creative dreams I did I did always all the stuff I wanted to do we've traveled a lot we've been in Europe a lot we've done we've done the QA to the England we've done you know We've done a lot of stuff. 

What about the girls? 

Did they inherit your talent? 

Well, one of them is a ballet dancer, which I think inherited her mother's talent. Bess was a dancer when I married her. Oh, you didn't have that. And I knocked her career in the head right there. 

Our youngest daughter is a principal dancer with the Milwaukee Ballet, and she's danced in Denmark, and she's danced in Nashville and Houston and with the Atlanta Ballet for six or seven years. And so she's a talented dancer, a good dancer. And my other daughter is a writer who's had some stuff published long ago. She quit writing poetry and that sort of stuff. She's writing advertising things now, which is where the money is, you see. 

But one was a writer. 

The writer came to me one day when we had five horses out there in the pasture and said, Daddy, I'm not going to Emory anymore. I've been accepted at the University of New Mexico. I'm going to New Mexico. The woman there, there was a creative writing instructor that she particularly wanted to study with. 

So she transferred, and her grades were excellent. She was on the honor roll at Emory. She went to the University of New Mexico to study. And I said, Lou Ellen, what about those five horses in the pasture. She said, that's your problem, Daddy. That's when I found out you could always buy a horse, but you could never sell. And so. 

So you became a horseman. 

Well, I finally got rid of them. And we had horses. We had horses. We had donkeys. We had goats. We had turkeys, *******, geese, chickens, cats, and dogs. 

So you're a gentleman farmer now. 

Well, I'm neither a gentleman from the Norah Farmer, I'm afraid, but I'm out here anyway. Any grandchildren? 

Yeah, two. The right daughter, the older daughter, has two children, one eight and one four. Oh, so you have nine grandchildren. Yeah, and they just left here, the two grandchildren. Their parents weren't with them. Bess went up to North Carolina, picked them up, and brought them home. Kept them here for a week. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I really did. And she took them back the other day. You love every minute of that. And I invited them back. I said, you two come back the day you graduate from high school. Oh, Bill Finch, you're a storyteller. No, no. No, I took those kids to the Golden Arches up here at Crabapple. And we went in a place that had a playground in there. There must have been 700 kids, and they're just screaming and yelling and raising cake. And I thought, boy, this is, I'm too old to be a grandfather. And there was a lady sitting at the table, Joanne, I said, had four children with her. And I said, look, I'm 83 years old. I can't take this. And she said, oh, it's good for you. I said, well, that's your opinion, but not mine. 

But anyhow. 

Well, sir, it has been a pleasure listening to your story. it's been a very interesting story and what a great accomplishment well I don't know I wonder about that well we're glad that we can ride around Atlanta and see all the wonderful things you well I'm discouraged about Atlanta because I think I think things there's too much too many things being built I think architects and planners have a lot to answer for there's a lot of junk being built and there's a lot of miserable housing being built and I don't know no no and we've never been responsive to planning constraints or restrictions the British do that much better if they've got a green belt around the town that's a green belt nobody builds in that green belt if we've got one somebody like the North Point development people Tom Cousins can keep pecking at the at the planning people until they let him do what he wants to do and I've been on hundreds of hearings zoning hearings down at City Hall and the county and I'm convinced that any decent realty firm any decent law firm can get whatever they want to get just by persistence you can take a group of objecting citizens and they'll go to the meeting and the people and the chairman will say who objects and somebody the spokesman will stand up and give their objection then two or three weeks later they got to go down there for another one and then another one and another one and finally they're exhausted and the guy says who objects nobody objects so they say okay give it to him you know it's pitiful but anyway well you've seen the best of times I think so and I think I think I think the best of times for me at least had it had nothing to do with peace and nothing to do with money so I can't quite agree with the philosophy we have had the prosperity is just around the corner well thank you so much for sure let's have let's have a we're delighted to have you here today and we are to be with you today and to hear your story. We thank you very much. You're quite welcome.