cl*** of 1929, conducted by Stephen Gaines on July 26, 1994, at Mr. Westbrook's apartment. The subject of this interview is student life at Georgia Tech. And Mr. Westbrook, as we were discussing earlier, we'd really like to hear from you some of the stories you have to tell us about your life at Georgia Tech. And what I'd like to start off is to give you a little bit of freedom, maybe to tell us about some things. How about telling us some memories ***ociated with playing football in the Rose Bowl game? Well, first I'd better go back to my high school at Moultrie, down in the lower part of the state. And it was also the home of Mac Thorpe, who's quite, had quite a nice career on the campus, as well as athletically, too. And he was followed there by his brother, Robert Thorpe, who was very successful in his college career, as well as his business career here. And, uh, Mac Clark was responsible for me getting an athletic scholarship, and he brought Coachelli down to Moultrie the summer of 1925. I was working on the tobacco warehouse, kind of floor manager, receive the tobacco from the farm and place it on the auction floor, get it sold and get it moved off and fill to fill up the warehouse again for the sale. We had sales there five days a week, I believe. And it was quite an interesting business and the tobacco industry was new in our area at that time. Blackthorpe lost his life during World War II when the Jets sunk a light aircraft carrier, the Bismarck Sea. He applied and was given the opportunity to train for a combat pilot at his age, which was in his forties I think at the time and was a little older than the normal combat father. I was very fortunate in being known to him. One year he skipped coming to Tech and stayed in his hometown of Moultrie and ***isted the football high school football coach there so he had seen me in action for a whole high school season and evidently liked what he saw and enough to get Coachetti to come down there and interview me and my parents. My only tryout was in my home there, which was next door to the Thork's grandparents on the mother's side, and Matthews lived next door to me. And, uh, Ellis asked me to trot out to the street and back, and I get back to our front porch where we were huddled, and he said, well, looks like you got a pretty good pair of legs, and that's what we want you for, is to, uh, use those legs to run in appearance. And so that was his Notre Dame system that we put in. And we had one of the four horsemen there came to Tech in 1925. And he had charge of the freshman team in those days while freshmen could not play varsity games. So we had our own separate schedule, I believe, three or four games, one of them was Mercer and another, I think, Auburn, and then that was the year when they started in Tech, Georgia freshman game for Thanksgiving. And I was fortunate to be a part of that and to help promote it for the next 25 years. That freshman game is still a very popular a game on the Tech freshman agenda, and it's been very helpful in raising funds there for the Scottish Rite Hospital for Crippled Children, and for several years I co-chaired the committee there was Mr. Bob Willoughby, a theater operator here, and we filled the stadium there for freshman game is most wild. I suppose it's the best attendance for a freshman college game in the country at that time. The, uh, that was the nucleus, the freshman, uh, game there, or team of 1925, was probably the nucleus of Howard, a team that went undefeated in 1928 and was invited to play in the Pasadena Rose Bowl on January 1, 29. And also the famous game that Roy Regals picked up a fumble which Stumpy dropped, and Stumpy would drop one once in a while, but he could sure scamper around and pick up some yards to make up for him. Roy Regals was instrumental in post-season games that we would play after the season was over, if neither team was invited to a bowl there for several years, Then we would alternate and play a game with each other sometime between the end of the season in January 1. It gave us a nice hero there, games played with different sections of the country and of course in And as a consequence there, I had several visits with Roy Regals over a 65-year period where I think he visited Atlanta on the Tech campus on three different occasions. Usually it's my guess. Notre Dame's sister did call for a team to be pretty alive and active on their feet. Don Miller, he had been, of course, on the new rock then, and they did a lot of wind sprints, and believe it or not, I, an old lumbering lineman, I could run, and that's the only thing that saved me, I was able to ***ist with the guards and I was very fortunate to be playing between an awful good center and feet of fun and tackles like Vance Marie, Frank Spear, and Coop Watkins. And then the best offensive tackle we had in those days was not the biggest, was Kenneth thrash. At the time, shortly after he graduated, he was on the tech faculty in some capacity. I wasn't too familiar with the difference of engineering courses. They accused, we had what was known as Commerce Department or the School of Commerce, and they called us Jewish engineers so that we could at least come under the general cl***ification as being engineering great students. And I did get a little training while I was on the campus. Again, Mr. Tharp and Carter Barron, they were cl***mates, and their last playing year was 25, I believe, that fall. And Carter had a nephew, Tom Jones, that was going to come and be a part of the 2018. And Mr. Thorpe had a younger brother, Frank Thorpe, who was slated to come to Tech, and also Tom Jones, who would have been a nephew of the Baron. There were three of the Barron brothers in the tech set up. The first one was Red Baron, David Irenus Baron, was quite a shifty ball carrier, played and finished Tech in about 1924 I think. He was at a, had finished Tech when I entered there in 25. Brother Carter was quite prominent on the team and also a man named Wyckoff, He was one of our better halfbacks. And we also had a fullback that had quite a career known as Father Lumpkin. Father Lumpkin came from Dallas, Texas, and he was a protege of another title that Father and played fullback. Came under the wing of a high school ***ociate and all of those and tech annuals scattered around here somewhere. And finally, some of that brigade is in my other room here, which I use as an office. I'm still operating a business, the remnants of an automobile business, that I operated here in the south part of Atlanta, around Fort McPherson Army Headquarters, East Point College Park, Hagueville area. So I had a very successful business there for 30 years. cashed in the chips in 19, I think it was about 1970. Can we go back to talking about the Rose Bowl game? Do you have some memories about the game, about the events that we're surrounding it? Well, it was the second quarter, and in those days, you could only be substituted once and a half, I think it was. We did not have offense and defensive teams. You played all the way most of the time. I think in the whole game we only used 16 players and got to have 11 at a time so there wasn't much substitution going on and I was told ahead of time I had had a little case of flu back in Atlanta. Between our last game around the 1st of December, which I'll use it as the last game of the season with the University of Georgia. We spent a few days in the hospital there with several of us had what was known as the flu. They put us over there at St. George's Hospital there on the Ivy Street back. Stumpy's bear? But Stumpy had a bear, yes, he brought one back, one of our old grads that was connected somewhere with the movie industry and gave Stumpy this bear and brought him back on a We had a special train that we were traveling in. So Nevada was quite a character on the Tech campus there for several years. I lived in Noble's dormitory building, and that was three stories. was in the basement uh in the basement was a shower room and toilets that was for the whole building and uh designing the hall a man called uncle gus operated the the dining area building was torn down and now the uh the you were dealing there back in the West End. So we made a, my freshman year in the spring there of 1926. It was one heck of a hot spell hitting and we took our little mattresses off of these cots and put it out where the flagpole is now and the entrance from the north side, North Avenue. It was so hot that we went out there to sleep out of doors. This was in the spring of 26. Someone suggested it. Why did Tick have a swimming pool we decided that well we'd make one and then this those building why we have a shower room about the size of this room we're sitting in with shower heads going down both sides and just freestanding walls with an opening at both ends and drains along, so we put cardboard out of our shirts from the laundry over the drains, turned on all the shower heads, and found some boards out by the powerhouse, and And I think I was the best carpenter in the crowd, that I had a little experience in helping build curing barns on the farm down at Moultrie. So we boarded up there about chin high and used paper wrappings from our laundry, from our shirts, kind of as a gasket, I would say, between the boards. and we got up just about so we could stand on our tiptoes and not drown. We did quite a lot of little business there and the boys had visited us from over in the Swan Building. That was known as Georgia Tech's first swimming pool. How long did this swimming pool last? Oh, we pulled up the drains at about 12 o'clock that night. And we did a landslide business there. Now is this a one-time event, or did you? This is a one-time event. Okay. And so we dubbed it. One of the girls in there gave me a brick that came out of an old building. I'll dig that up for you here, surround me somewhere. commemorating Georgia Tech's first swimming pool let me ask you this were there any repercussions of this event did anyone get under any discipline for this no it did though when we took up those drains that water couldn't go out fast enough and the water did back up into the storage room of the dining area and I think it was sacks of sugar or flour or something and what known above the water table I think the powers that be and the faculty and the dormitory operations figured, well, the boys were suffering in that heat, and we would like by our engineering graduates to have a little initiative to make things happen. So maybe that's a good experience for them, but we were never called to the mat. Thank goodness. I often get referred to as one of the Rose Bowl players. I said I was a graduate of the 1929 cl***. I did p*** back to Lamar. I had to stay away from a final exam my senior year, so I would be eligible for an additional year of positive football. The first year I was at Tech, I In the summer, between freshman and sophomore board, I went down to my home and got mosquito country and hit malaria fever, which I did. I lost a lot of weight. Most of the time I played a fairly light weight, around 160 or 65 pounds most of the time. I think maybe one time I did a typical scale of 170. That's the most out of the playing way. We're going to stop for a minute now. Well, in those days, the team had to travel by train or if we were playing down at Auburn or Athens, where sometimes we would go by bus, the special trains would load up out on the edge of the Emory campus, further drawn over to Athens. quite, quite a noisy, we played in our Georgia games, we played several years and running on the Tech campus. And I had, of course, Tech and Georgia had been, had not had good relations there for some time in the early twenties, but when I entered my freshman year in 1925, they had set up for their first game to be played that that year, and that was one scrap that I wanted to be there when it happened, and I was going to go to one of those schools, and some of the Georgia graduates, they brought one of I was one of the university star players there at the Moultrie and thought he could talk me into coming, going to Athens for college work. a famous title named Joe Bennett. Joe Bennett, he had one or two strikes on him there with my friendship with the Clark family. He had ***isted in coaching the high school team that one year that he stayed out and had a relationship there. His father had a dealership They are sold mules. It's quite a farming area. The best tobacco land in the state. You were talking about transportation, getting to, say, football games. Yes. Do you remember, what do you remember about the transportation out to the roads? transportation getting when you went to the Rose Bowl oh that was Bob my special train and we stopped the train in places we'd get out where we could exercise our legs up and down the train we'd go from one quarter we had quite a few spectators that went out with the team and we were out there probably some week or more before the actual game They winded us and dined us, and we got to see them make movies. I well remember one movie showed this actress in a taxi cab, and they would have revolving lights like we're going down the street at night and the lights and then to get the motion that they had a long timbre about a two by six or two by eight up under the axle of the taxicab and man up there shaking it to make it get you some street motion and I said that's what they've been fooling us making these movies here and we think they're out there running the street and they revolve the lights I learned a little about the boot of business, that it showed what it could do in variations. It was quite educational and interesting. Hold on, would you like to tell us some memories you have about your cl***es that you took? Cl***es, uh, most of us would wear a sweater or a jacket of some kind, and, uh, we, one of our English professors insisted, uh, for his cl***es he liked us to wear jackets and neckties. Most of the dress was pretty much casual like it is today. Do you remember which professor that was? I think it was Dr. Perry. The system on a demerit basis, free if you are out, struck, put you out on the street, so to speak. It was just doubled up on here. One time, some infraction there, one of the professors saved the day, I think, for me, one of them was an academic in French, which is, they have three of any kind which would split them. They were really not too rough on them. make a few allowances for the fact that we're pretty good at that position. I think if it hadn't been while, they'd give us the thumb of the time or two there that we didn't. And the dormitory life was up in the quarter bearing combination, Bob's older brother Mack. They kind of knew the way around. They had this firm up in Ohio that they'd order cl*** bills. They had the cl*** numerals and testing. My cl*** was 29 at Georgia Tech and the 29 designated. But they'd order 500 of those bills. And the idea was to sell one to every freshman on the campus. I think they paid a dollar and a quarter for them and sold them for two and a half. the sales pitch was around your ***** or around your waist. So I got on campus a little couple of weeks before the regular freshmen dropped in and so they got me to help them sell there on the, through the dormitories, and above that I got, I fell *** with the franchise for the next two or three years, provided I saved it for the Tom Jones, Pat Barron, the cousins and the family followed. So it worked out a very nice business ad. In a few days time I come up with several hundred dollars profit, probably two percent. That you continued that during your years in tech, after you discovered the business? Yes. No. No. No. No. No. had a dry cleaning, a pressing club, so these two colored men had a nice business and they They altered Army jackets and changed the collar at that time, and there was quite a bit of alterations to do in the ROTC close there. I went down and got them to make a loan to some machine or something and broke down and so we ended up we put them in business by pre-selling of these pressing club tickets. They have so many presses for $5 or so. That's what kind of took care of the loan there to get them a new machine, you know, things and to make a little money. And it was, some of the things we did then were the rules of the athletic conference would not allow it today. Did you ever have a car on campus? A car? Oh, yes. I had a car and I reckon that was in France. We had a high school boy there my senior year. that they were, he was really quite a gifted athlete named Piggy Isen. He was standing around a meat market there on the square. We had a brother of stars, went to Overthorpe, named Redfern, and he was nicknamed Soup Bone. It featured a lot of soup bones from this market. So I was going to get this Ison boy, who was quite a high school star, and I could get him to Tech, and we'd get him up there. So I called up Coach Ellick and told him, and he said, yes, I've heard of him, and we'd like to have him. So with that, I went around to the Ford dealer there I told Mr. Wright that he'd been nice enough to take me to quail hunting with him a time or two. I was, this was my last year coming up. So, uh, I said, I think I can get this boy. They want to know how I get him to Atlanta. I'm going to buy a car in December, but I'll just buy it now, and I'll take him up there in the car. The Ford dealer was nice enough to just sign here, when you get out of school, well, you could maybe back then, $680. Nice Ford, and it was like a little mascot car that they show up on the field there, game time, is that model, and so I reckon one of the reasons that they have this, when Bobby Dodd came to Tech from Tennessee, I was working for Cadillac there, which was an operation right close by there in the front of Biltmore Hotel, and Ellick introduced me to Bobby Dodge and said, I gave him a used car, but don't spend over $250, but I'm going to have to go on his note at the Mars Plan Bank. So I found this nice little Ford and Dodd, it was his first car and he just loved it and prompted to get this Ford in later years and make a team mascot car out of it. Did many people want to use your car when you had it on campus? Did many people have cars then? No. It was just two or three cars. I think Doug Wyckoff and one or two of the seniors had cars. had cars. I just had one my senior year of 1929. That's all. I only had a call on campus for about three months. It came in very handy, though. I could write a column for the Sports Department of the Atlanta Journal, Morgan Blake, uh, uh, he was, uh, Major Cohen, uh, who was connected with the family that owned the, uh, Atlanta's newspapers, particularly the German major corps would pay anybody something if they just write about tech. I come to find out why. I had two or three checks in a mailbox down at the newspaper that I didn't even know I didn't pay for writing these stories. And I would cover the freshman activities there, of being able to talk with them in the dining hall or in the dormitory there. Let me ask you, going back to thinking of your student life and some of the cl***es, are there any professors that you remember well? Dr. D. M. Smith was quite a character in the math department. Dr. Sparks, who later went down to the evening college, What we call it, night school, I think, Mondorf, who was the basketball coach at the time. I don't think I had any cl***es under him, but written some of the old school. We had kind of a business course there. Without any of these professors? I think there was any dirt or scandal that I recall. They were all nice, upright men. Any good stories? What's that? Any good stories about these professors? Funny stories, things that they did, things students remember? We had one of fields, they call it Polkett fields, and he had a ford with some kind of a little toolbox on the back. We always wondered what he carried in there. But one of them would park on the, you know, in front of the old library building, familiar with that. At one time the president had an office in there, and I think the tech president uses that building now for an office. The Carnegie building? Was it the Carnegie Library? And the ladies, the secretaries. Can you tell us about your memory of your first day at Georgia Tech? And if you could tell us something about your first day. We got off the train down at the General Station, and everybody came to college then with a stand-up trump, It didn't have too much furniture, it had these little pipe beds that the plumbers made the frames there on the campus, put them together in the pipes, and most of them have double-deckers. You were very fortunate if you didn't have to sleep in an upper one and have an uppercl***men in the one beneath you, and they could reach your feet and give you a bounce there. And sometimes you'd land back on the bed and sometimes you'd land out on the floor. My, uh, first room there was on the first floor of the Noles building, but, uh, we had this, uh, kind of platform area out, out on the front. You probably remember it before it went down. It, uh, about your freshman year, didn't it? As far as the first day you were at Tech, you got off the train, did you come straight to campus? Yes, you gave a baggage company, you gave them a check for your trunk and they delivered your trunk out to the campus. I had it sent to the Knowles building, so I came to the right place. And the football players were getting their meals at a house there on North Avenue, opposite the Swan building, or the open campus area, I think the family name was Holland, and one of the boys there was on the football team my freshman year, pretty busy. It was a couple of weeks before the normal cl*** would come in. So we got to be, feel like we were old timers, but we ate with the boss that they play us. We were pretty well indoctrinated in the campus life before the extra five or six hundred other freshmen were going to come in a little later. The reason I had such good success with selling these belts, it might have accepted me as being an upper cl***, you might say. And, well, I still had the dream of those there from the farm. Well, I'd like to move on to the general topic of social life, talking about maybe social things that happened in Portia Tech and also places that you would go in Atlanta. Well, they got to talking about fraternities or L.I. Lee. That wasn't in my line of raising. It says Greek-level fraternities. one or two boys and I just didn't change the houses. So I didn't know whether to call up the two Greek brothers that ran the restaurant on the square and most of them there, I watched this Greek letter business for me. So that didn't help much for me. I did get back to my neighbor, Mac Thawke. His fraternity was Kappa Sig. They entertained me one night, but I think he told me, leave that **** boy alone. because the boys had an idea to get rushed for one or two fraternities. Maybe that was the thing to do and then did. But I had a very nice campus life. Which fraternity did you pledge? I pledge with Delta, Taw Delta. I stayed with them throughout my career there, and headed up the group my last year. What kind of things did you do with your fraternity? Well, one thing is they were very nice and didn't want to injure by too much paddling or something. And, uh, one of the, uh, ball players was, they were quite considerate, uh, they, uh, I didn't have to take some of the hazing and the paddling that, uh, normally filled a lot of boys in my day. So did your fraternity hold dances on a regular basis, parties, and anything like that? Yes. They told me that I had to bring a girl to Sunday lunch on a dance. I had a cousin that lived here in Atlanta, a girl, and she was in an area where a good She gave me a gentle student going to a gentle college of ranch over around Forrest Avenue, I think it was. So she gave me my first and only dancing lesson. And I said, Lottie, I got to go to dance. So she said, come on over. She put on a lively Foxtrot record. And I've been dancing since. Sundy, who did you get to go with for your day? The girl that later married, a doctor that ended up in Greenville, South Carolina, where I eventually found my bride that I lived with for 54 years or so. How did you find the date? I met with one of the uppercl***men there in the fraternity group. We had a little break, and we were talking about dating a little bit, and you said that you were going to tell us about your first date that you had here in Atlanta. Unusual. This day, I lived in the Peachtree Terrace Apartments in 1343. I later lived there with a girl I married in 1937. But that's where on the, out on the town, 29 to 37, that'd be eight years. Could you tell us something about the shirt-tailed parades that they used to have? Well, if we, if we won the game, why, the, what's, uh, One of the things to accomplish was to get through the movie theaters, the big theaters downtown. There were two or three of them, and they didn't like us to come in and break up, but the idea The idea was, and particularly a freshman line, they'd go downtown, boys from the town or from somewhere else, they'd try to get our freshman caps. That would stir them up. What? People would take your caps? Yeah, you end up having a scrap to retrieve your cap, because we wore those freshman caps there until the last football game, and we wanted to do away with the cap, but we I didn't win it and had to wear it the rest of the year. Was there any kind of punishment if you didn't wear your cap? an uppercl***man had a license to wheel out his own paddle and maybe put his Greek letter a cut into it when they paddle the board is the buttocks that would leave the print Sigmund Ewer, or not. Just some doubt of them. A lot of them. So that would be punishment for not wearing a rat cap? Could be, yes. Okay. Well, let me ask you guys, do you remember, do you have any memories of the Fox Theatre while you were on campus getting in the box or was the box being built during the time yes it was and this quarter baron without we had that fixed there a minute ago he was a got the job as manager of that field was his first job out of college. Do you have any memories of the YMCA that was on campus? Yes, it operated as such. They, of course, are building, what's the question, certain social events, and I don't think the freshman athletes didn't seem to use the wide building very much. They sometimes have a show, a movie, and then they have a drama club or they can put on maybe some plays or they're watching it while. Did you ever go there during your years at Tech? Can I ask you about a couple of other places to see if you have any memories? The next one is the Georgian Terrace itself. The Georgian Terrace, they are up on the Peachtree right across from the Fox Field, and they, I believe, my favorite barbershop was had, which I used. I was in college and also several years after, never went back to the farm and waited in the stadium. Let me ask you, when you were at Tech did you have any contact with girls that came from Agnes Scott College? Yes, and I had two high school girl friends, both of them went to Westfield and Macon at the same time, and if I wrote a letter to one of them, the other one was there when she got that letter out of the mail. I think they called out names, said I kept myself in a hot water there from that. Do you have any memories of anybody from Agnes Scott? From Agnes Scott? Julian of Payoff, her father was connected with the education system of the state, I think. The church affiliation was Presbyterian, and they usually had a pretty good tech-biotic cl***. and then also the first Presbyterian at Peachtree on 16th Street. Do you have any memories of that Bible cl***? Can you tell us a little bit about it? It was the right popular cl*** and they would give parties there and usually had a mix between the girls of the right age. Let me ask you some questions about some of the campus organizations you were involved You've already talked a good bit about football. Could you tell us about some other things you were involved in? Well, I was active in my Greek letter paternity, Delta to Delta. I played lacrosse with the advice of a football coach because the coach of the lacrosse was Dr. Crenshaw, and I had considerable trouble with my French course in modern life. When I used up my lacrosse eligibility, I p***ed. Needed me on the French on a lacrosse team, but things went very well with that. Do you remember any other organizations being a part of? Well, we had a, probably one that wasn't looked upon too favorably. Beta Kappa. I was never accused of getting up into those ranks, but the Kappa Beta Phi seemed like was a little drinking pretent. And an initiation deal that we had supposed to hold that tea between the teeth and take a drink. We had Father Luck and I think it was We were kind of a rowdy, uh, one of our younger players, and he swallowed the tea, but we got I had some words, called up the football team doctor and told him that we had this man that swallowed that key. He says, who did you say it was? I told him to follow up and say, oh forget it. Do you have any memories of the Bulldog Club or the Cotillian Club? Oh, Cotillian, yes. We, like I, headed up the Cotillian Club for one year. We usually had a pretty nice party, the general college-type dance, different fraternities They'd send out an invitation and put an ATO list to the boys that kind of went the circuit. Are there any other things about campus organizations that come to your memory? that in a while sales that someone has told you on me now give me a line bill but a lot of tree tops here I can see this that's an outside