Dog Street: Memories of the College of William and Mary in Virginia

Through the mist of time. John Hayes Metzger and John Allan Constance on graduation day 1972

Many of my fondest memories of life were crafted in the Colonial Capital of Virginia. 

Once Middle Plantation, then Williamsburg, home of The College of William and Mary in Virginia at the west end of Duke of Gloucester (DOG) Street. 

Those days invade my dream life at least once a week. They make me smile, cringe, and cry. 

The smiles come from the pranks, foibles, and countless laughs shared with the lifelong friends that I made in those four undergraduate years. I mean the kinds of laughs that make you bend over and when you stand up you are offered the choice of continuing to guffaw or fall over for lack of oxygen. The kind of laughter that cleanses the soul. 

The cringes come from the senseless things said, done, or not done in those youthful years. While we walked the earth looking like adults, an occasional thoughtless moment made it clear that we were a long way from being full grown. 

The tears come from loss. Good people gone too soon. When we close our eyes in sleep, their youth, their joy, their empathy, their friendship is so real. But when we awaken to a new day, they are still gone. 

When my parents drove away on that late summer’s day in 1968, I was as lonely as I had ever been. My joy of being a freshman at the college of my dreams was doused by sadness. Those irrational thoughts that gather like storm clouds surrounded me. 

I remember sitting in the old Student Union (then a bright new gem, today a 55-year-old relic) alone in the deep end of my sorrow, when I looked up and saw a familiar face. It was a face that I associated with another first day; my first day of school at Catonsville Elementary in 1956. But Jim Weidman had long since moved away to New Jersey. I hadn’t seen him since those grade school years. But was it him? 

As a guy drowning in his own sorrow, it sure looked like a fateful life preserver and when I called out his name, he turned and responded with mine. I immediately felt the weight of loneliness lift from my shoulders. I knew someone at the College. I had a friend in my class. 

Jim and I took a walk in Colonial Williamsburg that day to chat and catch up on family and all the unshared experiences of the intervening years. It was on that first walk that I was re-introduced to his sense of humor. 

As we strolled past the candlemaker’s shop, Jim casually looked up at the sign and said, “you know there’s only one problem with working there.” 

Either I responded or just gave him a quizzical glance. 

“You have to work on the wick ends.” 

Jim and I would go on to co-host an evening news hour at WCWM, the College radio station, and are still in touch all these years later. 

My other vague recollections of those earliest days include my first meeting with Bob Beason, an upper classman whose easy smile and firm handshake I still remember these 57 years later. He was a freshman advisor who sought me out in my dorm room at Yates Hall. His big brother countenance made me feel safe in his presence and when he said that he had a guy he wanted me to meet, I trusted his judgement. 

That guy was a fellow freshman from McLean, Virginia named John Metzger.  

We became roommates, fraternity brothers, and lifelong friends. We have shared the joys and sorrows of life. He is godfather to one of my daughters. I consider his brother and sisters the siblings I never had. My parents loved his parents, and their passing was a sorrow I shared as though they were my own. 

That said, John Metzger’s sense of high jinks is truly twisted. And on two memorable occasions he stress tested my cardiovascular system. 

The first was quick, low-tech, but genius. 

One night before we turned in for bed at the frat house, I made the last call to the communal bathroom across the hall from our room. Our twin beds were parallel to each other with a stereo turntable on a small chest in between. My bed was closest to the clothes closet and John’s was nearest the small window on the opposite side of the room. 

When I returned to the room the lights were already out, and John appeared to be covered up and fast asleep in his bed. 

What I didn’t realize was that John had used his motorcycle helmet and dirty clothes to sculp a very believable human form under his bed covers and had then climbed into the clothes closet right next to my bed. 

I quietly climbed into bed, “said some words to the close and holy darkness”, and closed my eyes to sleep. 

After a perfect interval, I heard a noise in the open closet next to my head and as I turned, John jumped out and grabbed me. 

My scream awakened the entire hall who, as I am writing this, I am sure had been alerted to John’s plan. Before I could reregulate my heartbeat, the lights were on, and a crowd of brothers was standing in the doorway laughing hysterically. A legendary prank was born. 

John and I shared countless experiences at William and Mary, some (inappropriate to share) we’ll take to our graves.  

We had many things in common, but one in particular. We had never failed at anything in our lives. 

Whether in academics, sports, or social interaction we had been blessed with above average success. Nature or nurture had combined to give us the expectation of success in all we undertook. 

Then came Madame Ringgold and French 201. 

I’m not sure that I remember how John wound up in the clutches of this woman, but I had gotten there through a process that began the first week of freshman year. With the amount of Spanish I had taken in high school, I only needed two semesters to complete my language requirement in the liberal arts program at the College.  

That was the good news. 

The bad news was that my Spanish credits put me in a 300-level Spanish literature course. I attended the first lecture and was horrified to discover that the instructor only spoke in Spanish, and the books and the instructions in the class syllabus were exclusively in Espanol. 

I looked around me to discover that all my fellow students were taking notes in Spanish. I walked out the door of the lecture hall and made a beeline to the office of my freshman advisor. He explained that my only other option was to start over in language and take, say, four semesters of French. Not happy, but resolved to my fate, I signed up for French 101 with Madame Flam. 

All I remember about that first year of French was that Madame Flam was younger and more attractive that my other professors, seemed to like me, and one night took me and some other classmates to Christopher Newport College to watch the French film, La Guerre est finie, starring Yves Montand. And, oh yes, I passed. 

Then John Metzger and I wound up in the torture chamber that was The Domaine of Madame Ringgold. 

I had always assumed that Ringgold was a big deal in the world of Modern Languages, but I had her confused with her husband who was also in the department at William and Mary. She was just an instructor, but her age and demeanor conveyed otherwise. Unattractive, sadistic, and openly partial to the women in the class, Madame Ringgold took an immediate dislike toward Metzger and me for some reason. Like a vicious dog that can sense your fear, she delighted in calling on us at our most clueless moments (which to be fair, were many). 

I remember one embarrassing moment in particular. 

It was the morning after a William and Mary home basketball game, and we had gone to watch our fraternity brother play for the Indians (now the “Tribe”). When I walked into class, Madame Ringgold began an animated conversation, engaging me with French gibberish that might as well have been Chinese. What she was saying was that she had seen me at the basketball game the night before. Did I like basketball? Did I play basketball? What did I think of the game? Etc. Etc. (A girl in the class later filled me in).

Do you think that she could once, just once have given me a visual hint about “le basket” or what the hell she meant by “jouer au basket”? The thought that this nasty little soul had been at the game was so far from my muddled mind that I remained silent during this entire exchange.  

I still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I approached the door of her classroom.  

The sad part is that it is not like we didn’t study. Boy scouts that we were, John Metzger and I prepared flash cards and would quiz each other. We would do the homework and be ready (we thought) for each class, but language is like math. If you miss some core concepts, if you fail at the precepts of grammar, if you are stumped by the conjugation of French verbs, tu es baise (pardon my French). 

I had spent part of the winter break at John’s house in McLean and awakened one morning to see him reading a small piece of mail in his bed. His complexion was ashen, and his expression was somewhere between tragic and more tragic. He had intercepted his grades from his parent’s mailbox that morning and was absorbing the fact that next to French 201 was an unmistakable letter “F”. 

He was crestfallen, angry, sad, ashamed...all unfamiliar territory for a guy who had always worked hard and seen the results. I offered my condolences, but with my default optimism thought that I had surely slipped by with a passing grade. In those pre-cell phone or email years, if a similar turd had landed in my parent’s mailbox, I had at least a day or two to prepare for a disappointing communication. 

Bill Bonifant, our brother with a car, drove us back to Williamsburg that night and as we approached the fraternity house, brother Len Tunderman was emerging from the front door. “Tough luck guys” was all he said. Guys? Plural? 

You see, in those pre-privacy days, our grades were delivered without envelopes to our residence halls and unceremoniously dumped into the middle of the dining room table for all to see. You rummaged through the stack of 40 or so report cards (flimsy slips of dot-matrix-printed tissue-thin paper) to locate your own. Len had clearly seen our sad mail and become the Raven in our lives.  

With shaking hands, I plucked my grades from the pile and sure enough, there was the F in the same spot on my tiny transcript as on John’s. Crestfallen. 

I don’t even remember what my parents said. It has dissolved into the ether with the night I wrecked the car, the day I beat up the doctor’s son at the bus stop, the phone call that a friend had burned down a garage with a torch that I had cleverly crafted. Like all the rest, it seemed like the end of the earth at the time but would become an amusing bar tale in the years to come. 

They had raised me to know when I had screwed up and how to reset the course. 

Fortunately, my life at William and Mary was also filled with inspiring teachers who guided my path. Jack Edwards, George Grayson, Warner Moss and Alan Ward in the Government Department all contributed to my understanding of the world of politics and gave me a life-long interest that I pursue to this very day.  

Dr. David Holmes, about whom I have previously written, gave me a seminary-like introduction to the Bible and was that professor who looked you in the eye and engaged you as a fellow human being. He had very high academic standards and so my final grade was not reflective of how much I learned. He would oft repeat the words of St. Paul in the letter to the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly”. While he guided me far down the path, my final exam could have used a little more Windex. 

While at the College I don’t know that I truly appreciated the good fortune of lifetime leadership that William and Mary enjoyed. We saw President Davis Y. Paschall as a cartoonish patrician of the Old South, out of touch with the support being received for social protest on other campuses. He was silent in the face of the shootings at Kent State, saying that he had not “boned up” on the subject. 

What we didn’t appreciate was that his lifelong association with education in the Commonwealth of Virginia had given him unfettered access to the general assembly and the ability to frequently ring the cash register of state funding for the College. The “new campus”, expansion of the faculty, and growth of the student body were all his doing. 

And then Thomas A. Graves arrived in 1971 to turn gold into renewed excellence. His Yale education and academic success at Stanford and Harvard helped to make us great both inside and outside the classroom. Along with his wife Zoe, he threw open the doors of the President’s home and invited us in. A new young energy and pride of excellence blew down the Sunken Garden, across Crimm Dell, and to every corner of the old yard. 

I purposely use the term “renewed excellence” because excellence had been part of the College’s DNA from its very founding. Known as the Alma Mater of a Nation, its notable distinctions include: 

• First US institution with a Royal Charter 

• First Greek-letter society (Phi Beta Kappa founded in 1776) 

• First student honor code 

• First college to become a university (1779) 

• First to have a full faculty 

• First to found a Law School (Marshall Wythe School of Law) 

As the home of the first Greek-letter society, for better or worse, the College has always had a robust fraternity and sorority life. I consider myself blessed to have found my way to Sigma Pi fraternity at William and Mary. It enriched my life in countless ways and taught me how to live in community. 

The aforementioned Bob Beason recruited me for membership in Sigma Pi. In addition to being a force of nature in our House, Bob and other brothers held a variety of leadership roles in Greek life at the College culminating in Bob’s Presidency of the Interfraternity Council. When it came to campus-wide concerts and dances, Beason was the man. He negotiated the deals and signed the contracts that brought The Fifth Dimension, Mitch Ryder, Martha and the Vandella’s, Dennis Yost and the Classics IV, Marvin Gaye, and Sly and the Family Stone to the campus. And what’s more, he invited many acts back to our fraternity house after their performance. Dennis Yost, Martha Reeves, and Mitch Ryder all came to party with us at Sigma Pi. 

My wife (Hayden Rives Gwaltney Constance ‘72) has warned me about the length of some of these blogs, but I promised you two John Metzger hijinks tales and will end with the second. 

In our senior year, John and I moved off campus to an efficiency apartment at the John Yancy Motor Hotel on Richmond Road. It was affordable and met our needs. 

It had one double bed and a pull-out sofa that we took turns using. One was not significantly more comfortable than the other, so it was never a problem. The beds faced one another and when you were in the double bed, the closets and bathroom was down the interior hall to your right. 

One day, when I was away from the apartment and John had clearly too much time on his hands, he designed a Rube Goldberg contraption that enabled him to flush the bathroom toilet while lying down in the sofa bed. How and why, you ask? 

John sat three legs of my double bed onto three Corelle plastic coffee cups. The cup handles formed smooth guides through which John had strung a cord around the circumference of the room, with one end attachable to the handle on the toilet and the other end hidden under the covers of his sofa bed. That is the how. The why will be revealed in the telling.  

The night after this heinous project was undertaken, John waited for me to use the bathroom for the last time and then pretending to use it himself. He carefully attached the cord to the toilet handle, turned out the lights and returned to bed. 

Again, as before, I am settling in to go to sleep when I hear the distinct sound of the toilet flushing at the end of the little corridor to my right. John remained silent as I grasped the oddity of this moment. With perfect timing, he set the hook. 

“What the hell was that?” says he. 

Panic stricken and convinced there was a ghost in the apartment, I rolled over to turn on the lamp next to my bed, just as John had predicted. Of course, he had unscrewed the bulb, and in the utter darkness I was breaking out in a cold sweat when, the toilet flushed a second time. 

“Damn” was all he said at that point. 

Summoning all my courage, I walk-crawled down the hall and gingerly opened the bathroom door. Upon flicking on the light, I immediately saw the string and realized that, once again, I had been had by John Metzger. There is no laugh like the laugh John Metzger laughs when he has scared you to death. Twisted.