The Greatest Teacher

His name was Tom Smith, and he changed my life. He lived in the top floor apartment on the right at the front of 9700 Foxridge in Blacksburg. I lived in the bottom apartment on the right of the same building. We spent most of our free time talking to the two girls that lived on the floor between us. Tom Smith, was as he might say it “a good looking dude,” a finance major, who prefaced all remarks with, “Hey Man.” He was like a surfer except he was from Richmond. We became friends. He got me playing golf again. We went to Masters golf tournament together. He used to tell ladies out in clubs that we were Tom and Tom, TNT Dynamite.

In the fall of 1981, Tom said to me, “Hey man, you should take this Civil War class. I think you would really like it.” Up to that time, I was more interested in the American Revolution, and I hate to say this out loud because it might incense my Hokie Brethren, but I was interested in Thomas Jefferson.

I signed up for the class in the spring 1982 quarter. VT was still on quarters, not semesters then. I went to McBryde 100, a gigantic room that held at least 300 students in the bottom of the huge building named for former VT President John McBryde. It was about 9 a.m. when the teacher entered the room and mounted the stage. When James I. Robertson, Jr. opened his mouth, I heard the familiar Danville accent. I joined him halfway through the Civil War as the fall quarter covered the coming of the war and the early stages.

This was for me like Saul on the road to Damascus. Looking back, it was a moment that changed my life. While Bud might find it humorous as he is an ordained Episcopal minister, who loves to talk about Chaplains in the Civil War. From that day thirty-seven years ago to this this day there is nothing I would rather do than sit in a big auditorium and listen to him talk about the Civil War.

Bud passed away on Saturday. The last time I saw him was in my mother’s hometown of Augusta, Georgia, where I was visiting family and noticed he was speaking to their Civil War Round Table. He looked up at me and said, “What are you doing here?” I told him I came for class. He liked that!

He was the faculty representative to the NCAA for Virginia Tech. As Tech's Faculty Chairman of Athletics and President of the Virginia Tech Athletic Association from 1979-1991 he was on the committee that brought Frank Beamer back home to Blacksburg. In 2008, Bud became a member of the Virginia Tech Sports Hall of Fame.  

When I knew Dr. Robertson as a student, he was an ACC football official. He spent sixteen years doing that. Occasionally, I would see a coach berate him on the sidelines. One memorable memory is the time I saw Clemson coach, Danny Ford, eviscerate my Civil War professor on national television. Someone asked him about it in class and got eviscerated themselves.

I had Bud for two Civil War classes and one class called Representative Americans. Part of the grade for the latter was to teach the class one day during the quarter about a person from American History. Again, with apologizes to Hokie Nation, I chose Thomas Jefferson. Never in my life have I been more mortified to stand up in front of a group of people and talk because I knew that if I did not do a good job, the sharp knife of Robertson was waiting to cut me into little pieces, eviscerated. Until that time talking in front of a group of people terrified me, a surprise no doubt to those who hear me now, but that day changed my life too. If I can survive talking in front of “Bud,” no historical association or civil war roundtable is going to bother me.

I loathed speech class at Surry Community College in the late 1970s and once at Virginia Tech in the early 1980s, I recount the sheer terror of standing in front of James I. “Bud” Robertson to teach his class Representative Americans on Thomas Jefferson. I survived, and now I think nothing of getting up in front of a group to talk about history. This because I know my subject much better now than I did then, and my confidence has grown. I came to feel that it was important to talk about the history that interested me.

Bud came to help me raise money for the Bassett Historical Center over a decade ago. I picked on him by showing slides during his introduction pointing out that over the years Bud has made friends with many important people. I showed a photo of Robert Duvall and Hokie Bird saying there were two of Bud’s best friends. Bud consulted on the movie Gods and Generals starring Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee.

It is with a great deal of pride that I saw my former professor on the History Channel and on Blue Ridge Public Television. I listened to him for fourteen years on public radio on Friday mornings. They released CDs of his talks. Stonewall Jackson’s students at The VMI wrote many dreadful things in the margins of their workbooks housed in Lexington. I have placed my notebooks from the Civil War class in Special Collections at Virginia Tech, but there is nothing bad in them about my professor.

Bud worked as in a funeral home while in graduate school at Emory University in Atlanta under Bell Wiley. Bud wrote on his mentor quoting an Atlanta newspaperman saying, “He was the first man I knew personally who could take hold of the past and make it come alive.” Anyone who thinks history is boring never had Bud Robertson as a teacher. I have seen him bring grown men to tears talking about the Civil War and put people on the floor laughing while he talked about embalming practices during the Civil War. As he likes to say he is the world’s leading authority on the subject. The fact that he is the only one in the world interested in that subject is irrelevant to the title. Seriously, a great teacher brings his subject to life. I was blessed with a great teacher. On the dedication page of my book on Patrick County in the Civil War, you will see a dedication to my father who is here tonight with my mother, who also has a book dedicated to her. Just underneath you will see a quote from my Civil War father. “You will never understand what the United States is until you understand what the Civil War was.”

            Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr. of Virginia Tech often said, "One can never understand what the United States is until one understands what the Civil War was." The war is still with us today.

My Civil War professor at Virginia Tech encouraged audiences and the largest Civil War class in the nation to visit those cemeteries and take the time to listen and meditate on the Civil War. He spoke of “Americans who loved their country more than they loved life itself. That is the greatest legacy that comes out of that war, and we must never forget it.”

            In 2011, I went back to college. My professor Alumni Distinguished Professor James I. “Bud” Robertson, Jr. was retiring from teaching the largest Civil War class in the country after over half a century at Virginia Tech. I took the opportunity when in Blacksburg to do some research on William T. Sherman and his march through Georgia and the Carolinas for my friend R. Wayne Jones for a book about the Battle of Aiken, a cavalry fight between Joseph Wheeler and Judson Kilpatrick.

            Bud taught then in the Colonial Room of the Squires Student Center, but in my day, it was 100 McBride Hall. In 1982, I sat in on my first quarter of Civil War with him and it changed my life. To this day I am still amazed at how he brings the war to life and keeps the attention of twenty somethings most of whom didn’t know or care about Lee, Lincoln and much less Jefferson Davis and U. S. Grant. This was reinforced to me as I sat waiting for class to begin. The students behind me were bemoaning the fact they did not have DVR to record a recent showing of Gettysburg on Turner Classic Movies and one male regretted not seeing Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles, which made me laugh. Then a very attractive tall and blonde coed came in engaging the crew behind me and during the course of the conversation state that she hated that the Civil War class was about to end. She said she wished this class could go on forever. What better compliment could a teacher have, and I am sure Bud would have enjoyed the fact it was an attractive female who said it.

            When Bud came in, I spoke to him briefly and I was pleased to see his nearly eight decade old eyes light up and a big smile saying to me he could not believe I would come to class.  Bud then came to tell us all how much he hated computers, but that he had to do something called a PowerPoint presentation and that with the help of another young coed he had discovered something called Google and that there are images on there of everything. He had most of us in stitches laughing at something we had known for years. Computers were just coming into vogue in 1982 when I started at Virginia Tech and a personal computer sat on a desk and was called an Apple 2E or an IBM PC with 640K memory. My how things have changed.

            Well, it was my “last lecture” with my professor at Virginia Tech. He spoke about “Why the South lost the war” concentrating on Jefferson Davis and in his inability to get along with most of his generals, his vice-president Alexander Stephens, and the Confederate Congress. The fifty minutes passed much too quickly and although the time passed way to quickly and I had heard the talk before I remembered why this man meant so much to me. He could bring dry and boring material to life with humor and a presentation that still marvels my mind.

            Bud used to say that, “History is the greatest teacher you will ever have.” He did not have James I. Robertson, Jr. as a teacher, the greatest teacher I ever had.

Erie and Ron

My father has made a mark on his home at the foot of the Blue Ridge in Ararat. Every time I am out at a festival selling books, I have someone who had him in school come up and wish him well or ask about him or tell me some story related to him.

            Christa McAuliffe the teacher who died in the space shuttle accident in 1986 once said “I touch the future. I teach.” I know that my father has done that too. So, the man who tells the pretty girls his name is Erie-sistible deserves a few comments from his only son.

            My father Erie Meredith Perry turned 87 on December 19 and celebrated his 61st wedding anniversary to my mother Betty Jane Hobbs Perry of Augusta, Georgia, on December 21.

            Erie was born in 1931 in Chattanooga, Tennessee the son of Erie Perry from Sherwood, Franklin County, Tennessee, and Idell Bates Perry of Birmingham, Jefferson County, Alabama. His paternal grandfather, Meredith Perry, lived and worked in Sherwood, Tennessee, along with his “part Cherokee” wife, Alice Catchings, who I knew as “Old Mama.”

            Last year, my father and I both did DNA tests, and after being told his and my entire life that we were part Cherokee, we came back with zero Native-American in our makeup. When I told my father this, he pondered it a minute, looked at me, and said, “Grandma lied!”

Meredith Perry’s ancestors lived in the Franklin County area since the early 1800s. The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, is on what was once Perry land. During the War Between the States, the Perry family had fought in the Seventeenth Tennessee Infantry fighting in the Army of Tennessee until the fall of 1863 and then with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in last two years of the war joining with the Twenty-Third Tennessee and surrendering at Appomattox.

Idell Bates Perry. Grandma or “Ima” as I called her was from Alabama, and she was the second wife of my grandfather. When my father was in high school the family including sister, Shirley Caudle, and younger brother, Joseph Antonio “Buddy” Perry moved with their parents to High Point for textile jobs when my father was in the third grade My grandfather Erie, was a fixer and Idell a knitter. During young Erie’s seventh grade year, the family returned to Tennessee for one year and then back to High Point for the next three. Midway through young Erie’s junior year of high school, the family moved to Mount Airy in 1949.

My father, Erie, excelled in sports during his high school years in the “Granite City” After graduating, he spent one year working at what is now Spencer’s, then accepted a scholarship at Lees McRae College. He played on one championship football team and two championship basketball teams for Western North Carolina Junior College for a $555 scholarship, which required him to work in the lunchroom and sweep the gym floor. He was a student-athlete. He would not have been able to pay for college without a scholarship to play sports.

He graduated from Appalachian State Teacher’s College playing sports on scholarship. The first member of his family to do so. He later received a master’s degree in Administration from Radford University in 1967. He rode to Radford with George Rigney, who taught English at Patrick County High School for many years and recently passed away. Whenever I encountered Mr. Rigney at PCHS, he always told me about going to school with my daddy.

Erie volunteered for the United States Army in September 1956. After basic training, he was transferred to Fort Gordon, just outside Augusta, Georgia. While there, he met Betty Jane Hobbs born on May 4, 1932, in Jefferson County, Georgia. Her parents were Floyd Thomas Hobbs and Elizabeth Prescott. My father said he met my mother at a BBQ stand in Augusta.

The army stationed Erie at Stuttgart, Germany, in February 1957. He won $100 in a football contest in the Stars and Stripes, the U. S. Army newspaper and a round trip ticket home, which he used to marry Betty on December 21, 1957. After my father says he replaced Elvis in Germany in the army, he came to Patrick County in 1959 to teach at Blue Ridge.
            Two other Ararat men, Bill Smith, and George Beasley brought “Georgia Peaches” back to Ararat. Bill and Claudette Smith share the same wedding anniversary with my parents.

Erie and Betty came to Ararat, Patrick County, Virginia, in 1959 when he took a position at Blue Ridge High School as teacher/assistant principal. He coached baseball and basketball. I, their only child, was born nine months after the massive snowstorm in February 1960, on November 4. In 1963, my father accepted the position of Principal at Red Bank Elementary School in Claudville, Virginia. He returned to Blue Ridge Elementary School in 1973 from which he retired in 1988. I had my father as principal for my seventh-grade year only, at which time, I heard the “You must set an example speech.”

My mother, Betty Perry, worked for Doctor Tuledge in Claudville and then worked at Cross Creek Apparel in Mount Airy for over thirty years. Today, she like her mother and sister is going through dementia and my father, who is not built for it, has had to become a caregiver.

My father retired in 1988 after 28 years as a teacher at Blue Ridge High School and then principal at Red Bank and Blue Ridge Elementary Schools. Today, you can see his name on the Mount Airy Sports Hall of Fame marker, the Blue Ridge Elementary School marker honoring retired teachers and at the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace, where he and my mother were the first to be honored for their service in preserving the site.

            Earlier this year I was in Chicago, Illinois, after another successful year at Mayberry in the Midwest in Danville, Indiana. Each year, I take a week to do some sightseeing before I return for the Hillsville Memorial Day Flea Market.

            This year I spent a day in Dixon, Illinois, the home of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, who was born on the same day as Patrick Countian, J. E. B. Stuart. This was my second trip to Reagan home.

            When I visit the home, I always take a moment to stop on the front porch and remember a story that hit close to home for my father. My grandfather, Erie Perry, was an alcoholic and not particularly pleasant when he was imbibing. My father as the oldest child took the full brunt of his father’s behavior.

My father is the classic child of an alcoholic. I have never seen my father take a drink and the joke about him when he played golf at White Pines Country Club in Mount Airy that I called a beer joint with greens was “How can you tell which one Erie is?” He was the sober one.

Like Reagan, Erie is a very private person. Most people like him, but few really know him or see the emotional side of him except for Nancy Reagan and my mother. I have only twice seen my father break down emotionally. Once was when his nephew, Uncle Buddy and Aunt Gwen’s son, Andrew, died as a newborn. The only other time I saw my father cry was when his own father passed away in 1979 about a week after I graduated high school.

When I was growing up, I knew a mellower grandfather. He never owned a vehicle and walked or rode the bus everywhere he went except for the occasional cab ride. Grandpa Erie like to go up to Main Street to the pool hall or the cab station and have a few Pabst Blue Ribbons or Schlitz while smoking his Lucky Strike cigarettes. When he would start home a little wobbly from the alcohol, someone would call my grandmother to let her know. If I was present, I was dispatched up Pine Street to intercept my grandfather and get him back to what is today the Graves House, where he would fall into the bed and pass out. Before he fell asleep, he would reach in his pocket and hand me a Kennedy half dollar. When he passed away, I had a box of these.

            Back to Reagan and Erie’s connection. Reagan’s father, Jack, had a drinking problem. One snowy night, young Ron came home to find his father passed out in the snow along the walkway to his porch. The future President picked up his father and helped him into the house and saved his life from hypothermia.

            Several years ago, I found myself at my father’s house one evening watching the American Experience show about President Reagan. They told this story, and I could see my father was moved by what he was watching. I mentioned this to him, and he responded that sure is familiar. I replied that it sure was.

            It was at that moment when I came to realize what every child hopefully discovers about their parents, the moment of epiphany when you understand that your parents went through things that you never imagined and you gain a bit of empathy for them that you might not have had before and especially before you became an adult.

            As I drove out of Dixon this past May on U. S. Highway 52, the same road that takes you north out of Mount Airy, I remembered that my father and Ronald Reagan had a connection that only I ever knew.