VT Stories Oral History with Bill Starnes, April 26, 2018 (Ms2016-015)

ï"¿Ren Harman: Good afternoon. This is Ren Harman, the Project Director for VT Stories. Today is April 26, 2018 at about 2:03 PM. We are in the Holtzman Alumni Center on the campus of Virginia Tech with a very special guest with us today. 1:00Sir if you could just state in a complete sentence to get us started my name is, when you were born, and where you were born.

Bill Starnes: My name is William H. (preferably "Bill") Starnes, Jr. I was born December 2, 1934, at Ft. Sanders Hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ren: So you were born in Knoxville but you did not grow up in Knoxville did you?

Bill: No. I spent about a day or two in Knoxville. My mother's doctor was at that hospital, but my parents were living in Lee County, Virginia.

Ren: Can you talk a little bit about growing up in Lee County?

Bill: I think it was a great place to grow up in, Ren, because it had a good educational system, although you might not expect that considering its rather 2:00isolated geographic location. But it was a wonderful place for kids who liked the outdoors and who liked to do things like mountain climbing and riding bicycles and all kinds of sports-related things that were done outdoors. I feel very fortunate, in retrospect, to have been able to grow up there.

Ren: Can you talk a little bit about your mom and dad? Your dad was an alum as well, right?

Bill: Yes, he was. Both of my parents were from Scott County, which is a neighboring county, of course. My dad was a World War I veteran. He graduated from high school, and he had thought that he would go to Berea College for his 3:00education. But then the war was heating up more and more, and he realized he was going to be inducted into the military. So he dropped out of Berea and was drafted. He spent his time in the Army Corps of Engineers, most of it overseas. He actually had delayed starting to college because he was needed for farm work at home. (He grew up in a family with several children, a farm family in Scott County on the Clinch River.) Then the war came along; he was delayed by that, 4:00and then he had another short delay. This was for only a few months, before he was able to enroll at Virginia Tech. He was very interested in becoming an agriculture teacher; that is exactly what he wanted to do. So he didn't finish at Tech until he was 31 years old and was unable to really get his career started until then. My mother, as I said, was also from Scott County, also from a farm family and a family of schoolteachers. So a lot of men and women became schoolteachers from her family as well, and education was a big thing for both of my parents. She actually taught in a one-room school, when I guess she may have been a teenager, in Scott County. She had a teaching certificate and went to Radford College, which opened (I think) about that time, where she spent the 5:00requisite two years.

Ren: Were you an only child?

Bill: Yes.

Ren: So growing up in Lee County and your father is an alum of Virginia Tech, when did you first start thinking about college and how did Virginia Tech, how did that kind of come into the picture?

Bill: It seemed that in conversations when I was a kid, it was always sort of understood that I would go to college. Virginia Tech seemed like a logical possibility, because that's where my dad went. I also have other relatives who attended Virginia Tech. My mom, of course, went to Radford, which later was the 6:00women's auxiliary campus for Tech. So I never really seriously considered any other school. I guess if I had been turned down, obviously I would have had to do that.

I think the first time I ever visited Virginia Tech probably was on a trip with my dad to an agricultural meeting. The agricultural teachers had meetings in the summer. A vocational agricultural teacher (a Smith- Hughes teacher), which is what he was, had a 12-month job, so he had to do things like go to conferences and other agriculturally related things throughout the year. So I think probably the first time I ever saw Virginia Tech was when I came with him to one of those conference.

Ren: So you remember what year that was?

Bill: No, I don't. I could probably figure it out. I remember staying in the dormitory with him, and I remember there was a national political convention going on, and I remember listening to some of that on the radio. And by going back and reading about politics, I could probably figure out which year that was, but I think I was probably a young teenager. [Addendum: The year was 1948; I was 13 years old.]

Ren: Do you remember your first impressions of the campus, what it looked like?

Bill: Oh, I thought it was beautiful. I thought this was a really, really nice- looking place to go to school. My dad, by the way, was a good friend of Dr. Walter Newman, who was president of Virginia Tech at the time I was a student 8:00here. Dr. Newman was one of the founders of the Future Farmers of Virginia (FFV), which became the Future Farmers of America (FFA). My dad actually established one of the very first chapters of the FFV and then the FFA at the school where he taught.

Ren: When you first came as a student to Virginia Tech did you know what you wanted to major in, did you kind of have an idea?

Bill: No, I didn't [Addendum: Wrong! Actually, I did, having misunderstood the question.], but I need to back up just a little bit.

Ren: Okay, feel free.

Bill: I was a little too young to be in the Corps. So I had to go somewhere else, and I did. I went for two years to Union College, which is in 9:00Barbourville, Kentucky. My problem was that I was interested in everything. I thought about careers in all sorts of things. I even thought about a career in music. I'm a jazz piano player, but I was classically trained. I also played another musical instrument in a marching band and even played the mandolin in a country and western band, but that's another story. So I went to Union for a couple of years, and the first year I was there, I met a very inspirational professor. His name was Rupert Hurley, and he was a chemist. I never had chemistry in high school. I had general science. I was interested in it, but after taking just one semester of chemistry under Dr. Hurley, I said that's it; that's what I'm going to do. So I stayed there for two years and took all the 10:00courses that he offered at Union and then transferred to Virginia Tech. And there was an even stronger reason for doing that now, because I knew that Tech had strong programs in the sciences, such as chemistry.

Ren: So you weren't in the Corps?

Bill: No, I wasn't. I couldn't be. If I had transferred (well, I did transfer), I was not going to be at Tech long enough to get a commission, so there seemed little point in doing it. I had nothing against the Corps per se.

Ren: It just didn't work out.

Bill: It didn't work out.

Ren: Where did you live your first year at Virginia Tech?

Bill: I lived in what is now referred to as one of those old buildings on the upper quad. At the time I came, it was known as one of the new dorms on the 11:00upper quad, Femoyer Hall. I lived there for a couple of years, and then in my third year (the year I graduated), I and one of my friends and some other guys moved into a place in town. So I was there for the third year.

Ren: Okay. One big part of Virginia Tech Stories and collecting and talking to a lot of alums is to talk to them about mentorship and advising, notable professors that alums have had. During your time here as a student were there any specific professors or mentors that you can kind of remember that really mentored you or influenced you in any way?

Bill: I had a professor in chemistry whose name was Frank Vingiello, but he was 12:00not my mentor until I started working on an undergraduate thesis. I had courses under a number of other chemistry professors, and I had interesting courses under some other interesting people. I took German under Sally Miles, who was a football legend at Virginia Tech; the old Miles Stadium was named for him. One of the most interesting courses I took was actually an elective. It was a course on Edgar Allan Poe, and there was a professor named Harrison -- I have forgotten his first name -- who taught the course. And I remember the first day in class he came in and took a key from his pocket and threw it on the desk and then asked us if we could guess where the key was from. Of course, we had no earthly 13:00idea. It was the key to Edgar Allan Poe's room at UVA.

Ren: Wow.

Bill: Which is now open to the public, at least it was the last time I was there, and it's been that way for several years. And I discovered in talking to Professor Harrison that he knew my dad very well. In fact they used to go to Radford to double-date. My mother, who was not my mother (obviously!) at the time, was in school at Radford when my dad was...

Ren: So that's how they met?

Bill: Although they knew each other before they came to college.

I had some very good chemistry professors. I don't have anything really bad to say about any of them.

Ren: So three years that you spent?

Bill: Yes.

Ren: In those three years I'm sure there's tons of stories that we can talk about but are there some favorite memories or experiences that really kind of stick out in your mind?

Bill: Yes. [Chuckles] One year there was a -- well, a friend of mine who was a Korean War veteran; this was just after the Korean War. His name was David Ringley. He was from Abingdon, Virginia, and was a very colorful fellow. He passed away a few years back.

Ren: My aunts live in Abingdon.

Bill: [Whispers - We will talk about that later.] Dave purchased a hearse from the Christiansburg Fire Department. It was painted fire-engine red. He bought it for $100.

Ren: Oh my goodness.

Bill: It was a Henney. I had never heard of that before, but I learned later 15:00that they made marine engines and also made engines for hearses. The vintage of this hearse was in the 1930s. I've forgotten the exact year. So we used to -- I and a bunch of his other friends used to -- go to football games in this hearse, and I'm told we got written up in the Washington Post [chuckles] about the hearse, about how much spirit the Virginia Tech students had in going to football games that fall. We had people with musical instruments (I played the ukulele), and we would sing and shout, and we had flags, probably Confederate ones; I don't remember. I do remember when we went to the VMI game that year. It was in Roanoke at the stadium which is just at the foot of Mill Mountain. The police on the main street in Roanoke, from which you turned to go down to that 16:00stadium, thought we were an official vehicle, so they stopped traffic for us for several blocks.

Ren: Waved you through.

Bill: Yeah, and waved us through. So that was one of the experiences I remember. And another very interesting experience was the year I was the Chief Defense Attorney of the Civilian Honor Court, which was a student government position. It was an office for which you ran. Bill Latham was the Civilian Student Body President that year. I had some interesting cases, and I could tell you about one or two of them if we have time to do that.

Ren: Yes, feel free.

Bill: The cases were tried -- and I don't know whether it's done this way now or 17:00not -- in a beautifully appointed courtroom in what we called the SAB at that time (the Squires Building was relatively new). We had the prosecution staff and the defense staff. As I said, I was the Chief Defense Attorney. The previous year, I had been an Assistant Defense Attorney, which was an appointed position. I had a case that came up. There was a young student from a very isolated place in West Virginia, in his first year in college.

He was a civilian, but he happened to be in a dormitory which was a cadet 18:00dormitory (I've forgotten the details), and in a moment of weakness, he stole $5 from the wallet of a cadet and left. About three minutes later, he relented. He came back to the room (the cadet's room), told the cadet what he had done, handed him the money back, and the cadet turned him in to the Honor Court. He obviously was guilty. So what to do? I personally thought that he probably had been punished enough, so I took him to the state mental hospital in Marion. He 19:00was interviewed by a woman who was a leading psychiatrist on the staff, and she told me that she was absolutely sure that he had had a case of temporary kleptomania, and that if his case came to trial, as apparently it was going to do, she would be happy to testify to that effect.

Ren: Wow.

Bill: So I came back to the campus, looked up the prosecuting attorney, and told him what my defense would be. He dropped the case. [Laughs] That was probably the most interesting case I had, but we had trials that would literally last all night. I remember summarizing for the defense at like 7 AM after having been in this courtroom all night.

Ren: Right. The Honor Courts we hear stories of that from that time, and because 20:00like you said it was so student-run and students were really the center of it, I think that there was so much integrity I think because of that, right?

Bill: Absolutely. Yeah. It was a very nice environment, and the students took it very, very seriously.

Ren: Yeah, from what we hear. On the reverse side of that question, were there any difficult times or experiences that you can remember, whether it be coursework, personal things, things happening on campus?

Bill: I had an accident in an undergraduate lab that did some damage to an eye, which fortunately was not permanent. So I had to drop out of school that quarter. I guess I didn't have to, but it was recommended that I do that, and that set me back some, which is why I graduated in three years rather than two. 21:00But by staying the extra year, I got to take a lot of interesting courses, some of them electives, such as the course on Poe which I mentioned, that I would not have taken otherwise.

Ren: Right. You mentioned you were here I guess at the end of the Korean War, what was the relationship like between the Korean War vets and the civilians and probably the Corps as well?

Bill: Ren, I thought it was very good, extremely good. I never heard any non-Korean vets say anything bad about any veteran, and they interacted very well with each other. Of course the veterans were, in general, a little bit older, Mr. Ringley being an example.

Ren: So it was a pretty good relationship between?

Bill: I would say it was excellent. I just can't think of any animosity that I was aware of.

Ren: Right. Do you remember any kind of national or political events happening during your time and how those played out here in Blacksburg?

Bill: I'm thinking, and I don't remember anything that had a really major effect, such as the things that are going on now that are affecting the campuses tremendously. I'm thinking hard, and I just don't really think of anything.

Ren: That's okay. When you graduated in 1955 with a degree in Chemistry with Honors, I want to make sure we get that in there, where did life take you after that?

Bill: After that, I realized I wanted to do graduate work. It's desirable to go to a different school, in many disciplines, to do post-baccalaureate doctoral work, and the sciences and chemistry are no exception. I started at Duke University, because this was the school where my mentor who was in charge of my undergraduate thesis, Dr. Vingiello, had gotten his PhD degree. I was there for 24:00the better part of a year, and I realized for various reasons -- I don't want to be critical of Duke -- there were various reasons why I didn't think I could get the kind of education that I really wanted there. Well, I can say this: some of the professors there were very distinguished in chemistry, but they were not as modern (scientifically) as they were at some other schools, specifically Georgia Tech, which is where I eventually went. There were some very distinguished physical organic chemists at Georgia Tech, and I had already decided that what I wanted to do was to study organic reaction mechanisms primarily, among other things. Also, I had an illness that made it necessary to drop out of Duke before 25:00I finished my second semester. So I left in good standing and went to Georgia Tech.

Ren: So you graduated from Georgia Tech, is that right, with a PhD in Chemistry?

Bill: Right.

Ren: Your time at Georgia Tech and then into your early career and then maybe also throughout your career, were you coming back to campus a lot? Were you visiting Virginia Tech? I know it was a different time, were you staying in touch with kind of what was going on on campus?

Bill: Not very many visits to campus, primarily for logistics reasons, because the first job that I took when I got out of graduate school was in Texas. So I was on the Gulf Coast in Baytown, Texas, which is near Houston.

Ren: This was the Humble Oil and Refining Company?

Bill: That's right.

Ren: Which is now Esso Research and Engineering Company.

Bill: Yeah. Then it became Esso. They were gradually being bought by Esso, and the year after I left, the name was changed to Exxon.

Ren: So you were there from 1960 to 1971, is that correct?

Bill: That's right.

Ren: And then you were at the University of Texas 1971 to 1973 as an Instructor and Research Associate?

Bill: Yes.

Ren: A lot of positions here. AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1973 to 1985, Polytechnic University 1985 to 1989, and then it looks like in 1989 you were named the Floyd Dewey Gottwald, Sr., Professor of Chemistry. So all throughout this time, what are the most memorable things that stick out in this employment 27:00career here as we look at it and talk about it?

Bill: Well, if you're doing research, I think most people would say, the things that they were able to do in research. Some achievements were very memorable. I met some people that became lifelong friends, of course, not only fellow scientists, but other employees of these organizations.

At Bell Labs is where I really got interested in poly(vinyl chloride), vinyl plastics. I was interested in vinyl plastics, or PVC, before but had never really done any research with them. That was one of the major products that the Bell System was interested in. They used it for wire and cable coating and for 28:00other applications.

At Bell Labs, the way it was constituted at the time, you could work in an area of a particular discipline (scientific discipline), and if you were successful and published and had professional visibility, you could continue to work in that area indefinitely, which is very, very different from the situation at most other industrial research organizations. I think Bell Labs, most people would agree, was the premier industrial research laboratory in the world at the time. There were Nobel laureates that worked there, and it was a very stimulating place.

Ren: What made you shift out of kind of a career industry at Bell Laboratories and so forth into academia?

Bill: Well, I had always had an interest in being an entrepreneur, not so much in a commercial sense, but in doing exactly the kind of research in precisely the areas and on precisely the problems that were of interest to me. The only way to do that and to ensure that you can continue it is to go to academia, and then you can work on anything you choose if you get someone to pay you for it. This is where the entrepreneurship angle comes in, so you have to have research sponsors if you are doing that.

Ren: Yeah.

Bill: And so you are no longer sponsored by just your company, you are sponsored by people and organizations, of course, granting agencies (companies, government agencies) that are willing to fund your research. So that was extremely appealing to me. Also, I had always had a hankering for academia, I guess, because of my family background. At the time I went to Bell Labs, I was thinking of that, but then I got the offer from Bell Labs, and I thought this was something I really could not turn down. So I took it, and I had a wonderful 12 years there. Then I decided to go ahead and do the academic switch, and the Bell 31:00System by this time had been broken up by government actions. So it was obvious that things were going to be changing at Bell Labs. I left before they changed greatly.

Ren: Did you enjoy teaching?

Bill: I loved teaching.

Ren: I can imagine. When you were at William & Mary in 1989 as we mentioned and then I guess you kind of retired as Professor Emeritus in 2006, I mean there are so many as we are looking at awards and consulting and publications, and I'm sure you have graduate students who went on to get advanced degrees, how much do 32:00you credit being able to have the career that you've had to Virginia Tech and kind of your early foundings here?

Bill: I think it had a tremendous influence, which I didn't realize, of course, at the time. You never do until you have the hindsight, but I never felt that I had an inferior education in my undergraduate work. And anyway, I had an extremely strong background compared to people who were entering Georgia Tech and Duke at the same time I did. So I think it had a tremendous effect.

Ren: This is a question we like to ask anyone but if someone kind of simply says the words Virginia Tech what's the first thing that you think of?

Bill: I think of a school which is a very dynamic place and really has a very strong desire to get better and have more visibility. Not that it doesn't have a lot already, but in the course of my career, Ren, I have visited, of course, a lot of other institutions. I know people who teach at other schools large and small. I've lectured at schools large and small. I have done collaborative research with professors at schools large and small. So I know a lot about what goes on at a lot of different kinds of universities. And I see that Virginia Tech is really a dynamic place, that it's really pushing forward on so many different fronts. It's really heartwarming to see that that's happening, and 34:00it's frankly doing better than some schools who have historically a greater reputation.

Ren: Right. Another goal that we try to achieve in some of these interviews for VT Stories, there's a Gallup survey that came out a few years ago that talked about Virginia Tech alumni having this affinity for Virginia Tech. Maybe not necessarily giving as much, but they do love Virginia Tech and this place. What are your thoughts about what makes Virginia Tech unique? You've talked a little bit about it already, but why do you think alumni have this feeling for this place?

Bill: It's rather complex, and all I can say is what I guess about why I have 35:00such a strong feeling for the place, in no particular order. The interaction of the students and the professors, I think, is stronger in a personal sense than it is at some other places. There's a sense of community. It's like where we're one big happy family, maybe happier sometimes than others, and I don't think it's just in the sciences. I've served on the chemistry advisory council as a charter member, and I've been on the Department of Chemistry Advisory Council (the DCAC) for this will be the 20th year.

Ren: Wow.

Bill: I've had a lot of opportunities to observe other parts of the university 36:00that I would not have had, had I not done that.

Ren: Can you talk a little bit about alumni getting involved is also something of interest to us, can you talk about the Advisory Council and kind of how that kind of came to be and your involvement? And then anything else that you are involved in. I know you're a member of the Legacy Society and these kinds of things with endowed scholarships and fellowships and things. Can you talk kind of broadly about all this?

Bill: Yeah, a little bit. The DCAC was formed, as I said, 20 years ago when Larry Taylor was the Chemistry Department Chairman. I don't know anything really about the discussions that led to the genesis of the DCAC, although I heard a little bit about that later. But obviously someone thought that this would be a 37:00good idea. It's the sort of thing that happens at other schools. This may be apocryphal, but I remember when I was at Polytechnic University hearing about an advisory council at MIT that actually raised money, primarily among themselves, and built a building for MIT. That was for one of their engineering departments. I don't think that's an apocryphal story, because I've heard it from a number of sources.

The DCAC is visualized -- and I think it would be fair to say that everyone looks at it more or less this way -- as an advocacy group for the department. We've been involved in a great many different kinds of projects. Some of them 38:00involve raising money; some of them don't. We like to think that we have been helpful, not so much as an adversarial advocate for the Chemistry Department, but in a largely non-adversarial way. So I would strongly recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to serve in an organization like this, not only at Virginia Tech but elsewhere, to consider it. You will learn a lot that will probably be more valuable to you than what you give to the university.

Ren: Right.

Bill: But I think it really has, at least as far as I know, fulfilled this objective. The membership is by invitation only, and as you know, we are having a meeting starting tomorrow. I was pleased to see in the preliminary information about the meeting that we are going to have five new members on the Advisory Council.

Ren: Wow. Wonderful.

Bill: We have other members that have served, but are now in sort of a connected-by-a-dotted-line status, who are still interested and sometimes come to meetings, but have gone on to other things.

Ren: Yeah. Let me ask you this question first before we talk about this, in 40:00doing some research and learning a little bit about you I know you have an interesting story about how you met your wife, so will you tell that story and then I will ask my follow-up questions.

Bill: My wife tells the story much better than I do, Ren, and I'm wondering where you got that, probably from Jenny Orzolek.

Ren: I don't even remember. [Laughs]

Bill: I was attending a conference in Denver, and it was during the airline controllers strike years ago. This was when Ronald Reagan was President, and he ended up firing all the air traffic controllers. So, as you can imagine, this did not help the traffic situation (the air traffic situation) in the country, 41:00and it was in a godawful mess. Anyhow, I had been invited to Denver to talk at a conference, and I was at the airport getting ready to fly back home. I was with Bell Labs at the time, and I was flying to the Newark Airport. My wife -- well, the woman who became my wife -- was on the same flight [Addendum: because of rescheduling] and was living in Spain at the time. Her father was Filipino, and her mother was Spanish. My wife was born and raised in the Philippines, but the family had moved to Madrid as a result of political unrest. So she had been 42:00there for some time and had actually gone to college in Spain.

Anyhow, she realized that the stewardess on the jumbo jet had sent me down the wrong aisle, because in those days you had the envelope that contained your ticket and had your seat number written on the outside. She could see my seat number and realized I was going down the wrong aisle. So she looked over, and she said, "Sir, your seat is here." So that's how we happened to meet. She was visiting friends in Queens, New York, and I was living in New Jersey working for Bell Labs. So we had one date before she went back to Madrid. I took her to West 43:00Point, because I thought, as a Filipina, she would really appreciate learning more about Douglas MacArthur. So then we had trips back and forth and eventually were married.

Ren: Wow.

Bill: But she tells that much more romantically than I do.

Ren: You think about it...

Bill: The chances were...

Ren: Yeah, that's what I'm saying, if you had been on another flight.

Bill: Anything, yeah.

Ren: To meet that way and then to be married, and what year did you marry?

Bill: I believe it was the 32nd anniversary that we celebrated this year.

Ren: Congratulations. That's wonderful.

Bill: Thank you.

Ren: And to say she has a pretty distinguished career of her own.

Bill: Yes, she does. She's a writer of poetry. She also does literary 44:00critiquing. She has a literary critiquing business, and she does translations, but she was Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2012 to 2014. That's always a two-year appointment. During that time I was her "Director of Transportation" and the official "consort," I guess, of the Poet Laureate. We went to places in Virginia, where she was invited to do things, that I didn't know existed. It all turned out to be very interesting. At some places that I knew about, we learned very interesting facts. For instance, when we visited Longwood University, we were put into the Alumni House -- I think that's what they call it -- as guests. 45:00The room that we stayed in had a bed we slept in that had been at a hotel in Farmville (which is where Longwood is, of course) and had been used by Ulysses S. Grant during the Valley campaign. And in this same room, there was a desk on which he is supposed to have written out the surrender terms for Robert E. Lee before Appomattox.

These two items of furniture had been in a hotel at which Grant stayed. There was no Alumni House at that time! We learned interesting tidbits like that, and we had some real adventures. We could write a book. We had a very interesting 46:00trip to Michigan State when she was Poet Laureate, and there was some other fairly extensive travel, not just in Virginia. She still gets invitations. She has a new book, which has just come out in April, and so she's getting lots of invitations which have to do with that. I'm still going with her as the Director of Transportation.

Ren: Right, the driver, right. In 2013 you were selected as the only chemist to be inducted into the Hall of Distinction from the Virginia Tech College of Science, which was as an inaugural honoree and was wonderful. I also saw this, in doing some research, that I found to be very interesting: in 2008 you became the only scientist to be a charter inductee into the Southwest Virginia Walk of Fame. You share that honor with a couple of interesting folks don't you?

Bill: Yes, I do. There are a lot of interesting people who've had some sort of interaction with Southwest Virginia. I don't know which ones you found most interesting. Daniel Boone is one. Of course he was not from there, but he spent a lot of time going back and forth through Lee County. Then, of course, George C. Scott the actor, and the Carter family. The man who is given credit for inventing osteopathy also was honored.

Ren: Andrew Still.

Bill: Andrew Still. He was, I think, born in Lee County. There is a historical marker there.

Ren: In Jonesville?

Bill: Near Jonesville, yeah. His stone on the Walk of Fame is adjacent to mine, I believe for alphabetical reasons, and there are some other interesting people. 48:00We met at the awards ceremony Adriana Trigiani, who wrote the Big Stone Gap trilogy, and there was recently this movie "Big Stone Gap," starring Ashley Judd, Whoopi Goldberg, and some other people, that was based on one of those books.

Ren: I want to, and again much like your academic career and publications I have pages of awards and things. I wish we had the time to get through each one of these but there are some wonderful awards and honors and we will be sure to include these in your story. I want to ask you about Virginia Tech and specifically as someone who was here in the early to mid-1950s and has since 49:00been involved with the University. When you look across the campus and you see things and as this place continues to grow and change and evolve like most universities, what inspires you about it, and then on the flip side what concerns you about the growth and change?

Bill: Well, an inspirational thing is that it is really growing, and I think it is a controlled growth. The Corporate Research Center is a very, very nice thing. For any major technical university, you are going to see something like that associated with it. There are many new buildings, of course, and the 50:00athletic facilities are greatly improved. I'm a very strong supporter of Virginia Tech athletics, and we do come to games occasionally.

As far as areas for concern, Virginia Tech has been more or less escaping from this so far, but there's lots of things that relate to the current political dialogue, which is in really a terrible state in this country, that I hope do not really have a major impact on Virginia Tech. But I do worry that something 51:00like this could happen.

One thing that did happen -- this is not exactly answering your question -- but during the time I've spent attending DCAC meetings, my wife and I were on the campus for such a meeting on the weekend just before the massacre occurred where so many students were killed. In fact, phone calls were already being made about this -- I guess by the shooter -- and we were actually told about them before leaving the campus. Nothing like that -- at least to that extent -- has really 52:00happened, of course, since then. But I think Virginia Tech -- I can't really tell you why I think this, but maybe it's because of what I think of the school as a whole and its environment -- I think Virginia Tech is probably less likely to be involved in future events like that. I hope that's the case.

Ren: Yeah, me too. If you could, and I know that you probably do, if you could give any advice to any undergraduate students, especially for your field in chemistry to be yourself as one of the world's leading experts on the chemistry of vinyl plastics and these things, if you could give them any advice what would that advice be?

Bill: Undergraduates?

Ren: Or graduates.

Bill: Well, if you are going to do research, if you want to do research, you have to enjoy solving problems, and you need to try to become an expert in at least one or two fields, so that you will have a professional reputation. You can build a professional reputation more quickly if you concentrate on one or two areas of research. For undergraduates, a lot of people in chemistry don't know how many doors are opened by majoring in this particular science. Now chemistry is called the central science, but there are an incredible number of things that you can do with a degree in chemistry. You don't have to be in research. You can do lots of other things that a chemistry degree is admirable 54:00preparation for. I've had students, for example, that have gone into forensics. I had a student who became an osteopath (one of my William & Mary Master's students). He actually got his medical degree at the school in Missouri which is named for Dr. Andrew Still, so he's a practicing osteopath.

A few years ago, one of my junior colleagues and I had a course at William & Mary that we proposed. It was accepted, and we taught it. It was called the Seminar in Applied Chemistry. It was held at night, so there was not a real time 55:00constraint for a class period. It involved inviting visiting speakers in areas that are not traditionally associated with those where chemists work and having them come to the campus and lecture about their careers and how their chemistry studies led them to those particular things. We had an FBI agent who had been involved with the Unabomber case. We had a good friend of mine whom I had known since I was in Texas, Dr. Norman Neureiter, who was the first scientific attaché behind the Iron Curtain and later became a vice president of Texas Instruments. He currently has a very high position with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. We had an art conservator from the Smithsonian 56:00Institution. We had a patent attorney, actually a fellow that I had worked with, Dr. Ybet Villacorta, at Bell Labs before he got his doctoral degree from MIT. He had a Master's degree [00:56:29 at Rutgers] from Rutgers for his first Chemistry degree. We had some other interesting people. So that's not really appreciated, and I think it's incumbent upon faculty to try to learn about such opportunities and to try to steer students in directions that they think they might be suited to.

Ren: I have a story you might find kind of humorous. A couple of years ago we 57:00bought a house and we were moving and I found some of my old course works. I found some of my organic chemistry and things that I had done. My own work but looking at it I sat in my home office and it might as well have been in Greek just because it had been so long and I had forgot and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Because I was a biology major, I did the chemistry, the organic chemistry, inorganic, physics, all these other courses. The biology stuff I still remember, but looking at the chemistry stuff just puzzles me today. [Laughs] I was not a great chemistry student but I did enjoy it. One thing I do want to ask you about and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, is you are in the [00:57:59 percentage bequests] for the endowed fellowships and things with 58:00you and your wife, can you talk a little bit about that?

Bill: Which specifically, Ren? We have made a gift recently; is that the one you are talking about?

Ren: I don't believe so; I'm sorry. It's the Endowed Chemistry Fellowship and the Endowed Fellowship for PhD candidates in the Department of English, and Endowed Scholarship in the College of Agriculture.

Bill: Right. This is going to be funded to a major extent from a charitable remainder trust which we established several years ago. I don't recall the exact year, but it's been a number of years now. We decided to fund things in those three departments for reasons which, in light of our previous conversation, may 59:00now be more or less obvious.

Ren: Right.

Bill: Agriculture, of course, for my dad and English for my wife, and then of course, Chemistry for my career. I will say that without my exposure -- fairly intensive exposure -- to the Chemistry Department and Virginia Tech as a result of becoming a member of DCAC, it would have been much less likely that we would have funded things, or at least to that extent, on the campus. So that's another thing that schools, I think, need to keep in mind. If you want the alums to contribute, maybe it might be nice to invite them to serve on an advisory council or something like that. [Chuckles]

Ren: And there's a most recent gift?

Bill: This has actually not been publicly disclosed. I think it's going to be fairly soon, but Jenny Orzolek is well aware of it, as is Jim Tanko in Chemistry.

Ren: You want to talk about that?

Bill: Well, it is an Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Chemistry. I think it's the first one that they will have.

Ren: Wonderful.

Bill: This is an outright gift. This is not through a trust or anything like that.

Ren: Thank you for that. Just wrapping up here; thank you so much for your time.

Bill: Thank you for having me.

Ren: I know you have a busy couple of days after this. I just have a couple more questions. What would you like to be remembered for? At the end of the day what do you think you would like to be remembered for?

Bill: Tough question. Not so much for personal accomplishments, but for the impact that my career, encompassing everything, has had on other people (in a nutshell).

Ren: What does Virginia Tech mean to you?

Bill: Well, it's obviously my undergraduate alma mater, and it's a place where I spent years that were still a part of my formative ones. So it has been a place that's made invaluable contributions, as a result of the time I spent here, to the rest of my career, not only in terms of what I learned (factual information), but I think the values and all that that implies.

Ren: Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you thought I might or anything you want to add? This is just an open-ended question we always like to ask at the end.

Bill: I don't think so.

Ren: Again, thank you for sitting down with VT Stories. I hope you enjoyed this experience.

Bill: Oh, I did, Ren. It was great fun. Thank you for inviting me to do this.

Ren: Thank you. I will just say Dr. Bill Starnes, class of 1955. Thank you for talking to VT Stories. Thank you for your gifts and service to the University. I really appreciate it. Thanks for meeting you and thank you, sir.

Bill: Nice meeting you, Ren.