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 00:01:00with a very special guest with us today.

Sir 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, 00:02:00although you might not expect that considering its rather

isolated 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 00:03:00thought that he would go to Berea College for his

education. 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 00:04:00delayed by that,

and 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 00:05:00College, which opened (I think) about that time, where she spent the

requisite 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 00:06:00Tech. My mom, of course, went to Radford, which later was the

women'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 00:07:00first 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 00:08:00I was a student

here. 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 00:09:00Union College, which is in

Barbourville, 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 00:10:00do. So I stayed there for two years and took all the

courses 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 00:11:00known as one of the new dorms on the

upper 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 00:12:00Vingiello, but he was

not 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 00:13:00asked us if we could guess where the key was from. Of course, we had no earthly

idea. 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 00:14:00 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 00:15:00heard of that before, but I learned later

that 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 00:16:00police on the main street in Roanoke, from which you turned to go down to that

stadium, 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 00:17:00cases were tried -- and I don't know whether it's done this way now or

not -- 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. 00:18:00He was a civilian, but he happened to be in a dormitory which was a cadet

dormitory (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 00:19:00Marion. He

was 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 00:20:00hear stories of that from that time, and because

like 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 00:21:00that set me back some, which is why I graduated in three years rather than two.

But 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 00:22:00older, 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 00:23:00 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 00:24:00degree. I was there for

the 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 00:25:00an illness that made it necessary to drop out of Duke before

I 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 00:26:00 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 00:27:00in this employment

career 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 00:28:00interested in. They used it for wire and cable coating and for

other 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 00:29:00 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 00:30:00sponsors 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 00:31:00there. Then I decided to go ahead and do the academic switch, and the Bell

System 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, 00:32:00how much do

you 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 00:33:00first 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 00:34:00different fronts. It's really heartwarming to see that that's happening, and

it'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 00:35:00what I guess about why I have

such 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 00:36:00opportunities to observe other parts of the university

that 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 00:37:00that later. But obviously someone thought that this would be a

good 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. 00:38:00We've been involved in a great many different kinds of projects. Some of them

involve 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 00:39:00you 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: 00:40:00Yeah. Let me ask you this question first before we talk about this, in

doing 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 00:41:00did not help the traffic situation (the air traffic situation) in the country,

and 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 00:42:00unrest. So she had been

there 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 00:43:00Madrid. I took her to West

Point, 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 00:44:00writer of poetry. She also does literary

critiquing. 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 00:45:00House -- I think that's what they call it -- as guests.

The 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 00:46:00book. We had a very interesting

trip 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 00:47:00 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 00:48:00 people.

We 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 00:49:00and has since

been 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 00:50:00 the

athletic 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 00:51:00I do worry that something

like 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 00:52:00extent -- has really

happened, 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 00:53:00 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 00:54:00lots of other things that a chemistry degree is admirable

preparation 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, 00:55:00so there was not a real time

constraint 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. 00:56:00We had an art conservator from the Smithsonian

Institution. 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 00:57:00couple of years ago we

bought 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 00:58:00things with

you 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, 00:59:00 may

now 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 01:00:00like 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; 01:01:00thank 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 01:02:00had 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 01:03:00 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.