A publishing company. They publish all the books. He cared about
publishing scholarly books and so on. So the first morning I was here
after we'd had our hot chocolate and cookies, we got up the
next morning and went to the Wettach's house to
Page 6 have breakfast. Wettach had a lot of books and he told me
that he was a publisher and these were all the books that were published
and he was reading two or three manuscripts and so on. And I like to
read books, so I was impressed by that. Later on we got to be friends
and he taught Constitutional law. There used to be parties of the
faculty; ten people and they would always be one a month at
somebody's house. He told me that in World War I he had been
a Naval aviator and there had been very few. Very few. I mean, there
were fifty at the most. He was stationed in England and every day he was
supposed to fly the British Channel and bomb something in Germany or
somewhere. And the planes were not very good, so in at least one out of
every five sorties he would land in the British Channel. They had
pontoon airplanes. They used to carry a fishing line. They'd
sit there and fish waiting to be rescued.
[laughter] He was such a pleasant looking person and mild
and Van Hecke was mild in his appearance. But there's all
that steel there, you know. Then he was married to Mrs. Wettach who was
very nice. She couldn't stay for breakfast. She fixed it but
then had to leave because they were opening St. Thomas ward that day. It
had just been built and they were opening it that day. She was very
active in the Catholic Church. She told me, she said, "Do you
have any children?" And I said, "Yes, I have
two." And she said, "How old are they?" And I
said, "One is five and one is three." She said,
"Well just because you're on the law faculty
doesn't mean your children can come to my day
school." She had the only day school in town at the time. She
said, "I have a
Page 7 waiting list and you get on
the waiting list and you take your turn." And I sort of liked
that. I hadn't thought about day school, but there they were.
Then Porter [unknown] and Freddy McCall and
there's the McCall Award that goes to the best teacher.
Freddy McCall had graduated from here as an undergraduate where he
played on the baseball team and had been in the band. So he went off to
I forget, Vale or Harvard Law School. Then when he finished top of his
class he was offered a job here teaching at the law school or teaching
classics in the classics department or the assistant coach of the
baseball team.