The Old U(VA) and I: 1961-1965

By: Frank Briggs

The decade of the 1960s saw sweeping changes at UVA as old barriers fell and students of new backgrounds came. Litigation that lasted from the late 1940s through the end of the 1960s eliminated historic barriers to African American and women students. No detailed UVA-specific narrative has existed until former graduates from two ends of the decade, Joel Gardner, BA 1970, Rebel Yell to Revolution, in 2018 and now Frank Briggs, BA 1965, recognized that the University had changed in the most profound ways and used their own experiences to document what happened. This book will attract anyone who lived through that heady period. It will appeal also to others, to women and men who grew up later, and who may have wondered why and how the good old days ended and America stepped beyond them. Some might say grew up.

—John T. Casteen III, President Emeritus, University of Virginia, 1990–2010

Frank Briggs’s memoir is a highly entertaining trip in time to an era in UVA history that predated the social upheavals of the late 1960s. We accompany the author through his four years in a cloistered culture of tradition that had not changed over many decades. In a series of revealing and amusing anecdotes, we relive the road trips, party weekends, and collegiate shenanigans that dominated the student experience during that period. This is a must read for every Wahoo who lived through that era or anyone who has an interest in the social history of college life prior to the cultural revolution that swept across the country after Briggs’s graduation.

—Joel B. Gardner, Author, From Rebel Yell to Revolution: My Four Years at UVA, 1966–1970