Watch Full Video

Read Full Transcript

Transcript from "Dean William Tate"

Talk to me a little bit. I have worked with Dean Tate off and on and early in my professional career and one of the stories that he told me repeatedly was that he wanted to die in a bawdy house in a fight with a man over a woman.

I never heard that one!

I just…what an institution here, what an icon, and I know you have some stories and maybe some you cannot tell…

Well, we used to laugh. We talked about spending the weekend together, which we did, between chasing beer trucks from Arcade or raiding men's apartment to get the women, but he was…he had a way with students even though they were scared to death of him. They respected him. He knew their daddies and their grand-daddies and if a student was about to get in trouble, he would ask them their name, and it would scare them to death and when they told him, he would say, "Oh yeah!", and tell them their daddy's name. They thought they would get it when they got home, so he was a disciplinarian in a way without having to draw too much on any of the laws. He could just walk around the campus and behavior would change.

In his ballcap, and we would line up to register in lines outside of Stegeman Hall and out of the Coliseum. It is amazing the things that you remember from your time, and the things that made it. You know you get sentimental about that.

He turned in a report one Monday morning to me — we always had to discuss what happened over the weekend — and he names a student, a woman student,that he had to carry into the dorm. Well, I took it to mean that she was drinking or something, but he actually carried her physically. I called her in that afternoon. She said, "He walked in with me, but he didn't carry me". He used the expression when he was with someone, as carrying them, and I could tell some more, but I better not. Different words have different meanings.