Story by Chris Edwards, Photos courtesy of Bob and Barbara Duke and Betty Page Duke Collins ('52)

MANY MODERN-DAY DUKES FANS know little about Samuel Page Duke -- 30-year former president of what is now JMU. His name became the school's athletics moniker in 1947 when he purchased uniforms for the first men's basketball team, says former JMU Vice President Ray Sonner. Rumor has it that Duke, known for frugality, initially turned down the uniform requisition. According to his granddaughter, Elizabeth "Betty" Page Duke Collins ('52), one enterprising player prompted Duke to reconsider by responding, "That's a shame -- we were going to call ourselves the Madison Dukes."

However it began, the Dukes legacy seems to fit President Duke, who played football, golf, semipro baseball and tennis. "He was ardent in all of 'em, and good," says his son Robert "Bob" Duke.

Yet Sam Duke, affectionately known as "the Builder," gave the school more than its team name. The campus in the Duke era -- longest of JMU's longevity-bent administrations -- more than doubled the number of buildings, multiplied enrollment nearly five-fold and appreciated in value from $400,000 to $2 million. He also made it the namesake of Founding Father James Madison as the final step of upgrading the college to a full liberal arts curriculum.

At 34, Duke became president of "the Normal," the State Normal School for Women at Harrisonburg, when President Julian Burruss left the 11-year-old institution to head Virginia Tech. Duke was chosen over local favorite William Sanger, who had directed summer sessions at the Normal -- so called because teachers' schools wanted to dispel worries over women obtaining more than a "normal" education.

Born in Ferrum as the son of a Methodist circuit preacher, Duke graduated from Randolph
-Macon College and earned a master's from Columbia University Teachers College. As assistant principal and football coach at Willie Halsell College -- an Oklahoma Territory Indian school that Will Rogers had attended -- Duke hired an English teacher from Texas, Lucile Campbell. She would soon be his wife.

Duke became an administrator at Farm-ville Normal School and later, supervisor of high schools for Virginia.

When he arrived at Harrisonburg in 1919, the campus had six buildings, 306 students, 26 faculty members and $324.34 in the treasury. Yearly tuition was $30; room and board ranged from $198 to $218. Duke urged a faculty salary range of $1,200 to $2,250, "with $3,300 for the president," according to Raymond C. Dingledine Jr.'s Madison
College: The First Fifty Years 1908-1958.

The first Normal curriculum included four years' secondary education. Diplomas went no higher than the "regular normal course," equivalent to two years' college, until a four-year B.S. curriculum in education began in 1916. Duke dropped secondary courses in 1920, and in 1924, following his persistent demand, Virginia's normal schools were upgraded to teachers colleges. His school became the State Teachers College at Harrisonburg.

Later in that decade, state officials began planning a liberal arts college for women. After Harrisonburg lost the site to Fredericksburg, Duke campaigned for the teachers colleges to award liberal arts degrees. The initially controversial program started in 1934, broadening the State Teachers College's curriculum. In 1938, the school became Madison College at the recommendation of Duke, who cited Madison's advocacy of women's education.

The nine major buildings constructed on Duke's watch include Alumnae Hall (1923), where grading left the landmark "Rock" above ground; Reed Hall, now Keezell (1926), where early basketball games featured the cheer, "Skinum-a-rink-a-dink-a-doo;" and Wilson Hall (1931), where Duke moved his office from Harrison Hall. President Woodrow Wilson's widow, Edith, attended the Wilson dedication. "A chauffeur drove their old Pierce Arrow," recalls Bob Duke.

Coeducation began in 1946-47 when the first full-time male students, taking advantage of the postwar GI Bill, arrived. "We didn't really go wild about them," insists Betty Collins. As she recalls, "My grandfather was a very formidable man. You always stood back a little. He wasn't the kind of grandfather that had children get up in his lap, but he was very kind."

As managing editor of The Breeze, Emily Lewis Lee ('43) sometimes worked with Duke. She remembers him as "austere" but helpful when needed. Back then, she says, "I would say that was true of most people in authority." Lee adds that Duke was an expert at lobbying state officials for school funding. Lee, a Petersburg native, dietitian and Army Medical Corps veteran who now lives in South Carolina, served on the JMU Board of Visitors from 1979 to 1982 and donated a World War II memorial garden terrace to Madison this spring.

Duke wasn't active in only the JMU community, however. He was president of the local chamber of commerce and Rotary Club and board member at Asbury Methodist Church and Rockingham Memorial Hospital. He lobbied to keep Harrisonburg's railroad station open, according to The Daily News-Record.

"He had a photographic memory," says Bob Duke. Until enrollment neared 1,000, he knew each student by name. In bridge, "He could recall a hand played a week before and tell you the sequence of the cards played years later."

The year after the Dukes moved into the president's home, Hillcrest House, the Class of 1920 chose Bob Duke, then 3, as "mascot." "I didn't mind all them gals in my front yard," he jokes.

East of Hillcrest lay only fields where students sunbathed. A steep sled route plunged from the house to a creek that now feeds Newman Lake. There, Bob's brother, the late Samuel "Page" Duke Jr., broke his leg on a night toboggan ride. The bluestone campus' acres featured a nine-hole golf course (frequented by Sam Duke) and an outdoor theater.

Bob Duke recalls a horse-drawn truck carrying laundry and the odor of chloroform and ether wafting through the windows from Rockingham Memorial Hospital. Built in 1913, Hillcrest featured a central vacuum cleaning system with "a big compressor in the laundry room and receptacles in the baseboards." To ring the household help, Lucile Duke tapped a dining-room floor bell with her foot.

Several governors visited the Dukes at Hillcrest, as did students for numerous events. "I can remember my grandmother's strict etiquette lessons before dinner," says Collins.

Her uncle, Bob Duke, recalls, "I got a warmin'  a few times" from his father. He attended Duke University (founded by a distant relation); then the University of Virginia, where he completed law school in 1941 before a Navy tour. Bob Duke found he "wasn't too keen on law," so made his career in insurance and real estate.

The sole survivor of four siblings, Bob Duke lives in Harrisonburg with his wife, Barbara. Page Duke was an appliance and swimming pool salesman in Connecticut. Sister Julia was a librarian in Louisiana; brother Marshall, a research chemist.

When visiting Hillcrest as a child, granddaughter Collins says, "I thought it was a castle." Her mother had eloped with Page while attending Madison. At 12, Collins had an operator teach her to work the manual switchboard at Harrison Hall: "I loved it."

She returned to live in the president's house her freshman year. Without having applied to Madison, she had received an acceptance letter. Once enrolled, though, her then-surname guaranteed no privileges. One semester, she missed her all-A's goal when philosophy professor Walter Gifford gave her a B. "He said to me later, 'I expect more from you.'"

Even though the Dukes were in a position of privilege, evidence of their humble origins remained. The thrifty Dukes kept a box of candy in the refrigerator, eating one piece per evening while sitting by their radio. Lucile Duke recycled plastic bread wrappers, made Collins a winter coat, canned the family's produce and grew African violets. "She said, 'it's not a green thumb, it's hard work,'" Collins recalls. Bob Duke says, "I didn't much care for work in the garden. I'd receive calls at the principal's office that I should come home immediately after school."

In Collins' years on campus, "It was very small then and very close. Everybody knew everybody." Students ate in Harrison Hall after singing "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow." If bored, they cruised
town in the new city bus with a driver named Shorty. Sunday dinner was a Spartan "brown bag." Tuition was $121 per quarter; teachers' salaries in Virginia started at around $900.

The campus loved pageantry. Girls donned fancy gowns for monthly "birthday banquets." In her senior year, Louise Vaughn Hanby ('43), now a retired Delaware teacher, borrowed a professor's tuxedo to serve as "groom" in an "Old Girl-New Girl Wedding," a tradition for promoting school spirit. A white-gowned freshman was "bride."

On Senior Day, class president Hanby had to make a speech following long orations by VIPs including Duke and then-Virginia Governor Colgate Darden. When she began, with knees knocking, "At long last, we've reached this point ..." the audience misconstrued her meaning. "Everybody just howled. Dr. Duke was ready to fall off the stage."

On annual "Peak Day," freshmen boarded a train to Massanutten mountain with Duke for a hard climb up the peak and a glorious view, says Hanby. Duke cut a notch in his walking stick following each ascent. He called buzzards "mountain canaries," says Bob.

Rules from that time tend to sound terminally quaint. Lee and Hanby recall the 1941 "May Revolt," when militant freshmen protested such requirements as stockings and a five-minute limit to telling dates goodnight after dances. (At the end of the five minutes, Dean Annie B. Cook once pulled apart a betrothed, embracing pair). Though her grandfather was strict, she says "I think he was very conscious of the times and the changes that were going on." A radio study-hour ban was relaxed on the night Glenn Miller's band, by request, saluted "the girls of Madison College." Hanby recalls that a student leader who met with Duke discovered the president "wasn't aware of some of the requirements." Compromises ensued. Nine years later, though, Collins, as student government secretary, had to walk around campus checking lights-out violations.

During Collins' freshman year, Sam Duke looked forward to an annual celebration where the president danced with a freshman. "You and I are going to have that dance together," he told Collins, but it was not to be. A severe stroke forced his retirement in 1949. He and his wife moved across Main Street to the college's Zirkle House, where they would remain until his death in 1955. Lucile Duke brought him in a wheelchair to their granddaughter's 1952 graduation. "The senior class rose and turned and faced him. He was visibly moved," Collins says.

Collins, who was a student teacher at Harrisonburg High School, became director of Head Start and chief of early childhood education for Alaska, and later the Head Start director for Jacksonville, Fla. Her four children include Mark McCallum ('76), an Alaska forestry archaeologist.

Tom Duke, son of Page Duke's second marriage, was born in 1946, too late to remember much of his grandfather from Christmas visits to Harrisonburg. He was close, however, to "Grandma Duke," who lived into her 90s: "She was a neat lady, no airs about her at all."

An investment banker with the New York firm Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP, Tom Duke lives in Alexandria and flies often. Having flown to New York early on Sept. 11, 2001, and arriving at his 104th floor office in the World Trade Center, he was preparing for a meeting when everything shook. One partner yelled, "A plane flew into the other building!"

Duke and several co-workers walked down the stairwell, continuing after an intercom voice advised staying put. They were halfway down when their building shook again, harder. Duke did not learn it too had been struck until a partner in Seattle called his cell phone: "It was almost surreal." Of the firm's 83 staff in the office that morning, 66 died, including two of his best friends.

"It's been a very interesting year and a half. Everybody's been affected differently. We all have been changed in some way." The experience made Tom Duke want to "smell the roses" and spend more time with family. Daughters Ann and Emily, recent college graduates, work in the Washington area; son Samuel Page Duke III attends Episcopal High School in Alexandria.

"That's part of why I came here," Tom Duke said at a campus scholarship banquet last spring. "It seemed more important, trying to get in touch with roots."

He suspects his grandfather would approve of today's vastly changed JMU. "He wanted students to be well fed and teachers to be well paid. He would like it that the school still turns out teachers."

Go Dukes!