Early Holiday Shopping Tip: Gifts for Your W&L Friends
You think kids waste too much time on Facebook and MySpace and game sites? 
For us old people, eBay can be every bit as addictive.
At any given moment, there are maybe 80 or 100 Washington and Lee items for sale. (N.B.: When you search, you have to screen out anything from the movie Mo’ Better Blues, which paired Denzel Washington and Spike Lee.)
At the moment of this writing, you can go after one of those blue-and-white plates the alumni office used to sell ($25 opening bid but now up to $200 in a frenzied auction); a plate block of the 1949 bicentennial stamps, which seem always to be up for sale (opening bid 12 cents – face value – with no takers so far); a 1941 W&L-vs.-Maryland football program ($20 to open); a Lee Chapel postcard ($6); a 45-rpm Decca record of Mugsy Spanier playing the “W&L Swing” (“My Wild Irish Rose” is on the B-side; $4); 1937 and 1938 Calyxes ($35 each); and a host of other memorabilia.
(As for the postcard at the right, available for $10, notice that it must have been created after Old Tucker Hall burned down in 1937 and before New Tucker was built, because the artist filled the empty space with a slope-roof building that never existed.)
If you fire up “Lexington, Va.,” you can find such gems as a menu from Neo’s House of Beef (no date, but a veal chop was $2.95, and the description notes that the menu is stained and mildewed, so it's clearly genuine); an 1866 map of the Lexington Presbytery; a Lexington police officer’s arm patch; a matchbook from Earl Levitt; and literally 250 other items.