Dale E. Williams

Dale and Robin in the French Quarter at Mardi Gras

After graduation Dale was an artillery officer in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and two Medals of Valor. When he returned home he studied at Tulane and then enrolled at the University of Wales, where he received his D.Phil. in British history. He came back to New Orleans and taught history at Loyola University in New Orleans, where he also studied law and received his J.D. degree in 1978. Since then he has been a practicing attorney in Covington, Louisiana, across the lake from New Orleans, with a specialty in employment law. He’s is a member of the Federal Bar Association, the Louisiana Supreme Court Historical Society and the St. Thomas Moore Inn of Court.

Dale is married to Robin Holtz Williams, a classical pianist and chair of the music department at the University of New Orleans. In 2004 she released her first CD. They have five children: Richard, 38, owner of Texasdirectauto.com, the world’s largest internet-based auto dealer; Edward, 34, a Texas A&M graduate who is operations manager at Texasdirect; Miriam Petru of Texas, a mom and homemaker; Clayton, 13, a pupil at Christ Episcopal School and baseball and soccer star; and Chloe, 11, also at Christ Episcopal and a violin virtuoso.

Clayton and Chloe Williams last Easter

He is the author of several journal articles, published in the Oxford University Press journal Past and Present and elsewhere, challenging the Marxist theories of the eminent British historian Edward Thompson, set out in a 1971 article, “Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” The dad of an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old can’t have much spare time, but Dale says he attends his wife’s and daughter’s musical concerts, tries to keep up with the 13-year-old’s math and thinks of his head-of-household duties as an “extension of my house manager job at Lambda Chi.” He’s also reading The Odyssey “and other works on W&L’s reading list that I never got around to.” Dale says he’s registered as a Republican but “I haven’t voted that way lately.”