[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JAMES LEUTZE:

Maybe we'll start with your career at the University of North Carolina and what Chapel Hill was like in the years that you were there right after World War I.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

It wasn't until '53 or '55 that I was elected to the board of trustees, I don't remember exactly.

JAMES LEUTZE:

No, I want to deal with your college days.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, college.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Let's start there.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Have to go back a little bit further. Billy Carmichael and myself were in the same class, 1917, at Durham High School. His wife was also, May. And I was the third man scholastically in class, a preacher and a teacher's son beat me out. I was sixteen and I gave Billy Carmichael my scholarship to Chapel Hill so he was a class ahead of me, class of '21, I was '22 at Chapel Hill. I went on to Hotchkiss Prep School. Tore my knee all to hell playing football up there because I weighed 175 pounds and I as tall as I am now. They didn't move me, I played tackle. I kept that side of the line; I made the team. My grandfather had been a great friend of old Dr. Beelor, the headmaster, and that's why I went to Hotchkiss. And it made sense. My boys went to Millbrook School, Connecticut where we again knew the headmaster very well, and my grandsons went to Millbrook. The thought of a southerner going north to prep school made sense to me because then they came back and graduated at Chapel Hill, as I did, in the class of '22.

JAMES LEUTZE:

But scholastically, you were third in your class. Why did you go to Hotchkiss for more academic preparation?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

My father and mother thought I was too young to come to Chapel Hill and meet all the problems that were involved—women and gambling and all the rest of the stuff. [laughter] I was a good young boy and an only son, I had two younger sisters—now Mrs. DuBose and Mrs. Foxl. I came over to Chapel Hill. I spent three months in a hospital in New York and in Durham and that's where my hospital interest started.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was this because of your knee?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Because of my knee. And they did not operate in those days but they put me in what they call counter irritation. They put me with towels from waist down and put me in a bake oven, and then they'd throw me in an ice cold shower, and I'd faint. Then the nurse said, "Aw, to hell with it," and she took off her clothes and came on in there with me.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You didn't faint!

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, I didn't faint that time. [laughter] But I had a lovely little nurse, Miss Stancel, I remember—it's funny how these things come back—that always kissed me good morning and kissed me good-night. I was a youngster, and she was the head nurse, Canadian. [laughter] Such was life! And I was in the old Poly Clinic Hospital in New York during the very cold winter, so cold that we were without coal in the hospital for a week and I could look out the window and see the coal trucks crossing the Hudson River to Jersey.

JAMES LEUTZE:

This would have been the winter of 1917?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

'17. And then I came to Chapel Hill the fall of '18 and graduated in the class of 1922. That was during the war, and I lived at Mrs. Battle's boarding house where the eastern portion of the Ackland Museum is, as a freshman. And then I had cottages in various and sundry places. John Shaw of Charlotte took me under his wing. And I had a little cottage, near the Coop; I ran the damn thing for two years, got my meals free.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now is Cooup, spelled c-o-o-u-p as in …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

C-double o-p.

JAMES LEUTZE:

C-double o-p.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And I had a very big cook, I forget his name, a little bitty Henry and the cook, and we fed the boys, there were two cabins there. Then I ran the SAE house, I built it. That was the second house, the SAE fraternity; my father had built the first one which was on the campus to the west of the present library, the Deke house, and then the SAE house. And that burned.

JAMES LEUTZE:

The first house burned?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Dad built it when he was here in college, he was the class of '89, I think. And I built the present fraternity house, it's still there. The first one in the original fraternity court. It's a disgrace now, I understand.

JAMES LEUTZE:

It's in pretty bad repair. I want to talk about the atmosphere at Chapel Hill at that time. But, what about the atmosphere in the country in 1917, 1918? How did young men like you feel about the war, what the country was doing?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, I was disappointed that I couldn't participate in the war, too young, but at Chapel Hill I was a member of Captain Allen, as I remember, the Canadian, the non-SATC boys.

JAMES LEUTZE:

OK, you're going to have to explain that.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Student Army Training Corps, or something like that.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Did they have an ROTC?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

All the campus, all the dormitories were barracks. And the students were not permitted to go off campus. Those were all members of the SATC, Victor Bryant was one of the head ones. George Denney was the captain in our non-SATC. You remember George?

JAMES LEUTZE:

Uh-huh (affirmative).

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And I was number two in the group and we as non-SATC had the run of the campus. I started, as I remember, the selling of apples and other things on the campus to the boys who were in barracks and couldn't go downtown.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So now, these were men who were in military training.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

They were in military training. Luther Hodges was here; Victor Bryant was here. And they went on to Plattsburg and got their officer position. I remember November 1918 when the war was over, Pass Farrington who became a doctor in Winston-Salem, a fraternity-mate, friend, came running across the campus from South Building without a damn stitch on. "Weeeeeeee, the war is over, the war is over!" [laughter]

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, the non-SATC, you did military training of some nature, is that right?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah, we had far greater military training than the boys in the barracks in SATC because there were about 150 of us or something. That was real training.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Did you march?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, hell, yeah. We had some false guns, wooden ones, that looked like guns but some of the boys on campus had real rifles. And the Emerson Stadium was there, that was before 1926, I think it was, when they built the new one. Mother was a Grey Lady; she organized the Grey Ladies in Durham. Everything was gung ho for the war. As I remember, when I graduated in '22 there were only 2300 students here. There was a lesser number back in '18.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was there pacifism on campus?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, not the slightest. Everybody was gung ho, going to Europe.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Very patriotic.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, hell, yeah, no question about it.

JAMES LEUTZE:

How did you feel about President Wilson, for instance, in a specific sense?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, I don't remember any thought one way or the other.

JAMES LEUTZE:

How about about the issue of the League of Nations? Was that a topic?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Nobody gave a damn.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Nobody cared about that.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

We were going to go to fight. Period.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So were you disappointed in a sense when the war was over and you were cheated?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yes and no. We didn't know what we were doing to ourselves.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, did you know people like Sam Ervin? Did you have friends who were participating in the conflict?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah, yeah. I knew Sam and a lot of the old—well, there were a lot of older boys that were seniors and so on. Hell, I was a damn little freshman. But I had to behave myself.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Alright, what about the atmosphere on campus at this time? What was Chapel Hill like?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Franklin Street was unpaved; there was no asphalt. The Pickwick Theater was there and you had to be careful, you had to sit in the back of it because if you sat even three rows down somebody'd hit you with raw peanuts on the back of the head. Franklin Street—that's about all there was to Chapel Hill, as I remember. Collier-Cobb and all that crowd. We went downtown, walked the streets as they still do, but there wasn't much to it. Old Mr. Durham had an automobile, I forget his first name. And he used to drive us to Durham. We had a hell of a time getting back and forth. The train ran to the station out in Carrboro and you could take the train and go to University Station and come back. Well, that was a hell of a mess. Well, you stayed on campus, you just didn't run around.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, if I remember correctly, the first women came to campus in 1921 or '22. Is that correct?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

There was, yeah. Jonathan Daniels and I started out together in the same class, but Jonathan was smarter than I and graduated in three years: Howard Patterson the same way; he was smarter, though he graduated in 1921, Jonathan in 1921. I was football manager so I had a lot of other fish to fry, fraternity and so forth, and I didn't take my studies too seriously one way or the other. What did we start on?

JAMES LEUTZE:

On women.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

The first woman was admitted to the campus in the early '20s.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Right, I think it was '21.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Jonathan and I had a vote on the campus. We ran the vote and it was against co-education and the next day the trustees, my father, Josephus Daniels and old Judge Parker, I remember, were members of the board executive committee. They approved women coming to the campus and the first woman admitted was a Chapel Hill girl. I don't remember her name but she was not particularly impressive from a looks standpoint or action, a great big woman, I remember. Terrible, terrible. And from then on, slowly, they were limited at first to Chapel Hill residents and then the door opened.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Why did you not want to see it co-educational? I would think boys would want to have girls on campus.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, we weren't interested in women to start with, and we liked what we had. I can't give you any other reason.

JAMES LEUTZE:

OK. Well, what things were you interested in? Obviously, sports were a big part of life, and fraternities were a big part of life.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Fraternities were a big part. There were fraternities and non-fraternities. And the non-fraternities were strong. I can remember going down to Battle or Ehringhaus or whatever the damn three dormitories down on Franklin Street were called. Sam Caffey and Mary Worsham were blind and we'd go down there and read to them, read their lesson to them—they lived there. We just didn't go off campus except to Franklin Street and I used to take boys home to Durham and mother always was happy to have somebody come over for supper or something like that and she called us "some awful eaters." [laughter] And I called them "soused after light." But you carry me way back, God knows.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, did people put much emphasis on academics at that time? You said you had lots of other fish to fry.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I don't remember particularly one way or the other. They put emphasis on athletics. Basketball didn't amount to too much and then again it did. Billy Carmichael, Sis Parry, and so forth, that was before Cartwright, the younger brother, came into the picture, a beautiful player. Billy was beautiful and it was just lovely to watch him. He used to play in the old Bynum gym. And we got up in the gallery, the track was up there. That's where we had our dances. And the social life was very important and we used to bring girls in later. They stayed with Mrs. Klutz, which is now a fraternity house on Franklin Street, a

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sorority house. And I remember vividly as a senior, I had an old automobile. I brought down a girl from Asheville, a great lovely looking gal, and I was engaged at that time to Mrs. Hill. At law school. We went to the fall dance and, this girl I had invited before I met Anne to the dance, she came to the dance and she said, "Yes, I see what has happened." [laughter] But, such is life. No, we paid a lot of attention to the dances, the German Club, and the Fall German and the Spring German, got all dressed up. The girls had one spot and the boys went to the girls instead of the way it is now where one boy and girl dance all night. We just mixed the deal.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, who were your great athletic rivals at that point?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Virginia, because it was before the days of Duke.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Duke doesn't come until '23, I guess it is.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And when Duke finally came into the picture we kind of looked down our noses. We went over to play on the old field. Duke was young.

JAMES LEUTZE:

But Virginia was the …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Virginia was—no question there—the big game. As I remember, Virginia was turned down by the faculty here because Johnson was on the Carolina team, played half-back, Runt Lowe, and God knows who, Bill Blount, and so forth, you remember. You know of Bill, went on to be president and chairman of Liggett & Myers. The game was called off. So a bunch of us got together and we brought Reinhart and the Virginia team down to Chapel Hill.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You mean independently?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah, hell yeah. And we had the game, and I remember sitting on the grass as manager. I had the receipts and so forth, and I remember sitting on the ground with two tin boxes full of money and counting. What was it—$16,000 or something like that? And Carolina beat Virginia 7 to nothing.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Would people travel between the campuses? Would they go up to Virginia for the Virginia game and Virginia students come down here?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah, yeah.

JAMES LEUTZE:

That must have been quite a haul from Charlottesville at that time.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah, it was terrible, terrible. No question. By automobile.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Or train, I guess on a train to Danville, Virginia, and then on up to Charlottesville.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Sure, sure. Take the old Southern. We'd go to Greensboro and go up on the Southern.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, what about some of the old professors that were here? Do you remember some of your professors and the people who …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah, very, very, well. Dr. Drew Patterson (I was just a member of the Patterson family) Mary Patterson, Howard of course, and they lived down on—hard to believe—corner on Franklin Street and Hillsborough. And I was in and out of there all the time. That group of four boys, took very handsome girls down to Bynum for a week-end. We had two canoes and four horses,

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three horses, or something. That was the time we were seniors; that was the old days. That was really a party.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now just one thing about parties. If you'll excuse me, in some ways life in those days sounds very unsophisticated in modern terms.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, I'd say so. We had fraternity parties and there was nothing untoward about them at all.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Were they chaperoned?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, hell, yes, of course. You took that for granted. And there was no monkey-business or foolishness at all in those days.

JAMES LEUTZE:

How about drinking? Was there a lot of drinking?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I remember hiring a cook by the little old cottage that I had that the four of us lived in in my sophomore year: Bill Guthrie and Emerson Tucker, John Shaw from Charlotte. And I remember Emerson Tucker from Durham, and Guthrie from Durham, getting drunk, and I remember chasing Tucker all over the campus because he said something I didn't like and I couldn't catch him. But he was drunk. And John and I did not drink, period; we never thought about drinking.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Some people did.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah. And I can remember Rick running into the fraternity house and standing there on the bottom of the steps (the stairway coming down), and knocking the hell out of anybody coming down the stairs drunk. He beat the hell out of them. I'd just knock them down. That's the way we controlled drinking.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, what about the university acting as some gauge of morality as far as the students were concerned? Did the university make any attempt in religious or other things to … ?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I don't remember any. No, the university ran itself. South Building. President Chase, long, tall, very distinguished man, and Charlie Woolen, business manager, he was the one I worked with as football sub-assistant, assistant and as manager.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Is that Woolen of Woolen Gym? Is that where that comes from?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah. Charlie Woolen and for many years I remember, oh yeah. And we used to take the football team to Yale every September on the train.

JAMES LEUTZE:

That would be a big trip.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

That was overnight. We'd get up there and they'd beat the hell out of us. That was in the days that Yale had a real football team. And I don't know why we went up there. And we went to New Orleans one year, played Tulane. But the rest of the time it was around here.

JAMES LEUTZE:

That brings up an interesting point. What was the image that you had of the university at that time? In other words, today, I mean, sometimes you hear "The University of North Carolina: The Harvard of the South." Did you look on yourself as an academic equal of places like Yale?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No. Never thought about it. We just went to class. And we went to class, I don't know when the kids go to college anymore? I have a step-daughter in Greensboro, a junior, she's

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coming home tonight. She'll be here 'til Sunday night, through Sunday night. She goes back to Greensboro early Monday morning. To hell with it!

JAMES LEUTZE:

You had classes on Saturday.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, sure. We started at eight o'clock and we went through, lab in the afternoon, and you finished up three to five o'clock and classes until twelve o'clock on Saturday. Sure, never thought about it otherwise. You worked like hell.

JAMES LEUTZE:

But you didn't really concern yourself about the national ranking of the university.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, never thought about it or gave a damn. There were only the three institutions at the time—Chapel Hill, Greensboro (and Greensboro was full of women and nobody paid any attention to it), and State College, oh we looked down our noses at State.

JAMES LEUTZE:

As a technical school? Was that how it was viewed?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, that was a "cow college" and dairy and what have you. And, oh, Chapel Hill was way up above them, no question about it. We played State in football because we had to. I don't remember the university administration participating, getting in the way of the school or the students getting in the way of the university, faculty.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, what about compulsory chapel, though? Wasn't there compulsory chapel at that time?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, sure, sure. Several times a week as I remember and it slowly petered out, eventually, after I left college.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Did you take chapel seriously?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, it was just one of those things you had to do. You didn't worry about it.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Alright, now your degree was in …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

A B.S. in commerce.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Commerce. What was a commerce degree like?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

That was the second [Interruption] . Dr. Dudley Carroll was the head man in the School of Business, and we were the second class, as I remember, to graduate. We had courses under Collier-Cobb, in geology, that was a "fool" course, as we called it; I mean, a very easy course.

JAMES LEUTZE:

A "slide," we would call it.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

When I was football manager, I attended two classes in geology and passed the course. I was football manager, what did they know? [laughter] That was Collier-Cobb. "What we are mainly because of where we are." You're bringing me back. Dudley Carroll used to say, "Well, now, gentlemen," it slipped me. He'd ask the questions in the fall and we would answer them; he'd ask us in the winter and we'd say, "Well, that all depends, Dr. Carroll." And he'd answer us "That all depends," and we gave it back to him, made him awful mad. He lived down on Laurel Hill Drive, right around the corner.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, did you have a sense at that time that you wanted to go into business? Was that clear to you that that's what you wanted to do?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah. After my hospitalization, I became very much interested in medicine. I used to stand on crutches and watch operations.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, this was when you came from Hotchkiss, right?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah, when I came back from Hotchkiss. I used to go watch the doctor's operate.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

JAMES LEUTZE:

Did you know that you wanted to go in business and you referred to the fact that you had been in the hospital and so on.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I developed an interest in medicine. My grandfather had built a hospital back in '95 and rebuilt it in 1907. My father was president.

JAMES LEUTZE:

This is a philosophical question in a sense having to do with philanthropic activity, why did he build a hospital?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

His wife had all kinds of troubles, kidney troubles, nephritis, cystitis, God knows what all else. And she went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He was born and raised in Baltimore. She was from Hagerstown. And his father was the first wholesaler of Bull Durham tobacco. He came down here in '75 and became the secretary-treasurer to W. Duke, Sons, and they added "and Company" for him. Old man Wash Duke, Ben, and Buck Duke. He owned a fourth of the old American Tobacco Trust and got out in 1913 so he wouldn't have to go to jail under the Sherman Antitrust Law.

JAMES LEUTZE:

It was broken up at that point.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

That's right. When it was broken back into its component parts. He built it because there was no hospital in Durham, for one thing. He built it where McPherson Hospital is

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today, and the central building is now on Buchanan Boulevard, been moved back down there. And there was a central building and two wings and a little surgery. It was a pest house in the minds of people in Durham and it took a long time, some years, before people would use it.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You said a pest house; how do you mean? You mean a place they didn't want to go in a sense?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

People didn't want to go to the hospital. And I say advisedly a pest house. It was a place where, if you had a bad disease or something, you went to die. Period. And old Dr. Carr, A. G. Carr, was their doctor and he was very instrumental in bringing the hospital into being. My grandfather built it, ran it, endowed it, and, you go back and look in the records as I did: thousand dollar debts, ten thousand dollar debts. Hell, that's all there was to it. Eventually it became the public hospital and he built another one in 1907. He built the Watts Hospital which is now the School of Science and Math. My father built it, my grandfather paid for it: the administration building, the surgery and one ward building. Men on one floor, women on the other; eventually another ward building was built. When he died, (was it '21 or something like that?) he left money for the Private Patient Pavilion which I built. I'd gotten into the hospital business by that time.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, was this done out of a sense of social responsibility? Why would he?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

My father walked in the office one day. I went to work in 1925 in my father's office, $250 a month; I lived on the

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corner of Jackson and Morehead. Negroes lived behind me. Ablekopf lived in a little store in front.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Ablekopf?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Isidore Ablekopf. Great friend of mine. His father ran a little grocery store on the northeast corner of Morehead Avenue (you know where that is?) and Jackson Street, which is one street over to the east from Duke Street. And we lived where the highrise is today on Duke Street. And the Lyons lived on the corner of Morehead and Duke. We lived this side of it, in the old house that had belonged to my grandfather. It had been built in 1875 when he came down here. When he rebuilt the "pink elephant" as I called the tremendous house that he built on the hill. It had been moved down wall by wall because they didn't know how to move a whole house. It had been rebuilt on the property when we came down from New York in 1903 or '04, or something like that. We moved into this house, my mother, eventually my sisters, and me.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now I was asking you about the question of social responsibility.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I was the only son. I had this interest in medicine, as I say. But there wasn't anything for me to do but go to work, go into business. Period.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now did your father impress that on you?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No. That was my decision. He owned the then Durham Loan and Trust Company and the Home Savings Bank, where Guaranty Bank is now. He had started Durham Loan and Trust Company when he came from New York. I went into the bank in 1925 without a

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title. It had a million and a quarter total resources. It's hard to believe. He owned the, when I say he owned, he was by far the majority stockholder, he owned the Home Savings Bank, which I combined with the Trust Company, by then, in 1931. When he came down from New York he went to Mr. Pierce, who was the then cashier and said he had bought the Home Savings Bank. And Pierce said, "You see the sidewalk out there? Well, you ought to go out there and lose your lunch because it's busted." It was busted. It was a million and a half and all the big guns, Lindsay and Carr and so forth, had borrowed all the money and hadn't paid it back. So he went to work and made them pay. And eventually, it was a going bank. We combined it. We had the bank holiday in '31.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Alright, well, I've lost a couple of years in your life here. Now, you graduated from college in 1922.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I took two years law and I graduated Chapel Hill and I was the youngest man in my class. And I never thought about it one way or the other. I missed Phi Beta Kappa because I busted the hell out of accounting. [laughter] One course I failed and then I went ahead and passed it. Brother Peacock was the teacher.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, you obviously were intelligent enough to pass the course. You obviously don't have too much trouble dealing with the figures. Why did you fail the course?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Then I studied law because my father was a lawyer. And I wanted the law. And as I said, I passed the bar in August, I didn't have but a two-year course.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So that's August of '24.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I went through the summer school in law and passed the bar. I was the second man to leave the law exam in the old Supreme Court building and I thought I'd busted the hell out of it. But I went on to Asheville, I caught the sleeper to Ashville, I was engaged by that time, and I told my wife-to-be when I got there, I said, "I busted the hell out of it." She said, "Well, we're going to get married September the 24th, the invitations are out, already engraved," in those days. And I said, "Well." It was not in the actual paper the morning that I arrived in Asheville. My name was not there.

JAMES LEUTZE:

On the list of those who had passed, you mean?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Uh-huh (affirmative). So finally I had sense enough to call the News and Observer in Raleigh. Mr. Daniels was still the head of it, as I remember. Frank was running it. And they said they had not published the names west of Greensboro, but I had passed. So we got married.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So did you practice law?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

$52 and a half. I quit.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now what does that mean? You're going to have to explain that.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, I collected one note for $400, I won't tell you the name. The note was past due. The statute of limitations had run against it and I wrote one letter and collected the $400 note from a man and I charged him $52 and a half. Period. That was the extent of my law practice. [laughter]

JAMES LEUTZE:

That was enough for you.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Got married.

JAMES LEUTZE:

OK. Now, you got married in …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

September 24, 1924.

JAMES LEUTZE:

'24. That was in Asheville? Did you get married in Asheville?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, it was in Baltimore because she was the daughter of the Reverend Duncan McCullouch who owned Oldfield School for Girls, one of the great old girls' schools, and it's still a non-coeducational, still a girls' school, thereby hangs a looonnngggg [laughter] history!

JAMES LEUTZE:

So you were married in Baltimore?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

In Baltimore. And I remember the church vividly. It was an Episcopal church and it had flags on both sides of the chancel all the way down, all the way through. It was beautiful. It looked like old European.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, were you an Episcopalian?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Presbyterian. Congenital Presbyterian. My grandfather had come down here as a Lutheran and there was no Lutheran church so he went into the Presbyterian church, the nearest thing to it. And he became ruling elder for 25 years, and Superintendent of the Sunday school for 25 years; a great churchman. And my father followed him as eventually an elder. And I declined to be elder because I wanted to take a drink. [laughter] So I served as a deacon.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You should have been an Episcopalian. Then you wouldn't have had to worry about it.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I married two Episcopalians.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So this was the Baltimore of H. L. Mencken at this point, a very aristocratic community, with many German-Americans represented in Baltimore at that time, and a sophisticated community. Was it not?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, Baltimore was a very sophisticated place. That was before all the development that Rouse did down in the harbor and so forth. My grandfather's family lived out at Catonville, out on the southwest suburb of Baltimore; had a farm. I remember as a kid going up there. Watts Carr, Sr. used to go up there every summer. I went there as a kid twelve, thirteen. And they had Guernsey cows, had a very fine herd of Guernsey cows, where I fell in love with the Guernseys.

JAMES LEUTZE:

I was going to say. That's where the Quail Roost Guernsey herd has its origins.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I brought some of the three titters and one-eyed cows down from up there at the time of the dispersal sale.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, where did you meet your wife? Your wife is from Baltimore, you're from …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

My sister and my wife and Margaret Carr, Claiborne Carr's daughter, granddaughter of old General Carr, thereby hangs a tale. He was corporal in the Army, the Confederate Army, and he came home and declared himself to be a general. And he was known as General Carr from then on.

JAMES LEUTZE:

I thought people just claimed they were colonels?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Don't you put that in the transcript!

JAMES LEUTZE:

No.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

But, you ought to know that. But they all were—Marcia Davenport, the writer—they were all members of the senior class at Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. You've heard of Shipley School?

JAMES LEUTZE:

Oh, yes.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And my sister must have had, or some of the girls claimed that she had, trouble getting a beau for the spring dances, so she invited her brother. I went up there. God knows when that was; that was '23, I reckon. And I went there and we had two dances, card dances in those days. Two dances with the gal—Anne McCullouch—who became my wife. I caught the milk train out of Philadelphia down here and went to class the next morning and she was invited home in Durham by my sister immediately after Christmas. So she came down. We were engaged ten days later and I said, I remember vividly, what I said, I asked her to marry me and she was "so and so," and I said, "I'll give 'til tomorrow. I'm going to put you on a train tomorrow night for Baltimore," where her home was, out in the country, "and I want to know by tomorrow." Period. So I found out later that she sat up all that night and talked with my sister's governess and told me the next morning that she would marry me.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Let me ask you a personal question about yourself. That implies a certain amount of … what term do I want to use? … of decisiveness on your part. In other words, it didn't take you very long to make up your mind and then when you made up your mind you wanted an answer. Would you describe

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yourself as a decisive person? Is that a secret to your success in a way? Or a secret to your personality?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah, yeah. I've been that way all my life, I reckon.

JAMES LEUTZE:

OK, so you make up your mind what you want and you go out and get it. And that's it.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah. Sure. No need fiddling about it. I have no stress. I learned a long time ago my present wife is stressful, things bother her, she's much younger, she's 57 or 58 or something, her second marriage and my second marriage, but she gets all tied up in knots. I just kind of go along minding my own damn business. Always have. And stress can tear you all to pieces.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So when you make a decision you put aside, you don't sort of go back and mull over it and say maybe, maybe, maybe.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, no, no, no.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Are you a risk taker? If you make up your mind quickly there's a certain amount of risk involved.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Life is full of risks. In the banking business you've got to know what you're doing for one thing, and you make up your mind if you want to do it. Period.

JAMES LEUTZE:

And do you make mistakes that way?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, sure.

JAMES LEUTZE:

What do you do about your mistakes?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, you try to correct them. Eventually, I was a vice-president, and eventually president, and then chairman of the board, you see that on my curriculum vitae. And I'm still

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chairman; they elect me chairman of the board every year for a term of one year only. So I've got to be a good boy. But it's gone on for, I reckon, thirty years.

JAMES LEUTZE:

One more question on this issue of personal style. What about dealing with subordinates? Do you give a subordinate a lot of room to make decisions and to make mistakes?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Sure, sure, sure. Got to. I have always followed the general principle that I listen first what his thought might be. Then we discuss the situation and we decide. He may decide, I may decide. That's that. Go on about his business.

JAMES LEUTZE:

And so you give your subordinates plenty of room.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I listen. I'm considered one of the best listeners in Durham. And I don't pat myself on the back about that, but I mean that's just one way of doing things.

JAMES LEUTZE:

One wonders, though, where does this sense of confidence come from? That you can make up your mind quickly and that you can put your mistakes behind you? Where does this sense of confidence come from?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, my grandfather was a confident man, for one thing, tall, slender, six-foot-two. And he used to walk me to school at the old Morehead Grammar School, down Jackson, middle of the street. He'd stroll right out and I'd keep up with him. And I'd lean over and he'd hit me in the back. "Straighten up," I can remember, "straighten up, you little devil, straighten up." He never cussed or anything like that. He smoked cigars. I learned something there. And I was very much disturbed when the family would send the carriage for me or send me to school on a

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rainy day with a carriage or send for me, I was set apart from other people. I didn't like that, at all. Town carriage, it was brought back from New York. I don't remember my father telling me what to do or what not to do. I just have no memory of that.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So, maybe you absorbed in a sense a personal style.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I think so. He used to come home and talk to us at the table and tell us what had happened, and so forth. I'll never forget one thing he told us. My two sistes were gaga when he said he knew a preacher was coming to see him and wanted a thousand dollars, which was big money in those days. To make a long story short, he met him at the door with five dollars cash and handed it to him, patted him on the back, and the preacher went away happy. That was big doings as far as we were just kids. I don't know how old we were.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now as an example, although it violates chronology a little bit, I want to go back for a second to your college career. You said you built the SAE house. What do you mean by that?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, I was in charge. I selected the architect, I followed the architect, I told him what to do. Atwood and Nash had—I forget now who built the damn thing. Got the contractor, followed the contractor, paid for it, did the financing. I remember it didn't cost more than $25,000, something like that.

JAMES LEUTZE:

But you took a lot of responsibility.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I was responsible. Period. I didn't ask anybody. I just built it.

JAMES LEUTZE:

OK. It's incredible to think of a nineteen or twenty year old taking the responsibility for building a $25,000 building which, as they say, was real money at that point.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

In those days. Well. When I came home after ten months overseas honeymoon, thereby hangs a story.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Yeah, I want to hear about that.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

One of the first things my father did was say, "I wish you'd build a store building," which is now occupied by Rolls, or was; God knows what's there now on Main Street. So, I got an architect, contractor, and we built a three-story limestone front building. It was a hell of a nice building. He had organized Tilley's store, put them in there and they went bust. And it took me eighteen months to clean the damn mess up and lease it to somebody else. That was one of the first jobs I ever had.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Did your father lean over your shoulder on a project like that and say, "Well, let me see the drawings and let me be sure that I like that," and so on, and so on, and so on. He let you do it.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

He had his office in the northwest corner of the Trust Building, which he had built when he came down from New York. It was the first real office building built in North Carolina, 1903-04. Then the secretary's office, then I had an office. And my grandfather was across the hall.

JAMES LEUTZE:

And you were accepted as a decision-making participant in the process, then?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, I was told, I was asked, not told, I was asked to do so and so and I did it. Period.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Alright, we'll conclude this in a moment but tell me about this honeymoon that you went on.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

My father was a very generous man. And he asked me, he said, "I wish you would look at your grandfather's," my grandfather had died, "situation in South Korea. And I have business that I'd like you to attend to in Shanghai. Would you like to go to Korea and Shanghai on your honeymoon?" I said, "Well, that's pretty damn good." But we discussed it with my wife to be and we decided, fine. We got to Shanghai.

JAMES LEUTZE:

How did you go? How did you travel?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

By boat.

JAMES LEUTZE:

So you had to take the train across the country?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

We went to New York, got married in Baltimore and went to New York; spent the night; caught one of the American Line boats that had a small number of passengers, a freight ship, that kept going around the world. Every few weeks another would go around. We went to Havana, spent two days in Havana. Went on through the Panama Canal. Came around to Los Angeles.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now was this a kind of luxury liner?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, no, no, no. It was a passenger-freighter in those days. Oh, there might be thirty passengers and upper and lower berth, simple. They stopped for two days in Havana for freight and so forth and went to Panama, to Los Angeles. I had flu in Los Angeles so we left the boat. Were there for two weeks.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Los Angeles was a small town in those days, was it not?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, it was a good size.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Really?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I remember we stayed the night at the Ambassador Hotel, and we stayed there two weeks. It damn near broke me. The Ambassador was the hotel in those days. Then we went on to San Francisco. We went to Santa Barbara by automobile, and went to San Francisco and we caught another one of those boats to Hawaii. We were in Hawaii three or four days, and so forth. I was recuperating. Went to Japan. We got to Japan shortly after the earthquake had destroyed Yokahama. And we landed at Yokahama and I remember my wife getting in a rickshaw. "Gone in the darkness."

JAMES LEUTZE:

You thought you'd lost her, right?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I thought so. But eventually she showed up.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was destruction from the earthquake still obvious?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah. The steps to the American Embassy, or consulate, or whatever it was—there were three steps, I remember vividly. Period. Cement something. A whole side of the hill had come in. Oh, it was something. It wasn't far from Tokyo. We went on to Tokyo and the Imperial Hotel, which had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright—earthquake-proof.

JAMES LEUTZE:

It sort of floated.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And spread all over the hill. And there we met a gal who was the first white girl born (thirty-three years before) in Japan. The wife of Trustcon Steel people, I can't remember the name. I thought about it the other day. And she gave us use of

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of a car and chauffeur. We rode all over Tokyo and we went up to Kyoto and the shrines. We came back and we went over on the west coast of Japan and took a boat that went to Pusan; Pusan in those days, I think it was called, in Korea. Overnight and, oh, we were in Japan for ten days or more. And we caught the train to Seoul. And I remember it was like an American parlor car except it had a long seat on both sides. And a Japanese plenipotentiary came aboard at some stop with his man all dressed up in cut-away, and he took off every damn thing, stood there naked as a jaybird, and we were sitting across on the other bench. We looked at him and his man said nothing.

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JAMES LEUTZE:

… Japan at that time, so you were something of an oddity, I assume.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I had on knickers, the kind that went over the knee. I remember walking along and seeing little Japanese boys kneeling down and looking up under my coat, and times we stopped so they could see what the hell I had on. Quite a feeling.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You describe the scene on the railroad car [Interruption]

JAMES LEUTZE:

The scene of seeing this gentleman nude. So you went to Seoul.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Went to Seoul. A missionary met us in a car, a Ford, and he had a missionary woman with him. The two girls sat on the back seat. I sat on the front seat with this missionary and we drove down to Taiden and on down to Sungchun and Kwanchu on the west coast, became mountainous. And he was driving through the mountain country and talking to the back seat and just driving ahead and finally I took the damn wheel, got him out of the way, the preacher. We got to Sungchun or Kwanchu, I don't remember which it was. My grandfather had established a medical missionary station there and had a one-armed doctor, he lost an arm shooting "gwoog" (pheasants), as they called them, and they had a little native hospital, a big Japanese hospital, a very big building, and no Korean would go to the Japanese hospital.

JAMES LEUTZE:

How did he happen to establish a hospital in Korea? That was a very distant land.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, the church was interested in Korea.

JAMES LEUTZE:

The Presbyterian church?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

This was the Presbyterian church, the First Presbyterian Church of Durham. And, I don't know, somebody talked him into building a little hospital, a medical clinic, and they preached and took care of the patients, all together. And the preachers came from over here in Richmond, Union Theological Seminary, southerners. I remember Anne and I coming back to the church eventually in Durham and talking to the congregation at night service, Sunday night, in which we lambasted the preachers, both of us. And we said they weren't worth a damn. But they'd preach the gospel, yes, but it was not what you and I would like. But the medical side of it was marvelous and they were doing a great job of developing Christians.

JAMES LEUTZE:

And serving the medical needs of the area.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And this preacher had seven children. And I remember a great big bed and the baseboard was far away from the floor, and you could lay there and see the old Koreans going by in their white long gown aand black horsehair hat. And I heard a knock on the door and the amah, the maid, said we'd better get up and I looked out the other way and I saw the four-holer with seven kids lined up waiting to get into the four-holer. And I said, "Yeah, I thought we better get up."

JAMES LEUTZE:

The bathroom was in heavy demand at that point.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And we stayed there two or three days and then caught the boat and went to Shanghai and stayed in the Astor Hotel, the only hotel in Shanghai in those days, 1925.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Along the "bund" as it was called?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Along the bund. And I remember when we first started upstairs there was a China boy laying across the threshold. By that time I had picked up enough Pidgeon English, so I said, "What you do, boy?" He said, "Me key boy." I can remember it vividly. He reached up on the top of the lintel, got the key, opened the door, and laid down beside the door. And that was it.

JAMES LEUTZE:

That was his job, was to open the door and watch the key.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And then a knock came on the door, that's while we were unpacking, and I said, "What you do?" "Me give miss bath." I said, "No, sorry." But he drew the tub and she took a bath. The water, when you pulled the plug in the tub, the water ran down the side of the room through a little channel and out on the sidewalk. The "john" worked.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Shanghai interests me as an international community; were you aware of that?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

We were sent by this girl, the first white girl born in Japan, to her sister, who was Mrs. Atkinson, the wife of the "number one" man in Shanghai, Standard Oil. Call him the mayor, or whatnot, he was "it." She sent us to her sister [Interruption]

JAMES LEUTZE:

We were talking about the international community in …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

The Bund was filled with sampans. And they lived on the sampans, some of them never got off the sampan.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was the British presence very obvious there?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yes, no question. And there was no problem. We went out to Crow's antique shop. The day after we were there the irregular troops came in and tore it all to hell. We could not go to Peking, as we wanted to, on the Blue train, because the irregulars stopped the train every so often and killed everybody, and what the hell.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was the revolution very apparent in China at that time? I mean the disruptions…

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, not particularly, but when we went aboard the ship to sail to Hong Kong, we went in a hail of bullets.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You're kidding?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I'm not kidding you.

JAMES LEUTZE:

The irregulars were shooting?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yeah. Oh, hell, nobody paid too much attention to it one way or the other. We didn't bother.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Did you have the sense of a society coming apart? Of the dynasty not able to maintain? Things went smoothly at that time.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

The rickshaws, no automobiles. You went by rickshaw.

JAMES LEUTZE:

But you felt relatively safe, secure, as a foreigner.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I never thought about it, as I remember thinking back on it.

JAMES LEUTZE:

We had an Asiatic fleet there, there was a ship that sometimes came to Shanghai. Did you ever see any American military presence in either Japan or China?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I eventually knew at Virginia Beach a retired naval officer who was the ensign, the only naval officer, American, in the Far East, when he was an ensign on the Yangtzee River.

JAMES LEUTZE:

There were patrol boats, they had, river patrol boats. An author from here in Chapel Hill wrote a book called The Sand Pebbles, in fact, about the Yangtzee patrol boats and what they did in the '20s and '30s and what life was like.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

The name of Julian Timberlake.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Then from Shanghai, where did you go?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

We went to Hong Kong and it was quite a city, very, very British, controlled by the British. I don't remember the hotel or anything but it was nothing to compare to what you see now from photographs. And we went to Canton on the riverboat and came back. And then we went from Hong Kong to Bangkok by boat and we spent a week in Bangkok. We spent a week any damn place we wanted.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You had a photograph in there of Pnom Phen.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

That was—I have to stop and think a minute—French Indochina. We went from Bangkok to French Indochina, as I remember, or may be beforehand. Now Vietnam, we went to Pnom Phen first. And, oh, yeah. We went down south, we caught a little bitty boat, a little bitty thing. And I used to go swimming off the boat with a very big fat Chinese captain. We got into Bangkok eventually. And we went on from Bangkok to Calcutta, up to Darjeeling, and that's where we met the Irish golf champion, woman, a long story there. And we went on to Ceylon, that's where we met her, in Ceylon. And then we caught the boat from

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Colombo, Ceylon, to Port Said or Suez, I don't know which it was now. We had a mutiny on board.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Oh, really?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah. American officers, the same boat.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Line, the American Line.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I sat in the dining room with an American officer with a drawn pistol for three days.

JAMES LEUTZE:

What did your wife do? Did she stay in her cabin or what?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, no, we just … You meet certain things and you handle them and you just go on about your business. The Chinese crew had been attacked by the Filipino stewards, or vice versa. They had been playing Fantan on the stern of the ship and a Filipino blew them up or messed them up. The China steward, a great big fellow (the same one who we'd had across the Pacific, the same boat), he said, "Missy, lock door tonight." We'd just had a curtain to get the breeze, never air conditioning in those days. We were in Cairo, Luxor, Kharnak. Eventually we ended up in Rome, and that's where mother sent us a cable that she was sailing on the Aquitania, such and such a date, meet her in London, period. We met her in London. I had cabled my father from Cairo to send me three thousand dollars. Well, he did, but he took it out of my savings account. I had $3.61, I found, when I got home. [laughter] That was typical of Dad.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, how long did this whole trip take?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Ten months.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Ten months.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And we met mother. We were going to spend the summer in Europe. We were there. And we met her in London and we came back with my two sisters on the Aquitania.

JAMES LEUTZE:

From London.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

From London. Southampton. That was in June or July.

JAMES LEUTZE:

What a trip!

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

It was a gorgeous trip, to tell you the truth. But we had enough money saved from the return trip, Shanghai back to New York, to go the other way. We stretched it out, except for that three thousand dollars.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, what would you say was the long term influence on your life of that trip? Did it influence and your view of the world?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, one, the memories. Two, we had a hell of a good time. We had twenty-eight pieces of baggage including two golf bags, and I never touched them from the time we got on the boat in New York til I got back. [laughter] In those days there were porters; you handle your own damn baggage now.

JAMES LEUTZE:

You can't find a porter now. Now, I'm trying to get a sense of what it was like. Did you dress for dinner at this time?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No. We dressed in Darjeeling. I took a dinner coat, of course, and Darjeeling was the only place that had a British custom. This was a rest camp up in the mountains, Darjeeling. Some, no we didn't dress in Colombo. Well, it was a fascinating trip and the memories, I haven't thought about the trip for a long time, but a lot of things come back and there'll be more

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once I start thinking about it, I reckon. But it gave you a sense, an understanding of a whole lot of things that happened and I read a lot, magazines, articles, Newsweek, and Time, and Fortune, and so on. But you've been there and it's different. It's completely changed. And it hasn't changed.

JAMES LEUTZE:

I'm jumping ahead in a sense in thinking about your involvement in international affairs at the time of the Second World War and wondering whether this trip gave a sense of the world that was somewhat different from that of your colleagues that were …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, I think so, without any question. I was a member of the "Committee to Defend America through Aid to the Allies" prior to the war, the Second World War. And I worked like a dog for that and I had the southern aspect of it. And I remember Hodding Carter. My job was to persuade people, newspapers, writers, and stuff, to change from isolationist to interventionist. And I went on then, it eventually turned into something requiring that I go to New York every so often. Oh, that damn train was just back and forth, before the days of planes. And to New York, I can't think of that man's name who's the head of the thing; we used to meet at the old University Club, a group of us. Herbert Agar. We threw Bob Allen out because he talked. We had confidential intelligence, British and Fench intelligence, and I think we did a job.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Well, I want to go into that on a next visit.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]

JAMES LEUTZE:

We left off last time, I think we were up to the mid-1920s and talking about your marriage and your honeymoon and your coming back and more or less getting started in business.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

In 1926.

JAMES LEUTZE:

'26.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

'25, the fall of '25.

JAMES LEUTZE:

What was Durham like in 1925?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

A little town. That's about all.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was it a center of commerce?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, no, no. It was, I don't quite know how to describe it. American and Liggett & Myers tobacco companies, real manufacturing, then Imperial Tobacco, had a receiving station where… The tobacco market was a real thing in Durham in those days, four or five big warehouses and the farmers brought their tobacco in and the tobacco companies bought it. Imperial bought a lot of tobacco and shipped it to England, it being one of the companies that Mr. Buck Duke had organized back in the early days of the first few years of the century. And when he had gone to England and took over several British concerns and organized the Imperial Tobacco Company to handle England, and American Tobacco to handle North America, and the British—American Tobacco Company to handle the rest of the world. He thought big. [laughter] And there were quite a number of smaller handlers of tobacco at that time. The Erwin Mill was in full force, and one of the great sheeting mills, the largest

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sheeting mill in the world, is still in Durham and is operating. It has just been sold, I believe, by Burlington to Stevens recently. Durham Manufacturing Company was another one in east Durham; that was handled by Mr. Harper Erwin. Bill Erwin was the president of Erwin Mills. My grandfather was vice-president 'til his death and then my father became vice-president. I went on the board to serve for thirty years, or something, on the board of directors. But tobacco companies, tobacco manufacturing and textiles were the business of Durham.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was it a company town, in a sense?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Yes, the Erwin Mill owned a great many houses, small houses, three or four rooms, all in a row, all out in west Durham. And the same thing applied to the Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company, that's the proper name, had similar houses in east Durham. And East Durham was filled with textile workers; West Durham was textile and the tobacco workers were scattered all over in Durham. Durham was 50,000 people or something like that at the time, whereas now it's 125,000.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now what about the black community in Durham?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

The black community was strong. It's always been strong as far as I can remember in that now they're 45 percent or something like that of the population of Durham. But then it was far less. They have a much higher birth rate than the whites and all kinds of problems.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Was there a black elite? A black business and intellectual elite?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

There was a black bank that was started by the doctors, Dr. Spalding came into the picture. Spalding started the insurance company, the North Carolina Mutual, which became the largest Negro life insurance company in the world and still here. Some of his descendants and relatives and so on are still running it, Kennedy and so on. But it was a shirt-tail of a business to start with. And I remember my grandfather and father assisted Dr. Merrick and one other man to start the company; they put up some money and showed them how to do it and so forth, and then they went on their own. Grandfather and Dad have never had any part in the operation at all and eventually the North Carolina Mutual became one of the outstanding businesses in Durham as represented by a building that's fifteen or twenty stories high on the old Ben Duke home place. They bought that block and built it. There's a long story about that building but that's that.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Were there any of the Duke family members still in Durham at that time?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Buck Duke was, and Ben Duke was, in the old Fidelity Bank. And when my father first came here, and I may have said so before, that they did not pay interest on savings accounts and my father had a real fight with them because he started what's now the Central Carolina Bank, it was then Durham Loan and Trust Company and Durham Realty and Insurance Company in the old Trust Building. And he paid 4 percent interest on savings accounts regardless of whether people came in and demanded it or asked for it and so forth. And Mr. Buck Duke, Buck and Ben were in the

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Fidelity Bank, controlled it at least, and they were vice-president and president. And, as my father said, they almost ran him out on a rail out of town because he paid interest. He thought that was fair and that was proper and that was his way of doing business and eventually Fidelity Bank, which was the Duke bank and the bank in Durham at the time, eventually they started paying interest. You had to go in and demand it before they'd pay it. And it's interesting that in 1937, I think it was, when we built the office building, I built, which is now the CCB Building, that we had reached roughly ten million dollars of total assets. That was a lot of money in those days. And the Fidelity Bank was the same and we were passing, we were slowly creeping up on the Fidelity Bank and so they joined, or merged, into the Wachovia. Mr. John Wiley was the president and Mr. Kirkland later took his place when Wiley died. They all lived over on the Morehead Hill section, the Wileys, the Whites, the Moreheads, the Watts, the Hills, and so forth; that was the section of town. My father, when he came to town or shortly thereafter, organized the first real estate residential development in Durham, which is now known as Club Boulevard, from the water works east to Watts Hospital, and now the Science and Math complex.

JAMES LEUTZE:

I used to live on 2133 West Club Boulevard, the house that Walter Biggs built. So I know that.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, yeah, yeah. Walter became a member of the city council and then he had an unfortunate situation.

JAMES LEUTZE:

His son got in… Well, anyhow …

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

That's another story.

JAMES LEUTZE:

We'll have to take that off the tape. I'll tell you, I heard a funny story, I think it was Ben Duke that it was attributed to, that somebody, that Duke was going with a woman of loose morals and some member of the family got him aside and said, "You can't do this, it's hurting the reputation of the family. That woman has slept with every man in Durham." And he thought for a moment and he said, "Well, Durham's not such a big town." [laughter]

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

I never heard that one.

JAMES LEUTZE:

I'm not sure. I think it may be apocryphal.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, I think so because Ben Duke was—he looked like Disraeli, almost, was little and, not shriveled up or anything like that but he was very delicate looking, whereas Buck Duke was [with exaggeration] great, big, full, great, big stomach, tough.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Country boy; well, I mean, they were country people for a long time.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Oh, sure, they were country people. Old Wash Duke lived out in what is now the Duke Homestead on the northern portion of Durham. They had the tobacco barns. And he started in about, as I said last time, building the hogsheads and so on, had a belly on them so that they could roll them to Wilmington to ship the tobacco to England. But the troops that were stationed here just west of Durham two or three miles out at the end of the Civil War, broke into the tobacco barns and stole the tobacco. That's how the tobacco business got started. They scattered all over the United States, then they wrote back for some of that

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"good Durham tobacco," basically chewing tobacco, in those days. And Washington Duke and his two sons were smart enough to take advantage of the opportunity that they started and so forth and out of that grew the tobacco industry—American Tobacco Trust, Liggett, Philip—Morris, and what have you, Lorillard, and so forth. But Durham was a small community except for the tobacco and textiles and eventually Mr. Wright came into the picture. He had something to do with the American Tobacco Company and he also was helpful in developing the Bon Sac cigarette machine to make cigarettes by machinery whereas they had been rolled by hand. They brought a bunch of Spaniards over here to roll them by hand. They didn't have any cigar manufacture because that was a different type of tobacco; that was Kentucky. And they called the tobacco "Virginia" tobacco for some reason, God only knows. But it was basically North Carolina tobacco all the way through, brightleaf.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Sounds like a Virginia plot.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Well, it was very typical of Virginia. They'd take the full credit for everything. North Carolina in those days was known as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit, "— Virginia and South Carolina. Of course, South Carolina had been settled a long time ago and Virginia had the Cavaliers. And North Carolina was settled by the third and fourth sons that didn't have a cent. They'd come over from England and the Moravians and various and sundry different groups of people, the Germans.

JAMES LEUTZE:

The Valdesians.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And so forth. So we had a working group fo people in North Carolina in the early days and they did a good job.

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, was Durham considered to be a center of commerce for all of North Carolina at that time?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

No, I wouldn't say a center of manufacturing of those two, tobacco and textiles, but old Raleigh looked down on Durham. Raleigh was the center—the state capital and so forth—and Hillsborough had been the capital back in late Revolutionary days, and they looked down their nose. Everybody looked down their nose at Durham. They didn't do that in Winston-Salem, for some reason. Greensboro was a little town. Winston-Salem was in the tobacco business; Reynolds was just blooming like a rose. But old Durham was the fourth or fifth town; it was a town, it wasn't a city. Raleigh was leading, Charlotte, Asheville, now Durham was what number five or six in the state. No. I can remember walking to school, public school, that was back in 19—well, I graduated in 1917, and so that was, I skipped two classes, so that was 1907 or something—we used to walk to grammar school and then went on to high school which is now the Durham Art Council building. But you never thought about it one way or the other. The big houses were on Morehead and the little houses were east Durham and west Durham and the middle houses were on Dillard Street. Now Dillard was where General Carr had a big, almost a, well I'd call it a gingerbread house, a tremendous damn thing on the corner of Main and Dillard and eventually Mr. Toms's home, where the bus station is now in Durham. Main Street was—my uncle, Isham Hill had a reasonably small house on Main

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Street. Claiborne Carr, a son of the general, was on Main Street. Then Austin Carr, his younger brother, was in Durham opposite my father's home, which was built in 1913. Claiborne was head of the Durham Hosiery Mill, was quite a hosier