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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
C-0047, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
George Watts Hill, born in 1901, spent most of his childhood growing up in Durham, North Carolina. In 1918, Hill attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He describes what life was like in that college community during the early twentieth century. Hill left UNC in 1924 after finishing both a bachelor's degree and a law degree. After his marriage and subsequent ten-month honeymoon trip through parts of Asia and Europe in 1925, Hill returned to Durham, determined to continue in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather, both of whom had by that time become pillars of the business community in Durham. Hill describes how his family was responsible for the building of two hospitals in Durham and his father had begun to make a name for himself in banking, have established the Durham Loan and Trust Company (which later became Central Carolina Bank). Because of his perspective from a position of business leadership, Hill is able to offer a unique description of the development of Durham as a center of commerce during the early twentieth century. He describes the roles of various leaders in the area, such as C. C. Spaulding and members of the Duke family, and he discusses the impact of the tobacco and textile industries on the community's growth. During the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s he pursued various business endeavors, notably in insurance and banking. He helped to found various insurance organizations in Durham, paving the way for the establishment and growth of North Carolina Blue/Cross Blue Shield. Simultaneously, he worked with his father to build their banking enterprises, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, they were in a position to offer loans to smaller banks, thus ensuring their economic survival. During World War II, Hill left North Carolina in order to work for the Office of Strategic Services. When he returned in 1945, he picked up his business endeavors where he had left off. To those efforts he added further forays into land and business development. During the 1950s, he was a prominent figure in the development and rapid growth of the Research Triangle Park. In addition, he tried his hand at dairy farming. Throughout the interview, Hill focuses on descriptions of business leadership and formulas for economic success. In addition, he addresses such issues as balancing work and family, the importance of public service (such as his work with the UNC Board of Trustees), and changing ways of life in Durham and its surrounding areas.
George Watts Hill was a prominent business leader in the Durham area during the twentieth century. He offers his perspective on the changing nature of business and its impact on the community. In particular, he describes his business endeavors in such areas as banking, insurance, land development, dairy farming, and public service.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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.
It wasn't until '53 or '55 that I was elected to the board of trustees, I don't remember exactly.
No, I want to deal with your college days.
Oh, college.
Let's start there.
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.
But scholastically, you were third in your class. Why did you go to Hotchkiss for more academic preparation?
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.
Was this because of your knee?
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.
You didn't faint!
No, I didn't faint that time.
This would have been the winter of 1917?
'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.
Now is Cooup, spelled c-o-o-u-p as in …
C-double o-p.
C-double o-p.
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.
The first house burned?
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.
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?
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.
OK, you're going to have to explain that.
Student Army Training Corps, or something like that.
Did they have an ROTC?
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?
Uh-huh (affirmative)
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.
So now, these were men who were in military training.
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!"
Now, the non-SATC, you did military training of some nature, is that right?
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.
Did you march?
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.
Was there pacifism on campus?
No, not the slightest. Everybody was gung ho, going to Europe.
Very patriotic.
Oh, hell, yeah, no question about it.
How did you feel about President Wilson, for instance, in a specific sense?
Oh, I don't remember any thought one way or the other.
How about about the issue of the League of Nations? Was that a topic?
Nobody gave a damn.
Nobody cared about that.
We were going to go to fight. Period.
So were you disappointed in a sense when the war was over and you were cheated?
Yes and no. We didn't know what we were doing to ourselves.
Now, did you know people like Sam Ervin? Did you have friends who were participating in the conflict?
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.
Alright, what about the atmosphere on campus at this time? What was Chapel Hill like?
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.
Now, if I remember correctly, the first women came to campus in 1921 or '22. Is that correct?
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?
On women.
The first woman was admitted to the campus in the early '20s.
Right, I think it was '21.
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.
Why did you not want to see it co-educational? I would think boys would want to have girls on campus.
Well, we weren't interested in women to start with, and we liked what we had. I can't give you any other reason.
OK. Well, what things were you interested in? Obviously, sports were a big part of life, and fraternities were a big part of life.
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."
Now, did people put much emphasis on academics at that time? You said you had lots of other fish to fry.
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
Now, who were your great athletic rivals at that point?
Virginia, because it was before the days of Duke.
Duke doesn't come until '23, I guess it is.
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.
But Virginia was the …
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.
You mean independently?
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.
Would people travel between the campuses? Would they go up to Virginia for the Virginia game and Virginia students come down here?
Yeah, yeah.
That must have been quite a haul from Charlottesville at that time.
Oh, yeah, it was terrible, terrible. No question. By automobile.
Or train, I guess on a train to Danville, Virginia, and then on up to Charlottesville.
Sure, sure. Take the old Southern. We'd go to Greensboro and go up on the Southern.
Now, what about some of the old professors that were here? Do you remember some of your professors and the people who …
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,
Now just one thing about parties. If you'll excuse me, in some ways life in those days sounds very unsophisticated in modern terms.
Well, I'd say so. We had fraternity parties and there was nothing untoward about them at all.
Were they chaperoned?
Oh, hell, yes, of course. You took that for granted. And there was no monkey-business or foolishness at all in those days.
How about drinking? Was there a lot of drinking?
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.
Some people did.
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.
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 … ?
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.
Is that Woolen of Woolen Gym? Is that where that comes from?
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.
That would be a big trip.
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.
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?
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
You had classes on Saturday.
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.
But you didn't really concern yourself about the national ranking of the university.
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.
As a technical school? Was that how it was viewed?
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.
Now, what about compulsory chapel, though? Wasn't there compulsory chapel at that time?
Oh, sure, sure. Several times a week as I remember and it slowly petered out, eventually, after I left college.
Did you take chapel seriously?
No, it was just one of those things you had to do. You didn't worry about it.
Alright, now your degree was in …
A B.S. in commerce.
Commerce. What was a commerce degree like?
That was the second
A "slide," we would call it.
When I was football manager, I attended two classes in geology and passed
the course. I was football manager, what did they know?
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?
Yeah. After my hospitalization, I became very much interested in medicine. I used to stand on crutches and watch operations.
Now, this was when you came from Hotchkiss, right?
Yeah, when I came back from Hotchkiss. I used to go watch the doctor's operate.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
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.
I developed an interest in medicine. My grandfather had built a hospital back in '95 and rebuilt it in 1907. My father was president.
This is a philosophical question in a sense having to do with philanthropic activity, why did he build a hospital?
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.
It was broken up at that point.
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
You said a pest house; how do you mean? You mean a place they didn't want to go in a sense?
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.
Now, was this done out of a sense of social responsibility? Why would he?
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
Ablekopf?
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.
Now I was asking you about the question of social responsibility.
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.
Now did your father impress that on you?
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
Alright, well, I've lost a couple of years in your life here. Now, you graduated from college in 1922.
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.
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?
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.
So that's August of '24.
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.
On the list of those who had passed, you mean?
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.
So did you practice law?
$52 and a half. I quit.
Now what does that mean? You're going to have to explain that.
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.
That was enough for you.
Got married.
OK. Now, you got married in …
September 24, 1924.
'24. That was in Asheville? Did you get married in Asheville?
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
So you were married in Baltimore?
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.
Now, were you an Episcopalian?
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.
You should have been an Episcopalian. Then you wouldn't have had to worry about it.
I married two Episcopalians.
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?
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.
I was going to say. That's where the Quail Roost Guernsey herd has its origins.
I brought some of the three titters and one-eyed cows down from up there at the time of the dispersal sale.
Now, where did you meet your wife? Your wife is from Baltimore, you're from …
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.
I thought people just claimed they were colonels?
Don't you put that in the transcript!
No.
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?
Oh, yes.
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.
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
Yeah, yeah. I've been that way all my life, I reckon.
OK, so you make up your mind what you want and you go out and get it. And that's it.
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.
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.
Oh, no, no, no.
Are you a risk taker? If you make up your mind quickly there's a certain amount of risk involved.
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.
And do you make mistakes that way?
Oh, sure.
What do you do about your mistakes?
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
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?
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.
And so you give your subordinates plenty of room.
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.
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?
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
So, maybe you absorbed in a sense a personal style.
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.
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?
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.
But you took a lot of responsibility.
I was responsible. Period. I didn't ask anybody. I just built it.
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.
In those days. Well. When I came home after ten months overseas honeymoon, thereby hangs a story.
Yeah, I want to hear about that.
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.
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.
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.
And you were accepted as a decision-making participant in the process, then?
Well, I was told, I was asked, not told, I was asked to do so and so and I did it. Period.
Alright, we'll conclude this in a moment but tell me about this honeymoon that you went on.
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.
How did you go? How did you travel?
By boat.
So you had to take the train across the country?
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.
Now was this a kind of luxury liner?
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.
Los Angeles was a small town in those days, was it not?
No, it was a good size.
Really?
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."
You thought you'd lost her, right?
I thought so. But eventually she showed up.
Was destruction from the earthquake still obvious?
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.
It sort of floated.
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
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
… Japan at that time, so you were something of an oddity, I assume.
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.
You describe the scene on the railroad car
The scene of seeing this gentleman nude. So you went to Seoul.
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.
How did he happen to establish a hospital in Korea? That was a very distant land.
Well, the church was interested in Korea.
The Presbyterian church?
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.
And serving the medical needs of the area.
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."
The bathroom was in heavy demand at that point.
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.
Along the "bund" as it was called?
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.
That was his job, was to open the door and watch the key.
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.
Shanghai interests me as an international community; were you aware of that?
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
We were talking about the international community in …
The Bund was filled with sampans. And they lived on the sampans, some of them never got off the sampan.
Was the British presence very obvious there?
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.
Was the revolution very apparent in China at that time? I mean the disruptions…
No, not particularly, but when we went aboard the ship to sail to Hong Kong, we went in a hail of bullets.
You're kidding?
I'm not kidding you.
The irregulars were shooting?
Yeah. Oh, hell, nobody paid too much attention to it one way or the other. We didn't bother.
Did you have the sense of a society coming apart? Of the dynasty not able to maintain? Things went smoothly at that time.
The rickshaws, no automobiles. You went by rickshaw.
But you felt relatively safe, secure, as a foreigner.
I never thought about it, as I remember thinking back on it.
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?
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.
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.
The name of Julian Timberlake.
Then from Shanghai, where did you go?
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.
You had a photograph in there of Pnom Phen.
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
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah. American officers, the same boat.
Line, the American Line.
I sat in the dining room with an American officer with a drawn pistol for three days.
What did your wife do? Did she stay in her cabin or what?
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.
Now, how long did this whole trip take?
Ten months.
Ten months.
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.
From London.
From London. Southampton. That was in June or July.
What a trip!
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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 …
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.
Well, I want to go into that on a next visit.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
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.
In 1926.