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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-0062, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Isabella Cannon moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, during the mid-1930s and became an active member of the community through her involvement in the United Church of Christ. Cannon explains how the United Church was particularly involved in matters of the community and served as a collective advocate for civil rights issues. Later in the 1950s and 1960s, she became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement through her activities with the church. In this interview, she describes her participation on the speakers committee, which brought in the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Norman Thomas, and Eleanor Roosevelt; her relationship with African Americans in the community; her role in developing Raleigh Integrated Church Housing (RICH); and her thoughts on school desegregation, particularly busing. Cannon also discusses her political involvement at the local precinct level in describing her leadership role on the Citizen's Advisor Council (CAC) and her growing concern with the impact of Raleigh's rapid growth during the 1970s. In 1977, Cannon decided to run for mayor, campaigning on a platform that emphasized a long-range comprehensive plan for developing Raleigh while maintaining some of its historical and natural elements. At the age of 73, Cannon was elected as the first woman mayor of Raleigh. During her two-year term, Cannon worked vigorously to bring her plan to fruition. At the time of the interview in 1989, Cannon was pleased with the continuation of many of her accomplishments. Here, she discusses bringing Raleigh into compliance with North Carolina laws, her revision of the City Code, and community advocacy as the accomplishments she was most proud of. In addition, she describes some of the obstacles she dealt with during her years in office. In particular, she describes the problems she had with the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) administration—which she describes as a "good old boy" network—and some of the challenges to her efforts to embrace policies of affirmative action in local government. Finally, Cannon briefly reflects on the role of women in positions of leadership.
Elected in 1977 at the age of 1973, Isabella Cannon was the first female mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina. In this interview, Cannon describes her involvement in the United Church of Christ, her support of and participation in the civil rights movement, and her advocacy of community revitalization and development. In addition, she recalls her major accomplishments as mayor and the challenges she faced in implementing her long-range comprehensive plan for the city.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Kathryn Nasstrom interviewing Isabella Cannon for the Southern Oral History Program on June 27, 1989. On the phone, I mentioned to you my interest in women and politics in North Carolina, so the thing that first comes to mind is your time as mayor of Raleigh, but if we can, I'd like to look at the years before that and to talk about your political activities there. I know from a conversation I had with Vivian Irving that you were quite active in the civil rights movement in North Carolina.
Oh yes.
I'd like, now, to first talk about what sorts of activities and organizations you were involved with in terms of civil rights.
I was a very active member of the United Church of Christ, which was a leader in the civil rights movement. Do you have this? Is it all right?
I'm just adjusting the dials as we go along.
O.K. We were instrumental in bringing some of the real activists to
Raleigh, including Martin Luther King. We had Norman Thomas, which was a
shock to some people, Eleanor Roosevelt, and for several years, I was on
the committee that helped to get speakers. I was also treasurer of that
group, and we were leaders for the very first time in having dinners
where black and white could sit down and eat together. We had a dinner
every week, which created a great deal of concern among some areas in
Raleigh. It also had a great deal of support, and the
And what's the name of that black church?
Laodicea Church. We also had one member who went to the First Baptist
Church. Now, there are two First Baptist Churches downtown, but she
became a member for several years of the First Baptist Church which was
primarily the black church. We've always cooperated with
them. We have things that happen together. Our choirs work together; we
have meetings together.
What year was it that you arrived in Raleigh?
That was in the mid-thirties. It would have to be, oh, thirty-five probably, long about there.
Another interest of mine is in looking at the years before the 1960's in terms of civil rights, because I'm going to take it that the marches that you've been referring to and the integration activities were in the early 1960's.
That's right.
Do you recall any kinds of activities that you would consider to be related to civil rights before 1960, organizations that were talking about these issues that you were involved in, anything along those lines?
I seem to blur that in with the activities that the United Church did. I
find that difficult to sort out. I think I
It seems, from what you've said so far, then that, in some ways, the inspiration for your interest in working for civil rights came from your church, and then some of these formative experiences in you earlier years travelling and that sort of thing.
Yes, that's right.
Do you trace any other, maybe the words is roots or wellsprings, for this kind of interest in civil rights?
I don't think so. I don't believe that I do. Maybe
it would take some thinking to dig that out. I've lived such
a long time, some of these things I forget.
I would say just from my talking with other people, over and over, these churches that you've mentioned, that Vivian Irving mentioned, those certainly did seem to be a focal point for many people.
I think that they were. I think they were the leaders, and the United
Church and, for instance, there were five of us who came together to
form the RICH community, Raleigh's Integrated Housing. I
don't remember what the "C" is for, but it
was Church Housing, yes. We started this at Method with day care and
with integrated housing, and we did a lot to support that financially
when the church really didn't have financial
If you would, I'd like you to speak a little bit about the people in the black community that you were involved with and that interaction and that relationship. Certainly Vivian Irving would be one, but if there are other people that, from the vantage point now, you look back on this period and recollect them as being important to you and the movement.
That gets difficult for me to bring, I'd need something to trigger my thinking on who some of them were. I'm not sure that I can help on this, couldn't say much about that. I've always been involved with the people at St. Augustine's and, to an extent, at Shaw University. I've been out and in the end there, and Dr. Robinson at St. Augustine's, but he comes later in my thinking there. Certainly Vivian's family was important to me, her mother, her father, her sister, all of them have been very important to me, but I'm not sure I can bring out some other names. I'm sorry.
That's fine. The other thing, then, that I'm interested in too is the evolution of the civil rights movement over time. The activities that we've spoken of so far, I think, took place mostly in the early 1960's to maybe mid 1960's. How do you trace, in terms of your own involvement and your own activities, the civil rights movement into the late 60's and early 1970's?
I'm not quite sure which area you're taking me. I'm not sure.
Yes, I'll try to put it another way. In my looking into how the civil rights movement evolved in different communities in North Carolina, in some cases, the issues changed as we went into the late 60's and early 1970's. Some things became less important and other things became more important. Different leaders might have emerged. Different organizations might have become more important in the later period of the movement. Do you have a recollection of that or, in your mind, does it all hang together in one aspect.
I'm going to need some help on going back into things to help
trigger the thinking. I think if I got just a clue to trigger, I could
come up with some of these things. One of the things that I do know that
is important, but I can't put a date on it, was when Al
Adams—he was very active in the Democratic Party and set up
something extremely important, registration for voting in every library
in Raleigh. Prior to that time, people had to go to a lot of trouble to
get registered to vote, and this was a deterrent, particularly to the
black community. It was a deterrent to anybody to have to hunt up a
registrar, have to go at certain times. You could go at any time, every
area had a registrar, and you could go there, but every library in Wake
County—he was Wake County Chair of the Democratic
Party—every library had somebody trained and the papers there
to register. Well, this was an important thing in spreading the voting,
taking it away from being so heavily white to bringing it into
I think that does take us into the later period, sometime past '65.
Yes, I think so. I'm not doing well on going back into that period. I have to get something to trigger my thinking better. I'm sorry!
No, that's O.K. because this is your recollection of that time.
I think if I got the right trigger, I could come up with more things. I just have got to get the orientation, the trigger that would bring those, and I haven't hit on it yet.
One thing I will ask you about, because other people I have interviewed have spoken about the school integration aspect, which would then have really been in the late 60's and early 70's, later than the sort of voter registration drives you've just described. Do you have a recollection of how your neighborhood or Raleigh in general responded to the court orders for desegregation.
Of course, there was a lot of opposition to it, but it always made sense
to me, and I was not really involved with that. I'm more
involved with the schools now than I had been, but I was not
particularly involved with the schools, and of course, the problems
became so difficult when the need for busing arose, and the opposition
arose to busing, but busing was the only way that integration could be
resolved. I live close to Oberlin, which was a wonderful black community
that is disappearing, and one
Well, if need be, we'll come back and do it at that point.
I had not thought about that sort of thing that I've got to dig it out of the layers of memory.
That's fine. No problem. We can come back to it if we feel the
need to.
Again, I'd have to go back to the United Church. They opened
up to me the importance of being a citizen and an involved citizen, and
I began to get involved in the political things, particularly in the
Democratic Party to attend precinct meetings, and in the early
70's, the revenue sharing mandated that the cities had to set
up these neighborhood organizations, which in Raleigh we called
Citizen's Advisory Councils, known as CAC's. This
was a very good thing for me to become involved in. I had
It certainly seems that way in the sense that what I've picked up reading articles about you, and that sort of thing, is that those kinds of activities were your spring board into your running for Mayor.
That's right, and they still are terribly important to me. Our
CAC in this area is not, at the moment, very active, but I have been
instrumental in forming and being very active in some other neighborhood
organizations. I organized in the neighborhood here—I
wasn't the only one, there were several of
us—organized the University Park Homeowners Association
because we have a very vulnerable area close to N.C. State University,
and we're feeling the tremendous impact from the growth of
N.C. State University and the effect it was having on our lives. Later,
when the new Chancellor came, I was able to talk to some of the people
on the, some of the Deans and the faculty at N.C. State and to help get
established to bring before the new Chancellor the need for a liaison
committee between the neighborhood and the University, which is somewhat
less active than it was, but has also had an impact on Hillsborough
Street. Our University Park Homeowners Association has been extremely
active, and we will, indeed, this fall, once more, have a
candidate's forum, which is usually the most highly-attended,
the best-attended forum, of any of the political activities in the city.
So these were avenues besides the CAC and, of course, I am also, was two
years ago, Chairman
What were some key issues for the CAC that you were involved in before you ran for Mayor? What things stand out in your mind from this vantage point as having been key issues?
These things tend to blur. It's very difficult for me to put a date on some of them, particularly zoning issues. The efforts here in the neighborhood, again, with the impact of N. C. State's growth and the fact that N. C. State did not provide housing, nor eating places, nor parking, and the fact that people were buying beautiful old homes they had paid maybe five thousand dollars for, and somebody came along and offered them fifty, and they're elderly and [they said], "Oh my!" you know, and turning them into undesirable residences. Hillsborough Street began to change from being a beautiful street with trees and a median and lovely homes into a rather shabby street with fast food places, and our constant efforts to try to keep it from deteriorating to that extent. Now, we're trying to bring it back, and there has been some progress, but it's still a continuing problem, but to identify it, I don't know how to put dates on these things. I don't know how to do it prior to being Mayor. I think I would have to go to some of my records to identify that.
It might also be that they spread out over this whole period, and I may be asking you to make delineations that just might not be there.
Yes, they're not easy for me to make. I think I could do that
by going to my files. I think that by looking at my files, I could
identify them in time periods, but so many of the issues tend to repeat:
the zoning issues. We had a meeting last
Well, it's important too that, because those records exist in your files at the Southern Historical Collection, so then what's interesting now is, in your recollection, it's a continuum of interests and activities.
Yes, it is a continuum.
I would like though, and I gather from what we were talking about before, that if we move now into talking about your time as Mayor, there are key issues that you recall in those years as being important to your activities.
Oh yes.
So would you take a moment to outline what those are and describe them?
I ran on a platform I'm very proud of. We were trying to, and
I guess this ties in with some of your earlier questions, you see, I
need the trigger to bring me to the earlier thinking.
I'm sorry. What was his name?
Smedes York, who then succeeded me as Mayor, is still very active in the
community, a very wealthy family, big developers, an old Raleigh family.
So he had the background, the knowledge, young, active, and on the City
Council, and also an active developer. We met for a year. It was like
lightning bolts between the two gropus. Oh, the difficulty of the
meetings was incredible. We did come through with a plan, which is still
quoted as if it were the Bible—Raleigh's long
range comprehensive plan. It was rough; it was general. We could not
bring it down to details or we would have gotten no document whatever.
When I gave it to the City Council, that was in early
You mentioned that through all the political wrangling about it, what came out…
It was immense.
… During your term as Mayor was a general plan and yet it's still in some ways being used now.
My favorite quote about it is [that], "It's quoted
like the Bible, and then people do like they do with the Bible. They
Are you pleased or disappointed with how it's evolved over
time because, I would say then, it's been ten years since you
all produced it?
It's the clock that my father gave to my mother for their New Year's gift in 1902.
It's beautiful. I should say now, with ten years of it being in place and people using it, are you satisfied with it?
No.
What are your disappointments?
Well, I have seen violations of it. They establish one thing and
then—for instance, shopping centers were supposed to be a
minimum of a mile apart. The Council tends to find reasons not to do
that. There are too many shopping centers. We have gone out very far,
and we've had a lot of input by developers on the Council
that they can go out and buy land. No one on the Council put it that a
possible extension of the important thing—sewer and water.
You can't build a shopping center, a hotel without having
that. They've gone out, and they've spread out too
far. The Councils have let them spread out. We are too scattered all
over the map, and when people talk about mass transportation, this is
one of the problems of it. So, there have been some things that have
deeply disappointed me. There have been some things that have been good.
The zoning does not just breeze through the Council. They have set up a
plan.
In hindsight, what's that phrase, "When you have twenty-twenty hindsight," after the fact, you know what you would have done differently.
Yes.
Do you think, in setting up the original plan in '78-79, you could have done something different, or do you feel that was the best you could have done?
No, that was the only thing we could do. If you could just visualize the immensity of the anger between the two groups, to get anything produced and to be able to get a document is important. I'm very, very pleased with what we did. It wasn't perfect, but it was a good beginning.
So it's been more the implementation that has been what concerns you?
Oh yes. As I said to the Council, as I said a few days ago, "The
implementation of this depends on the decisions that you, the City
Council members, make." And sometimes their decisions have been
too much influenced by money growth. I'm upset, now
here's one great thing that was recently done, a study of the
Umstead Park area. Protection of that, I thought, was going to be good.
This week, this City Council, saying they're
neighborhood-oriented, is going to permit sixty percent of the area
adjacent to it be built up and run over, and our environmentalists are
just shocked. This is a gem; we need to
Too many things to try to manage all at once.
Well, there isn't that much time, and the demands of citizens are great, rightly so, but it is difficult for somebody to be a business person having a job and be a City Council member and give any time to family. I was able to give so much time because I have no family. I could be down at City Hall in the morning at eight o'clock and stay until midnight. It was all right.
Which I know you did.
That's right. And the police would be so wonderful to me. They said, "Do you want somebody to meet you at your house and see you get in safely?" And I'd say yes, and they were wonderful to me. There were also some other accomplishments, but go ahead. You may want to ask more about this.
Actually, I do, but I'm going to check our tape here.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Among the things that I am very pleased to have been influential in was
bringing our city charter in compliance with the state of North
Carolina. Those who are technicians, those who study municipalities,
know that this was probably the most important thing that I did. There
was opposition in the previous Council by one person, by the Mayor. The
Council went to the legislative delegation, though, of course, the
Legislature is the one that has to say "yes" or
"no" that the city's charter is in
compliance, and when they went to the delegation, to the Wake County
delegation, the Mayor objected. The other Council members were all for
it. We spent a lot of money. We spent about $25,000 on legal
fees, getting all the kinks worked out, and the proper documents
prepared. So, of course, the Legislature turned it down unless it was
totally unanimous, and particularly with the Mayor objecting. So this
was one thing that I did. The groundwork had been done. I can really
claim very little credit except the thinking that we needed to do it and
saying, "O.K.
And I'll show my ignorance as an average citizen. Why is it an important decision?
Well, nothing that you're doing is legal. You don't
have a driver's license, if you don't register
your property, you see. All of the things that relate to the state and
the
How long had Raleigh been out of compliance?
I really don't know how long we'd been out of
compliance. It became a factor in my awareness when I was going down to
City Hall so much, and then when it was turned down, I was really
outraged. Another thing I started, and that we consistently keep
complaining about, is that the City Code is not kept up-to-date. One of
the things I said to the City Manager, who sets up the agenda for the
Council meetings is that we need, especially our workshop meetings, that
we needed to—it's not just the public meetings
that the Council has, but they have workshop meetings—that we
needed to get on with this revision of the City Code. The City Code
actually changes every time the Council meets. Every time
there's a new ordinance, there's a change, but
there were a great many things that were out of actual usage, and
it's so boring, it's so detailed, and the Council
started, and it would be like a group working on bylaws.
They'd pick at every word, and the time went by, and we got
maybe one or two things, and there were big thick notebooks full of
these things. So, for a while, the City Manager would put it on the last
item, when everybody was tired, and I said "Uh uh.
You're putting this on the first item when we are fresh, and
we will work on it." Well, they worked too long on it. They got
fed up with it, so finally [we] just did sort of a sweeping
Please do.
O.K. One of my big problems was CETA, and I'm not sure that I
want to go into too much detail on that. You have immense records on
CETA, but CETA was one of the most controversial things and caused me
more problems than anything, and it, too, is forgotten now by citizens.
You say, "CETA" and they have no idea what
you're talking of. It was the Comprehensive Employment
Training Act, and the man who was in charge of it simply never brought
any of the stuff to the City Council. Yet I, as Mayor, was signing
millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of contracts and
felt responsibility. I did not know enough about it. It was very
complex. The CETA regulations changed almost weekly between Washington
and Atlanta, so I finally had a real confrontation with the City Manager
and with the Head of CETA, that every contract had to be brought before
the City Council and approved by them because they involved city
responsibility, city money, and this was done with a real battle.
I'm not sure that I need to go into that. It was pretty bad,
and there were a lot of personal things that happened to me that were
I think so. I'd encourage you to because I think of your note that I saw in one of the files to the effect that a lot of the clippings didn't really get at the nuances of the situation, and I think it would be good to document some of those.
I would probably need to look at some of those to refresh my memory on
them, but I was not part of the "good old boy"
network. The Council members as a whole knew each other, and
we'd get to a Council meeting, and they'd go off
for lunch or they'd go off to a meeting, and I would be
alone. There was one other woman on the Council, a very wonderful woman,
Miriam Block, who continued on the Council for many years and has been a
very, very fine friend of mine. Frequently, Miriam—she was
also a neighborhood-oriented type person—frequently Miriam
would support me in the voting. Often the vote was six to two. The Mayor
must vote, incidentally. Everybody must vote, unless they're
excused for some reason. If somebody had property that was involved in a
decision, they could ask to be excused, but if they were going to be
away from the City, could not be present, they could ask to be excused.
Otherwise, their vote was registered as a "yes" vote,
and so, their vote was counted, unless they were excused. So,
frequently, the votes would go, particularly on zoning cases and
neighborhood things, would go, frequently, six to two, but often seven
to one. Sometimes Miriam did not go along with my thinking. She was an
immense support to
But from how you tell it, very symbolic.
Yes, it was totally that you never expected a small, five foot female, or
male for that matter, to be the Mayor. Among the things I did, and
you're particularly interested in some of the things that
relate to women, were the first female fire fighters. I had a real
battle with the administration on that. We were taking in people as
beginning fire fighters, and there was no intermediate step for them
between that and becoming a driver. When a position as a driver, and
very few of those, when a position as a driver became vacant,
you'd have maybe forty, fifty, sixty people and only one
could be chosen. There was urgent, and we'd lose a lot of
those that we had spent money
Well, actually, I found this interesting, the affirmative action in city government programs, and am I right in concluding from what you've said that if you hadn't been there pushing for these things, then the status quo would have remained the same?
There would have been some [change]. I added some impetus. Immediately
after I went in, I went into office in December, and in January,
affirmative action came back at us. We were out of compliance. If we
didn't get in compliance, it was going to cost us some
fourteen million dollars. Immediately, we set up mechanisms, albeit with
a lot of opposition to it, but here was this money. We had to get in
compliance. We were just dreadfully out of compliance with the
affirmative action, and the
Does it take someone in the position, say, of the Mayor or the City Manager to very actively be going after affirmative action, otherwise it gets stuck in this middle ground?
Yes. It has to be more the Mayor than the City Manager. The City Council
employs three people: the Clerk, who
Is it possible to answer this question, very general, of what would it take to get women, and then you were mentioning blacks too, past the "A Train" into these very top level positions? Is that too general a question or do you have a sense of what it would take to accomplish this?
No, I think it's a question that most of us wrestle with in
many areas. For instance, N. C. State, the federal government came down
on N. C. State. They looked at the salary levels and saw that the levels
are incredibly poor. The differentiation between women and men, not at
only N.C. State, at Chapel Hill. It's even worse at Chapel
Hill. The number of women who are heads of departments, we can go
farther to our University system. There is not a woman head. There has
been a woman at the one that you'd associate women more with,
the one at Winston Salem, but there has been only one woman head at
How did that happen?
He just persuaded the Council to do that. If I'd had that
month, I would have won, but see, now, our election is this October.
It's always October now. There was a lot of rhetoric about
that, that if you had a run-off in November, it ran it too late into
the, too close to the City Council. They take office the first Tuesday
in December. A lot of rhetoric there on that, but basically, if I had
had that month, I would have won because I did not work at being a
candidate that summer. It suddenly dawned on me, was I going to run? I
didn't know if I was going to run again. Being Mayor had its
wonderful moments, but it had a lot of rough moments. I really suffered.
I had no idea of the personal attacks I would have on me, including from
some of the older community. "Why don't you stay
home where an old lady like you belongs?" I'm not an
old lady! I don't care what age I am, I'm not an
old lady. I was not prepared for some of that. Some
So that when you call it a mistake, in having the location placed there, is that right?
And using that beautiful building. It should have been used in a
different way. But perhaps that was what the times called for at that
point. So I don't carry too heavy a load of
The thing that's running through my mind is that we started
out talking about the accomplishments, especially with the comprehensive
plan and the things that were pleasing to you
Well, usually you talk about the good things, you see, and usually a reporter or interviewer is not going to be that much in depth. And naturally you want to talk about the good stuff.
Oh, absolutely. But I wonder too then if you would think about, if the comprehensive plan was the thing that pleased you the most as you look back on it, what things or if there's one thing, stand out as the most disappointing to you?
Well, I think the comprehensive plan is both the best and the most
disappointing. Very few things in life are totally, one hundred percent
black or white. And I think the comprehensive plan is really something
I'm so proud of, but the implementation of it has been oh, so
disappointing to me, and the proliferation of things like developments
and shopping centers and that sort of thing. We have far too many and
too little control on those, things like the Umstead Park and the recent
impact on that, which I was not involved in. I shouldn't
count that as part of my [term]. I had nothing to do with that. I really
think that the Sir Walter is a mistake that we made. I don't
see in looking back that I could have done other than go along with it,
because the immense pressures and the need for the housing versus that
the place was closed. It was not operating. You see it was just sitting
there, and it was difficult to see the future on that. I had anxiety
about it when it was going through the council, but I wish that had been
a different
Meaning a citizen that was often coming down.
That was coming in and opposing, particularly talking about housing projects. It's a lot easier to govern a city if you don't have a lot of citizen input. If the manager and the council and the mayor can say, "Okay, this is what we're going to do," and they do it, but if you get citizens and citizen meetings, a hundred people gathering and vociferous. I've gone down, quite recently, to city hall where the whole city council chamber, and the citizens had misunderstood what it was, and cried, "Communist," and "This is not Russia." And it is not easy to control a meeting, I don't mean control, but to handle a meeting and have it be productive. The council is under pressure, too, to respond. There are more requests for council members to attend citizen meetings, more times to meet in the council. You've got greater involvement of both city members and council members. I don't know what the answer is, but it is geared, it is very difficult for citizens.
And I imagine it is specially troublesome to you, given your commitments, your reason for running for mayor in the first place was to turn these things back to the citizens.
I go down now and I'll be upset. I went down recently to a
hearing, gosh, what was it about, and the place was full. And I knew, I
looked at people, I saw people who were opposed to what was being said.
I had not planned to speak. I finally got up and spoke. I was the only
one who spoke on that side. It was this meeting where they had all this
yelling about communism, so I went there. It was misunderstood by the
citizens, but it was not right that all of those, afterwards I said,
"Why didn't you speak? Why didn't you get
up and speak?" Oh, Isabella, "You said (
What was the issue, do you recall, that was being discussed?
If I'm not mistaken, I think it was the one, which was very
touchy, about the expansion of churches and control of churches in the
neighborhood. Where I live there are thirteen churches. We have constant
battles with them of buying property which removes it from the city
rolls, the tax rolls, the county rolls, and either tearing it down for
the parking lot, and it's almost impossible to fight a church
on a parking lot. And we had some areas around here that are just
horrible. There are just nice homes, nice neighbors that have gone. But
the churches were down there saying, "Oh, they can't
control us." Part of this proposed ordinance was to say that
they could go only to a certain height and they thought that included
steeples. It did