Louis Philip Trutter Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

University of Illinois at Springfield
Norris L Brookens Library
Archives/Special Collections
Louis Philip Trutter Memoir
T777. Trutter, Louis Philip (1913-2000)
Memoir
82 pp.
Trutter, architect, discusses his family history, growing up in Springfield, job at
Producers Dairy, everyday life in the 1920s and 30s, Lake Springfield, attendance
at the University of Illinois, architectual work, designing schools, designing for
the handicapped, courtship and marriage, creating jigsaw puzzles, and world
travels.
Interview by Eugenia Eberle, 1995
OPEN
Archives/Special Collections LIB 144
University of Illinois at Springfield
One University Plaza, MS BRK 140
Springfield IL 62703-5407
© 1995, University of Illinois Board of Trustees

PHILIP LOUIS TRUTTER
MEMOIR
Architect
COPYRIGHT 0 1995 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT SPRINGFIELD
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means,
electronic ox mechanical, including photocopying and recording or by any infowon storage or
retrieval system without permission in writing from the archives of the Univmity~f Illinois at
Springfield,

ARCWES
OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF UINOIS AT SPRINGFIELD
Assignment of Rights
For and in consideration of research, management and archival services provided by The
University of Illinois at Springfield. We the Narrator and the Interviewer do each hereby assign
and transfer to this institution the right, title, and interest which we may have in taped interviews
done under the auspices of the Archives of the University of Illinois at Springfkld.
This assignment includes the transfer of all right, title, and interest in all tapes used, the contents
recorded on said tapes, all transcripts and copies of said tapes and tape contew heretofore or
hereafter made, and all documents appended thereto, including all rights of publication, public
distribution, licensing, copyright, donation, and reproduction.
This assignment is made subject to the followiing conditions:
The Narrator reserves the right to review the edited transcript and make any aplendments,
deletions or additions he or she chooses prior to final typing and publication.
Interviewer
Address
Date
-

PREFACE
I
This manuscript is the product of tape-recorded interviews with retired ArchiQct, Philip Louis
Twtter, and conducted by Eugenia Eberle for the archives of the the University of Illinois at
Spring6eld.
Philip Louis Tmtter was born in 1913. He gaduated form the University of glinois School of
Architecture in 1938 and began working for Henry HeImle and Carl Meyer before opening his
own practice. He is also known for many schools thought Illinois, his local shools include:
Sacred Heart/ CkifYu, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the Ben Fr- Middle
Schools. He has been internationally recognized for the "cottage" design for t)e Hope School. A
strong supporter of the Springfield Art Association for which he designed the@dition, he has
been an ardent participant in the art programs since he was a small boy and canthues to look
forward to each session, He has been internationally recognized, also, for his inticate jig-saw
puzzles and creative art works. Mr. Trutter iravelled extensively throughout $le world with his
wife and recaps his experiences.. He retired in 1945.
Mr. Trutter was married to Kitty Wilms, now deceased, and is the father of tx+ns Marilyn and
Caroline, has three grandchildren, and is the brother of John Trutter of Chica$o.
Eugenia Eberle was raised in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and matriculated with ~n, athletic
scholarship to the Women's College of the University of Virginia. She earned her BA degree in
Wistory and is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Public History with em&asis on Oral
Elistory at UIS. This activity has earned her two awards from the Illinois Stat$ Historical Society,
She gained experience as a journalist writing for the Arab News and gathered Folk and Fairy
Tales for translations into English while living for six years in Riyadh, Saudi Plvrabia with her
husband, Professor of Pediatric Orthopaedic Surgery at SIU School of Medicine. She has been
active in a broad range of civic activities both in San Francisco and Albuquerque, where she
served on museum boards, fund raising, and in the development of the Audub~n Canyon Ranch,
an environmental enclave in Marin County. She is the mother of four grown Wdren,
Readers of this ord history memoir should bear in mind that it is a transcript af the spoken word
and that the interviewer, nmator, and editor sought to preserve the informal conversational style
that is inherent in such historical sources. The Universtiy of lllinois at Springfi(e1d is not
responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir nor for the views express4 therein, these are
for the reader to judge.
The manuscript may be read, quoted and cited freely. It may not be reproducttd in whole or in
part by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the archive$ of the
University of Illinois at Springbld.

CATALOGUE
Trutter, Philip Louis (1913 - 1
Born and raised in Springfield, Illinois. A graduated of Springfield High Schoq, Springfield
College, he recieved his degree in Architecture fxom the University of Dhois 31938. He is best
lolown for his school designs throughout Illinois. Local schools are Griffin, Thqmas Je&rson,
George Washington and the Ben Franklin Middle School. He is internationally tecognized far
designing the Hope School "cottage system" and an ardent supporter of the Sp$nacld Art
Association for which he designed the addition. He recalls "Old Springfield" a 4 elaborates on his
travels throughout the world.
Project: Pbilip Louis Trutter
Tntenkwd by Eugenia Eberle
Open: Open
May 23,25, August 3,9, If, 18,1995
kngth: 4 hours
82 pages

Louis Philip Trutter. Architect. May 23,25, August 3,9 15,18,1995 in his hqpme at 1033 West
Vine Street, Springfield, Tllinois, 62704.
Eugenia Eberle, Interviewer
Q. Phil, maybe you can begin by telling me where you were born.
A. Oh that's. . . yes, I'm the apple that hasn't fallen very far from the tree, (Chuckle). I was born
at 838 South ILlinois Street, from there . . .I was born there on July 2, 1913.
Q. Where's Illinois Street? Does it still exist?
A. Oh, it's right over here, as he points North. South Grand which used to be, I mean
MacArthur used to be West Grand. We had West Grand, South Grand, North Grand and Bast
Grand and it got too confusing because you had West Grand, you had Southwst Grand and you
had Northwest Grand (chuckle) and then you had South Grand and you still have it and you still
have it and then you had West south Grand and. , ,anyway you moved over to, . . Illinois Street is
just west of MacArthur. You go to English, Douglas, Illinois, Park, or Lincdn and then Park.
Q. Well, you haven't rolled very far!
A. No, so I went from there, 838 Illinois over to 822 South MacArther today. It was then
Southwest Grand, and fiom there to 1120 Williams Boulevard, (Chuckle). That's the house that
mother and dad built. Harvey Stephens lives in it today.
Q. That's a darling house.
A. We moved there in 19. . .we went to MacArthw in about 1915 and then over to Williams
Boulevard, mother and dad built that about 1924. Carl Meyer was the architect, by the way, and
he did most of the houses around here, and then from there, there was a war which intervened and
stuff and now I'm at 1033 West Vine.
Q. So you haven't moved in between? Did you and your wife live and bring your children up on
Williams Boulevard?
A. NO, no no. We were married during the war. I
Q, So where did you live with your wife and family?
A. Here. We moved in here. . .we came home from Dayton, Ohio. We were ~arried in
Evanston, and then I was working for the air forces, . .

Q. We'll get to that.
A. . . .but by the way, Kitty's aunt built this house in 1923. She had no childreq and when s b
died she left it to Kitty, and Kitty had it rented during the war. Her aunt died about 1936 or 7 and
she rented it and the war came along and, I don't how how deep you want mq to go on. My
father died in 19. , .
Q. Tell me about your father. We'll get back to your childhood.
A. My father was the. , ,where do we start? Let's get his father here fist. Hexame from
Germany and he was one of the boys that came over here right after the Civil Var. His name was
Louis Trutter, and they came. . .these kids all got out of Germany about 1867. mat was right
after the war, and Bismarck was consolidating all the little principalities into what was going to
become hssia, so he got 'em all together so they could start another Franco-Wssian war, and
my grandfather, like all the other kids, were sick and tired of fighting with the Elrench and so on.
He was a teenager and so these kids all came over here and they had some relalives who were
already here and so they wound up in Sprin&eld.
Q. By ship?
Q, Do you how the name of the ship?
A. No, haven't any idea. All I how is he came from the Black Forest area an4 he was a fanner.
They had vineyards there and he came to Springfield and went into the meat mket and poultry
business and he was. . .it was down on. . .oh, his place of business was down iq. . .was on 1 lth
Street and Monroe, That's where all the business was, down there you know dong the railroad.
Q. Do you remember the name of the business?
A. No. But then he got married to a very, very lovely lady by the name of Arnqlia IHimmelsbach.
(Chuckle)
Q, Another German?
A. Another German. And the Trubr should really be pronounced Trooter, y& (chuckle)
Q. So was Amelia found here in America?
A. She was here. He didn't bring her over, and they proceeded to have a fady.
Q. Do you know the year they married?

A. No. I imagine my father was born about nine months after they were 4ed.
(ChuckIq) She.
. ,he was number one and they had five boys in a row and dad was the oldest Of thirteen. pat's a
lot of kids, but you how in those days. . .after he had the five boys, he decidd he'd go baqk and
be a farmer. It'd be a better place to raise the kids, so they went out east of Springfield on the
Mechanicsburg Road, about three or four miles from Springfield .here. The kids walked to school.
My dad went to St. Peter and Pauls grade school and walked in four miles eve day, and they
proceeded to have more kids and so on, and later on my father was a very pro essive man. He
was a wonderful guy. He said to his father, he said, "Look dad, you have all f ese boys now
come along, let's get some more land," and the father said, "Oh, no". . .he c ad him Paw, and I
could show you a picture of the old boy, (chuckle) what a guy, and he said, ''Nope, I have two
hundred acres here, that's five times as much as I had back in Germany and. . except he didn't
equate,. Forty acres of vineyards to two hundred of grain land in Illinois. He was, I guess, a great
old honest man, a hard working guy, Gave me a quarter once.
Q, What did you do with it?
A. I wish I had it today. I was about. . .he died in about 1923 or something We that. That was
grandfather Trutter, and my other grandfather died almost at the same time, mdfather Phil
Michler, that was mother's father. But anyway, dad, I think he was twenty two or twenty three,
and he thought 'what's the future here for me?' so he went to Springfield loowg for a job and
decided there were no jobs to be had, so he went to. . .he borrowed some money, fifty dollars, I
think from one of his brothers, they'd been working, thrashing gangs and stuf$ I don't know,
'what's the future', and so he found out about "operazo" Indiana University *ere, and that was
laown as the "poor boys" school. A lot of people went there, and prominent Ones, and he went
there and got a teacher's certificate and came back to Springfield then and worked the summers
and so on, and he worked his way through, and with his Eifty dollars and the LiMe bit that he had,
and he onetime told me what he had, he said he used to press a lot of pants and stuff and cents to
go through school and he came back with the teacher's certificate and started )=aching his first
school. His fnst school was out at Woodside Country School there and then. . .
Q. What did he teach? Was it in a "Little Red School House?"
A. A "Little Red School House" was what it was. He taught them all, and th~se kids got good
educations too cause they all had review from the class ahead and the class bewd until you got to
eight or when you went into one. Then you could only look ahead, but then fiom there he went
over to a school on West Washington Street. It's now been torn down.
Q. What was the name of it, do you remember?
A. It was a county school, I don't remember. It probably had a number or sovething, and he
taught out there and I've got a picture of it, the school kids stuff here, and thep he won the prize
for the best country school for the county and stuff out there. In the
he decided
he wanted to go for law and so he did what a lot of the kids did in
1

almost an apprenticeship or something like that, or like an internship, and you s every afte+on
and evening and whenever you were loose you sat and read the Illinois reports $ a law office
someplace and were kind of under the. ..and so he taught school and then there bas a whole,
bunch of them, fellows that were doing it at the same time. Mike Ekstein and J p Sneeg. There
were about four or five guys who took the state board exam together and they wsed togetha, all
of them. (Chuckle) In the mean time they had girl fiends and mother, my mothq was a very
progressive woman too, and she wanted to go to the University of Illinois.
Q. What was your mother's name? .
A. Francis Mischler ( he speUs it out) and she wanted to go to the University of Qlinois. She
applied for a scholarship without her parents knowing it. Now she was a third c$tughter of three
girls in an old German family and she got the scholarship and when the notice oflit came, she was
just tickled to death and she went waving the letter to her family and that caused a riot. No
daughter of theirs, the younger daughter, was going to a state university and gett'ruined."
(chuckle) atty's father said the same thing to her, almost, cause she graduated $om high school.
She skipped.. . that's anorher stmy, but the same thing, an old German family.
Q, The time frame.
A. Yes, but in about 19, ..that would have been in abut 1910 or 11, in there, sqshe went to a
teachers' training school, which they had in Springfield, which was quite a very $ne school they
had here, It was out on north 6th Street. There's a school there, just East of the Art Club, and it
was on the North end of that property, a great big old house, I can st.
see it. C+n probably see
pictures of it.
Q. Still standing? It's not a part of the Illinois College?
A. No, no, no, it's not that far. It was just west of. . .I t would have been the 7 or 800 block. I
think the ArE Club is 700 or something and it was just East of there on Sixth, Art Club's between
Fourth and Fifth.
Q. So when did your parents meet then?
A. ( Laughter.) I don't know whether I should tell you that story or not. Apparently my mother.
. .these am just stories that the family, that you've heard from the family. Mothq was actually
going with my father's brothers. They'd go to dances that were held at the KnglCts of Columbus
and stuff like, that. Of came they were all chaperoned with others, ldds and fan@y, but it seems
that a big dance came up and the river. , . Uncle Charley was the one, he was owthe, out on the
farm there and the Sangamon River, South Fork I think, is at the foot of the hill wd you go up the
hill and that's where the farm was, up there, and I can remember the bridge, or @at valley flooded
out whm the river came up. I think there's a sewage disposal plant down therelnow too in that
sort of a valley, and you passed that, and you go up past that and you go up on a/ hill, but there

4
was a bridge and this bridge was way up in the air but you had to go up like thi (demonstratqs)
and then you had to get down so the bridge didn't get washed, so there was a b* storm about like
now and Uncle Charlie, the river came up and he couldn't get into town cause had to come in
on a horse and when the automobiles in those days, this had to have been 1908,j9, or 10, some
place in there, and so he called up, I guess they had a phone, and he got word td, mother and my
father, anyway, cause he couldn't get in and that is where it started, (chuckle)*w
Uncle Charlie
was number Ehree boy, and by the way, he never did marry. A lot of them neveq married. I guess
3
they were scared about fertility, I mean with thirteen kids, (Chuckle) and they most, it was only
two of them who didn't live. One was a nun and she got pneumonia when she as only twenty
two or three. I think she joined the UrsUline nun maybe, the Ursuline order, and she was way
down the line, and the other one. , .no there was Way baby who died. Who bows in the country
there, Diphtheria, Typhoid, or something or other, probably diphtheria or pneumonia or
something. And then there was a boy. . .they had a picnic one Sunday and they ELU went
swimming in the Sangamon River and he drowned in the Sangamon River. He was about
fourteen or fifteen, Course if somebody wanted to write a history of a river, tha Sangamon River
and the bodies. . .somebody drowned just the other day, again. Again.
Q. Tell me, what was your father's name?
A. Frank Louis. His father was Louis.
Q. Did he become a lawyer? Is that what he did or did he teach?
Q. No he was a practicing lawyer and he was an expert on estate work and titlus. In those days
he loved history and he always said abstracts, which we don't have anymore mwh. Abstracts
were marvelous, marvelous family histories from when the land was first acquirtd, however it was
acquired from the government, Indians or whatever. (chuckle) That was his fee.
Q, Then he had two brothers, Charlie and. . .
A. No, of the thirteen kids, ten of them survived.
Q, When did your father and mother marry?
A. June 27,1912. I came along on July 2,1913 (chuckle).
Q. So you were the first of the two? Did your mother teach for several years oc did she continue
to stay home?
A. No she taught. She and Minnie Appleman who became the wife of Mike Elrstein and. . .@e
girls all went to the training school together while their husbands were getting stablished. Now
dad probably passed the bar exam in 1909 or something like that and then they bad to get
established so they could pay the rent because married teachers were out in tho* days. It's q

ecently that a female teacher can be married, now it was all right for men, but teaching was more
or less a woman's profession and the minute they got married, Out!
Q. Then your brother came along, . .?
A. He came along seven years later. That would have been, . ,He was April $e 18.
What about 1920? Would that be about right? He was 75 last year.
Q. And what was his name?
A. John Thomas,
Q. And your brother is a. . .what does he do now? What has he been doing oyer the years?
His occupation was businessman really?
A. Yes, he was with the telephone company. By the way he graduated from @e University of
IUinois, if you want that. He was going into law and his fourth year of liberal pts. . . they had a
six year course in law instead of seven and so they combined the fourth year of liberal arts, and he
was into that and was a senior when Pearl Harbor came along, Now if they wpt a history. . .
Q. That played with a lot of people's lives didn't it? It changed a lot of peoplp's lives.
A. He was the guy. He was everything at the University of Illinois that they had. Sage and
Mowanda, Scull and Crest, President of his fraternity, the all-University Dance Committee, the
Student Senate, president of that. The only thing he didn't get was to be Chief Illiniwick and he
tried out for that because he's always been interested in Indian lore. (Chuckle)
Q. Now they've done away with that haven't they. They passed a law. . .no, #'s back in?
A. No, no. I think they passed a law the other day that they better keep him q this guy llliniwick
from Oklahoma. . .he's the one causing all this Indian problem Causing all the problem out at. . .
Q, Dixon Mounds?
A. Dixon Mounds, yes. By the way, my father took us to the Dixon Mounds the mid-20's
when it was nothing. . .it had a galvanized iron roof and a bunch of poles just qovering it.
remember that very well.
Q, Well Phil, let's go back to your childhood. As a child where did you go to school?
A. I went to the Hay Edwards School in the first grade and. . .

Q. That's about the time your brother was being born too?
E
\
A. That's right, and then from there they decided, I guess, I should get some. , .over to the 6t.
Agnes School so I went to St. Agnes £rom second through the sixth grade with sixty five kid in a
classroom.
Q, How many nuns?
A. One nun to run the classroom with a great big ruler. I shouldn't go into thg.
Q. Did she use it on you?
A. Everybody. One little whisper and whop, whop with those great big rulers.
Q, They really had control in those days though.
A. Yes, they were doing more controlling than teaching, 1 got a good educati~n because of my
mother and father and I guess the kids there, a lot of them went on to do thingq in spite of
everything and then they built Blessed Sacrament and I went there in the seven* and eighth
grades and they only had forty in the classroom there.
Q. So you learned more maybe?
A. Yes, and they were cracker-jack teachers. Old father Terrant started that. He hand picked the
teachers to be over there and. . .
Q. So because your brother was quite a bit younger did you play with each oer? Did you know
each otber early on or were you like only c Wen for many years?
A, Well we got along all right, we didn't have the usual fights, I was (chuckle) too much biggerby
seven years. Oh, by the way, my brother there at the University of Illinois was the guy. ..he
was president of the student senate or something. The day after Pearl Harbor, when the student
body all met, of course Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday afternoon, and on Mondsy they all gat
together in Huff gymnasium. They had a big student rally on where were we gping, so he
represented the student body talking to the Ms. I mean he was a big shot on @e Illinois campus,
he always had been, and so then he went on and graduated in June. He'd been ip the cavalry, in
ROTC and he probably liked the boots that they wore, the uniforms, and also &at the horses
knew the commands and he didn't have to walk, (chuckle) and it was quite so~eching to be in the
cavalry in those days.
Q, What about yourself? Did you. . .after StAgnes and Blessed Sacrament. . .
A. Oh, one more thing about the dear brother. He graduated with, with one hvd he got a sheep

I
skin and the other, he got a commission in the Army, and he was off and gone d went to. .. he
rattled around the Illinois states here while the war got started, then he went tolchina, Burma,
India theater, spent a year in Kumling, China, and he was a Lieutenant Coloneljat twenty three.
(chuckle) That's the kind of an organizer he is, and then when he came back hq worked for the
telephone company and had three different chairs as a vice-president and still wrkes for them at
the age of seventy five at half time.
Q. Today?
A, Yes, today. At sixty-five everybody up in that upper eschelon is supposed to be out, so they
hired him back
Q. Did ye marry?
A. Yes. He married Weque Woods. Do you know Weque?
Q, Only fiom her friends and relatives.
A, She was Edith English known as Weque and that's only because she was b m in Weque,
Tonsing, Michigan. ( chuckle)
A. That's right, and the spelling of that is unusual but I'l get that later.
Q, Is she still living? And do they have children?
A. Yes, they have two.
Q. Two children as well. No big families.
A. A girl and a boy. And he's a hot-shot too. The kid is.
Q. Did he go to the University of Illinois?
A. No.
Q. He sapped out?
A. No, no. OE course they lived in Evanston and he went to. .. he went to Loyolla up there as a
kid and studied Chinese. I think he had seven yeas of Chinese &d then he wem to the Univvrsity
of Southern California and got his degree in Asiatic Studies and then he got into banking. i
Q. Did he ever work in Asia?

e
A. No, but he did spend quite a bit of time in Egypt. Has nothing to do with hina and Meco
since then.
I
Q. But he didn't use his Asian studies?
A, Not that I know of.
Q, Is he married?
A. Yes, he's d e d and that's an interesting marriage. ,.we're getting
but, . .
childhood here,
Q. We are, but we have a long way to go.
A, All right, If this is interesting to you.
Q. It's very interesting. The family is obviously, close yes, amd they also have aspirations.
A. Yes, he went to work for the Bank of America in California and the First National in Chicago
and stuff and then decided he'd get his MBA, so he went to Northwestern, to Kellogg and it's
supposed to be one of the very very top MBA schools. And there he met a yqung lady. Don't
ask me her name other than Guia, and her faanily was Italian. Her father is an pstm-physicist and
he was in charge, to his embarrassment, of that Hubble Telescope that went squr. Course he
couldn't inspect every dimension on it but anyway they got it straightened ou4 and at the present
time he is down in Chili, I believe, and they're building a huge new observator)l in the mountains
of Chili and that's where he is now. Very interesting guy.
Q. That's Castilian or Spanish, not Italian so obviously he's speaking anothenlanguage. He's
probably multi lingual anyway.
A. Multi, yes. And they were in Spain for a long time and so when he and his wife. . , he's quite
young actually. And Guia, she got her MBA there. I don't know where she went to school fust.
Q. Very interesting family. Now, what happened to his daughter?
A. Now wait a minute. Let me go on about my nephew &st. So he gets his MBA. He goes to
work for Kernper. He worked for a couple of banks and then he went to Keflper Insurance and
stuff, and since then he is, since he's gotten his MBA he's gotten a CPA and rlow he's added to
that a stockbrokers whatever it is, so he could go to New York or Chicago and any of those. . .
Q. He's not really focused yet, is he?
c
A. Yes, he's a vice president of Kempers and he's in charge of investing ins ce moneys. You
I

know, more or less today, I don't how what it'll be tomorrow.
Q. It's a big job.
A. Yes, it's a big job.
Q. A lot of responsibility.
A. And his wife is at the First. . ,they have two children now and they have a Poliash nanny
(chuckle) whose chased along with them. She's at First National Bank.
Q. And about the daughter.
A. The daughter. (Chuckle) She's done everything and I think she's. . .wheread she graduate
fiom? I think she went to Northwestern and she's also gone to a school in Chicago on Interior
Decoration and Design that's one of the top ones. She's very capable and she about thirty nine or
forty now, 1 guess. She's a policewoman. (Chuckle)
Q. She's very different that his son.
A, Yes. She's done everything. She's worked for Marshall Fields and all therest of them. But
that's what she is at the moment. Without her parents howing it, she had a cw, a foreign car that
had to be something recalled on it, so she took it out to the dealers, and there were a bunch or
people standing around across the street and a big sign-up, EXAMS or something, and it was the
area police station, and she had time on her hands, walked across the street. . she's not afraid of
anything, she walked across the street, went in and asked, "what's going on?" They said, "We're
having examinations for the entcance into the Police Academy and we're lookiag for women that
have college degrees. Are you interested?" And she said, "Well, sure, I haven't anything else to
do." She took the exam and passed it, (chuckle) And then they gave her a physical exam and
she'd been a swimmer and all kinds of athletics, and so a year ago she went to the Police
Academy up there. They paid her $32,000 a year while she did it. She's bees accepted, as of
Christmas, and she's out riding a beat (chuckle) at nights!
Q. Where?
A, Well at least it's North and West in Chicago. So she went six months to the Academy and
now she's. . .and my brother said she's just. . .then she told her father and mother, which I guess
they nearly blew a fuse, and my brother had been on the police advisory comflLittee or what ever
they have up there, cause he's in everything. At one time he was on forty org-tions. Have
you ever heard of Hull House up there? It's one of the great old, old organizations for training
people and things. They've never been in the black until he'd been president of it. In a couple of
years he got the red off there.

Q. Well, he's quite a guy,
A. A terrific guy.
Q. Well, we should get back to you now.
I
I
A. We'll get back to me,
Q, You're very different,
A. Very different, Oh, and by the way, he's a very fie cartoonist.
Q. Now, we have to get back to you.
A. All right. Where were we? We were gating me to St. Agnes or Blessed Sacrament. . .
Q. Then where did you go?
A. Springfield High School when there was only one high school except for &ls. The girls went
to convents in those days and never. . .there was only Springfield High School, That was it.
About 1800 kids.
Q. Just boys?
A. Oh no,
Q. But you say except for girls. . .?
A. The girls. They had Catholic Schools for what we called the West End Cmvent That's the
Sacred Heart out there and the other one was Ursuline and they were high schools for girls.
Q. So were there fewer girls consequently at Springfield High School then boys?
A. No, there were 1800 there or thereabouts.
Q. But you had Griffin too didn't you in those days?
A. GriEin wasn't started yet. It was started right after.
Q. I thought Griff~m was earlier than Sacred Heart, It's,the other way around,
A. They were both going before Gsiffin.

Q. Did you finish high school there?
A. Yes.
Q. You didn't go away to school?
A. No.
Q. Then where did you go?
A, Then I went to Springfield Junior College. I graduated from Springfield H@I School. . .I
went there from '27 to '31 and then in. . .
Q. Where's Springfield Junior College? Is that Springfield College? That's right, it was only two
years until just a couple of years ago wasn't it?
A. Isn't it still two years?
Q. I think it could be. Then where'd you go after that?
A. Then I went to the University of Illinois. See, those were depression days.
Q. What year did you graduate?
A. High school, June of '31 and Junior College, '33, and then I went to the Uaiversity of Illinois.
A, I went longer than that cause I took pre-engineering. Courses out there were pre-engineering,
was engineering, and I'd always been interested in airplanes, model airplanes, I built them from
scratch. That's what I intended, had in mind, but in those days they didn't have. . .at the
University of Illinois, there were two classes in aeronautical engineering in your senior year of
engineering.
Q. Did you have five years then at the University? Did you have three years at the university of
Illinois?
A. I went there as a junior engineer in '33 and I. . .the engineering wasn't for me and I was
miserable ahd I had a wonderful, wonderful roommate at the fraternity house, I pledged and
joined Alpha Sigma Phi, and in those days there were no dormitories, there ware dormitories for
girls but not for boys. They had lots of fraternity houses so that was the best. . .
Q. But let me get back to this. In a normal college you go four years and if yqu want engineering

you're there for five or six maybe. Now you had two more years basically of
Illinois?
A. Yes, then I switched to architecture.
Q. So how many more years did you have &r that?
A. I went to two summer schools in order to pick up stuff, I had too many credits that I couldn't
use for architecture so I got out of there in January of 1938. So I was over thdre, yes, in about
five years, four and a half but I went to two summer schools. One at the Art Qstitute in Chicago
and the other one at Catholic University at Washington.
Q. Have you always been artistic? And your brother as well, obviously?
A. Yes.
Q. Were your mother and father artistic as well? Did you pick that up from ewer of them?
A. Mother was quite artistic, yes.
Q, The flair if nothing more,
A. She had. . .
Q. Really drew, . .
A. I've got a lot of pictures that she did.
Q, So you carried in the genes, A lot of times that doesn't happen. But both of you are artistic
with a different style, you and your brother.
A. Yes, he's done a lot of nice work but he's more into 'cartooning' or wonderful cartoons.
Q. How old were you when you discovered your art? Were you in college as an engineering
student when you decided to become an architect?
A. Tt was not for me. Engineering was not for me.
Q. why?
A. I couldn't stand it, Them-dynamics. The only thing I had fun in was the foundry and
machine shop in the junior year. Oh, I was wonderful &I the lathes and stuff p e that and in the
foundry making the clay cores for the stuff we were casting. !

Q. That's why you're so good at jig-saws.
A, . . . in other words if you're going to cast a piece of something or other, yqu have to have a
core,
'END SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE
linseed oil or something and then they bake it, and it was just like cookies and pou put those
inside. . ,well, take a radiator Like this over here. You had to have a core insi* of that and then
you have a mold on the outside and you pour the hot metal in there, it burns @ oil out, and you
shake the sand out,
Q. So the engineer is "structure" and the architect is the "designer"? So you ~bviously had a
design. ..
A. I've always been interested in design and planning and so on.
Q. Have you been happy in that field?
A. Oh, yes I was because I had good partners that I picked up who liked engipeering.
Q. Oh. So you finished architecture in 1938 and then what did you do?
A. Well I nearly lost my mind because my father died while I was in the middle of my final exam
week and he died very suddenly fiom a middle ear infection that should have rtally never
happened six months before the sulpha drugs, and somehow or other I went b a after his funeral
and took one more examination in engineering, and how the devil I ever pass& it I don't how.
Q. In engineering?
A. It was an engineering subject in architecture. So then I. . .I mean I could do the engineering
but 1 didn't like it, I mean it wasn't any fun, so then I came back, and the thjg to do was to get a
job. There wasn't any building much in. , .
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A. In 1938 they had public housing and W A and things like that and so I wmt to work for Carl
Meyer on Washington's Birthday. I mean the real birthday, February 22,1931. (Chuckle) As a
matter of information, I worked two months for nothing. About like being in pedicine or
something way back
Q. Now, we've reached the peak of your childhood, Let's go back and find ut what you did as

a child.
A. We forgot something in there as a child.
Q. We haven't covered a lot of things, I'm sure.
A. We forgot Helen Sterickex's Nursery School. There were no Kindergarted's in those days.
Q. She's not that much older than you? Oh you mean HELEN Stericker?
A, This is old George Stedcker's sister. Dkl you remember the Stericker Hovse there on
Second. The yellow brick house, The family. . .they tore it down recently and made another
parking lot.
Q. They had two houses there. They were entirely different style.
A. Well this was the yellow brick one right on the corner.
Q. More Colonial Style wasn't it? Revival?
A. Yes, that was old Dr. Stericker. The father of George Stericker who had built the house and
he had these two kids, George and Helen. Maybe somebody else, I don't know. Helen had a
Kindergaten and she'd been to school up in Evanston there. It's still there. National School or
something or other but that was Kindergarten. She picked us up, us kids at me and a half or
four years old. I'l show you pictures of that, of some of the Eds,
Q. Well, that's great We'll start there then. What kind of a youngster were you? Do you
remember? You were a handsome young man,
A. I would say I was fairly shy, really. Kitty took it out of me. It's a good tljng.
Q. She brought you out? You were shy? What did you do as a child? Who were your fiends?
A. Built model airplanes, model boats. And what'd I do on Saturdays? Oh, bp the way, the
Kindergasten. . .she came around in an electric car that was like a great big fi&-bowl and the
doors were on the sides and the driver sat on a bench seat in the back with a tiller, like this, (he
demonstrates) and on the end of it was the horn and you could roll this, and &re were two
swivel seats up in front and cut glass bud vases, You know about those? And she'd come around
and pick us kids up. . .I went two or three winters. These were winter deals. But she'd go
around and pick up all us kids and crowd us into this and drive us to her home and we'd go up
there all morning and then. . .oh, that was fun. I'll never forget those days. 'Qen Saturday's, I
went to the art Club. Bunch Bunn and I and Paul Barker. We all went out to, the Saturday
classes at the Art Club. We were eleven and twelve years old and I think we W d about this at

the Art Association (Recollection of Old Springfield January '93) because we'd go down to :
Bunch and say, ''Don't you think we'd better go down and visit Grarnps today{' We didn't bo
every Saturday.
Q. That's the candy store?
A. That's the candy store.
Q. Why was he called Bunch?
A. I don't know.
Q. Well he told somebody. His mother always tweaked his cheek affectionatdy and. . .
A. (Chuckle) Well anyway, that's where I spent my Saturday mornings, at tha Art Club.
I was only eleven or twelve years old. '
Q. Then you were doing art at an early age? Now, who else were your playmates early on.
Whose your earliest friend?
A. My earliest fiiends were down the block fiom me on Lawrence Avenue thqe. Betty Wpods.
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You know Betty Woods? Her brother, Walt, Walt Taber, and next door, TJ wd Francis
McMurray. The three of us. I can show you pictures in the family album of all these Idds. put
there were a numbn of winters whm they never hew where I was on a Satqday afternoop
because I went to Eva Farrows Dancing School.
Q. Who was Eva Farrow? This is the fist I've heard of her.
A. Well, she taught ballroom dancing and stuff like that. I think it was the 014 Redmens H4.U or ,
something. I'll tell you where it was. It was on Monroe Street between fourth and iBh. It was
on the third floor in the middle of the block on the north side of the street,
Q. Did all of you do this?
A. No. I did it but the McMuxrays and Tabers didn't.
Q. So you did it by yourself, really, without the gang knowing about it all thase years?
A. My mother. She was going to make a ~ntleman out of me.
Q. But nobody knew. You thought. . .
A. But my friends never knew where I was on Saturday afternoon.

Q, You didn't want them to know you were dancing? ~
A. I was dancing. Oh, my God. And the girls would sit over here and the boys would sit over
there and you'd have a little break between dances and she'd explain: this is a &x trot or a waltz
or something and then you'd go over and select one of the young ladies. Now Fese are kids;
eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. You how the boys are not too excited aboyt girls in those
days, at least they don't show it . .and you'd have a handkerchief in your hanaand you went over
and you'd bow and I say, "May I have the nat dance with you?" and she rnigw say yes and she
might say no, and then you'd find another one. But then when she'd get up to Uance with you,
you had your handkerchief over your hand on her back then.
Q. And she was probably taller than you too!
A, Probably (chuckle) The girls always were, But then, those were my Saturc@y afternoons
(chuckle) of my childhood days and the rest of the time, the three of us or the @ur, we had an old
chicken house. . .is this interesting to you, is this what you want?. . .in the bacb yard. . .this was
World War It days, . .eggs in those days were something like 75 cents or a do& a dozen which
was a lot of money and so people kept chickens and so on, But any way the vc$r was over and
the chickens were too much trouble. OH, you want some useless information 6om WWI about
food? About eggs? You put eggs up in the wintertime in something called wwr glass. I don't
know what the chemistry is, but you take these old jars that you kept pickles q d sauerkraut in
and you put this water glass in there and then you put the eggs in there and it npde kind of a slimy
seal on the shells and you could keep them all winter in that stuff.
Q. Fresh?
A. Well you didn't use them for an angel food cake, the whites wouldn't. . .yw could use them
for cooking and stuff so in the summer and the fall. . .of course eggs were not faked as they are
now. . .so that's what you. . .but I'll never forget that water glass and I remember I used to hate
to go down in the basement and reach down in there and grab three or four of those eggs that
were real slippery and slimy, yuk
Q. Let alone eat them!
A. Oh; they were all right when mother cooked them She'd wash them off a$l fry them or
scramble them or use them in cooking. Not in nice big cakes because they weqen't that good, but
anyway the old chicken house out there. . .that was our old club house and we pere always
digging caves in the yard there or something and we'd build little fxes out theq and have our
baked potatoes or things like, that in coals.
Q. You were patiem A baked potato would take a long time over coals like
A. I don't bow what all we did but I can show you pictures of all of us sittin
chicken house.

Q. Who were 'all' of you? Bunch, and ... ?
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A. No, no. Bunch wasn't in on this cause he didn't live near us. These guys qed down the
block and we'd. , ,
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Q. Who were some of these again?
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A. This was TJ MacMurray and Francis MacMurray, his younger brother, othfrwise hown as
Sach cause he had a great big bottom on him and they called him 'Sachell" (chqckle) and Walt
Taber, Betty Wood's brother. She was Betty Taber, And her father ran or owped Mauldenr=rs.
The Mauldeners were out of it years ahead. Maddeners was a wonderful , w wddl place to eat
and they catered and they made their own candy and ice cream. Their ice crew was. . .
Q, They're still very good aren't they?
A. Yes, but not like they used to be. And of course tbey're all gone now. I wan old Walten,
and he had the best fie works on the 4th of July and all the kids would go dow in his back yard
and he'd have 20 ball rolling candles and sky rockets and stuff like that.
Q. Now this is Tabers?
A. This is Tabers. And even balloons in those days. They made these paper balloons. You
wouldn't think of it today, I don't think, but, , . hot air balloons about this hi* and in the bottom
was a ring, a little ring, probably made in Cbina or something like that and a & across and then
you'd had a about this big around of excelcier about so thick, and that soaked In
.paraffin or something that would bum and. . .
Q. Like a hot air balloon?
A. Like a hot air balloon. And you'd get out there and you'd hold the top of this hot air balloon
and get this up off the ground and then you'd light the little fire in there and ithmade a lot of heat
and pretty soon the thing would all swell out and start to go up and then you'd let go of it and
BOOM! up they'd go, and they'd go way out in the country-side and why in cbe devil they didn't
burn down woods! They were supposed to be out when they came down but they went for miles.
Q. Did you all follow them? Did you run around after them or were you too close to town?
Where'd you usually do that?
A. In their back yard off Lawrence Avenue,
Q, Quite an ingenious idea for fun?
A. Oh boy, we kids shot fire crackers off all day long. Why we've got any fipgers at all I don't

how.
Q. Exactly, So what else did you do?
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A. No wait a minute. Lets move me away £ram the Mac Murray gang. We qved to Williams
Boulevard. Who'd I play with over on Williams Boulevard.
Q. Did you play in the park?
A. No, we played down behind the old Governor Yates house. There was a very low place there
and we tried co dig caves in there, and that's where my brother then had his, later on, had his
Indian tribe down there and they expanded it down there. All the neighborhood kids. Oh, and I
didn't finish why he wasn't Chief Illhiwick. He got out there and danced for @ern and he had all
the equipment, I mean he had all the feathers and stuff. And he went up to Cmp Anaceechee
which was a YMCA camp in Wisconsin for two or three summers and he taught Indian lore up
there so he was a very, very qualified guy for Chief Illhiwick. The only thing is he didn't get it
because he got out these in the middle of the stadium and did his Indian war dances and stuff and
of course those Indian dances are little foot-steps and Eddie Calb of Springfiew came out there
and, I guess he hew a lot of Indian stuff, but he got out there and you've seeq them maybe as
they gyrate around, so he got it, and John said, 'But he wasn't authentic", and they said, "We
can't see you from the top of the stadium but we can see him, authentic or no^" So that's the one
thing he didn't get at the U of I that he wanted.
Q, What a heartache!
A. By the way, was there any interest about my being at the University of Illisois over there. The
tuition was $45.00 a semester, (chuckle) Special classes might have been an additional $5.00 or
something, and the house bill at the Fraternity House was $52.50 a month and that was twenty
meals a week
Q. Not bad. It was all relative though wasn't it?
A. And bansportation from Springfield to Champaign was on the old Illinois Terminal Railroad
as we called iE, Inter-Urban. They had a special weekend pass which started Friday noon until
Monday noon and that was $2.00 round-trip to Champaign.
Q. That's not relative,
A. No. And I nearly died when I paid $2.00 for a sheet of Watman's paper fac drawing class for
architecture but we worked on it for. . .
Q. During this same time?

A. Dhg this time, that was Watman's double elephant but that sheet was go
of work and those art supplies were expensive and so then in my last two years
fraternity house divided up and exchanged meal jobs. Ever heard about those?
Q. For work?
A. You worked for your meals and we did it with other fraternity houses. You gidn't work 51
your own and familiarity or something like that, and I wasn't a waiter anyway, Ijwap a scullion. I
figured out one day that I had either, washed, scrapped, dried, or something or Other 250
thousand dishes or something like that and I only had a half-time job. There we& no rubber
gloves, no dishwashers. The dishwashers are for the three guys who did it and @e waiters
brought the dishes in and the guy who receivad them, he scrapped them and stacked them to a
whole and put them over here. The guy who worked in the hole, that was the double sinks, and
he put the dishes in there and wash them from one sink there. . .or maybe there were three sinks,
back and forth and then put them up here (demonstrates) and tlien maybe somebody else would
dry and when they stopped bringing the dishes in, that guy would help dry and fie cook would
come over and check those dishes every so often to see that they were clean an# that they were
dry.
Q, Drying them would have been the job.
A. That was old Opal, Five feet tall and five feet around. She was something. I did that. One
week I'd work in the kitchen, the next week I'd go back to our fraternity houses and I'd eat ip the
dining room, the next week I'd work. So I'd have. ..in that way one guy. ..two guys could pay
half and I think we saved about $13 and a half dollars a month for doing that. Gee.
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Q, You look back and wonder if it was worth it?
A. Oh, and it was perfectly OX. to calI up a young lady and say, "How about a coke date
tonight?" Is this of any interest to you?
Q. A coke date?
A. A Coco cola, not the other kind of coke. Nobody had any money for that stuff and we didn't
know anything about it anyway, but and we didn't even talk about high school and drugs and
things like that. There weren't any. But you could call up a gal and say, "How about a cok date
after library". . .they had to all be in by 10:30 anyway or in the afternoon befoa dinner or
something. That meant that you had a quarter and that would buy you a fifteen cent package of
cigarettes and two cokes, Those were the kind that were in an old fashioned coke glass with ice
from the . . . the soda fountain cokes and you could sit there. And if you had 35 cents, boy you
were really good. Each of you could have two cokes.
Q. What about the old soda fountains. There was one on the corner of Adw and. . .

A. Wd, there's one right now down on Sixth and ...Bachman and Kumlcy's pug Stare.
Q. Yes, with the tile floors and marble at the soda fountain. Yes?
A. I think that's Bachman and Kumley. It's the corner of. . . I
Q. It was a Christmas Store for a number of years, Enchantments.
A. Oh, no. That was Broadwells.
Q. Oh, that was Broadwells. That was a beautiful place in side,
A. Oh, they had the best malted milks in there.
Q. Did you have dates like that too? Isn't that what you did with your date? You took her to a
place like that?
A. Well, no, we went hamburgers.
Q. Where'd you get hamburgers?
A. Oh, the Sugar Bowl. You haven't heard of the Sugar Bowl yet? There %re a couple of
them
Q. Sugar Bowl. Where were they?
A. One of them was over here on State and South Grand. It's now the big smre there. Avenue
Shop. Then Avenue took over this whole thing there later on because this stzpted out as a
theater, and if you'll look up on the top here, Carl Meyer was doing this one vd. . .Peoria. .
.Fletcher Langton was doing the Esquire Theater and one of them was. . .youhe pushing me a
little bit to get these names out, but the Fraina had one of them and the Karsoti's. I don't know
if that's of interest to you or not.
Q. Yes, it is because you see these keep being repeated by those in your age bracket.
A. WeU, what happened you see, they stated those theaters in the late '30's and they decided, the
two of them decided that they were in competition with each other,. Karasods is still in existence.
Katasotis has got 150 or 60 haters around town and. . .Frasinas and Karas~tiso that where the
Esquire is now, but there was only one theater there, there was one big one which seated about
900. My office was up there for fifty years almost on the second floor there.
Q. Oh, so you could walk to work couldn't you?

A. Except I didn't because a couple of times I walked to work and then
example I'd run into one of the neighbors coming back and they wanted
an appointment at ten o'clock. . .enough of that. But where the offxe
Thrifty Drug Store for awhile. . .no, that was a Thrifty and then they
became the Avenue Grocer's Store which started on the corner of
Alex Caron had it and you could park, drive in diagonal parking and park off 9 street and they
had car hops and they'd come up with a tray that would snap onto the side andfyou'd get your
cokes or hamburgers or sodas or something like that.
Q. Well,what about the "Pill Rollers"?
A. That was Charlie Dungan. He started that.
Q. That was another group?
A. That was a group of kids in high school. This is what they don't do today for kids. They
don't know. . . they're all mmhg up and down. . .of course we didn't have any cars in those
days. Those are depression days. But maybe one guy or something, he'd buma car. Families
only had one car and they'd have dances once every month or something like tbaL If I were to
look around, I'd find "Pill Rollers", membership card number 16, and it had a little pestle and
morter on it and that was Charlie Dungan, and he kind of sponsored these kids md they'd ali. go
in for their cokes.
Q. All right. Charlie Dungan ran the drug store?
A. Yes, he was the druggist. I don't think he owned it, but he was the drug@$ and he liked kids
and so on.
Q. What did you talk about when you were having your 'coke dates'?
A. I don? tow, probably talked about girls.
Q. Or each other?
A, Or each other, or something. Golly I don't how.
Q. Or what to do next?
A. Well, we'd just sit around and just talk about nothing. Kids sit out here on the fenders of their
cars in somebody's parking lot. I don't know what they talk about. Of course, you see, o q high
school days were completely different So different it wasn't even . . .I mean 4 coke and a
hamburger. . .you had a dollar to go to a high school dance. Fifty cents for thq dance, oh, you
had that ahead of time and then you had a dollar for the evening and you could have a coke or

something and you could go down. . ,
Q. Did you needed a corsage?
A. Oh, that was later, much later. Junior Prom or Senior Ball, but. . .and the SeFor Balls wqe
nothing like today, oh my God. Crazy.
Q. They have lost a lot, haven't they?
A. Yes, But then, we had an hour. The dance was eight to eleven in high scho~l gymnasium,
eight to eleven, and then you usually had. ..I usually conned my father out of the family car and I
had a pal, Maury Majors, and we'd double up and we'd go to these dances togqer. Afterwards
you had an hour to get to your car, to get to the Sugar Bowl or something like that, cause you
always had to stay for the last dance which they played "I'll See You in My Dreams," and that's
when you really held them tight cause you'd hope to get a kiss at the door when you took them
up to the door, maybe. Big deal. And then you went and got your. ..oh, maybe we went to the
hamburger stand. There's a Root Beer place down at Fifth and South Grand thae behind the
filling station, the Frosty Root Beer, and you could go in there and get a hamburger for a die
and a Frosty Root Beer for a nickel. They were all covered with ice and you gabbled those qown
real quick and then you went for a ride through the park and maybe she'd sit ower close to y
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and you'd put you arm around her a little bit. And one girl, we used to drive the car togeth r.
Gear shift here (demonstrates) and I'd handle the clutch and the break and one piece of the 1
steering wheel and she would do the shifting over here and we would kinda cuddle up together.
Q. What were you driving in those days?
A. Let's see. My father's was a Willis Knight, (spells Knight), yes a Willis Wght. Yes, thqt's
what we drove. Dad had a couple of em.
Q. Was it a coup?
A. No, it was a four door.
Q. First I've heard of that one. Now, you were raised a Catholic and were you consistently
involved in the church?
A. Yeah, we went to church every Sunday.
Q, And was Sunday a bit of a ritual? Did you come home and have dinner at the table, etc?
A. Oh yes. Mother would have, . . our dinner on Sunday was at noon.
Q. Was it chicken?

A. I wouldn't be surprised. Mother was a good cook. Excellent, And there yas one thing we
always had at our house, and that was cake.
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Q. With h sh eggs? I
A, You're dm right. And in those days there was no such thing as packagedpakes. See my
father died in '38 and having been out in the country there with all those kids ad old cook stoves
and stuff, dad. ..I don't even think he ever had a birthday cake. They were toa busy baking bread
and stuff and so when he and mother got &ed she found out that he was c4e starved and our
house was never without cake. Many a time I'd beat the eggs, you know, withan egg beater and
she'd make angel food cakes that high, chocolate angel food, burnt sugar angel foods, burn the
sugar in the skillet,
Q. My mother used to take a wire whip, It must have taken half an hour for ha to get those egg
whites whipped.
A. And you took it up and when you had a little point, and when it just turnedlover, that was
ready. But on Saturday, she made the white cakes, maybe layered with caramel icing or maybe
chocolate icing or something and she had a cake pan over in the corner on one of the kitchen
cabinets and there was always cake under there and the white cakes would kind of last till
Tuesday. . ,oh, dad, every time he'd come in he would hock off a piece of cab.
Q. And the chocolate?
A. Oh, it didn't make any difference what it was. White icing, strawberries. When strawberries
were in season, she'd mush strawberries up and make strawberry icing and the most marvelous
caramel and then on probably Tuesday afternoon or so, maybe Wednesday morning, she made the
yellow cakes. That's when she used up all the yokes. I think it was thirteen eggs. . .and then we
used. . .
Q. We had a lot more cholesterol in those days didn't we?
A. I guess we did, and so she had what she called a "sunshine cake." It was like an angel food
but it was like+ a yellow cake and had all the yokes in iL Or else we made, or she made her own
mayonnaise. I whipped that with a fork A little bit of oil, a little bit of oil, an# don't do it too
fast or it'll curdle. . , ( chuckle )
Q. It's great to reminisce isn't it?
A. Oh, kids today have no idea.
Q. No they don't. I think this is one reason I enjoy doing this. To hear the 'old days'. We aU
have the old days, they'll have the old days.
I

A. Aad the wagons over on Williams Boulewd. Why, the city even came by &d picked up dl
the ashes. People didn't have the. . .gas heat didn't come in till the late '20's a@ so you had coal
fired. . .you talk about the air being polluted, that coal smoh. . .and you hand &ed these thi~gs.
Stokers didn't come in until about the middle '20's and oil burners, oh they we* great but your
whole house smelled of oil, and then Wy,
it was the late '20's when they brolght in natural gas
but the city of Sprinaeld went up and down the alleys twice. They do nothing "Clinkers" they
were called. The coal they would gather together and kind of stick in what we called a kind of
clinker and it'd burn out but it wasn't into ashes and that's why my father gat, be got when we
were over on Williams Boulevard he got Kentucky block coal which was a harQ coal and it had
nice ashes. It wasn't like the local coal here and then he'd mix coke with it and that made easier
ashes because you had to haul the ashes out of your basement into the ally in the back of the
house.
Q, Didn't you usually have a pit at the base of your fireplace? Ah, but that wa$ a furnace thing
wasn't it?
A. This is furnace. And so you'd carry them out to the back and just dump tkm on the ground
and these guys would come back with a team of horses and a wagon that had Ibe bottom th#t
would drop out of it and they'd come along and shovel the ashes up into that, into those w%ons
and take 'em out to the dump and come back and get more.
Q. They didn't use the ashes for anything else? I thought they re-cycled thosa ashes,
A. Oh, some of them they did but that was in the power plant. But, oh gosh, you'd haul time
ashes out and I can remember my mother. My father would go down. ..we had a particulaly
cold, cold winter, It was when we were on MacArther there and dad would s t up at five o'clock
in the marning and start the fire, up again, I mean you bedded down for the night, but you how
he'd get the house warmed up and in the living room . . the stove was one of these old grills in
the wall when they had kind of a little design on it, and it was so cold up stair$ that I came
downstairs to get dressed and this paticulm morning, I dropped my pajamas and leaned owr to
get my shorts and I got my bottom against that gdl and I had the design (chu~kle) all over it Oh,
I was branded (chuckle). Oh God, he had really fired it up that morning. Peqle don't knaw
what cold houses are today.
END TAPE ONE; SIDE TWO
Q. You talk about cold houses. How did you cool a house in those days?
A. Yo, ha, ho, ho. Well, let's put it this way. You know that warm air rises and cold air falls,
And so what people did in those days, they would put a sheet on the carpets i~ the house and
they'd open up all the windows and doors and stuff and then you'd wear as fqw clothes as
possible. You went out on your porches. There wasn't any air conditioning. The people today
forget that air conditioning was something &r World War 11, and television

I can't remember if we talked about radio or television.
I
I
Q. First, let me ask you. Didn't they have fans?
A. Oh yes, they had fans but nothing like the fans we have today.
Q. Well, you how, people wore so many clothes in those days and during hum(d spells like the
last several weeks, and the starched collars. What did they do?
A. I don't know what they did. They were crazy.
Q. What did you do when you were at, say, work?
A. Work. See my first job was working for the Producers Dairy in the summen time and that
would have been about driving a milk truck. I just had white trousers and a wwte shirt. I could
get pretty perspirous, I mean, I'd walk around in clothes that were wet from haulitlg stuff in and
out and up and down stairways and so on and then what would happen, (chucde) somebody
would want some ice cream that came in these big tin cans. Four gallons of ic~
cream in one of
these big five gallon containers. That's what they put in the soda fountains but why four gallons?
And the top was empty. That's so that you could dig the last of the ice cream Ipn the can that was
almost empty and put it on top of the new can that went in. So that's the way you bought ice
mam. It was four dollars for four gallons in a five gallon can. I remember w@n there was,
perhaps, half a gallon left in the old container and the ice cream got low, ernpq* then they9s call in
to get one, particularly on Saturday or Sunday. They 'd call for a new one and you'd move the
bottom of the old container on to the top of the new one sit it made it difficult for us to reach so
far further, deeper, into the can. By the end of the day, my shirtsleeves past my elbow would
smell sour and be sticky, I'd carry an unpleasant odor and look messy in our whh uniform
which, incidentally we paid for out of our $14.00 a week salary,
Q. And an ice cream cone was how much?
Q. And a soda ?
A. Yeah, I guess a soda was ten cents, But I would go into those coolers to get cans of ice
cream to deliver, and I'd come out of those coolers which where 10 below zero or more, maybe
YE
20 and I'd have all my clothes that were solid, having Erozen just in the time that I was in . . .
that's when I got flue a couple of times from it too. In August,
Q. Were there ceiling fans in those days?
A. Oh yeah. As a matter of fact in those days we had the ceiling fans that a* now so pop)llar

and you had these little ones on the floor that would move and, . .
Q, What about offices? They all had that?
A. 0 Lord. I can remember. . .well when I worked for. . .I worked for both Hrjnry Helmle. . .see
I started working on Washington's birthday on 1938. 1 was mid-semester gradpate, I think
we've covered that and I worked for Carl Meyer, and his office was on the ten* floor of the
Myers' Building and he had a comer office that was West and North, the North West corner of
the building and we'd open all the windows and get the breeze through as best we could and then
when I worked later for Henry HelmZe, he had the penthouse which was the elwenth floor on the
Fhst National Bank. There was no such thing as air conditioning and you'd ju$ open the
windows and when it was really hot, perspiring, we would take tracing paper a d make cuffs on
ow arms, wrap those, so that we didn't perspire and get the perspiration on OW drawings. That
was a mortal sin to do that because once you got moisture or if we dripped, wa were wore
headbands on there, the paper would kind of crimp around it and then you'd h4ve to draw. . .it
was terrible. . .so we were very careful. Our drawing was really slowed down by fighting these
paper cuffs, you know the bacing paper we had wrapped around. We had to s$ck them on with
tracing paper with scotch tape and keep towels and paper towels and stuff arowd, Guess we had
paper towels then.
Q. I don't think so.
A. I don't think so, We're talking about the late W es. But that was the m$n thing, to keep
those drawings dry and it was terrible and you could, oh, golly. . .
Q. What about poUens? Were the pollens as bad? Did people have a problem with breathing the
way they do today?
A. I don't think so. If you did, you didn't hear much about it. I don't know.
Q, The ozone layer right now is very difficult on us, depending who you listep to of course.
A. Do you have it too?
Q. Well,everybody. Because the sky is basically clearer and not overcast wilb Mt. Helena's
ashes and that kind of thing to mask the sun as it did last year. So they say thq ozone layer is
more damaging to skin and people out in it and so. . .
A. Oh, I haven't had too many breathing problems or anything like that, but I( do do this, When I
get in my car in the morning to go someplace, it's not in the garage, I will the little window
wiper deal that squirts the windshield and give it four or five wipes and surprised at the
pollen and dust that is acquired from the last time I drove it from the
you can see it
collecting to the side when the windshield . . .and that's the stuff

Q. What else do you think the kids have missed?
A. By the way, I worked. . .this was two summers. . .
Q. For the dairy?
A. For the Producers Dairy of Springfield which was on the corner of Ninth @ Jefferson Street.
And I worked on a summer job as a delivery. . .I delivered anything. . .and for sb days a week,
and that included Saturday and Sunday and I worked from seven in the mornin4 until six at night
one week and then the next week I worked from twelve noon until twelve at I)ight. That made
it really rough on you, on Sunday morning yw switched. Saturdays and Sundays was delivering
ice-cream and stuff to the family reunions out in the parks.
Q. Did you have a little car with a bell?
A. No, no. They were on order and they'd have family reunions and stuff and so we'd take these
cartons of dixie-cups and whatever they wanted and they were in cardboard boqed but they were
all packed with ice so the stuff really was hard when it was delivered. The maiq thing was to try
to find out where to deliver it. If you went out to Washington Park or Lincoln Park and you had,
say, the "Smith'* reunion there, the best way to find out which one was the f a y reunion without
having to walk dl over the park, to find the group there, or the group there, yoq'd look at your
delivery ticket and decided that if you had fifq dixie cups, so then you'd say, well there's a group
of about twelve or fifteen people. That's too many for them and you'd try to tr@ck them down.
And you'd try to. . ,it took a little while to get smart, othewise I walked all ovgr the place to try
to find. . .
Q. You walked?
A. Sure. I mean you parked your truck and then you had to find out where thq group was and
then you went back and got the box instead of hauling it all over the place. Wh+n you're talking
about heat, this is a funny night. When I fist got down there, that was in the h+ut of the "redlight"
district and a block away was called the Stag Hotel, a little light outside @d the Stag Hotel
and the girls would call into the dairy, that was on the corner of Eighth and Jeffbrson. The daixy
was Ninth and Jefferson and. . .by the way tht girls wore evening gowns there, ey were really. .
but they would call in about ten o'clock or so for lunch and go in for milk s h q and pie, cause
they had a soda fountain and stuff, and they delivered it just about a block away and I did that a
couple or three times. But the fist time, that was rare. (Chuckle) I knew what It was. And then
Madame Patton's was just across the street. Those were the high class ones.
Q. Madame Patton?
A. Madame Patton. (Spells it,)

Q. And she was on Eighth Street between Washington and Jefferson on the we/st side of the
street, but I didn't deliver there very often because they had a regular route guy who took care of
thcm and the, girls were well fed with butter and cheese and ice cream and all tliat, oh yea, but I
never saw any of the girls there, but the first the I went to the Stag Hotel therq, I went to the
back door and it had a big porch on the back, you know, with latices on it. Tha: door was locked
and I knocked on the door and I yelled, "Order from Producer's Dairy''and nobody came so I
beat on the door harder and very shortly a mat big woman wrapped in swadag clothes or
something like that, it was almost like a silk curtain wrapped around her. Great big gal came to
the door and her comments. . ,and a dog barking too, a little Boston bull dog (&uckle) she mme
to the door and said, "What blankety blank SOB is hying to beat down the back porch door?
(Chuckle) And I said, "I have an order from the Producer's Dairy, and I'm new on the job and I
just thought I'd bring it to the back door, that I was supposed to deliver there", and she said, "Oh
honey!'' (chuckle) She turned a hundred and eighty degrees and she said, "Oh honey, you should
deliver to the side door. That's where the girls are waiting for it, Go around @ere." And tlwt's
what I did and they had quite a good size vestibule there, and the vestibule was dark and inside
was sort of a dance floor and very well lighted and there were two or three gab waiting there and
this one girl, I said. ., what ever her name was. ..and they called her and she c m in, a little
short blond gal and a white evening gown, and she stood in that door and she made the most
gorgeous shadow picture. But she had a full length evening gown which you oould see right
through with the lights behind so they paid off, and I only did that about two or thee times
because they decided 'why waist a truck when we have curb boys.' Let them go a block amy
and haul it down by hand so I didn't have to, . .then one other night (laugh) it was a great tirne.
There was a gal by the name of Madge Harnlin and she had a house and she was on Jefferson
Street, They were all right by the police station and it was a hell of a hot nighq and I even
remember what was ordered. It was a quart of lemon sherbet and I had a nice little box fmd up
with dry ice and I went up there and she was on the second floor, one of those string of steps to
the second floor. On the second floor there was a screen door up there and I kpocked on the
screen door, "Producers Dairy" and, "order fiom Producers Dairy", and this gpl came to the door
and (chuckle) this was the first tirne I had ever faced or seen a girl in her undenvear, I mean I was
a well protected little boy with no sisters or anything like that not that we wem tenibly modest
around our house but there was this long legged gal and very scanty panties and a very skimpy
brazier and high patent bather shoes on. High heels, I mean really high heels,
Q. No long dress? I
A. No dress on her. It was hot. (Chuckle) Any rate it was quite . . .I only want there onc
was some of my.experiences of delivering. Oh, gosh.
Q. You had a series of interesting jobs.
A. Yeah, I got $14 dollars a week for that.
Q. That was good.
1

A.. Yeah. It was better than the job I had starting for Carl Meyers. I worked *o months fgr
nothing there and then $5 a week.
Q. Did that lead to anything at all. Were you glad to get away from that?
A.. Well the main thing 1 had to. . .I mean I was like an intern in a hospital. 1
Q. It was a job?
A. I was a graduate in architecture through the University of Illinois right? Tben you had to get
the experience in an office before you could take the state board exam, so I had to do it, at any
price and there was no work in those days.
Q. Let's get back to what else have the kids missed. What do you remember most fondly that
you're sorry that young people are not experiencing?
A.. Well, the difference between the young people in my day and the people today is there" an
automobile. As I understand it, most of the kids today, the moment they're Ween they've '
already had drivers training in high school or something like that and all they're ready to do 1s get
their drivers licence and get a car. In my day the family had one car, maybe, ad
it wasn't a bw
one every year either. You could buy in the mid thirties and stuff you could p t Fords and
Chevrolets and stuff for $6,7,800, and that was a lot of money. But the fami4y had one c q and if
you wanted to go to a dance in high school and borrow the car from the family, why you cleared
to see if they didn't want to go some place that night and you got the family car, and whenewer I
went to a dance in high school. . . "did I clear this with you?" The tickets were 50 cents at
Springfield High School and you may add another fiftv cents and you maybe had another 50 cents.
Q. And you had a coke date. Besides the car, what are tbe biggest changes y ~u most revere in
your past that they won't see today. Do you think the peer group is a larger *tittition than it was
in your time? A larger influence?
A.. Probably, but I would say one of the differences is, today the kids have cas. They don't
dress up. The only time you see them dressed up is when they have a wedding and they go out to
Gengridges or whatever you call it and they have the damnest mess of monkey suits.
Unbelievably, and I was out one time at one of them at White Oaks Mall,and I needed to get a
cumberbund or something and here were a bunch of kids and they were in cutqoff Jeans and I
don't blame them for being comfortable and stuff but here they were all gettirg fitted up for a
wedding and I thought, Oh boy, in these Jeans. From the sublime to the ridicdous or vice or
versa, I don't know which and so on. But in my day I got. ..I don't know wkther I've told you
this, but when I was a senior in high school, my father and mother gave me ofders to go d m to
Meyers Brothers before Christmas and get myself my first twcedo and they h4
specials on @em
and they had tuxedo and shirt and vest and even black sox and even black pa#en leather shoes.
Dancing shoes that weighed nothing, The leather heels on them were even hcflow so I mew you
I

had a heel like this and then underneath was a little thin cap on that so they we# very nice and
light. I happen to know that because I wore them often.
I
Q. Well you also had vests, and gloves and spats and, .. 1
d
A. I never had spats. Those were not in my day, but I can remember one tim ..and then when I
went to college, they got me tails.
Q. Did you have a top hat? 1
A. No I didn't, I had a Homburg. My mother gave me a Homburg and I had
t"
at a little later.
But I can remember going to, I think it was fourteen dances in one Christmas eason and I had
three stiff shirts. Now there was the really McCoy laundry. They really starch them They were
like a board and wing collars, and I liked those stiff ones, and you'd button thqm in the back I had
those three shirts and collars were at the laundry the whole time. Now all thol;e fourteen dances,
they weren't all, some of them were tea dances. Some of them were tea dances but most of them
at the country club.
I
Q. And you had them in the park at the Pavilion.
A. The Pavilion. Yeah, they had dances the too.
Q. Well, there was pride in those days too.
A, Oh, the girls got dressed up in the evening in long dresses.
Q. Would you repeat that era in your life?
A. Sure.
Q. Would you like to be living that way today?
A. I'm perfectly happy in a dinner jacket and I have all of the ones that I ever: had. Still exist in
various sizes. I've got one right now. I got a new one, oh, a couple of years ago.
Q, So the Sangarno Club has just announced that they dress more casually.
A. That's for the hot weather.
Q. Only?
A. I think so.
I
I
i

Q. So things are changing because that's one of the last in town.
A. Yeah, I think that was because of the heat, only. At least a jacket and a tie. Now yesterday
when I had lunch down there. . .it was a Tuesday. . .we had our first. . .kids w b were in hi&
school together who are still around, . .
Q. Who are they? What do you call it? Have you named it?
A, Jim Myers started it
Q. Prairie House Jim Myers ?
A,. Yes. Huh huh, he started it. See we were all in the same graduating class, in '31. And Jim
Myers, Cliff Hathaway. . .there were six of us. Lloyd Springer who was not i~# class with us but. .
Q. He's a good friend of everybody. He's three or four years younger isn't he?
A. But let's see. Oh, Basil Cutrakons. He's the Judge of the, oh, people whg go broke.
Bankruptcy. He's refereeing banlrmptsy and he travels all over. They won't let him retin.
Q. What have you decided to do with this group?
A. We meet for lunch the first Tuesday of each month. It's only been going for three months
now.
Q. What do you calk about7 Old times?
A. Whatever anybody thinks about. Old times. New times. Somebody says, "Say what
happened to so and so. You guys remember. . .oh yeah, she married and moved away.
Q, Is that good for all of you? Is it a good feeling to have all these old chum around?
A. Yeah, it's kind of fun. Of course here's the crazy thing the other day. Qere's one guy whose
name I can't remember. He's new. I can't remember. He's new and been &ere twice now, but
here are six now and maybe I told you before. Four of them have hearing aids. The fith one,
Lloyd Springer, should have and I'm the only guy whose got decent hearing@ the crowd.
However all the rest have their knees and legs and stuf€ and (chuckle) I don't have knees.
Q. So you're all breaking down in one way or another but at eighty two wyt do you expect?
I
Q. Oh, I how him fairly well.

A. You how what he did in W? He was a navigator on a B29 and they m+de 36 trips
Japan fiom Taipei, Taiwanp Tinian or one a€ those little islands out there. They would fly
there, bomb Japan, and fly back. Thirty six times and he never got a scratch aql I think he sGd he
used up six airplanes but managed to get them back all shot up with holes in tvm and every(hing,
but managed to get back to home base.
Q. Well, he's a quiet man so you don't hear all this unless you have the opportunity. Did you all
enjoy doing the Reminiscence of Springfield at the Art Association?
A. Oh, very much. Got a big bang out of it. Everybody said the boys were mch better than the
girls. (Chuckle)
Q. I forget who the girls were, Mary Jane Masters, Jo Sane:. . .
A. Can't remember the others.
Q. Time changes our way of life. What comes to mind when you think about kt?
A, There's a number of things where I can think right off the top. Number o*, we are cerWy
a much more afnuent society. In my day I was in high school during the deprasion. I mea@ the
stock market bust during 1929, 1931 and Gee, people. ..that depression was wrrible.
Q. Well, your father had a job.
A. He was a lawyer,
Q. So he carried through.
A. He carried through fairly well, but golly there was the old expression, "Br~ther, can you spare
a dime?" They sold apples on corners. I man it was. ..
Q. But you see that on street corners today.
A. Yeah, but there were so many. . .the farmers lost their farms because. . .ten cents a bushel
corn and they couldn't meet their mortgages on their farms.
Q. So who bought them?
A. Some guy who had a couple of buck laid back and bought them for nothisg.
Q. Not the government?
A, No, no.

Q. So they changed hands and families as well?
A. Huh, huh.
Q. What happened to these people when they lost their farms?
A*. I don't how. That was later when they had the Oakies. Do you rernembw the stories of the
Oaldes from Oklahoma. God, I can remember in the summerthm going out. . *what summer was
that in the middle thirties wasn't it or something like that? You could look up st the sky in the
evening as the sun was setting and you could see the yellow soil that was being blown off their
fields out there. The farms were just blown away.
Q. What about the locusts?
A. We didn't have any locusts here.
Q. When you were in high school, there was a great fire, several great fires.
A. Oh, there were some honeys of fires, There was the Vrendenburg Mill, pltpling mill which
was a frame building, which was huge, on the corner of second and Madison 8treet The NE
corner. It was a huge building, a frame building and it caught fire one night. nat's when I was
in Junior College and that burnt right down to the ground, Oh, you could seerit for miles.
Another one was a mill, a grain elevator that was across from the. . .there wag then the Chicago
and Alton Railroad and then Amtrack on Tlnird, this was on Third and Adamg there. A great big
wooden grain elevator, a huge thing and that went up in flames. I was at that one too. Then
there was the famous Myers Brothers' Building. That was in the late'20 and ;C didn't see that fire.
It was late at night and then there was the old Armory Building. That was inlabout 1930 ur '31.
That's where the present State Armory Building is and that went up in flames. That was a
beautiful old, almost like a castle. Culver had build it and it had round turret$ on the corner and
stuff.
Q. Who was Culver?
A. Culver was the stone mason. I though we maybe had talked about him He was famous for his
stonework around Springfield as a contractor. There's still a few of them lek and that was a. .
.we were out of town. That had to be in August 1930 or '31.
Q. All right now that brings me to the Sangamon River. How did people gwerally feel about the
lake etched out of the Sangamon River?
A. Well,number one, the original Lake Springfield was supposed to have, to be formed by
dammiag up the Sangamon aver and the Oak Crest Country Club or someding. You h ow that
the golf course that's out on the way to Riverton there. Maybe it's still callqd Oak Crest. That

was put out there and they even designed a great big club house and stuff becaqse they were
going to be on Lake Springfield and Carl Meyer even had designed the club hopse for them He
had the picture in his office there but of course the club house. . .they already lpd the golf course
and they took a long look at what had happened in Decatur and Lake Decatur vas formed by
darmning up the Sangamon River over there. The Sangamon River's got the Hod fork and
South fork and so on and they were having trouble with the silting, As a matw of fact I thipk
they had already put three or four feet on top of the dam and of course that m$te all kinds a€
trouble with the shore lines and stuff. But over there, the people owned their Qwn shore lines and
in Springfield, as you know, they lease them so Springfield tried to control. . .$in= it was a water
supply. Well then they went to the other creeks where they have it now. They abandoned the
idea of having it on the Sangamon River and so & fifty years now, they've sp$t a few million
dollars ~rying to dig this silt that's washed into it.
Q. And with the hope that they can maintab aesthetic surroundings, it's very difficult isn't it?
A. Yes.
Q. Was the Electric Power Plant built before or after the lake was built?
A. Before the lake. The Electric Plant and Water Plant were built at the same the as the lake.
Springfield got their water from out North of the Fairgrounds. If you go Sanpon Avenue,
beside the Fairgrounds, you go Sangamon Avenue and it swings around. If pu go straight on
that road, you go down and run into the river, and down there they had deep weUs for water and
they had a pumping station down h re and that's where our water supply comes kom.
Q, Did they have a filter system?
A. They probably had some kind of a filter system. I remember some of the great pumps they
had down there with fly wheels to pump it out of the ground.
Q. Did you go down and swim there ever?
A, In the Sangamon River? Oh God.
Q. That was a popular place.
A. If you want to write a history of tragedy, it's the Sangamon River. To chase down all the
people that have drowned.
Q. That's been kept very quiet.
A. Oh, every once and a while so you'll find somebody. .,but they don't swim in it like they used
to. Before Lake Springfield, there was no place to swim
i. They had a. . .

Q. Rope, and they used to take it out over the river and drop themselves someyhere. (Chuckle)
A. I'l tell you this. They had camps on the Sangarnon River, In the '20's, thew was a camp
called Camp Colgan. Now the Colgans were a good Irish Catholic family
money in coal during the World War I and there was movement called the
and it was in competition with the Boy Scouts. Have you ever heard
Q. No.
A, Do you want me to talk?
Q. Sure.
A. So, I can remember the Colgans donated a couple of hundred of acres of l&d for Camp
Colgan out west and a little bit north of Springfield here. I'm not quite sure I +an find it now but
the Sangamon River ran around it and they had a sand bar. There was a big cu@e in the river
there and there was a sand bar and that's where the kids from the camp went down to swim and it
was, oh, a good block to go down there, and we went down and swam in that damn river and as a
matter of fact my father lost a younger brother. They had a picnic. This was ears and years ago.
The kid was 12 or 13 years old, 11 years old, and they had a country picnic. 3h ey lived out on
the east side of Springfdd and they had a country picnic out there and one af+rnoon all the kids
went swimming in the river and he drowned.
Q. Was there a rip tide that made it so dangerous or whirlpools?
A. Yeah, whirlpools and there were lots of trees and things which fell in the dver and the
swimmers would get caught in them
Q. Was there a waterfall of any kind to change the terrain. Was it a rushing fiver? How deep
was it?
A. Shallow and deep. It just depended on where you were in it.
Q. It varied.
4. It varied, yeah,
Q. What size boat could you take on it?
A. Well, how far back do you.want to go? Look at Abe Lincoln who was in a flat boat that came
all the way up there and got stuck in a dam or a raft. They got stuck on the (8am at Petenburg
there. New Salen SQ it was much more navigable than it is today. But thaq Camp Colgan. That
was terrible. My father took me out there one Sunday and then they dumpeQ me there to stay for

Q. Why didn't you like it?
A. Well,you started out every morning. . . I was never a camper anyway, but you started out
every morning by going to mass in the mess hall. It was a very Catholic organiqtion and they had
fancy uniforms with purple epaulets on them.
Q. Did you all feel this way. I mean I always had the feeling that a good CathcQic boy would do
what he was told and go to church and never complain about it.
A. Well, he did for a long long time, pretty much until he got a lot of it beaten out of him
You're not Catholic are you?
Q. No, I'm an Episcoparian. We won't go into that here! (Chuckle)
A. Alright. Not enough difference really. Depending on which one.
Q. But, the lake.
END TAPE! TWO; SIDE ONE
A. Wayne. 1 don't know his first name, but he was the director of it, and they bid to expand it
into a national organization or something but for several years and so on, it suldenly fell apart
because somebody put the finger on the director or master or whatever he waq called. Wayne,
because (chuckle) he liked little boys and that was the end of the Catholic Boys Brigade.
(Chuckle) As I remember things about. . .
Q, The lake.
A, The lake, yeah. I, . .
Q. Do.you remember it? Was the town excited with this idea?
A. There was a certain group in town that were so damn excited that we stood out there at the
dam the night the water went over the dam.
Q. The first time?
A. The first time. My father. . .I think I mntioned my father being here for the first flight of air
mail. I thinlr I mentioned it, But he was a very very progressive guy for a country boy and he
was very intmsted in Lake Springfield out there.

i
Q. There are some wonderFu1 pictures at the Sangamon Valley Room Have yQu seen them?
1934'35.
A. Oh, of course. You see, the water went over in '35 I think.
Q. Did it take two years?
A. Oh they. ..the Sugar Creek that went thmugh there would flood up every often and lhey
just surveyed it. They estimated what the, flow of water was and how much it take to fdl
the basin there and where would be the prop place to put the dam. And by $e way, when you
drive across the dam and go to your house, in the middle of that dam is a core wall of concrete.
Q. A core wall?
A. A core, In other words, they put. . .so that if the earth was washed away
they still had that big concrete wall in the middle of the dam underneath the n
highway there. You go over it every day when you go home.
i
lr anything like that
Id. Underneath the
Q. I how bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge had these tremendously deep
That's not what this is?
hore pilings.
A. Yeah. Of course when they put this in that was just farm land.
Q. You have a change in terraine of about fifty to seventy five feet?
A. Now you see, I do know a little bit about this because my grandfather had a hundred and
twenty acres of land that had been in the family since 1857 or something do- there and it had
wonderful timber on it and all that and it had a house right in the middle of this 120 acres. Along
came. ..and he had a marvelous timber there, and God help any tenant who sut down a tree
without his permission. Along came the lake and they wanted 70 acres of the 120 and you know
where Virginia Lane is? That was the heart of that 120 and the city paid $108 an acre for it. In
other words you had a square like this and they took this piece off here (dem~nstrates) and this is
West Lake Drive over here, down in, and the other 50 from the 70 was in hem and the house was
right in here, and dad had to fight like the devil with the city to keep the hous because West Lake
Drive goes right by it today.
Q. Is it across the road from the Lake? Is it on the edge of Lincoln Land Community College?
A. It backs up. . .that's the rest of the story. Along came "Lincoln Land" ard they wanted the
balance of that fifty acres there and so we fought like the devil. . ,
Q. How did they do that? It was your property?

A. Oh, Eminent domain, You know for the good of, they can come in and comiemn it That's
what happens with all these highways. These farmers get chopped in two.
Q. They buy it They do buy it from them but at a low price, right?
A. Well, look at it. $108. I think we sold that 50 acres. . ,we only sold them 49 acres by fighting
and fighting and fighting. We managed to keep the farm house and one acre. And my brother
and I own that now. It's come down to us and it's a little house. ..you how qhere the
maintenance area is on the east end of the University. It buts right into that ad
this little acre,
one am with a house on it, my brother and I rent this.
Q. What's the name of the road it's on?
A. West Lake Drive.
Q, Oh, it is West Lake.
A. 2335 West Lake. It's up high with a lot of trees.
Q. So what are you going to do with that eventually?
, A. We rent it. My brother's very sentimental about it.
Q. Does somebody live in it?
A, Yeah, huh, huh.
Q. So let's go back to this.
A. Oh, wait a minute. You see, I remember all about the Lake Spriu@eld because we used to go
out there for picnics and Sugar Creek came right across the bottom. . .if yougo down the hill at
Virginia Lane, you go down to tho water, and right qff their shoreline is some of tbe deepest
water in the lake, It's about 25 feet deep but that's where the old creek we* right through there
and we used to go down there and have picnics and gather paw paws and st@ that would grow
there wild. You how what a Paw is? It's kind of like a little wild banana.
Q. Why were bananas growing here?
A. They became a Paw. (Chuckle) But you see, I do know about the Me there because of that.
Q. How did they determine the size of it? . I know it's 56 miles around.
A. Yeah. I think they decided. ., a lot of engineering went into it, of courge, and sum
Y
g to

establish where the shoreline would be. The average, I think it, what is it, 560 I think, 560 feet is
considered normal sea level of the lake.
Q. Mrs. Knudsen came in. Did you remember her?
A.. Sure.
Q, Tell me about Mrs. Knudsen,
A. Nutsen. It's K-N-U-D-S-E-N but pronounced Nutsen. The K is silent.(Ckckle)
Q. Her daughter, Mollie Grey, is still living.
A. Yes, her daughter is living right over here on Williams Boulevard.
Q, Going strong!.
A. Yeah. They lived out near Salisbury. They had a farm out there. Oh, she was a founder more
or less of Lincoln Gardens.
Q. With Jensen?
A, Yeah, with Jensen the landscaper. And then before that there was a Cath~lic priest here. .
George Link, and he was a great naturalist, a fabulous character and he was more or less the
founder of the Springfield Nature League. You'll probably find that in the Gvdens. Now whether
Knudsen got in with him on that or how they got together I don't how, but be had a little
church down in Godfrey or something like that. Not Godfrey. He was orighplly fiom Quincy and
then he had a little parish sort of, ..he was in Springkld an awful lot. It waq almost a ..oh, he'd
do one mass a week or something like that or on Sundays, but he had a very very small parish so
he was fairly free to do his nature league work too out of the Bishops office and stuff. Whenever
he'd pop into town, .. we were living on Williams Boulevard over here whe* Harvey Stephens
lives now. Mother and dad built that house and we had a big porch an the bwk of that and he'd
load that porch up with all kinds of.. ..he'd bring in cages or something. I remember one time he
brought in a cage with little white footed deer mice. Cutest dm
things. You how they have
white tummies and white down here (demonstrates). Cutest dam things.
Q. What did he do with them?
A. Dump them on our back porch. (Chuckle)
Q. Why?
A., Because we'd take care of them until he decided what he was going to
P
o with them.

Q. What did he do with them?
A. Oh, maybe take them some place else.
Q. Well if they were caged, they were wild. Why'd he do that?
A. I don't how. Maybe he went around, took them to schools, things like that. That was
1920's and I'l never forget he'd just pop into our house and rnother'd put another plate on the
table. He'd crawl into the bed in the guest room or something and we even took a trip with him.
He talked my dad into. ..dad was quite a naturalist too. We went down to Smgkey Mountains
National Park the year it opened and we took him along. He'd been down the* before, that was
1930, '34. We even climbed the top of the mountain down there. Of course G~tlinburg was a
funny little place. It was a little town there and they had a hotel where you could stay. We were
down there for maybe a week or something.
Q. With the priest? Learning all about nature?
A. Oh, we got a marvelous education from him and I'l never forget this the. There was a
particularly interesting book on flowers that he wanted and (chuckle) he was Ways reading,
reading so he talked mother into buying it. So he dropped in and she said, "Faer, we've got that
book you're interested in." And he got it and she called him to dinner and he qme into the dining
room reading the book and sat down at the table and kept reading. Dad served. We always ate in
the dining room over there and he would serve, serve him his dish and he was ritting there like
this (demonstrates) reading, and fmaw motlner. ..I'm not sure that she said, "George", but she
might have, she might have said, "Father Link, we do not read at the dinner table." And he closed
it up or she might. (Chuckle) But he was quite a guy and I think he probably qould have been one
of the faunders of the Memorial Gardens. He was one of the guys who dug tQe ground for it, I
mean got it started,
Q. Was it a coincidence that they use the edge of Lake Springfield for this? Was it all planned
that way?
A. Well, they were planning all the parks and stuff and that area over there vas a wonderful
wooded wild spot, more or less untouched and so maybe it was the Nam League or whatever it
was, whatever it was called then, conned the city in designating this area for a wild park.
Q. Then when did the properties take hold?
A. When they made the lake.
Q. Was that all part of the plan? People would live around the lake? It would be residential?
A. Yeah, they would have various. . .

Q. With Lake two, they have no plans for property sites.
A. No, no. Certain areas were designated as parks and certain areas were desipated for
recreation and parks or fishing areas and stuff, and then for clubs. That was a& set out in the
beginning.
Q. Was George Link responsible for establishing thc Priory with the graveyard at the north edge
of the gardens?
A. That was built by the diocese of Springfield. Now how they leased that ground. . .and that
was built originally as a first and second year seminary for would-be priests.
Q. Have they sold it? Somerhing's changed recently,
A. I don't know if it's an old people's horn or, . .I think the diocese still owns it but I think they
had to abandon it because they didn't have enough guys who wanted to be p*sts.
Q. They're having that problem with the nuns too.
A Chuckle. I could maJce a crack on the &st joke that my kids told us. KiY and I were always
looking for a sense of humor which we think is so terribly important in peopld
r
and the kids came
home one night, we were sitting in the kitchen, they'd been out playing and I they were in
seventh or eighth grade and we were having a drink before dinner and the Id said, "Hey, we've
got a couple of jokes for you." We said, 'You have?" They said, "Yeah". &~d we said, "Let's
hear them." And they said, "Well, do you know why they build the walls arwd convents so
high? At that time they had a big brick wall at Ursuline Convent out there. ?hey said, "Why'd
they build them so high?" And we said, " Why'd we build wall around convqnts so high?'And
they said, Well, when they say nun, they mean none." (Chuckle) I don't know whether tbey
knew it or not. So we laughed (laugh). Then we said, OX. what's the othe one?'They said,
"What's the definition of a monastery?" aod we said, 'What's that?" They &'d, "It's a home for
unwed fathers." (Chuckles) So those are the first jokes we ever got out of ur kids.
9
Q. Apparently Mrs. Knutsen was responsible for planting certain indiginou trees around the
lake. So that what they took down. they replaced with a certain variety.
i
f
1
A. Yeah, Now when the city came in, they had to clear lots of the lake b there of timber
and so people, timber buyers, would come in and I how that the land we s Id to the city there
was some timber that was below the warn line and they had it all surveyed o you knew where
the water line was and before you sold your stuff for $100 an acre, these g s would come in and
buy the tirnk, especially big stuff. Oak and walnut and things like that
Q. Can you remember what it looked liloe before the lake?

A. oh sure. i I
Q. Did you ever go out and watch the process? Didn't they dig parts of it out?
A. Well, I can't remember that they dug anything in the lake except to take the mes out andit0
build a dam.
Q. They had horse driven carts to take away diR, I thought, according to photqpaphs in the
Sangarnon Valley Room. Perhaps it was only trees.
A. Oooh. Now you know where Lake Springfield is now. To the east of them, there's water
over there. You've seen that flooded haven't you? That's the way Lake Sprin@eld was.
Q, So it was low and maybe the perimeter was the deciding factor,
A. I've seen Lake Springfield now not quite that full of flood waters, like it was on the other side
before it became Lake Springfield,
Q. Before the dam?
A. Yeah. Before the dam, and just hold it back. They didn't have to dig it o*. Now they did a
lot of construction there for Vachel Lindsey Bridge and for the dam and then &ter came the
power plant, and Carl Meyer designed that first brick building that says. . .it h q great big letters
across the front of it. That's the original building with the original generators )n there.
Q. So they've expanded it over the years?
A. Tremendously, The MacDonald enginearing company of Kansas City has never stopped
working for the city but the original building was done by Carl Meyer. And Qose letters up there
are about three feet high. When you go buy, take a look at them there.
Q. They're W n for granted.
A. Yeah. That was one of my first jobs working for Carl Meyer. The buildizlig was built and
these big aluminm letters had to be put up there and so the letters had bolt hqles on various, all
different, I've forgotten, I've forgotten that. SpringF~3.d. City Power Plant or something like
that.
Q. I'll have to look at it on my way home.
A. But those letters are three feet high and I had to lay those out on a bigger llscale where all the
holes were on the back so they could put there guys up there, drill the hole iM the wall and anchor
those letters up there, so if they're spaced properly, I did it.

Q. What's it like driving around town seeing things that you've done years and years ago?
Is it a good feeling?
A. Yeah. I get a bang out of it when I go by Griffin High School out here or t)e Thomas
Jefferson or the George Washington or the Ben Franklin Middle Schools. Go (own to St Jphn's
Hospital there and I think it's an exray building or something. It's on the corncrr of Seventh and
whatever the street is in front of the St. John's Hospital. There's a red brick building there, bright
red and they had a lot of exray stuff in there. Whose in there now?
Q, Across the street? Washington?
A. No, this is on Seventh and. ,.well anyway it's a two story building I did there. Doc Hemdon
built it I think and it was all exray department for awhile and now I think a f d y practice is in
there. There's a little two-story red brick building. . .
Q, You didn't do the Nurses Building which was just torn down?
A, No. Henry Helmle did that. He did all that hospital work there until he died and then he and
his brother did the Mother House in Rivcrton or something. That was the St. James Trade Gchool
out there and next to it was St. John's Sanitmium and the Mother House. Nw the St. Jaws
Sanitarium was for tuberculosis &d for crippled children. That was way bach in the 20's and 30's
and that's when if you got tuberculosis you were flat on your back for a yea or more.
Q. Also a place for polio?
A. I don't know about polio but they had crippled children and they did all mds of work out
there. I.think the last doctor around might have been, was it Doctor Trumpy? He was on lungs.
He's retired now. Has been for some time. But they had a tremendous instimtion out there and
the wonderful one was the St. James Trade School which has been expanded to an old mens. .
.called St, James Court today, and it's for alder men or men that are mentally handicapped or
don't have all their marbles or something like that. That was originally St. Jqnes Trade School
and they had a bunch of ~erman'brothers in there h t were their teachers and it was a fabulous. .
.and they took kids in there that needed a trade, They couldn't go to college, weren't smart
enough to go to college but they were great for trades, But they had a bakeqy shop out there and
they baked all the bread and rolls and stu£F for the hospital, St. James HospiW and the convents.
They taught the kids to be bakers then they had another one that was their meat. . . They wodd
butcher meat out there and teach the kids to be meat cutters to make sausages, everything to do
with the meat business and I can rernembex way back at the Sangamo Club. Peter Durer was out
there. Tuesday was his day to go out to the St. James Trade School and they'd butcher a black
angus or something like that ' He'd go out and cut the steaks out of it, the 8% and stuff. He'd
cut it himself. That was his day to do that and he'd cut his little, whakver they were to the size
he wanted to serve. Maybe he bought a black angus from Wally Oblinger. @s wife was a
legislator. Wally was a lawyer and he'd been with the FBI during World Wfir II. Settled into
I

Springfield. She was a state legislator for years and years and her son is now thp county clerk, I
think
Q. Now, that rings a bell.
A. But Wally and his wife had a farm out N d of Springfield where they raisql black angus
cattle and so Petex Durer would go out there and pick his own or the one he w-d out to the
herd or two, how every many he wanted, and they'd take him in the trade schopl there and they'd
butcher them and stuff and,he'd go and cut what he wanted.
Q. We miss Peter. I think everyone does.
A,. Oh God yes. What else they had out there was wonderful. They taught these kids to do
everything. You name it. A trade. It was their iron work, and oh, there were auto mechanics
too. But all this fancy iron work. They taught these kids to make gates and Wgs like that,
Q. How did they pay them at all? Their roam and board?
A. I think they gave them their room and board They might have given the
money. But what happened was that all there wonderful German brothers
nobody to replace them so the school wanted to put St James Court there
Q. What do you h ow about the Fair Grounds?
I
A. I know that the Sangarno Club used to have a club house out there on the race track. They
could all sit and watch the races and sit and drink. Play rum or whatever they wanted to do.
Q. Did you have anything to do with the design and architecture for any of the buildings aut
there?
A. Never did a thing out there.
Q. Who was responsible for those buildings? And why were the Fair Grounds in Springfield?
Do you h ow anything about this at all?
A.. I don't know how it got started. How they got all the land for it or anytbing except I guess
somebody decided that the capitol city shdd have a fair grounds and that it's a rural cornunity
and they could show off their aaimals.
Q, 4H?
A. 4H stuff and so on.

Q. Did you attend? Do you remember when it was built?
A. Oh no. It goes way back. I'l tell you, last year. . .
Q, Did you attend all the summer functions?
A. Oh sure. Monday was Children's Day at the State Fair and that when motQers took all the
kids out there and remember when we talked about the street cars, the open smet cars. Those
were wonderful, Of course you couldn't use them today cause you couldn't ga insurance for
them With a conductor wallring up and down on a running board on the outside, all the seats
open, kind of on the running board. You got in that way for a nickel.
Q. Did you go back and forth on the street cars?
A. Huh, huh. It was fhe easiest way out there.
Q. How long did it take for you to get there from, say Williams Boulevard?
A. Oh, maybe a half an hour because we lived then off MacArther Blvd. just ~ ff Lawrence
Avenue and you'd go down there half a block, get the street car and transfer.
Q. What do you remember? Has it changed a great deal? Has it gotten largq?
A. I don't think they've gotten any more land there but they've built an awful lot more buildings.
In the early days like that . .oh we were talking about fjxes. I've just remembred, it was called
the dome building or have you had that pop up?
Q. Did you see it?
A. As close as we could get to it. My father w;as on the ball again and I don't know when that
burned. You see, I think that building came £rom the Chicago Worlds Fair ad
I think it was full
of ammunition and stuff from WWI. They used it as a supply area which they did with the Fair
Grounds in WWII. They used a lot of the buildings out there to supply stuff cause our office had
FairIield Air Depot. Out in Dayton, Ohio we had a lot of these Fair Grounds cause we were the
supply for the air forces but there wasn't much going on at the Fair Grounds until years later. I
mean we had a fair but the buildings weren't used like they are today,
Q. Were the Richardsonian entrances the same? The original main entrance?
A. They were the original. Well, how original I'm not s d , but it goes way back.
Q. Did they have the "ethnic" booths then?

A. That was years later. When I was a kid it was a fair grounds period.
Q, And they're only for fairs?
A. Oh principally for the fairs. They did horses and stuff.
Q. Did they do a lot with children and 4H in those days?
A. Oh yeah. 4H. has been around for years and years.
Q. You were never involved in any of that?
A. No. That was for farm kids. I was Boys Scouts.
Q. Did the Boys Scouts do anything up there at all? March or. . .
A. They always had an exhibit out there. One of the greatest exhibits I used to go see was the
bees in the machine building. They two or three. . .they had Machinery Hall md then they had
one building that's now on the main drag and then in the back far corner there they'd have a big. .
. the beekeepers had a great big exhibit and they'd have all these glass things with the bees
crawling inside.
Q. So you could watch the activity?
A, You could watch the activity. Then they'd sell beeswax and things like Sat. Of course in
those days you'd need a piece of beeswax for your iron. Your electric irons pr, you'd always
have a pjece of bees wax in there.
I
Q. It's peat for needles too.
A. Yes and shoemakers of course. They all had to have beeswax and that's I made my own
bows and arrows. I made my own bows and arrows out of lemon wood.
Q, Lemon wood?
A. kmon wood. Six foot staves about four wide. If I were to dig around the basement, I could
probably find one for you.
Q. Is lemon wood hard or soft?
A. Very hard. I don't know where they got it and with no knots in it.
i
Q. From the West? Maybe from the South.
r

1 I
A. Yeah I suppose. With six foot staves and stuff you made your own bows. You had to
bow strings so you went to where they sold materials for the shoemakers whers they
leather, heels, and soles, everything. And they also sold shoesbhg and you got Irish
12. Something like that. Irish Linen chord and a gob of beeswax.
Q. Were you an archer?
A. Yeah, sure. Made my own bows out of bmon wood. Then the arrows were made out of a
certain kind of wood that came from Sweden, I think, There were no knots in it and it didn't
warp. Now you took birch and stuff for arrows and they would warp but thest didn't warp.
Q. Now Indians used birch didn't they?
A. Probably.
Q. They didn't know about lemon wood?
A. Or hickory was wonderful to make a bow out of if you could get it. Get r good clear piece or
Osage Orange.
Q. I how what that is. I used to play on one at the Haverford College. It jqt went for ever.
Great bows of it. Long long heavy branches. Yes, it's a very rare tree.
A. I know where there are some right now.
Q. Here in this. . .
A. Old hedge wood. They are, . .
Q. Where are they?
A. Take West Lake Drive. If you're going to the University and when yoq go to the University
about where you turn off to go onto West Lake Drive, you're on Shepherd Road then and right
there as the road turns right by the Press Rouse, There's a building out there that has huge trees
in front of it. Those are all. . .and if you ever want Hedge Apples in the fa& the, ground is
absolutely littered with them and people say that Hedge Apples are good for water bugs,
Q. Water bugs? How?
A. Roaches or waterbugs. Just put them in ydur basement near the drains, they come ough the
sewers or something and peel them a little bit and they'll get into the milk plat's in thos hedge
apples and they're gone,
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48
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Q. You have a great many tid-bits, Phil. ( Chuckle)
I
A, About a year ago last summer in June ox July, the Sangamon County
meeting out at the Fair Grounds on the history of the buildings in the
it and it was in the. . .what was the old Poultry Building, it's now the
the horses up there, and that's where they had it. They had a lot of
smaller building.
Q. Not the extension building?
I !
I
A. No. I could draw you a picture of where it is. If you go in the main entrace, turn left and go
past the Colosseum. When you get right at the end of the Colosseum, turn left and you come
circle around a bunch of barns here and ova here on that point there's a brick building. They've
spent a lot of money on it.
Q. I think that's next door to the Extension Service.
A. I suppose, but that's where they had this, but it was an interesting program.
Q. So there's a documented history on it?
A. And that was the history of it, and she had slides of all the old buildings aad how they
developed and all that stuff.
Q. That's probably in the Sangamon Valley Room too isn't it? Well let me *ow.
A. That was Sangamon County's Historical Society that put on these various! programs,
Q. Well now Phil, you've gotten involved with various things in town over tlje years. Wha .t have
you been most involved with?
I
1
A. Oh gosh. How far back do you want to go? (Chuckle)
Q, I think you were a married man, you had children, and you became civic minded.
A, Well do you want to go back to where I taught soap carving to the. . .
Q. Sure.
A. To the kids in the summer school%t the First Presbyterian Church and they had a summcr
Bible School there. I was in high school I guess at the time, and I was known. ..see there's about
four or five things I was known as. (Chuckle) Let's see, Phil Trutter, your Tmtters boy, or
you're marrkd Kitty Wills,and you're the fsther of the twins, and do you s
I

And that was quite an art, taking Ivory soap.
Q. Only Ivory?
A. Only Ivory. That's the only one that was any good for it. They'd maJe elephants and aI( kinds
of stuff and they used to have a national contest and they gave some whoppin$ great prizes for it.
Proctor and Gamble did it for years and years. Every year they had a soap cwing contest.
Q. Did you ever enter it?
A. No, I never did enter it. Mine were never quite good enough for it, but I Qad a lot of fun
doing it.
Q. Did you .ever have a really creative studant?
A. Oh, I've probably got like this (demonstrates) of some of my carvings thaqI did. (chucqe)
1
END SIDE TWO; TAPE TWO
Q. What happened after that? You got into jig-saws didn't you?
j
A. Jig-saws were much later. I got into lots of sculpture work and things that. Remember
that architects think in three dimensions which is what you get into when o soap carvings
and sculpture and things like that. When you're just doing drawings, you width, length
and height Just two dimensions there, but when you get into the sculpture y& have three
dimensions. You have depth and with the other you have to use your shades &d shadows to give
them depth and so on but with the sculpture you have to think in three dimen~ons to carve the
back sides and so on and that's fun too so architects have to think in three dimensions. Just the
front of the building, you have the depth of it and the back and so on but, oh, 1 got into lots of
stuff. I got into sculpture at the art club as a kid and on up through the years I've continued
doing it, then I got into jig-saw puzzles accidentally because my daughter bought a house up in
Winnetka and a big sort of a French Provincial deal and it bad wings on it and, a great tower on it,
a big octagonal tower on it forty feet high and she had nie look at it with her q d her mothex and
so on when she was just buying it and she asked, 'What did I think?,, and I sa@, Well, it's just
greag but there's just om thing missing. It's like a lady in her basic black dregs with no pearls and
I said, "You've got the big tower there and it needs a nice weather vane to setit off as the jewelry
of the house. (Chuckle) She said, "000h' that's a great idea." And Kitty said( 'Why Phil, why
don't you make s weathervane, and I said I'd never made a weathemane in mj life. She sajd "Oh
heck, you could do it" So I said, "Well, I'll try. What do you want. You pic$ the subject pnd so
they kind of looked at each other, mother-daughter deal and they hally said cm the same wave
length, "We've always felt sorry for the poor dragon that St George is alwaysl tilling with 4 spear
or something. What about that?" And I said, "Alright, I'll try." So I made, @w up a design or
two and worked it up. It's St. George in his suit of armor on his elbows and Wees and his yump,
I
I

kind of in the air with great big spurs on the back of his heel and his head is
mud and the dragon is rampant with a sword in his hand womping him on
flinches, he'll stick his bottom on the spurs 90 it passed inspection very
great big sheet of alurninum and cut it out. The whole blade is five feet
the dragon.
Q. What whipped around? That long tail or sword?
A. No. It's an mow on half of it and the dragon is on the other half and so
i
e kids then took
that and they had an old Swedish iron-monger somewhere up there in Winne a someplace, or in
one of the suburbs and they got him to make the rest of the weathewane. Th post that this fits
on and rotates on and then there's all sorts of circles and gold balls and East, est, North and
South on it, It's a very very elaborate thing and this sits right on top and we bad it balanced so
that the slightest breeze would make it flip around but you see, in order to that quarten inch
plate of aluminum and cut it, I had to have a jig-saw, so I went down to Blac~s hardware store
and they had one on sale there and I bought a Black and Decker, I think it w about $400- This
was about 1971, '72 and, ., 7
E
Q. Is is a light instrument?
I
A. Oh no. It's huge.
I
Q. So it takes both hands to. . .
A. No, no. Its a machine. It's electric and it has what we call a" throat". 1tIs like a big C. Then
you have your blade that vibrates in there but you can take your big stuff and ' ou can turn it
because.of the clearance you have on it.
P
Q. So you're turning the wood. You're not manipulating the blade?
! I
A. No, no. You're not manipulating the blade at all. So, . . I
I
Q. So breaking the actual blade is easy to do isn't it?
A. Oh yes. Easy to do but these were metal blades I used in cutting the dtm&um so I got it all
cut out. The kids. . .
Q, Did you wear goggles when you were working?
A, I didn't. No. Occadonally I have, but, I didn't. So we get the thing all made up for th
and by the way, I'l show it to you in the back hall. It's up above the door. You didn't set
cardboard cut-out which it came from?
I
I
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I
kids "
the

Q, No, but do you have a picture of this particular weathemane?
A. If I look around I have a picm on the house. I took slides of it.
Q. So tell me more about your jig-saws.
s the
A. Kitty had hundreds of old-fashioned jig-saw puzzles. They were usually TCO. Tuco wa
name for them and you got them at the ten cent store for twenty-nine cents or
those days.
I
Q. They were wooden?
A. No, no. They were cardboard. Thick cardboard, and she had boxes and boxes and boxes of
those and, oh, several hundred anyway, and she'd do those. They were five ar@ a half or eight by
eleven or something like that, a few bigger ones, and one night she was doing pne and we were
sitting in the kitchen and she said, "Phil, you've got that jig-saw down in the b+ement, Why
don't YOU cut me some jig-saw puzzles out of wood. Some decent ones, I'q getting tired of
these, their just holes and bwnps, squares and. . .so I said, "Well, I suppose I qould." So that
started me out,
Q. How many years ago was this?
A. This was about 1972. So it's been more than twenty years now. .
I
Q. Well now you're of national or international fame aren't you?
A. Well more or less. (Chuckle)
Q. You've had a Dutchman visit with you recently.
A. He's the master of jig-saw puzzles in Ewope and Ann Williams in Maine whose written this
big, almost encyclopedia of jig-saws in the United States and so on. I think she has a couple of
thousand and one that I gave her, but the Dutch guy came to see me cause sh* had told him that
my method of cutting is most unusual having the figures. . .my figures are pecple and things.
Kiw didn't want hard puzzles she wanted interesting puzzles and so that's when I put all the. . .I
made birds and beasts, flowers and geometric stuff. I've got a couple or mor$ of designs that I've
made up.
Q. You've desigaed your own stencils so to speak and then you put them on @ painting.
And you use that drawing, don't you. . ,
C
A, Yeah, I get a picture out of a magazine or something, Now with Kitty, we had done so much
travelling that she loved to have pictures of where we'd been so I'd take the rpagazines that came

out fiom the various countries and whether it was Thailand, Japan or Hong
or something like that and then I would paste those with contact cement. I
way by experimenting, cause I had no training. . .
Q. Trial by error?
A. Yeah. I had no training in jig-saw puzzles at all. I worked it all out by myelf so anyway if it
was, say, from New Guinea why we have a bunch of items we brought back @m New Guinea
and I would draw those down to size and would make pieces of those for the guzzles.
Q. But you used the picture of the puzzle to enhance a particular design by putting the stencil in a
particular spot?
A. Well I guess you can say that. Or I'd take, for instance, Bangkok, or Th@and. I have loads
and loads of elephants in there and the barges, the royal barges, they sail up asd down the river. I
had those in there and Balinese dancers and things like that and I'd take my li@e designs and try
to make it so that the parts of the picture fit into the little piece that it is. Oh, pnd then of course
for birthday cards and people like that I put their names in it. To Kitty or Phyvs or someone like
that. Never sold any. That would take the fun out of it. I think there's a story, in mentioning
Phyllis there who is a jig-saw nut
Q. Phyllis?
i
A. Phyllis Brissenden Herndon. She was on a couple of trips with us and the one that particularly
involves jig-saw puzzles is when we were in French Polynesia and we were o t on the island of
Hua Hini which was a very interesting island and you could see Bora Bora th e which is only
twenty qinutes away by air and anyway we were there for a number of days Tgether and one
morning we were having breakfast and the manager Tim. . .he was British by fie way. . .and he
was the manager and we got to, . .when he came over to see how we
(chuckle) Phyllis said, 'Tim(and she reached in her pocket and brou
opened the kleenex and in it was a great big cockroach. A huge one.
long.) . . .and she said, "Tim, this was in my bathroom this morning."
he looked at this and he said, "Phyllis, you killed it, you killed it." S
said, "They eat the mosquitoes." and of course we all knew he was
said, " the people are about three weeks overdue coming from Pap
here one of these days, and I'l tell you what I'll do, you bring me ninetee
round number of twenty and I'l give you the biggest rnaitai we can make
"alright" and it took about two mornings, she had twenty more so
brought out the rnai tai and she should have ken smashed as the
a bottle of booze in it, but anyway so we got home and I took a map of the
was kind of consolidated, It was mostly white. Blue for the sea and white
various isles were put together of the French Polynesian, the friendly islands
But the main ones, and so (chuckle) I took that puzzle and I cut

mean there were other things but it was a pretty good size. It was more than ejght and a half by
eleven, probably fifteen by eighteen or something like that, 1 don't know. Butt here were al! these
cockroaches. No two could be'inter~han~ed. They just won't fit. You'd havp to have the right
one in the right spot or you're out of luck. With all those six legs on em.
Q. Now you were doing this in wood ?
A. All my cutting was in wood. No, no, And after Kitty died, I dug up I beqa five hundred
puzzles that were in the basement and I gave them to Scotty Hoff out at Memorial Hospital for
their waiting rooms and stuff. I took them out. ..I'd been out there and I not*ed they had a table
in a waiting room, near the operating rooms or something like that just sittingand waiting, so I
took them out to her. I finally emptied our basement of all of them and she lwed them. Now
those are just the cardboard ones, but anyway she has a couple of others that I gave her and then
there are a couple of others I did that were ~eally outstanding and we were gwsts of the owners
of the Grand Hotel up at Macldnac Island in Michigan and we were invited ul) there three
different times with my daughter Caroline and her daughter for weekends andl stuff. All we had to
do was get there and get away and they took care, . .we couldn't pay for anytfLlng and we were
with them, we were t he for the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the G$md Hotel and the
people who own it today are Amelia and , . . I can't think of his first name, . ,yes, Dan Musser and
he's the nephew of the man who started it, and they got him to sell it to thempnd they've put
millions in it to restore it to the grand old lxiy that it was as a place of outsta@ng vacationing.
Well anyway, we went up for the first time and what do you give people like that, and so I got
home and said how am I gonna say thank you, so I got a map from the Chicago Motor Club of
Michigan and I got one of the Upper Peninsula there, it was big, and cut a jig*saw puzzle out of
that map. I mounted it on wood and cut it out. There was lots of water in it and the island and
stuff. Of course there are no automobiles there. It's all horses and bicycles. You ferry across to
it, and buggies and that and so the puzzle is just full of various kinds of buggies and wagons and
horses and horseback and boats and fish and typical of the place up there. Oh including a little
waiter whose carrying a tray with glasses and a little bottle on it and his coat-tails flying and
things like that. It was a big one. It was something like about 675 pieces in it.
Q. How long did it take you to make it?
A. It took a couple of weeks, Especially the design. . .
Q, How many hours would you put into something like that?
A. Oh gosh. Just an ordinary eight and a half by eleven, I'l spend eight or nine hours. 11 s not
the cutting, it's the designing of the pieces that go into them and where they go into it. T en so I
taok that up when we went the next time, but I guesrr I took it up and gave3 to them. Tl :y were
tickled to death with it, Of course they wouldn't leave it out in the hotel anyplace figwin people
would swipe the good pieces out of it and so then they invited us up again fa
the 100th
Anniversary for the founding of the hotel, and so I made another ahead of fitpe and took j with

me of a different part of the hotel and I inserted, I got folders of the hotel and fet them into the
map so that it all wasn't all just map, and I took that up and left it put togetherland it was, id had .
two pieces of plastic keeping it apart so that I could carry it Likc. They went npts over that one,
and that was about 600 pieces, nearly 700 plces. Those were the whoppers @at were fun. Oh,
I've made lots of them that were fun. Oh I've made them for kids, for my gra+d-daughters.
Q. Do you have a portfolio of pictures of these puzzles?
A. Some. I used to take little pieces of cards or something like this that were interesting and then
when my grandchildren were very young, I would cut them so there was a nuxflber. There were
pieces almost square and then I'd have a one and a two and a three, four, five bnd they'd learn to
count that way and the numbers would lock the pieces together. I can show ypu just my tracings
of that.
Q. Now you use plywood?
A. Yeah. It's about an eighth of an inch of clear birch three-ply wood and I flon't know if I can
still get it or not and at the time that I could I bought a lot of it In fact I bou$t three big four by
eight sheets of it way back. And I still have a little bit left. Not much. I
Q. Well you're not making them much anymore are you?
I
A. Occasionally. I haven't recenily but they're a lot of fun and I'm to get the itch to
do one, but I just havc too many things that interfered just like you things. (Chuckle)
But that's kind of the story of the jig-saw puzzles but dl of them
personal.
Q. an all absolutely delightful, Now you have a tremendous collection
in this house. What can you say about that?
i
A. Well, I can say what my brother says about it He says, "Phil, you live in museum bu/ maybe
I should call it a layered archeological dig." (Chuckle) 1t's about right beca e in our tra#ls we
visited ninety countries so many many times, always on our own, we didn't on tours and we
had a lot of fun setting up, reading and doing all our homework before we w nt and then some
more homework when we got home to go back again. Because in traveling, ne of the rule is to
always leave something that you didn't get to do so you have a reason go ba& to see what you
forgot or didn't to.
Q. What have been some,of your favorite places?
A. Well, we always go to London if we couldn't go some place else cause it was cheap in, those
I
days. Go see some shows for a couple of weeks, We did have children.
I

Q, It was cheap in those days. The dollar had a reverse value then that of toc#iy.
A. Yeah, $250 iould get you a round trip ticket from Chicago from Sprbgfidd even to ~ hdon
and back and rent a car while you were there and run all over the place, boy. Go out and sqe
Stonehenge when you could get in, walk around it, and pat the stones.
Q. It has a fence around it now.
A, I how you can't get in there. It's all fenced off. We tried to . . .Kitty lowd to hunt up old
places so she'd get lists of old Inns and stuff, you know two and three hundred years old and
we'd stay in those except when we flally found out in London, a great place to stay was Browns
Hotel until it began to get so much publicity and it was the tourists took over go we went
elsewhere then. When it was dedicated in 1827 I think, Princess Victoria was there, she wasn't
Queen Victoria yet, she was a little girl and she was there.
Q. So what other countries? You talk about your travels a lot.
I
A, We loved the Orient.
I
Q. That's why you subscribe to BEy of &, this wonderful magazine.
I
A. It is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful magazine.
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Q. Well, tell me about the Orient. You were traveling during the less danger us times.
A. Yeah. For instance, we got to Afghanism before the Russians got there. by the way, Wyllis
Herndon was there with us once, and we just loved the Orient. We got to Ho g Kong, Taipei,
and our f ~st trip to the Orient was 1959 and Kitty and I did a, it was sort of a econescence type
of trip for three months because she thought that the girls. . . part of our twin aughters education
was to see how the rest of the world lived and so when they were sixteen, it s 1961, four years
later, we took the twins. They went to two mrnmer scl~ools, and it was the s cond semester of
their junior year we took them out and went f ~r six months around the world tarting from
Hawaii and on into Tokyo and Taipei and IEong Kong and Bangkok and. . . 1
Q. Why do you suppose you appreciate the Orient so much? Is it you architectural backgr
or the design, the mystery?
I
I
A. It's so unusual in design,
Q. Unusual to. . . the American eye, of course, But is theremy other reason?
A. Just appealed to us,

Q. Do you like the way the people Live as well. Do you appreciate their morays?
A. Yeah. You appreciate their. . .we were in India four different times. Nor&, South, East and
West and Nepal twice. We got into Nepal in 1959 right after it was opened tq the public. We
were the first five thousand people to get inho Nepal and. , .
Q. Did you meet the Dalai Lama?
A. No not the Dalai Lama but the China Llama. The China Lama, he was Lama number four.
Oh, we got very well acquainted. He speaks twenty six languages including all their dialects. I've
got all kinds of movies of them and a pair of beautiful Tibetan boots that my ldds bought. We
took them up to see him too and we stayed at the. . .there was only one hotel when we were first
there. It was an old palace. Oh I wish I could name. . .Han Su Yen wrote a book about Nepal
and the Jesuit priest up there. (Chuckle). It's been so long ago, I can't remember all these
names. Later on I'l think about it.
Q. Have you been to Kathmandu?
A. That's what I'm talking about. We've been to Kathmandu two different Ves. Twice, just
twice. In '59 and '61,
Q. It's changed a great deal in the last couple of years I understand. I
A. Well I think the hippies and the druggers got there.
Q. It's the Chinese who have taken over Tibet.
A. yeah, well Kathmandu is in Nepal.
i
Q. And Nepal?
A, Yeah. Llasa we never got into. The Cbina Lama wanted to take us ove to TibeL He's quite
a little guy, and you talk about religion being mixed up. His daughter was 'ed to the son of
the High Priest of the Hindu religion up there (chuckle). They're all mixed . The Hindus and
the Buddhas up there and they live very happily together. There weren't y Muslims there.
He lived on a circle in what was a Tibetan village catled Bodenath, just outs' e of. ..Kathmandu
is a valley about twenty miles long, maybe eight or ten miles wide like a me platter,
Q. It's really a mesa isn'tit?
4
A. Yeah, Huh huh. It's surrounded with mountains. On one side, of courw, you go rig t into
the Himalayas. There's quite a story about the history of it and the giant @ the battle at the
head. He took his sword and took a slash at this guy and he hit one of the rpmtains an cut a
I

slice in it and that's the way the water. . .that let all the water out of the basin @d so we flew
through that in an old DC3 that was unbelievable, and people standing on the qountainside were
waving at us. (Chuckle) Kitty and I grabbed each other's hands and she looked at me and I looked
at her and she said, "Well Phil, it's been fun. Let's hope."
Q. Your life has been something like Hallibwtons, the world traveller who ro* the elephants
through the khybur Pass in the late 19th Century. Do you have any other placss you fondly
remember? What about Scandinavia?
A. Nope. Never got to Scandinavia. That's another story too. Our daughter Caroline and Kitty
and I were in Denmark.
Q. Then you did get to Scandinavia?
A, Well I guess, I always think of Scandinavia as Norway, Sweden and F iqd but anyway we
went up to . . .we had a car there. We saw Denmark. It doesn't take very 10% to drive around it.
You've been there? And we went out one morning to see Elsinor, Hamlet's c tle. We went out
there and we didn't know how long it was going to take and we got through ere by about
I
eleven o'clock in the morning and we looked across the way, and they said, " ell, you can take a
pretty fast boat across if you want to spend the day in Sweden." So Kitty and Caroline looked at
each other and said, "Do we go to Sweden or do we get our hair fmed." (Ch+kJe) And the two
of them said, "Let's go get our hair washed. It needs it Phil you wander aroynd and take some
pictures and stuff, we're going to go get beautiful." And they did and we neqr got to Sweden.
Q. What about Australia?
A. We were there twice. Australia. Outback to Alice Springs, Ayers Rock. 3jl those days Alice
Springs had a maximum of about five thousand people. That's right in the rni1dle of Australia and
we got a plane, a little Cessna, I think it was, probably 182 or something like Fat and flew from
Alice Springs up to Ayers Rock. Well you don't think about distance up there like you do down
here. And that would be about the equivalent to getting a, chartering a planetfrom Springjield to
go up to Madison, Wisconsin. It,was about two hundred and fifty miles way out to Airs Rock
which is an absolutely impossible, fascinating thing which looks like the top of a loaf of bread
sticking out of the desert there. And it had rained about two days before we got there and all the
desert flowers were in full bloom Otherwise it was. . .I've got pictures of that, and airs rock is
six rniles around the bottom. It's twelve hundred feet high and the Australiam started digging
down to see how far they could, at that time, they'd gone down twenty five hpndred feet and it
was still one rock and you could climb to it if you wanted to. They didn't recqmmend it but if you
wanted to, they had some chains but twelve hundred feet high. , , a few people got killed sliding
off of it
Q. Is it a smooth or rugged?
!

A. Oh, I've got all kinds of movies flying over the top of it and around it, and
the bottom. That's where the aborigines had a manhood ceremony, down in s
and these guys would go in there and take ,the young men and they'd slit their
and then they'd put their wrists against the wall. The wall was all brown from@& old blood.
They did that.
Q. What was the point of that? Culture?
A. Culture, Nobody knows why,
Q. Did you see many aborigines?
A. An awful lot of them in Alice Springs.
Q. Are they doing anything there?
1
I
A. Some of them, yeah, and they had a lot of missionaries. Now this was twenty years ago that
I'm talking about. They had missions there and of course the "flying doctors." You've heard of
them The doctors really don't fly, they're actually in Alice Springs mostly aqd there's the Canella
Airlines. Everybody's got radios and stuff out there so. ..and they have a nice hospital there in
Alice Springs and if somebody's sick out thexe, the doctor will get in the plan
i
and fly out with
them and bring them back if necessary. They call them the flying doctors, bu they're not
necessarily the pilots, and as we were flying up to Alice Springs to Ayers Ro , by the way there
were about frfteen or sixteen people who lived up there. The water tastes te 'ble but they have
plenty of water but it's full of magnesium and they have to be careful how m ch they drink or
they'll spend the days in the johns, also to make it palatable we took up a couple of jugs of lime,
Roses LZ,irne juice, used for liquor in drinks. Well we took two gallon jugs ofithat with us to put in
the water to make it a little more palatable,
Q. But still you had the magnesium
A. It sure killed the taste. (Chuckle)
Q. What was the air like up that high?
A. It was nice and clear and clean. Of course they'd had this little rain, half an inch or something
like that which was just fantastic how that desert suddenly came to life, and they'd been short on
water for so long, and we were lucky to do that. We spent the day there and got back thq night.
Q. Now that was all before the rna@cea symphony hall was built
A. Oh. No, they were building it while we were there and I've got all kinds of pictures oi it.

Q. Have you been back there?
A. When we were there the last time, it was not open yet I mean they were &st putting the
finishing touches on, But they were very very unhappy with the guy who won the contest. I
think he was Danish. He was a designer, he wasn't an architect. They had to hire engineers to
take his designs and make the structures for them.
Q. The acoustics is supposed to be superb.
A, Yeah, but the funny thing is, oh sometime when you want to see. I've got! slides of the thing
when it was being built. Everyone of those slabs that goes into that, it's like a parrots bill or
something like that. Every one of them was a different size. It had a left one and it had a right
one to put in it and they were all graduated from the big part down and we were there the day
they put the last slab in. They're magnificent and it was originally designed to cost about eight
miUion Australian dollass and an Australian dollar was a dollar and a half for qs and at that time,
the last time we were there, they had spend almost a hundred million. It was go out of line that
they were having national lotteries twice a week to raise additional money to do it and they had to
buy. . .they had all the stage equipment delivered from Europe or someplace where it was made
and it was all out of date and they had to scrap it and start over with another @ree or four rpillion
to get all the stage equipment.
Q. So they realized they had made a mistake in hiring this guy?
A. Well, they bit the bullet and they're very proud of it. (The original budge9 was 6-8 million
dollars,) It's outstanding. There's nothing else like it in the world and what 1. thought was very
interesting, because they had a building that you could go into, it was up high, and you could
overlook to see how the thing was progressing and they had models inside. D showed how, now
the stages and the seating has absolutely no relationship with the parrot shells outside, That's just
hanging inside there. It's wild, but they had really cashed in on it
Q, What year are you talking about?
A. Let's see, we were there in 1959 and then I think we were there in 1967.
Q. So it was about '67?
A. So it was about '67 when they were finishing it up and then they had all kinds of problems
because it was built on the bay, (Chuckle) They didn't have enough space fof automobiles.
Q. So how many years did it take them to build that? Nearly ten?
A. Gosh, I don't know, About ten anyway.

Q. Have you been to Europe? I
A. Oh, many times.
Q. What area do you like the best there?
A. Greece.
Q. There's that architectural influence coming out again,
A. Yeah, architecture coming out again. Tried to get to Rhodes three differeq times and didn't
make it. We got down to Crete, spent almost a week there. Delightful.
Q. Rome?
A. Yeah, and oh by the way, we got to Turkey four different times and I. . .we got down to
Epiphysis. You how, St, Paul and his letters to the Ephesians. a tremendous town there. It was
destroyed by an earthquake about 67 BC I believe right in there and they were excavating at that
time a part of the old town and they were fantastic. They had sewer systems ip that town and
down in Crete they had clay tiIe like we have in what they call the Bell and spigot, one fits in the
other one at the other end. They had that there. They had it in Crete in the Pqlace of Knossos.
Gosh that goes back. The laberinth and all that and gosh, get over into Italy tg Pompeii and that
brings up something some of the medical profession has kicked around. The yater pipes in
Pornpeii were made out of lead and they had brass or copper spigots and stuff turn-ons where
you could turn the water on and off just as we have today. There's no change in them, you knaw,
but the lead pipes are in them and with all the piping in lead that maybe some of those people. .
.well maybe they got lead poisoning form the water pipes. That's been kicked around a bit. I
don't think anybody's done anything about the lead in the paint around here. (phuckle)
Q. Well, they did have very intricate water channels for irrigation. David desjgned an elaborate
system through the underground. We just haven't improved those wonderful Foncepts.
A, Here's something for you. You get over into Portugal, north of Lisbon. mere's, near
Cueembra, across the River from there, has the oldest University still in existence in Europe was
started in ten hundred and something, and the name of this town is CONDW. (spells it) It is
an old Roman Palace in tone where they have marvelous, mamelous mosaics b the floor of the
Governors Palace there which was the typical Roman house with the atrium iq the middle of it
END SIDE ONE: TAPE THREE
*.
with lead pipes and the wabr was brought f om the mountains nearby in the- aqueducts. The
snow waters melting and they brought the water down for the people in this Governors Pailace, a
magnificent big palace, and one of the guards around the place will come oveg and indicatq to you
I

they had a little English, and say, "Would you like to see the water run?" They'd turn on a faucet
..the pools in there are not just a pool, they run up and down like this (demon$rates) with
flowers on each side like in the shape of a cross or something. The water sprays out and across
like this from each side and it'll be a couple of feet in the air and they're all the same height and
everything and then you cross this pond with a few escudoes and he's very happy and we're very
happy and I have movies of all of this. Now what else was different than this glace was that
Portugal was cold. Much colder than Italy so they had a cenwl heating plant where they burned
wood in this big oven and they had pipes, tubes made out of bricks and so on to each of their
buildings from the central heating plant. They'd get a big fire going in there ;qd the heat would
go and then it'd have to force it's way out and go to the pipes which would fe~d into these
buildings, in the Governor's Palace and so on and heat them from a central heating plant
(chuckle). I mean, we're not so darn smart as we think we are. The water in the aqueducts and
magnificent mosaics.
Q. Have you been to Dobiaco in Northern Italy?
A. No, we did Naples, Pompeii, Herculanum. Most people don't go to Herc@num, nevezt even
heard of it.
A. No. No. And then of course we did Rome and went up the old Roman highway up to Perusia
and St. Francis', I can't remember where he was.
Q. Assisi.
A. Assisi, yeah, and then Perusia, and then went on into Florence. We did tbat by bus,
Q. How about Malta?
A. Nope. Never got there.
Q. That's very Middle Eastem Have you been to the Middle East? ~orocc+?
t
A. Oh yeah, we went to Morocco. We've recommended that to friends. Th 's the nearest thing
that we how to the Middle East or to the Orient is to go to Morocco. We w nt there four
different times.
Q. Casablanca?
1. -
A. Oh, sure. Casablanca and Touradant even, down South. That's where t .y had the awful
earthquake, and Marakesh, and Fez, and oh the most important place, I can't think of the same of
it, the big town there, second town. Oh, and Rabat and we went over into @ mountains Qver to
I

the east Golly, I'm having trouble remembering all these names. They'll corn$ to me when it's
too late here. Tibetans, were they the ones, the Bedouins were in the desert w(ren't they. The
Blue Men.
Q. Bedouins are generally out in the deserts living in tents.
A. Yeah, these were people living in the woods and stuff, living in the moundns. They wese the
ones who were the pilots,
Q. Mountain people? Like gypsies?
A. No just Moroccans.
Q. So what did you like about it? Did you like the color, the Middle Eastern Design?
A. Oh we'd go a week or two, get a car and drive all over. We drove Fiteenbundred miles in
Morocco,
Q. Ever ride on a camel?
A. Oh, yes, We did that in Egypt, 1
Q. Would you rather go to Morocco than Egypt?
A. Well, I like them both. Better than France. (Chuckle) Paris, let's put it that way.
Q. You.like the exotic lands?
A. Yeah, but let me tell you, and this came up with that was down at
Tulane in summer school with her anthropalogy. Ancient
her, "By the way,
when you get into anthropology and things like that did
about the cave
paintings in Southern France?'She said, "Oh yes." I
the cave which
is near Clairmont,
Q. You have a book on that.
A. That's the cave, We bought a book on that. She said, "Oh yes, we've slides on. . .I said,
"Your mother was there when it was openad to the public in 1961 and we
airlocks to get into it and they discovered after five years that they had to
because thek breathing was bringing in maisture so we got in there and. .
one of thc kids that fell in the hole when his dog, they were out running
hole. It was the very beginning of World War TI, 1940 or '41,
French kid fell into this hole, or his dog did, and he went down to get him o
I

they discovered all these caves with those fabulous. . .so they went and reporte4 it to the local
Priest and he went out and down in there with flashlights and stuff and so they 8ot the
archeologists who found they were the finest cave drawings found any place. And we got to see
them One of those. . .I'll tell you, Kitty and I had more luck. You talk about @e luck of th& Irish
because we weren't Irish, but anyway we had the luck of it. When we were in blarakesh, we
were there about four different times and weren't in the hotel that particular time where. .
.Churchill used to go to. . .but we were in another hotel, but we came in from running about
someplace cause we'd just get a car and drive, we walked in and it was about two o'clock in the
afternoon and the girl at the counter said, "Oh, oh, oh, Fantasia, Fantasia." Wq looked at ha, and
she said, "They ride, they ride. Once a year." We said, "Where?" And She said. . .and she told us
where to go and it was outside the wall. There were a lot of walls in Marakes4 and we went out
there and there they were, all these guys that had come from all over Morocco, and there are no
prizes, it's just the satisfaction that you can ride better than the other guys and these groups
would be maybe twelve or fileen or as many as twenty-five with their Arabianihorses, beautiful
horses, and old, old trappings on them with old fashioned saddles and guns. neir guns were
ancient, all mounted and silver and long huge things and they had their daggerg, very similar to
this sitting in their belts, (he grabs for a variety of small daggers sitting near b$ and these were
young guys and old guys, and what they did, the idea was they were all lined qp at the end of the
course there outside the walls there, people just standing around watching them, no grandstands,
nothing like that, Anybody who found out about it, these guys trucked their horses in there and
everything and they'd line up, take their turns and somebody, the leader of theigroup, would yell,
and they'd all start running to the other end of this place, maybe about a block, a block and a half,
and just before they got to the end, driving with one hand, waving these old bQmderbusses up in
the air and with that, then at a certain moment, the leader would yell and they'fl dl fire their guns
at the same time. Now that was the whole secret that everybody shot their g$s at the same time,
and they had smoky powder in them and they'd make. ..a lot of them were &ost like flintlocks
and so o.n, but now, the mortal sin was if one of the guys didn't fire at the saqe the the others
did, and if you had this great big BOOM and then a little boom after or one boom ahead of the
others, that was a mortal sin. That was the whole purpose. To be able to rid4 down to the end
and everybody shoot your gun off at the same time. (Chuckle) Oh boy.
Q. Anything happen to the fellow that didn't. . .?
A. No, no, There was one guy and they were riding and something happened to his saddle, it
came loose and he went over, he was at the front of the group. . .by the way qey're dl in their
flowing white robes, Oh gosh. This is very very colorful. Once a year. We ere there. And this
guy, would have if he. . . his partner next to him caught him and got him bac up on the run. IT
he'd fallen in between, he'd been trampled by the horses behind, and he sav
Maybe he didn't shoot his gun off because he was holding him up, this guy,
on to that horse, After he'd pulled him up from in between, Oof!
that guys life.
ing his best to hand
Q. They were like Dervishes? Whitling Dervishes?
I

A. Yeah. These were businessmen and all kinds. These. . ,
Q. These were the local people?
A. Well from Morocco, from all over. They came in from Fez or Marakesh.
Q. How about Africa?
A. Only North Africa. I mean we got over from Morocco to the Mediterranqm Africa. Yeah,
we were in Algeria once, briefly, overnight I guess and then we were in Tunisia for about a week.
I had friends there. We went out around Carthage and so on. He was an arcNologist helping. .
.they were French, They lived out in Sidi Busaide, I think it was called. S I Q I (He spells it out).
I cannot go any further, but that was an Arab village and he was in charge of. . .he was a scuba
diver and so on. . .now this is way back, this is probably in the '50's when we were there, and
there had been a huge barge of Greek artifacts, bronzes and things that were @en across horn
Greece over to Cartage and it, right outside of Cartage there was a big storm gnd it sunk in about
fifty feet of water, just outside of Cartage there, and so they, after the weathey cleared up they
sent some divers down there and they'd go down, dive for a minute or two a@ then put some
ropes on and the pulled up a bunch of the stone and bronze statues and retrieved them but then it
just stayed there and so they decided to go down and see what they didn't retfieve. The little
stuff, and so this guy, this French guy was in charge of scuba diving at that pqint, excavating, and
they found all kinds of small s M that the others had missed. And they had old palace nearby,
you see, if you're one of the rulers, you never use your father's old palace, y q build a new one.
Q. What happens to the old one?
A. Well, they became museums. But this was a magnificent museum. She worked for the
museum. Spoke about four or five languages. She was a friend of Clarise mkox'. They went to
school together out at MiUs College (Oakland) So she wrote them a letter. Told her where we
were going to be and if they were available and it was funny, we were sitting
the lobby of this
hotel thew, and she said, "It's not TUNIS it's TUNEES" and we were in the bbby expecting to. .
. they were to hunt us up. And we were sitting there having a drink and so 04 and we noticed this
couple wwalk through the lobby a couple of times and £inally they zeroed in onius. We decided
later that they were looking us over to see if they wanted to how us or not. Fhuckle)
I
Q. Well now, of all the places that you've been, where would you most wan to return to?
A. Jihnmmm. Hong Kong. That's one of them. And who knows what it's ing to be afwr '97.
Q: Do you mean Hong Kong proper or do you mean. . .?
f
A, I mean Hong Kong. We always stayed out on the island. Victoria's Is1
don't know how much of this stuff you've been to but we had good

this trip we took the girls on for six months in 1961. Kitty wound up. ..we had more friends that
we had made on the way and so Kitty kept writing and writing so we had a Mend in Japan who
spoke good English in Kyoto and so she arranged to have the girls meet Japqese girls and we'd
go to their houses and stuff and of course they weren't speaking Japanese, bq the kids were
sixteen and we went off and left them alone and when we came back, all foqof them camc out.
Oh, they were twins too. Japanese twins and our twins. It was really sometl$mg. Mrs. Ewya
really did a job with that, and she was marvelous with that. The kids came oit waving the+ arms
through the gardens. a lovely old home. They know the same games we do, ey'd been flaying
cards and stuff. t" I
Q. Well now, you have this mini-museum. Have you always been a collectof?
A. Always.
IT
Q. And what do you think started you off?
A. I think one of the most interesting antiquities I have. ..I always have stuf
5
and junk and little
things but was the Director of the Springfield Art Association, a man by the me of George
Raab, ( He was of1 German ancestry) he had a white moustache and a white tee, and he was
one of the first Directors of the Art Association we ever had and we were godd friends. We got
to be very good friends, I've got pictures of them here. Tall gentleman with p cane. Marvelous
artist. And he gave me a Roman bronze coin that he had picked up when he was in Pompeii and
then about a year later he gave me a second one. Believe me I still have theq I can show them
to you. And that really got me excited about coins and things. They're not v+ry legible but their.
.,since then I've got a lot of Roman and Greek coins and things. I've got coibs from all over.
t
From the markets of Afghanistan, from Istanbul.
Q. They're easy to carry.
A. They're easy to carry, yeah.
Q. What else do you prize.? You have some Netsches? The Brundage Colleqtion would like to
see them, I'm sure.
A. I've got a collection of seals.
Q, Seals. Stamp seals?
i
Middle
A. Stamp seals that are made out of stone. Some of them are rollen and sone are Greek qnd
Eastern, some from h, places like that
Q. You seem to have an eye for quality.

A. These go back to the days when you rolled them in clay. Cuneiform stufft 1'11 show &rn to
you after awhile. I've got prints and stuff af them and crazy stuff like that.
Q. No particularly large collection of any one thing?
A. Just a typical collector of everything (chuckle) and master of none.
Q. Well tell me something about Kitty? She seemed to be a good companioq.
A. She was a marvelous companion. All five feet of her. She fought weightbll her life. In high
school she was a little butterball. She was smart and in those days. You cod$ skip grades in
grade schools or at least skip a half a year so she skipped four different times, the second semester
and so that she was about four months oldex than I was. She was born Febngtry the twenty
eighth and I was born on July 2,1913 and so she was two years ahead of me high schod. My
father had me in a parochial school then we went to Springfield High School$ but she was two
years ahead.
Q. She was local then? What was her maiden name?
A. Wilms. German. She lived at 1045 South Grand here but I mean she lived in several places.
She lived down on Walnut near the Presbymian Church.
Q. So did you how her in high school?
A. Yeah, but I was a freshman and she was a junior and you know the senioq girls didn't go with
freshman boys.
Q. So you knew her back then?
A. I knew who she was, sure. And of course I was living over on Williams I$oulevard here and
her aunt, , .
Q. Her aunt?
A. Her aunt. Her name was Reardon. Clara Reardon. She married very late in life to a guy by
the name of Horace Reardon and anyway they built this house in 1923, I guess, and dad and
mother built their house over on Williams and we moved in about 1925 and +e used to walk
around thc neighborhood and mother hew her and she'd stop in and see mother every once in a
while and then I heard latcr that she'd say to Kitty, ( they were very close,) "tVhy don't you ask
that nice Trutter boy to some of your parties?" And she said, "What, invite t4at little infant?"
(Chuckle) So that was always ldad of a joke between us, and she graduated f(om high school
when she was fifteen and a half and wanted to go to the University of
always interested in the theater as a child. She did toe dancing and all

in theaters and. ..do you want to hear all this? Anyway, I think; this is an in~esting story fibout
Kitty. Her father would have none of it that she wanted to go to the Universh of Iowa because
they had such a wonderful speech and theater department there. "No fifteen apd a half daughter of
mine is going to a state university." His only child, tough old German guy ,a)d so on and not
terribly German, oh God, he hated the Germans. He had a record, I have it hqre someplacq, of
Madame Schurnann Hetl. Ever hear of her? She was a great, great German $nger and it was a
twelve inch platter and he wrapped it and wrote on it. . .this was World War 4. . ,When the war
is over, break it and destroy it." (Chuckle) He was a Captain in World War
He was older and
he was here and it's a long story about how he saved a lot of lives. He was i charge of. . .not
getting away from going to the university . .but he was in the National Guarf a Captain in the
National Guard and it was very close to the end of World War I and they weIp still gathering in
the draftees and stuff you know and they were shipping them up to Rockfordi Camp Grant or
something, up at RocHord, and about that h e the flue epidemic was beginag to break out and
I don't know, I don't think they ever knew what it was, and the guys would wme down with
these lung things and they'd die in two or three or four days and it got so bad, I even got this
fiom one of the doctors in the Army up there, he said, "They didn't know wlqat to do with it.
They were dying like flies there in the camp. The only thing they could do was get garaged and
lay them out in there like cord wood and so on. And here came orders to sed up a new batch of
draftees to Rockford to Kitty's father and he countermanded the order for thqm to be shipped,
three or four hundred anyway, ship them right into that mess, and he said, "I'm going to
countermand that order, They're not going, they're not going up into that mqss, and they can
court marshal1 me if they want to but they are not going." And he sent the oqders out that he was
not going and I guess he got into a Little bit of trouble and then they woke ua to how, and so
those guys were not exposed to all this mess up there. Well anyway that's a 'ttle story on the
!
side. Most people don't know about Kitty's dad. Well anyway, he said Kitt will go down to
Montecello down in Godfrey there. And I used to tease her, she went to Mo+tecello Penitentiary
for Women, and she went two years there and after two years there, he let h$. go over there for
her junior and senior year in Iowa and she piled into the theater over there, dhe took astranomy,
she took advanced mathematics, everything and theater, and she was in a play in her senior year
written by her professor, a guy by the name of. . .the play was called "Green Grow the Lilacs" and
by, his name has slipped me and I know it just as well as. . .anyway she was in that play with dress
rehersals every day and every night after classes, and he would change the lines. "Well now Kitty,
maybe if you'd say it this way maybe it would sound better." Well that would change the queue
for the rest of them or maybe he would say to somebody else. . .they did thatright up to the last .
.His name, I think his name was Glenn Riggs. "Green Grow the Lilacs" and right up till the night
of dress rehearsal, they were still changing their lines and Kitty had one of th~
two female leads,
so they got through the play and not too many years later a couple of guys pqt it together a
musical and it became. . .
Q. Same name?
A. No. Oklahoma. Kitty would never go see Oklahoma in a movie on the stage or anything.
She wanted no part of it. (Chuckle) As much as she loved the theater.
I

Q. Was she angry? 8
A. 1t just had bad memories for her. To try to learn the part this way and the), change it, 4d
I
change it? It was like "My Fair Lady." You know that was "Pygmalion" as q play.
I
Q. They took the story f om Pygmalion?
I
I
A. Right. They just took the story and put it to music and a little bit more 9 that.
Q. Did you go up to see it?
A. No, no I didn't see her then. I graduated from the U of I in Architecture, panuary, 1938, rnidsemester
and got a job with Carl Meyer on Washington's birthday and I had qn old friend,
Florence Wilcox, and we'd gone to Kindergarten, no nursery school together+
1
they didn't have
kindergarten in those days, at Helen Stericker's Nursery School, and we bu ed into each other
every once and in a while and she said, "Phil, we've got a play out here and need very pcy
door designed. It's a murder mystery, and you're the guy who could do it fo us out at thd Little
theater" that they had out on South Fifteenth Street right across fiom that ket that's out there.
You know, it's about a half a block south of Laurel, there's a big vegetable/ eat market opt there
and across the street from that was an old Nickelodeon theater. Today it ma3 be the Gemym-
American singing society or something like that, but they rented it for fifteen pollars a mar@ and
the members, this was lmown as the Repertory Guild, and this was a group
1
at loved the theater,
they worked their heads off with plays.
Q. Like the little theater on, . .
A. Yeah, but it was minor to that but that type of thing. And they put on
cracker-jack stuff and X think they'd run eight of nine nights with it, and,
that. Really fine plays. "Shadow and Substance" was one they put on.
in to do a door for them. What happened was this door suddenly had
made it very fancy with silver on it and stuff and it had a bunch of
at the time that somebody was. ..but that was my fist episode
there on, I was tapped and I built more damn stuff out there
to the theater in those days. It cost the five cents and on Saturday nights itbost fifty ce&s and
here were girls out there working to clean up that theater. It only had one lide john in it apd
I
it
was just an old concrete floor and the girls out there scrubbing the floor, wasma up and, ell
they wouldn't do that at home for anything cause they had maids in those days. This is la '30's
and I had a budget of twenty five dollars to buy materials for those sets for ewh play and e used
everything we had and I tied to build it for ten or meen, not have to buy anwg new if
possible. The theater would hold maybe one hm&d and eighty, hundred and seventy, hu dred
and sixty. Right in there somewhere and there were no dressing rooms really and they'd h ve a
rack of clothes of costumes hanging with the boys on one side and girls on other. (Chu kle) It
didn't make any difference. We had more Eun then and we always had plays.
i
i

Q. Now this is where you began to see her?
A. I knew her. This is when we started going together. When they had these plays, they'd have
lots of parties. That was the most important thing, putting on a play, they had a party afterwards.
No one had any money, really, but we'd get together and have these plays, and then these parties
and I remember, oh I don't know, I remember I got paired off with Kitty a little bit or she'd be
directing a play and wanted me to do the set and we worked together and ma$e she was the
director of the play and had the most menial part of a cleaning woman in the play, she didn't care,
it just was a play, whatever it was, it didn't make any difference to her. She lqved it and she was
smart enough to know that the theater is not a good place to eat regularly. I rqean unless you
make it to the top, and very few ever do that, but after she graduated, she wed to Chicago and
did some radio up there.
Q. What did she do in radio?
A, She was anything that they needed. Helen Trent. Did you ever hear of that? If they needed a
little girl or an old aunt or a grandmother, and she'd be in once or twice a we&. They'd go in
maybe at nine o'clock, maybe at noon. She said they went through three Helea Trents but. . .
she'd be in for a week or two and they'd get twenty five bucks or something l&e that, and she
lived with a friend. . .
Q. You were in Chicago then too?
A. No I was in Springfield. Oh, that was before she came home. She graduqed from Iowa
about 1934 or '35 in there. See I didn't get out until '37, '38. So she got her Chicago
experiences. . . this is all wild, am I making this up? She had a friend up there by the name of
Margarqtta Brown. Did I mention her before? Maggie Brown. She was matron of honor at our
wedding. Maggie was a cute little girl. I think her mother fell in love with a shrdent, a seminarian
who got married at a very young age. . .
Q. In her early twenties?
A. Teens. By the way, he was the guy, I understand, that later invented the stop and go lights.
Red, green, orange.
Q. Mr. Brown?
A. NO, No. His name was Curry and they had this one daughter, and that wqs Margaretta, and
so they were in California doing something out there in the lobby and a gal case over and said,
'Zook Mrs.Curry, you have a beautiful daughter there. Maggie was maybe tyvo or three or four.
Maybe four, in there. No three. Maybe four or five. And she said, "Tell
interested in having her in a movie?" Maggie said, well her mother said,
could be interested," I think mamma was short on money as Maggie has

many a the in the Salvation Army overnight, and her mother was a very, very beautiful woman,
and so she went into this movie with this gal and the gal was doing a movie of her own life and it
was Mary Pickford and she played Mary PicHord as a little girl and that got hcr started in movies,
and then she was the first little girl in the "Our Gang Comedies." You remember those?
Remember, they had little Farina and the fat boy? She was the little girl who was always dressed
up in the real nice pretty starched ribbons and stuff and got pushed into the md. That was
Margaretta, and then she got a little older and a little older and then she went with the Dunqan
Sisters on the stage, Incidentally, she probably never got much schooling (ch~kle). And then
when she got to be eleven or twelve, she got to be a little bit in-between for t.f$ stage. In the
mean time, her mother ran into a guy by the name of Case in Chicago who raq the Case Mmdy
Bakeries and they baked pies, millions of pies. Scattered all over the Chicago pea, and Poppa
Case had a lot of money and I guess was a lot older than Maggie. Then Magdes mother, (I've
forgottea what her first name is, I do know her but it's kind of buried), so Kitqy's aunt used to
like to go up to Chicago, not having any children, and her father, I think he w~rked for the
Canadian Railway or something like that, arrd he'd be gone for awhile and he was a great hunter
and all that, so Kitty's Aunt Clara would say, "Kitty, come on, let's go on up go the Edgewater
Beach. We need to go up and hear Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby was his sbger," and so
they'd go up to the Edgewater Beach, at that time there was a beach there an4 they'd stay fbr a
week or two and her aunt didn't have a very good heart and Kitty would be bqard stiff and she'd
just go out in the afternoon, take a little book with her and sit in the garden an0 that's where she
bumped into this other little girl her age. Maggie Brown. Margaretta. So wh$e their mother's
were having naps in the afternoon or something, getting ready for music or soqething, the kids
got to be.the very, very best of friends, so every time Kitty would go
Margaretta Case was around, and yes, she's registered in. Anyway, Mar
cancer of the bones and died at thirty six and Maggie was left with this
Edgewater Beach Apartments. It's still there, the North building. The
been torp down, and her mother had just taken out a twelve month le
when she died, seven or eight room apartment in there, and here was
Case had died also and he'd have a lot of millions.
i
Q. So when did you two get together?
A. We got together after these episodes. She and Maggie used to have fun there with bein
radio and television and then Kitty came home. She wanted to work for Franldin Life.
cracker-jack with her English and she'd learned it the hard way from a Swedish teacher do
Montecello where there was nothing else to do if you wok a theme, you tripfle spaced it
at
if
you made a mistake, she'd put an X there, find out what's wrong,
I
1
END SIDE TWO; TAPE-THREE
l
and you had to find out what was wmng with whatever spelling punctuation,
i
ammar, get the
rule and write the rule in the space you left trippled spaced and turn your the back in to be
corrected and it came back to you. As long as you had anything wrong, you g t the wrong rule,

do it over, hunt for another rule that would match, one that was right until you were absolutzly
correct on that theme in every respect, so she really hew her English, so oncq she got back to
Springfield, she went to work for Franklin Life and she used to do the proof-repding and
punctuation and everything in the fine print of their insurance policies (chuckle$ which was pretty
important. In the meantime she got interested in the theater and so on. They always had th e
t
parties after. I did a lot of sets for her, and there was one particular party whqe we went u ..
.they used to have a dance band on the sixth floor of the Old Elks Club and yop could go uq there
at night and dance and they had a bar and so on, so it was a beautiful night,
long about twelve thirty, the dances lasted until about one, about twelve
we walked out on the roof, cause Kitty loved moons and astrology, she
university. If she wasn't in a play at nights, she was over there on their
went out to look at the moon and it was a bemtiful full moon and I got
on and she kinda got together and I kinda got an arm around her and so
up at me and I looked at her and decided it was time to put the lips together a& we did and we
kind of hugged a little and stuff and (chuckle) so we decided we'd better get b~ck in for the
dance. The rest of them might miss us from the gang from the theater so we qent to the dc@r out
on the roof was a fire escape door and you couldn't open it from the outside SO we stood thkre
and banged and yelled and knocked on the door. It did have big glass in it so e waved at
i
anybody, nobody really saw us very much, they were too busy dancing. Any y, we were there
until just about the time the dance was over and everybody said, "Well, where ave you been?"
"None of your business, out in the yard." So that kind of started things.
Q, So tell me about your girls, your twins. Identical?
I
A. They're not only identical, they are rnirrar twins and they looked exactly al&e until they were
sixteen at which point we decided ... that's when we took them around the wory. . .they decided
they we:e tired of looking exactly alike and wearing the same thing and that stpff, so that wqs the
end of that.
Q. How did you feel about that?
A. It was up to them, I didn't care.
Q. Did it change their personalities at all? Did you see a difference inpason as they chose
their clothes and brcame more independent af each other?
A. Not particularly.
Q. Did they become independent? Are either of them interested in the theated?
A. Oh, they were in the theater. Their mother got them in a couple of plays. The one interesting
play. Helen Hays played it for years. What was it? Yes, "Mrs. Mac Thing." I even have the
book over here that Kitty had, some place around here,
I
72

Q. Wasn't that was Bobbie Herndon's Godmother?
A. And named for the daughter that Helen Hays lost. That play. . .Kitty had #e lead, and phe
twins played in it. I think they were eight at the time. They had their birthday. It was in October.
Oh, they put on a pasty for them, but what they did was, one would play one night, the other
would play the next night so they weren't up too late and the play was on for tight or ten days.
Oh gosh, what's the name of that play? It's a famous play, and oh, it was kind of an ether@
thing with a fairy Godmother and stuff, but it was funny. The last night of thelplay, the kid4 had
identical costumes and they came and, the fairy Godmother or something in
Kitty, she came oh, no, it was the director of the play who came on with one
for the director to come out and she came out and took care of which ever
she went like this ( demonstrates with his finger) and the other one came
said, "We'll let you all in on it. It's their birthday tonight. You saw this
the play, and this one in the last half of the play. Come join us for a
! I
Q. Phil, I have neglected to ask you where and when you were married?
I
I
A. Well, we were married in Evanston, Illinois, on May the 8, 1943 and we re married i~ St.
Mary's Cathedral Church in Evanston at Maggie Browns house there in Ev $ ton and, anyay
we were married, of course the war was on deep and we were married without benefit of
relatives, There was a bit of, .
"r
.I was Catholic and Kitty's father was past Potantate of the hrine,
and in those days they didn't mix very well, but anyway we went ahead and g t married at
Maggie's and we had a wonderful little wedding of twelve or fdteen people. ent over to e
Edgewater Beach Hotel. I'd driven all night. I was at Dayton, Ohio at the e, at Pattersgn
Field, and I'd driven all night from Dayton. . . $
I
/
Q. Wha$ service were you in? j
A. I was a civilian as an engineerlarchitect and I was chief draftsman for the
the Fairfield Air Depot it was called. They could control me by keeping me
the military because they'd have draftsmen come in and then they ship out.
Q. What were you drafting?
A. Oh, all ldnds of stuff for the Air Forces there. "Fly Devils" and stuff. ' gs like that.
Q. And then you stayed at the Edgewater Hotel and then she went back. . . .
:i
A. Saturday night I drove all night and Friday night to get to Chicago. We
afternoon. We had tKe reception at Maggies, we went to the Edgewater
night. . .we all got together the next day anyway. . .as a matter of fact I
got to the hotel about eight thirty and about eleven thirty or twelve, the
friend Maggie said, "Hey you two aught to be hungry now. It's time
I
I

"Come on down to the breMast shop. Come and have breakfast with us. So we did and 04 the
way back up to our room at about one thirty,.they had funny papers in the
up two or three newspapers and took them along with us and I don't
about six o'clock or so and so we said, "Let's get even with Maggie
we said, "Maggie, we've read all the newspapers and all
She said, "You eat breakfast, I'll be. right down." And if she
come down. (Chuckle) We had breakfast at about seven or
and drove all that night. Pulled in at the Gibbons Hotel, Monday morning, Dqton, where
could stay for five days, but since we almost bought the bar at the hotel befor7 that with o
company, we stayed there for five months.
I
I
I
I
Q. What did Kitty do? 1
A. She darned all my sox cause I could put em on from either end. She did
weaving. She said, "When I got it all done, it was silly, why not throw them
some new ones." She'd always darned her fathers so she sat around for
for an apartment and then. . .
Q. They didn't provide one for you?
A. Oh no. Four hundred war indusiries and Oh, my God, I think there were
Q. In Dayton, Ohio?
A. I think there were f ~ty five thousand civilians. See, you had Wright field, atterson Fiey and
the, Oh, the Air Technical Service Command. How could I
a prize for the Air Forces, and that was in another place that you had,
Patterson, and so she went out. ..she had volunteered for the Red
here or the women rolling bandages, and she was in the
international truck around apd so she went out to the Red Cross at
talked to the Director there, "Did he need any volunteer work
give you a job. You're the new assistant field director. So she started just lik that and for
she got a hundred and fifty dollars a month, just like
wasn't making too much, We paid five dollars and a
sheets and pillow cases and towels every day. We cooked a
pot that we had. There was a big market across the
the menus at the hotel which was not often, but
come in and so. ..and they knew us very well
beef sandwich instead of just the roast beef
cents. It was 'about three dollars otherwise. Oh boy.
Q. So when were the twins born? 1

A, Let's see. October 19, 1945.
Q. Near the end of the war?
A. Maybe it was October, '44. Yeah it wa .s '44 becaus
birthdays and the war was over in '45.
Q. So you came back here directly by way a€ Dayton.
1
our way horn le, thdy had their y ar
A. We came back here fiom California. Our fiend Maggie was in California Ld she decidkd we
should come out and visit on the way home.
Q. Where in California?
A. North Hollywood.
Q. What was she doing out there?
A. I don't know. She was divorced from Dm Brown at that point and then +y got back
together but she just thought it would be a good place for me to start practicinb architectur~
Q. How'd you feel about that?
1
A. Well let's look and look it over and she had a guy who was even willing to give me a job. But
of course, the trouble was California does not recognize anybody else's licenc .
Q. At that time?
A. At that time, yeah. Still don't, I guess. You have to go for national.
registration now but in those days, why. . .any more than Florida would
because of hurricanes. I was alright for New York, I guess. If I was
Chicago, I could build in New York, but anyway I didn't want to do
Angels fear to tread. People with twins getting on an airplane in
Mmmm. That's a whole story on it's own. Anyway, we got to
then we came back here to Springfield and moved into Kitty's
who had rented this had gone home. The war was over. It
so we left the kids with Kitty's mother and Kitty and I
place. There was a bunch of furniture that was her
moved that down and did that for about a month
Christmas: and that would have been '45.
Q. And you were working with Meyer?
I
i

A. Not until a couple of months later. See that was '45. No, no. I was through, I didn't go to
work for Meyer anymore then. .
Q. You were working for who then?
A. For myself. Wait, I was working for Hadley and Worthington for two or
couldn't find anyplace for an office. There was no office space ANYPLACE
a partnership with Karl Bretcher who worked for Carl Meyer for years and w
up there and thought we'd work as a partnership and he managed to get a col
old Reisch Building and so we worked together for a couple of years and the]
own.
Q. What year was that?
A. That was about 1949. 1949,1950.
Q. What was your first job? After you went out on your own?
A. Oh Gosh. That's when I'd say I was with Karl Bretcher and he had the jc
over because he had something else and that was the Holland Jewelry Store d
Springfield. It's still there next t6 Mauldners with the glass you can see insid1
windows you can see on the sides.
xee months qause I
le of rooms
i
n the
[went out o my
so I kind of / took
mtown herq in
md the show
Q. What's been your most rewarding job over the years? What was the job 1
A. Oh, I was very pleased with Griffin High School. That was built about 15
Franlxlin:
u liked the npost?
9. Or the Bin
Q. You did the Ben Franklin?
A, I did the Ben Franklin. Washington and Jefferson Middle Schools. Then
did the Municipal Building. Bill Turley. He did the structural and engineerin
design and the other on that, I'll tell you something nobody ever thinks abom
reasonably rewarding and that is the Hope School for the Multiple Hmdicapp
vere two of us who
and I did the
hat has been
i.
Q. Which one?
A. The one that's out here on Lakeview. You go East Lake Drive.
Q. Tsn't there's another one on Wabash? A Hope School on Wabash?
A. There is? Is that for blind handicapped kids? I don't how anything aboa it but I know this
was started by old DOC Jordan and his wife who had a premature child that w$s haxdly six
!
76 ! I

months old, but was a preemie and they were very proud of the hospital keepiqg this child
except the eyeballs and stuff hadn't developed and mentally handicapped. Sha's still alive.
they started. ..there really wasn't any place that they could send her for blind pnd other
handicaps, mentally and. . .
Q. How did you learn to build a school or building for such handicapped?
A. That was. ..there was nothing to research. One had never been built befort. There was/ one in
England that had been an addition on some kind of an old building there, a do+rutory type Qf
building, and I think there was another one up in Sweden someplace, a very s
i
all thing, and none
of them had ever built anything like this. They wanted a "cottage system" th 's out there. I
don't really know anything about it. It's built on a "cottage" theme so that th y were more like
home than being in an institution, and there'd be a. ..
Q. Did they dictate what they wanted rather than you, . .?
A. They dictated what they wanted to do and this gal from England came ov
of good points, For instance to be sure that the glass above child height is
have any sharp edges and make it easy for the attendants, I mean when it
a bath, raise the bathtubs up off the floor so that they don't have to lean
(demonstrates) to lay the kids down in the bathtub, and since so many
and stuff, why we put sits baths in for them and if they got all messed
and turn the sits bath and just sit them in there.
Q. Had they designed the sits-bath by then?
A. Oh yeah. Sits-bath. In all the years I was an architect, I never once installid a bidet. i
(Chuckle) Some place to wash your feet or put your flowers or something lik4 that ( chucde.) I
don't know. But that's. . .
Q. Big wide halls for wheel chairs?
A. They didn't have any wheel chairs there. There were wide hallways, but the main thing was
we had twelve kids to a cottage, this was the cottage system, and with classro~ms. And I hadn't
thought of it but some of these kids could see light and so on. Most of them wre mentally
handicapped too and in the corridors they could ride bicycles and roller skate and stuff and they
do, from cottages to cottages, and we put the cottages like this and so on and hen you have a
corridor that ties them together and here's a fence that ties them off and then they could have a
play yard out here and drinking fountains in the yards. Forty feet apart or somctbing like that.
They've added to it a lot since I did it, but I made the master plan. PCople come from all over the
world to see the damn thing.
Q. I ought to go over to see it myself?
i
I

A. You haw where it is? Take East Lake Drive. . ,
Q. Want to tell me later?
A, Oh, I forgot, we're still going on.
Q. So what else have you done that you've been happy about?
A. Oh, eighty or ninety or a hundred schools all over the state of Illinois in thq baby boom days.
Q, So you were known for your schools?
A. That was the principle work in the 1950's which was fine.
Q. Did you have a certain design or a rather a formula for your plans?
A. Actually in the early '50's we really got into problems because the war was pn and there were
restrictions on the steel we could use on buildings if you could imagine that. y e don't think of
that, so we developed a method, these one story buildings, and we could use bb timbers. I mean
we could get these great ten by eighteen or twelve by sixteen timbers that werq twenty four or
twenty five feet long, and then they were tre~ted, salt treated, and then we put
I
them on four foot
centers instead of steel beams for roof. We could have a little bit of steel. TwQnty five percent
maybe, so we had to save that for the gymnasium and these were classrooms here we used all
wood and then they made big sheets of, not flexicote. If you were to take exc sior, very course
excelsior and mix it up with cement and you put it in forms about four inches 'ck. Four feet
wide, and eight feet long, and when that poured cement set up it was stiff soli and yet the
excelsior left swirls and designs on the ceilings, see, so that was your acoustic for the classrooms,
so we could take these eight foot pieces and the beams were on four foot cen s so you could
take one sheet and go across a beam to the next one, so you had covered eight eet with a beam in
the middle supportive. Then with the next one, you'd stagger them back and rth, and so you
I
had an acoustical ceiling and you had to. . .
Q. Well, you were very innovative?
A. Oh , I had some good partners too. I teamed up with a guy from Lincoln whose father was
one of the first, he was number six in the state of Illinois. The sixth registered architect. He was
Joe Deal and he and a partner of his designed the courthouse, the county courthouse in Lincoln.
It's still thereand going strong.
Q. Are most of the pieces you've done still +sting?
A. Oh, yeah, yeah.
ff

Q. What was the last thing that you did?
A. It takes a lot of thought. I'm not sure. There were some nice houses but. . ,the houses were
fun but about all they did was to pay the rent and the telephone bill.
Q. Were they easier?
A. No.
Q, Did you have a formula for them?. What style were you? Bungalow?
A. Whatever they wanted. I tried to please the clients in that I didn't force
except on some lady who'd come into me and say, "Phil, I've seen some of
them very much and I want you to do one for us and I've got some ideas
very big folder and it's full of all the stuff they had pulled £rom House
Garden, Better Homes and Gardens, books that they got on House
this one and that one and the other one and that's when you get
think, ' Now this living room I love, this is wonderful, and this
room is just about what we need and so on,' and you take all
put that into a house that will meet the budget, of course.
: Q. And their approval.
A, And their approval. And so, my first conversation then would be after I fo
6
nd that out, "Have
you looked around at the existing houses that were already built that could be emodeled to suit
your requirements, otherwise you're going to spend a year or a year and a half f decisions and
decisioqs and decisions of what color here, what kind of light fixtures there, w at kind of tile do
you want and so on and so on and so on."
Q. So what became of that?
A. They said, "No, we'll go ahead on our own." I never talked any of them out of it, and so it
was always compromise, compromise, compromise. I did my bast to put their houses. . .and then
I'd interject some of my own ideas to make their's work better and they usually would buy those.
Q. Then how did you charge them when they kept changing and compromising, changing a d
compromising?
A. That's one of the headaches because you'd make sketches, they'd sketch you to death and
you'd charge them six or eight percent.
Q. So what would you say were your fondest memories of architecture for yo*? And would you
do it again?
t

A. Not the way it's done today. It's all computers. I don't know if the kids wrning out of
college can draw or not. I don't know. When I put my pencil down in 1965. ,.Kitty and I. ..
you want this silly little story? Kitty and I =re in Germany on the Rhine Riv~
in an old c~tle
right near the hrilei there, the bend in the river and down below us was the. . .
Q. The Frederick Castle?
A. I'm not sure, I can't remember, but right below us was the little "False Ca$le"
7
in the rniddle
of the river, That's wliere the boats paid their tolls. Across the way were the ''Cat and Mouse"
castles. The big one and the little.one, and it was October and it was a beau 1, beautiful day,
and we sat out there on the terrace and watched the boat go up and down the ' e, and the
people were picking the last of the grapes, you know the spatlase grapes gro the very ripe sweet
ones, and we had a beautiful bottle of red wine and they only had about six ro ms in the old
castle.Beautifu1 thing. As a matter of fact it had a moat around it and we cod only drive up to
it It's only about four hundred feet above the river and we could drive up onl
4
so far. And they
came out to meet us and they had a little pony cart with two wheels on it and pony to pullit and
that's what we put our luggage on, and then we walked, following our luggag the rest of the way
to the castle, So anyway, we got to the bottom of the second bottle of wine, d somehow she
said, "Isn't that beautiful" and she said, " Phil, have you ever thought maybe b siness was
interfering with out traveling?" And (chuckle) I said, "Well Kitty, many timesiI've thought so
lately." She said, "Well now, you think about it. If when we get home, you Tnt over to your
ofice and told your partners to go to hell January one." I said, "Kitty,
I'll,do it. Now what are we going to do with our time?" So we got a
made a list of things, course we were going to travel anyway, and we went of places after
that like Afghanistan and Sumatra, so we made a list of about twenty three
still got the list in the basement someplace. We didn't get them all done but w$ got a lot of them
done besides traveling.
Q. When did she die?
A. July 30, 1977.
Q. You have three granddaughters. What mure they doing?
I
A,. They were the three that we mentioned earlier, I think. In college, all of thtm. Two of them
are sisters, twenty two and twenty one, they're fifteen months apart. One of th~m just graduated
from Princeton, the other one is a senior at Northwestern.
Q. She's an assistant isn't she?
A. Yes. The one at Rinceton will be an assistant to one of her professors the*. Of the three
gixls, Jill and Jan. . .and we didn't give them any rniddle names. Their mother aaid it was bad
enough when you get, later when you have a middle name, you get Married and you have four

names to wite out. If you want a middle name you add it yourself. So thqy were Jan afld
Jill. . .or Jan's the oldest. They were fifteen months apart,and Jill has finished graduating
at Princeton University and she's going back this fall to be an assistant to lone of her
professors. Her sister will be back at Northwestern as a senior. Last year, her Junior
year. . .Northwestern changes with the University of Suffolk in Enghd, hich is about
iTS
five minutes out of Brighton. She was there last year and when she finis d with her
year, Jan graduated and they kicked around over there for over a month d they didn't
get back till the middle of July and had a lot of fun together. Their cow'
Carolines. ..Marilyn was their mother. Carolyn had one daughter. ..that' Holly. Her
actual name ...her baptized name, is Natalia which means Christmas Chi
She came a
little ahead of Christmas but that's allright she uses Natalia officially but qhe uses Holly
as a nickname. She's a freshman. She fmished her freshman year at Lehigh. She went
down for a summer course at Tulane in ancient geography and Anthropolqgy. She may
persue that some more now cause she enjoyed that so much this summer.
Q. You're still going strong and only have your 'knees' to tend to.
A. That's right. Just the knees!
Q. With the exercises you're getting you're feeling better.
A. People say, "Well, Phil, how are you doing"? and I say , "Well, fiom the knees down,
lousy, and fiom the knees up, fine and fat"!
Q. But then you're still going back to the Springfield Art Association to cb your art, yes?
A. Oh yeah, I'll go back there this fall. Go back into sculpting to keep my fingers active.
Take care of what arthritis I have in my hand.
Q. Well, I want to thank you very muck It's been delightful.
I