Margaret Fanning

Self Recorded Interview

Tape 1, side 1

I’m going to try and do this.  I don’t know why—I learned to read and write and spell and all and now I have to talk to this damn thing.  If it works, fine, if it doesn’t I just will have to write it.  Tag, you want to know about Charles Hall.  Well, I just have to call him Grandpa Hall, because I always did.  He was State Senator Charles Labias Hall.  Then he had a son later called Charles, Jr—he had a different middle initial.  All right now, Charles Hall was born in Sherman, New York.  But there’s no use looking for Sherman, New York, it doesn’t even exist.  I tried once.  He was born there in 1836, I think.  Didn’t come west until he was about twenty-four.  Well, I know he was very, very proud, very arrogantly proud of his family.  And yet I don’t think anybody ever mentioned his father or his mother.  I don’t know if he had brothers or sisters.  I don’t know anything, any anecdote, from before he came to Colorado.  Except that his mother died about three years before he came out.  And they had moved from Sherman, New York, where they had a grocery store, to Chautauqua.  It says on the family tree that it was in New York, but I think Chautauqua was Illinois, I don’t know.   I don’t know why they moved and I can’t imagine how he had enough money to have his own wagon and invest when he got out here.  Maybe his mother left him insurance, maybe they sold the grocery store, I have no idea of his finance.  But he always seemed to be pretty well off.  And always investing, and you have to have something to invest in the first place.  Well, I know nothing except that in Chautauqua he had a girlfriend called Minnie or Minna.  And I always thought it was awful that his first daughter was called Minnie because I think it sort of reminded him of his old girlfriend, I thought it was sort of tactless.  But maybe that’s just my imagination, nobody seemed to criticize him for it.  Anyway he left Minna in Chautauqua at twenty-four and somehow, I don’t know financially how, got on the wagon train—it was called ‘Pikes Peak or Bust’—and they had a cavalry escort, maybe only two or three, I have no idea how people many protected them.  I don’t know how many wagons were in the train but it was a very famous one, I’m just guessing maybe forty or fifty.  They gathered from all over the East, from Maine and Virginia and places like that, and finally they all met in Chicago.  So, in my mind, they’d already gone halfway West, but not the wild part.  And they got to Chicago, and I think they were there three or four days, got supplies and everything.  And then the wagon train kept going out, not to Denver, actually, but to a place that I think was called Auraria or something, where Denver is now but it didn’t have that name then.  I don’t know how long it took, I’m guessing three or four months, I’m sure all that would be in the Rocky Mountain News, in their history morgue department. 

Well now, let me think about him as a person, because I don’t think he changed ever.  I think he was very cold, very humorless, very very proud.  What he was proud of I think was the family background.  He was going to sort of show his family that he too could be something super.  You see, everybody has one father, then they have two grandfathers, then they have four great-grandfathers, if you stop and think.  All right, out of the four great-grandfathers that Charles Hall had, three of them were officers in the Revolution, so he was pretty stuck up about that.  It was a thing to be proud of, leadership in America and all that stuff.  But also he was proud that all his Hall side were also Mayflower people, Plymouth Plantation people.  If you get that book called, ‘Plymouth Plantation’ it’s by a man called Bradford, one of the leaders of the Mayflower bunch, you’ll find out that one of his ancestors even fell overboard and got fished out from the Mayflower.  It’s sort of an exciting beginning.  He came over originally, this ancestor, I can’t think of his name, John Howland, I think.  He came over kind of indentured.  He had to pay his way and he couldn’t have any money.  So he worked for, I think it was Bradley or Bradford or somebody, for three or four years for his fare over, kind of like a servant.  But luckily, the kindly old man died, so he inherited the house and everything within about a year of arriving.  So he started off very lucky.  And I think Grandpa Hall had that competitive thing, he wanted to be as good as his great-grandparents, as good as the Pilgrims.  He undoubtedly thought he was much better than everybody else.  He liked Horace Tabor, who was on the same wagon train.  He liked him all right, but I think he felt socially educated, appearance, manner, better than other people.  And kind of gave that impression to people.  Because, surely by the time he was thirty-five he was the first legislator, when Colorado became a State—I don’t remember the year, you can surely look that up—but anyway, he was the State representative for Chaffee county or Park county or Leadville area at that time.  Anyway he came out on the train and the nice anecdote is that they stopped one time and made coffee and it was the most awful coffee you ever had in your life.  And it was from salt water, and of course, guess where the salt water was.  Well that story I think is pretty official, because even Mrs. Tabor who was having coffee with them thought it was the very worst coffee in the world.  All right, that probably gave him the first look he had of South Park and how big and how wide and how beautiful.  It probably stuck in his mind because he came back about a year and a half, two years later and took that land.  I don’t now how that happened, whether it was a homestead or a law suit or what, but anyway he got title to all that area.  And by then he was still not thirty—twenty-six or seven.  Let’s see, he met his future wife on the wagon train.  Now she was married to somebody else, had two children, and her father was sort of escorting the young couples out to Leadville—I guess they were headed for Leadville.  Well, now, I’m getting confused, because if I tell you the story of Charles and don’t tell you the story of Mary, I’m going to go crazy.  I can’t divide up the family that way. 

Well, his life sort of divided because when he was an Easterner and when he was a Westerner, there’s a whole different picture.  One way he’s just a kid in a grocery store and all of a sudden he’s a State Senator.  But there must have been a growing up period someplace.  I think he was very ambitious.  The first he did, of course, was ridiculous, building that great big chimney and going in the salt business, and trying to make money off the Indian.  Well, they got money for salt, you see, the Ute Indians.  And they used to come out there and get their salt and put it in a corner of the blanket, and then they’d tie a little knot and skid the blanket around their shoulders and come back to get more salt.  So his wife would have to stand there and double check that three corners were empty and only one corner got salt.  I do like the picture of a whole bunch of horses in a row and the Utes coming up to get their salt, and the horses had long poles down each side dragging in back.  And then the blanket was at the end of the poles dragging on the ground and the, papooses, I guess you’d call them, the kids were in the blankets and they’d have to take them out to go get the salt.  Very colorful, crazy times, and it was very pleasant, the Indians didn’t mind, they got it for free.  And they didn’t have to boil it down, so for them it was a bonus, but the poor government, they were paying a fortune for this.  And after three or four years—you’ll have to look that part up—the railroad came, not the narrow gauge, but the one to Denver.  And as soon as the railroad got there, salt got very cheap, and Grandpa Hall got broke.  Just thinking back again, why do I have those impressions of him, because I never laid eyes on him, he died before I was born.  And it is the effect he had on his family.  He had two daughters and both of them would call him ‘papa’ and they always referred to him a little bit gingerly.  He never seemed to have any home habits like playing the piano or reading a book or anything.  He was always having a career.  And they were either flirting and getting husbands or cooking, or you know, fluffy sort of things to do.  But they were a little scared of him.  Oh, I forgot, this I remember, at some point when he was married and living on the ranch, he went away for a while.  When he came back he said, “Never, never mention Sand Creek to me.  Never mention it in this house, no matter what.”  So nobody ever did.  How he ever knew Major Chivington, whether he went to Sand Creek, whether he did or didn’t, couldn’t be discussed.  He wouldn’t even have the word ‘Sand Creek’ mentioned around the house.  And both of his daughters would get just scared to death and shut everybody up who ever said it.  Maybe he was just shocked by it, maybe he was involved in it, it was just a blank and it should stay a blank. 

Well, let’s see, he’s twenty-four, he arrives in Colorado, he makes the terrible coffee, and I don’t know what happened for a while.  But after the Salt Works went broke, he still had the land.  You couldn’t make salt, that was ridiculous, but somewhere along there he had mines, which he called—this is really awful—he called them the ‘Minnie B’ which must have been for the Eastern girlfriend.  He had two or three.  He never really found gold, he never chopped with a pick.  He would grubstake people.  Like some man would say, “I’ll do it but I haven’t got a cent.” So Grandpa Hall would maybe give him twenty dollars and the man would buy enough groceries for six months.  And if the man found any gold he would get a percent.  It was kind of like an agent, I think, for mostly Welsh miners.  I don’t know why, but they were always Welsh, it seemed like.  Well, he did the mining thing for a while.  And then later, when he married, I’ll tell you about that in the other half of the family.  He was married and suddenly his wife and oldest daughter had to go back East on the train, that was normal train service by then, this is maybe fifteen years later.  And while they’re gone, he got a ship’s carpenter—what in the world a ship’s carpenter was doing in Colorado I don’t know—but anyway the ship’s carpenter built what’s now our house at the ranch.  And he built it beautifully, big and tough and strong, tough for wind to even shake it.  So when his wife and daughter came back, by George, there was this great big beautiful house, in front of the little log house that he’d had before. Now to go backwards, when he first had the little log house he wasn’t married.  Then he got married and had two daughters and a son, and they all lived in that little log part in back of the big house.  I don’t remember very many anecdotes about when they lived back there.  Yes, one time some Indian came, I think you’ll hear that story other places.  Some Indian came who wanted Grandma Hall to elope with him, and Grandpa Hall was away.  So Grandma Hall of course got a gun and scared the Indian off.  Some colorful episode, I don’t even know who the Indian was, or whether he was a Ute or not.  Another time, I know, one of the Utes got awfully sick, I suppose it was smallpox, I’m not sure about that.  Anyway, he died in that little bedroom, so that’s why we call it the Dead Indian Room.  But she took care of him for quite a while before he died, and then they had a little polite service, I think he was a Christian, and they buried him, but they buried him up there back of the Salt Works, you know up there on that Mount Hall.  They buried him standing up, sort of like a chimney in the dirt, awful.  But, anyway, I think it’s still up there where the quaking aspen are, for heaven’s sakes don’t get some archaeology person to dig.  Anyway they had a nice little service and he was buried and everybody was friendly, the whites and the Utes.  That part was peaceful, but other things happened back then.  One time later, his wife’s first daughter, who was then grown up—had come and she was living there, too—and she had a terrible toothache.  Her name was Aunt Ella, Ella Nye.  Anyway, Aunt Ella had a horrible toothache.  And so Grandpa Hall said, “Don’t worry, my dear, I’ll take care of it.”  He got some pliers and pulled out her tooth—and it was the wrong tooth.  And so he just stuffed it back in and did the right one.  So I think they had a lot of courage in those days—chopping wood and the ice cold water and pulling their teeth—just horrifying. 

I don’t know a thing about his times in Leadville.  Some of it’s still in the city records, I guess.  But nothing colorful, I think it was just investing and betting on miners and making money and supporting his family.  I don’t think it was very exciting, no Indian wars or anything like that.  He was a pretty good friend of Horace Tabor’s.  And at some point Horace Tabor was getting famous and successful in a political way.  And I think Grandpa Hall was, too, but not as much.  And somehow,---and then there was a man called Bayer, Byer, I forget.  Anyway they got money out of some Englishman, and built a place called the Windsor Hotel.  I wish it was still there.  In Denver.  It was really beautiful.  Marble and carved and a lovely lobby, a lovely little Greek revival kind of downtown hotel.  For years it was very, very popular.  For instance, in the Denver telephone book, the very first telephone book, on the back cover, they took an ad for the Windsor Hotel.  Let’s see, Hall, Tabor and Bush, I guess.  It’s still on the telephone book if you ever find a copy of the very first one.  At some point Horace Tabor was estranged and left Mrs. Tabor up in Leadville and had a girlfriend called Baby Doe, and he put her in the Windsor Hotel.  She had a parlor and a bedroom.  Well Grandpa Hall, I told you he had no sense of humor, and very, very proper.  I don’t know about religion, probably Methodist.  He had a fit the idea of his hotel with this wicked woman.  So he went to Leadville and told Mrs. Tabor.  And sold Mrs. Tabor his section of the hotel, his third, I guess, to her.  So then here you have Augusta Tabor and Horace Tabor, each with a third of the hotel, and Baby Doe living in it.  It was really awkward.  And of course Hall and Tabor never spoke again, it was a big rift.  I don’t know about ages.  To me he was always elderly.  He couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty at this point.  I don’t know when he was in politics, except that it was the first legislature.  Oh, my goodness, I forgot a thrilling part.  At one point he was climbing around on some mountain near Leadville with two men.  And there came this terrible blizzard and everybody was lost and frozen and starving and had a deadly time.  And one man, let’s see, how was it.  One man went snow blind.  I don’t think that’s a permanent thing, but like from the glare.  All right the man was blind and Grandpa Hall was so thin that he was, you know, like eighty-five pounds or something ridiculous.  And the third man went crazy.  So the third man was going to eat them.  I don’t know if this was before the Packer episode or after, but it was very similar, but not the same at all.  Grandpa Hall said, “Look, carry me and I’ll tell you where to go.”  So the blind man said, “All right, you tell me where to go, I’ll carry you.”  And piggyback, off the two of them went and left the crazy man who was going to eat them asleep on the mountain.  And they tottered on back down to Leadville, somehow they got there.  Oh, I see how this joins up.  Because there he was cadaverously thin, I don’t know what happened to the other two.  And nursed to health by the lovely young lady whom he had met on the covered wagon train.  That was his future wife, Mary--Mary Melissa—I’ll tell you about her another time.  I have to keep jumping because you said all of one person.  Well, I don’t know anything more about him.  But there’s a big jump.  I think at some point he left Mary.  Maybe they were getting better, sort of middle class well off, and she had gone into the Christian Science thing, and I think he was horrified to have a faith healer for a wife when he was a big political shoe.  So he went to Arizona and he had a mine down there, the Mammoth Mine, and he put his son in charge.  I don’t know how much money they made, but it was certainly a very well-known good mine, a gold mine, I suppose.  And then they had some trouble with a tornado or hurricane or something.  I remember one story about the mules being blown out of their harnesses it was so windy.  I don’t know why Grandma Desoto told me that.  She was there and saw the mules go flying through the sky.  That doesn’t seem reasonable, maybe she just heard about it.  Anyway, Grandpa Hall came back to Denver.  Charles the son was left to run the mine and there got to be a ten thousand dollar deficit.  Ten thousand dollars back then was like a couple hundred thousand now.  It was a big deal.  And so the son said, “Dad, I’m terribly sorry, I’ll pay it back, and Gee whiz, I was gambling.”  And there was a big scene with the mother pleading for mercy and the father having a fit.  And he said, “Well, pay it back, at once.”  And he said, “Well, I’ll do it as fast as I can.”  He said, “No, you have life insurance.”  And Charles Junior committed suicide.  This is according to the story.  And his mother and daughters lived in one place and Senator Hall from that time on lived at the Denver Athletic Club.  So I don’t think it was just Christian Science that separated them—not divorced, just separated.  I think Charles Hall’s death had a terrible lot to do with it.  You’ll find his will in our safe someplace, that shows that he really did have the ten thousand dollars life insurance.  That part’s really true.  Of course, suicide was never ever mentioned.  Well, you didn’t even mention people die because in Christian Science there’s no death.  But Charles Hall certainly died very, very young.  That silly looking deer in the dining room at the ranch, he shot that, I mean young Charles shot that when he was about fourteen or fifteen.  Everybody was proud of it—it was his first deer.  And both his sisters—that would be Mildred and Minnie—absolutely loved him.  And I think could never quite swallow the rift between the father and son.  The women stayed on one side and the men on the other.  I don’t know what else to tell you, except towards the end of his life—I think he was pretty well known in Denver.  There’s an awful lot of clippings you’ll find in papers about him.  He was always referred to as Senator Hall.  And I think he was pretty broke.  But at one point his granddaughter Antoinette—that would be Antoinette Perry Frueauff—she went on the stage.  And Grandpa Hall had a fit.  And the clippings even in the Denver Post that he said he was going to disinherit her, which was really sweet and fun and kind of a nice silly thing to say because he had already gone through bankruptcy.  But still he’d disinherit her; he had a fit about her going on stage.   But he died about 1906, I guess.  So he just barely survived that.  He didn’t live long enough to see her get married.  His granddaughter.  I don’t think he saw his wife Mary or his two daughters very much for the last, oh, five or ten years of their lives, but they were all buried together.  You’ll find them all at Fairmount.  I can’t think of anything more about Charles right now.  Let me jump while there’s still some tape left, to Mary, his wife.  Let’s see, I’ll go way back.  She was four years, three years, I guess, younger.  But she was already married to a man called Nye—N-Y- E.  And I guess Mr. Nye was a hopeless drunk.  Mary’s father was Ebenezer, anyway he was a preacher.  And he escorted Nye and Mary and the two little kids, a girl and a boy, out on the covered wagon, saw them in Colorado.  It wasn’t Colorado then, of course, it was Kansas Territory.  But he took one look and said, “And I’ll thank you very much.”  And turned around—I don’t know how he got back, there wasn’t a train.  I don’t know, I guess all the covered wagons had to turn around if they wanted to.  Anyway, he was one pioneer who turned around and went back East.  Well he had a wife and other children.  And Mary, unlike Charles, would talk about her family, about her mother.  She wrote back and forth.  And she had sisters and nieces and nephews.  They all showed up.  I remember a couple of them were very good friends of Grandmother Desoto’s later.  That side stayed connected.  Charles Hall’s side disconnected, totally.  Mary was a very, very sweet, very motherly type of person.  Everybody loved her.  She was the kind who would take care of the sick and give you recipes and cook all night and have children in all directions and be good to Indians. 

She was just a loving, loving person.  And really the only record of her—there was a man called, what was his name, he said, “Go West, young man.”  He was the editor of the New York Tribune.  I can’t think of his name, he was very famous.  And he wrote travelogues as he would go for the newspaper.  Stopping at the ranch and meeting Mary who was then Mrs. Hall.  And said how charming and lovely she was.  For a while you see, the big house that’s still there at the ranch--that house was run like a stagecoach house, kind of a bed and breakfast thing.  The dining room had two or three little tables.  And where the fireplace is now was an open window, and all the food would come in through the window from the kitchen into the dining room.  And Grandma Hall did all the cooking.  And I suppose her two, three daughters—one was a Nye—they all helped serve the dinners to the guests.  And the living room was the super one to get because that had a parlor in front and a bedroom in back.  Then upstairs was just bedrooms, there wasn’t a single bathroom in the whole place, so everything was chamber pots and privies and it must have been just chaos to run it.  Because there would be easily six or seven guests at a time.  The stagecoach would come right on up to the front porch.  And I suppose they had to take care of the horses and the drivers and all that.  It wasn’t like a cab stand, it was too many miles away.  But that didn’t go on for long.  I think Grandpa Hall got sick and tired of serving people in any way at all.  And before you know it they were moved into the front house and the guests were all out and it became a senator’s home.  I suppose at the time he went into politics.  I’m not sure about any of this.  I may be imagining, but I remember Grandma—that would be his Minnie daughter—always remembering how nice it was when they could move into the big house because it was insulated and they had a pump, you know, slowly but surely the amenities moved into the house and the furniture got better.  That reminds me, Mary, when she was leaving back east with Mr. Nye and two children, and coming out west, she wanted to bring her piano.  And she had a fit, she just cried and screamed because they could not put an upright piano in the covered wagon along with her father, her husband and two children, it was just impossible.  So all the way across the United States she grieved for a piano.  And of course Mr. Nye was dead drunk from—well, he was disappearing sometimes for days.  Once in Chicago they couldn’t find him for two or three days, just drunk.  So she had to drive the team of horses.  And I guess, the ladylike way you had to wear clothes in those days--they couldn’t wear things like blue jeans--it was just agony for her to sit forever in bustles and corsets and pantalettes and goodness knows what, and drive a team of horses just because Mr. Nye was drunk and her father was old and the children were much too little.  So Mr. Hall, who was in a different wagon, took her rocking chair and fixed it somehow so that it could still rock, still be comfortable—have a pillow in the seat—and yet not fall off the front of the wagon.  And she rode for a lot of the way, I guess from about Nebraska, let’s guess, she was sitting in a rocking chair that could rock and still wouldn’t fall off the covered wagon, which that kindly young man from another wagon had fixed for her.  And then Mr. Nye would be so drunk in the evening when the wagon would stop, what were they going to do?  They got to be friendly with each other and also with Mr. and Mrs. Tabor.  And the four of them would play Whist.  Whist is just Bridge, but easier, some different way of scoring or something.  Anyway they would play cards and meanwhile Mary would maybe cook some little snack for towards evening.  And they would sit and play cards outside.  They had to let the horses go in the beginning, you know, let them feed and water and all that.  But towards evening when everything was peaceful and they had a guard so no Indians could hurt them, they’d put something out and played cards.  Charles, Mary, not married to each other, and Mr. and Mrs. Tabor.  So one day Mary was baking biscuits and they were playing cards and the biscuits were cooking away and smelling nice, but they weren’t done yet.  And they heard this horrifying scream, a piercing, terrible shriek, and there goes an Indian with the terribly hot pan of biscuits in his hand, he’s burning and galloping at the same time on a horse.  No saddle, just a bridle, and screaming his head off because the biscuits were hot, but taking them back over to wherever the Indians lived.  Mary said just give them all, but they had to stop playing for that night.  Anyway you might think it was weird that they were out playing cards in the middle of no place, but that—I think his name was Byer or Bayer—anyway he loved the theatre, Shakespeare, all that sort of thing. And they decided to give a play.  Each night a little bit they would rehearse and then on a certain date they were going to have the play, “Twelfth Night.”  Well, Twelfth Night is a lot in the woods, and goodness knows that was easy to do because they had to take the front, I don’t know about horses and wagons, but those two long poles that stick out in front of the wagons where the horses are tied, they took them off the wagons and stood them in the ground and pretended they were trees.  And the wagons were of course all in a circle and the cavalry was taking care of the wagons.  And they would rehearse, and they finally gave Twelfth Night to the enormous relief of whoever this man was that insisted they give this play.  But it’s a scene I’ve never seen in a movie, to have pioneer people out there mincing around the trees and talking Shakespeare, but it really did happen on that trip.  I don’t know how many times they had the same performance, and I think almost everybody in the wagon train was in it.  I don’t know who watched.  Maybe the Indians.  I know that part’s true.  Well, let me jump ahead to the place where Charles, who is still young and not married, is up in the mountains and being carried down to Leadville, skinny and starving.  And Mary comes and mothers him and babies him and takes care of him and fattens him up and marries him.  Now you’re going to think how in the world could she marry Grandpa Hall when she was married to Mr. Nye.  Because it was a terrible thing the year before.  She had when she came out on the train with Mr. Nye and her father, two children, Hal and Ella.  Ella was the oldest.  I don’t know how old they were, let’s say four and six, I’m just guessing.  And she was pregnant.  And Mr. Nye and she got into a big fight, I don’t know what about.  But anyway he kicked her in the stomach and she had a miscarriage and he took the children and put them in some vehicle, I don’t know, covered wagons that turned around and went back.  But anyway, he took the children and left.  And there she was on the floor and having a miscarriage.  And the miners in Leadville were very kind and very loving and very upset about this whole episode and gave her a legal thing called a miner’s divorce decree.  I wish I still had the paper, but Tag and Claire and Carl and Toni and crayons scrambled up and ruined that decree.  I have read it and seen it but it was certainly demolished by my kids.  But anyway, they were legally divorced.  And that was not in Colorado, you see that was still Kansas Territory.  So when she married Grandpa Hall it was about three, four years later in a town called Oro.  Well you can’t prove it, but Oro has no records, there isn’t even an Oro there any more.  It’s way up, even higher up than Leadville, and long gone.  And so anyway they were certainly legally married, but you can’t prove that by the D A R; I don’t know how you’d go about that.  Except that the State Senator and Mrs. Hall were certainly assumed to be totally married and divorced.  Well now I’m getting mixed up again.  At this point, Mr. Nye, still drunk of course and with the two children, he writes a letter to Mary and says, we were held up by Indians on the way back, the children are dead.  She had no reason to want to go home, she had no reason to live, it was just a sick terrible thing to do to a mother.  And for a long, long time she believed it.  And when she got married to Mr. Hall, she believed it.  And she had had two daughters when one fine day she gets a letter from Baltimore from some relative and Ella is a waitress in Baltimore and Hal is still in school.  And Mr. Nye, I guess was dead, nobody ever mentioned his name again.  But Ella was supporting Hal under shady circumstances. So that’s why she got on the train with her daughters and went back east to rescue Ella and Hal.  And of course, they came right back.  Well, what could Grandpa Hall do?  Obviously when he married Mary he thought the children were dead.  Well suddenly he’s got two step children.  It wasn’t very long, maybe five years, before they were living in the big front house, no longer in the back log house where Ella had lost her tooth.  They were up in the front house when Grandpa Hall found out that Aunt Ella was expecting.  Well that is absolutely the worst thing that could have happened to a State Senator.  It was just the last straw.  So he sends for the future husband of Ella, who was a bartender in Leadville, I think his name was Nettleson or something.  Dragged him up to the ranch, practically with a shotgun, I don’t think it was that corny, but, by George, they were married that very week, the minute he found out.  Well, Aunt Ella was probably only about three months gone when the wedding happened so it was no big news to South Park, but to Grandpa Hall it was the end.  He kicked out Mr. Nettleson and Aunt Ella back to Leadville instantly, and forbade Mary to ever speak to her again, ever, ever.  So Mary was sort of obedient to him—he was a very bossy, scary guy—until one day a cowboy comes galloping in and says, “Mrs. Hall, I think your daughter’s going to die.  Don’t you think you’d better go back?”  It was Fairplay, not Leadville, Fairplay.  So of course, within twenty minutes she was in some buggy on her way back to Fairplay.  And Ella and a little girl died.  My Lord, I’m crying and I never even met them.  Fairplay--there’s a hill behind it.  There’s a football field I think Carl had put back in Fairplay from Frueauff money.  And Ella and the baby, Mrs. And Miss Nettleson, are buried up there someplace.  Now you know how gossip goes in a place like Fairplay.  Even then it was even smaller.  And the Nettlesons always felt that the Halls were high hat, but that’s because he was a bartender.  I don’t think it was that, I think it was just an absolute puritanical quality in Grandpa Hall that made that episode happen.  The young sister of that Mr. Nettleson knew Clara McKay and she always thought they were terribly high hat because he was bartender.  I swear it was the moral side not the social side.  Anyway they were buried up there, and Mary and Charles were buried in Denver.  There was just a knife dropped down a guillotine and that ended the relationship.  I don’t know what happened to Hal.  I really have no way of beginning to guess.  I think he just couldn’t stand Grandpa Hall and left.  He’s never talked about.  Mother never mentioned him.  I think Hal just maybe went back east again.  I feel awfully sorry for him, he was right in the middle of really a tug of war between a drunk father and a kind of cruel stepfather and a mother who was sort of obedient for a long time.  She didn’t stay obedient, Mary I mean, after she got her daughters grown up.  Minnie and Mildred—Minnie was the oldest.  Then I think she came to Denver, she was more interested in religion.  What she lived on I haven’t got a clue.  They seemed to have a very nice apartment, and sort of middle class, even upper class friends.  I don’t know how they lived.  If Grandpa Hall was bankrupt and living at the Denver Athletic Club, I don’t know how they did it.  Maybe you just went bankrupt and started over.  Now it takes ten years or something.  Anyway grandpa and she were completely separated.  But he just stayed old and cold and kind of critical of everything.  I don’t know how she met Mrs. Eddy, but she did and became one of her very first students.  She went back east for a while.  I don’t know how you study a religion exactly, but she really did.  And they got to be very good friends.  Years and years later the Christian Science Church wrote to me and said, “If you have any letters from Mrs. Eddy we would like them back.”  So Grandma Desoto, Minnie the daughter, did have a lot of letters her mother and Mrs. Eddy had written back and forth.  And she had copied them on some sort of glass, a way you photographed in the old days on a plate of glass, and so I gave the glass plates of the letters back to the church.  I thought even if I wasn’t a Christian Scientist any more out of respect of the church I did what they asked.  And all the personal relationships between Mrs. Eddy and Mrs. Hall are embossed in the mother church.  And all the paperwork and magazines and books and prayer books and quarterlies and things like that I gave in Denver to the Christian Science library.  And so if you ever cared you could find them in one of those two places.   But her relationship with Mrs. Eddy was not entirely just spiritual and God kind of thing, they were really good friends, they really adored each other.  They were best friends.  So when Mary came back now a separated older woman with two grown daughters and a granddaughter to Denver, she was certified by the church as a Christian Science Doctor—a C S D—and was what they call a practitioner.  Some was on the phone; some was personal.  An advisor, guider, I guess a relationship a Catholic would have with a priest.  In some ways she became that to other people that were coming to Christian Science, or needed help, emotional or physical.  So after a while her daughter Minnie went back east and studied with Mrs. Eddy and became a CSD also.  Maybe ten years between the two.  And then Mildred, the younger daughter, became a CSD.  And then Molly, whom you may not know who she is, but Molly was a sort of indentured best friend, guest and helper around our house.  A German that came over as a little kid with her brother, and somehow always lived with us.  Sort of like family but not by blood.  She was engaged later to young Charlie.  So Molly was always right there almost like a sister, a nanny, not a servant by any means, she was definitely family, but no blood relative.  But Molly became a CSD.  When I came along as a child every woman I knew was a practitioner, practically.  Even my governess was a practitioner.  It was a solid wall of spiritual women. 

I’ll tell you this machine is driving me so crazy.  And there’s numbers on it, seven hundred and something.  I don’t know when it’s going to end, maybe at a thousand, I don’t know.  I’d better stop for the end of this side of the tape and send it to you.  Because if it’s incoherent you might as well face it now and save me chattering.  I‘d much rather write this. 

Tape 2 side 1

There are just a few things I forgot to say in the last tape about Charles Hall.  First of all the date for Pikes Peak or Bust was 1859.  Also his father, whom I don’t think he liked because I never heard him mentioned, didn’t die for another eighteen years but I don’t think there was any contact any more.  His mother had died before he came out, his father long after.  There was really no relationship between him and the Halls, just his pride in them.  Now Mary, she was about three years younger.  I don’t know how young she could have been when she married that awful Mr. Nye, but obviously her family kind of worried about him because he was such a drunk.  And she had two little kids.  So her father—he was a minister—came out with her on the same Pikes Peak or Bust.  She was about twenty-two, with two little kids and her father and that drunk husband.  At one point in Chicago they lost him for a day or two but they got him back in time to keep going west.  I know at one point he was earning their living with a tintype.  A tintype was a sort of an early camera, and your picture came out on tin, sort of copper-color and shadow.  And it lasted maybe a year, then it faded out to nothing so there were no leftover pictures.  I think he worked up there in Central City or Blackhawk or somewhere, with the tintype thing for a while, and then Leadville. 

Did I tell you—I don’t remember if I told you, I’ll tell you again—that at one point Grandpa Hall—Charles Hall—put a toll bridge, not a bridge, a toll gate across the Central City road and charged something like 50 cents to go through, which was illegal of course, and they stopped him doing it.  But he made quite a little money during one winter blocking that road and charging. 

Well, wait a minute, I think I’ve told you everything about Charles Hall that I know.  To go back a little bit on Mary.  She stayed very close to her family even though she was out in Colorado; she had mother, sisters, nieces, nephews, they all stayed in touch and sometimes nieces would come out to Colorado when things got more civilized, trains and all.  And she was a very loving, warm, helping-everybody sort of person.  Everybody liked her.  I think they were just sort of scared of him.  Well, I don’t know how Molly got in the picture.  But she was the same age really as the two daughters that Charles and Mary had.  One was the oldest—goodness, I don’t know which one was oldest—I think Minnie was the oldest, Minna or Minnie.  And the younger one was Mildred. And then they had this young brother, the one who died in Arizona.  Now those two girls were about as different as if they came from different families.  Minnie was short, red-headed, freckles, chubby, very flirty and very independent.  She wanted to flirt, she wanted everybody to like her, and she thought sex was about the most dreadful, awful, embarrassing, nasty thing.  And all she ever did about that was to produce Antoinette, say “Thank God, that’s over,” and got rid of Mr. Perry almost immediately.  She married twice more, no sex, of course.  Out of the question.  One was Grandpa Murphy, the one that I considered my grandfather.  He was a Quaker.  He’d been carrying a flag or a banner or something in the civil war someplace and got shot right across the back of his shoulder.  And it made him kind of hunch-back looking.  He was always kind of sickly, and he must have been at least sixty-five when he married Granny, Minnie.  And I think he thought it was going to be a lot more of a marriage than it was. But she babied him along.  He sat at a card table for years and years by the window, playing solitaire.  And the living room would be full of friends of Minnie’s; servants being fired and screaming and yelling.  It was a very hectic household.  And Grandpa Murphy would just sit in a corner and be a Quaker, kind of a martyr.  I don’t remember when he died—that was a bad episode, I’ll tell you about later. 

But then she remarried a third time.  A man called Emilio Domingo DeSoto.  I think he was from Columbia, or someplace.  I mean his family—he was a regular American with that fancy name.  He was a sort of dapper-dan type.  Small, very well dressed, kind of quiet.  He’d been a lawyer for mining claims. And he was just a left-handed kind of escort for Minnie.  They had a honeymoon once in Hawaii.  I was so embarrassed—my own grandmother—she came back with those leis of gardenias and goodness knows what fluffy stuff around her neck.  She looked so silly, she was then about sixty-five or seventy in a flowered chiffon dress, and this little dapper Spanish-type man with a little greased mustache.  And she went always crazy about DAR’s.   Whenever there was a convention of Pilgrims, Mayflower daughters, DAR’s she dragged poor Desoto with her to ‘fluffy’ around.  But that was her silly side.  She had a very good side, too.  And that was she was awfully talented.  She did clay model busts, I guess you’d call them, of almost everybody in the family and they all got squashed.  They were just soft clay, they were never cast.  And then she painted quite a lot in the style of her day.  She was always running around with paint boxes and little folding canvas chairs and sitting out somewhere in the middle of South Park, dabbing little daisies and things on the fields.  I guess you’ve got enough of those pictures of hers.  They were always about the same.

Now that I’m telling you about her I’ll begin at the beginning.  I think she was born right close to the ranch.  Maybe Denver, but she lived as a little girl right there in the log cabin at the ranch.  And when she was about eleven or twelve the trains came and that’s when she went back east with her mother to find Aunt Ella and Hal.  I guess she had a perfectly good education, but I never heard anybody say where they went to school.  Maybe her mother taught her.  She was perfectly well-read, had a very nice voice.  She wasn’t interested in music a bit, or theatre, she was just living all the time.  Remember Grandpa Perry, the first man she married, was a Roman Catholic.  Well that was just awful from the Hall’s point of view.  They were just scared to death, you know.  That was the day when the Irish were coming over and everybody was getting more catholic all the way across the country.  And the Protestants were having a fit.  And it really got quite nasty.  I don’t know how in the world she was allowed to marry Mr. Perry, but it certainly didn’t last long.

I don’t know what this machine is doing, I pushed about two buttons too many.  Well, let’s see, Minnie produced Antoinette.  Well during the time she was pregnant with Antoinette, that was in 1888 in Denver, she was already separated from her husband.  And in that day they had those big puffed sleeves at the top, up near your shoulders, big puffs, and then a bustle in back, which she thought was terribly funny, because the baby stuck out in front just as much as the bustle stuck out in back.  And she thought it was terribly funny, her father and mother were horrified.  She went all over town matching the front and the back of herself.  She said she measured 38 inches from front to back.  And she always carried a little pocketbook with some dental floss in it, so that if the baby got born while she was downtown, she could tie the umbilical cord with the dental floss.  Now when you had a bustle and of course pregnant and everything you couldn’t wear a coat, there were no coats.  She wore like a three-quarter length shawl—cape.  And she’d go to the theatre and sit in the front row, well, it was concerts really, she thought mother should listen to music even while she was inside.  And she would keep the shawl over herself so she didn’t look too pregnant and try and sit in such a way that the baby could hear the orchestra.  She was eccentric. But, what happened then…  She kind of lost interest—she loved the baby, but in a way it was her youngest sister Mildred who inspired the child with imagination and theatre and books and stuff.  Now Mildred was entirely different.  In a way she was—she could have been a very great star except things happened in her life so she didn’t get the chance.  She was kind of an intellectual.  She looked kind of like an Indian and was very dark with high, high cheekbones and a beautiful voice, the best voice you ever heard, speaking voice I mean.  And she went to Wellesley, which is a big college these days, but then it was only about four years, five years in existence, a girls college, a woman’s college, which was very odd in those days, women weren’t supposed to get that educated.  I don’t know if she got expelled, I don’t know if she graduated.  I suppose Wellesley would have the records of her having gone there.  Her name was Mildred Hall.  And at that time back east, well the civil war was the big subject, you know, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was sort of a socialite in the east.  I think New York.  And she had a brother who was a very important minister, sort of the protestant pope of those days.  His name was Henry Ward Beecher, and he got into some sort of a scandal, I don’t know the details—married woman stuff or something.  And at that point I think Mildred met Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher and all that bunch and just left college.  Whether she graduated or not, I don’t know. And started meeting writers and actors and people like that.  Well it wasn’t two months around that crowd in New York before she met an actor called George Wessels, I guess he was a very good actor, not a leading man, a character actor.  At one point he worked at Elitch’s in Denver.  At another point he had a little theatre kind of a stock company thing right in Manhattan.  And then he got to play Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes with William Gillette.  William Gillette was a big famous star because of Sherlock Holmes and so Wessels, being the villain, got to be pretty important, too.  And Mildred married him.  I don’t know what in the world Grandpa Hall must have thought of his daughter marrying an actor, but I guess Wessels was so nice that you couldn’t help but include him completely in the warmth of the family.  I don’t know how long they were married but they were very happy.  And as my mother Antoinette would grow up from a little girl into a kind of teenager when they would go on tour with different plays Mildred would play the lead and Mr. Wessels would play the lead and if there was a walk-on mother would be in it.  And they stayed in boarding houses.  Mother said they were filthy dirty, awful, they never even changed the sheets from one family to the next.  But it was kind of an adventure.  And they wouldn’t tell Senator Hall too much about it.  They’d get back from the tour and not discuss it much. 

And I know mother went to high school.  No first she went to regular school, Miss Wolcott.  And she also went to Corona.  I think that’s a high school in Denver.   I read in a book one time that nobody knew where Texas Gimon went to high school—she was a night club entertainer.  I can tell you.  She went to Corona High School with mother.  They couldn’t have been more different.  Mother was a very natural, very feminine, very lady-like type.  Texas Gimon was chewing gum tough, bleached blonde—well, she’s the one who invented saying, “Give the little girl a big hand.”  And she’d bring these chorus girls out.  She and mother were amused by each other.  I think Texas was about two years older than mother.  And she went the way of musical comedy and vaudeville and night clubs.  Mother, of course, was interested in Shakespeare and Shaw and stuff like that.  Well, poor Senator Hall, he was just horrified by it.  I told you at one point he disinherited mother; but that was just silly, he was broke anyway.  But I think the rift about his son’s suicide and Christian Science mixed was too much.  So the grown-ups were separated.  The women were on one side of Denver and Grandpa Hall on the other side.  And as mother got popular working in plays, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old,   I think somewhere in there he died.  Because he wasn’t at her wedding.  Now mother was in a play, and my father (I’ll tell you of the Frueauff side another day) met her backstage, I guess, after opening night of something in Denver. And that was it.  At that point he must have been about thirty-two or three and mother was much, much younger.  And he just said, “That is it.  I’m going marry her.”  He was at that point very successful in the oil business, sort of social and much in demand among young ladies in Denver.  That was it, he was going to marry her.  Mr. Dougherty, the president of the company had a fit, you just didn’t marry an actress.  Daddy couldn’t care less, he was going to marry her, and he did.  The company was enchanted, it was romantic, it was extreme, it was very well known around Denver.  A big hubbub about that wedding—I don’t think it could have been a very big wedding—the house wasn’t very big.  It was over on East Colfax where they had the wedding.  Where the Nissi Dry Cleaner is now, in front down by the sidewalk, we used to have a big lawn and then the house was back there.  I got born there.  But mother and daddy had lived in New York for a couple of years, married, before I got born, but when you start to have your first baby you want somebody around that you kind of trust and mother just left daddy and went right back to her Christian Science mother and had me in Denver.  Left Daddy in New York.  So of course he came out for the birth but then he had—no, he didn’t, no—I got born and then I got on the train with mother in a drawing room and we came back.  And Daddy and a lot of the City Service men, they were in top hats and all that sort of nonsense, at Grand Central to greet us.  Well, mother could be outrageously funny sometimes.  And this was too much.  Because daddy knew I was a red-head, he’d been told that on the telephone.  Mother had a little cap made, because you know I was a two-weeks old baby, a little silky cap with lace around the edge, tied under the chin.  And she put false red curls all around the cap, like hot dogs, these great red curls were coming out.  And then in those days babies had a kind of a rubber thing you could suck on and it makes a ring outside, like a big ring that pops up and down as you suck, so here is this, I guess it was plastic or cellophane, plastic ring, popping up and down over my nose, these orange curls.  Mother gets off the train with all the executives of City Service, with this comedy act baby.  Poor daddy, he was much more serious and he considered me practically the princess of the company, amongst Grand Central.

Now, I’m getting mixed up again.  Go back to where Mildred and Wessels are        happy and touring.  And Wessels began to get kind of weird, acting kind of crazy.  He wasn’t a drunk, he wasn’t dopey or anything.  He had a tumor on his brain, but nobody knew it.  And he got weirder and weirder and they put him up at the ranch with Annie his wife, and one day they were at the head of the staircase, and he hit her.  I mean just punched her, and she went crashing down the stairs, it was right there in the front hall.  And then he ran on out of the house down towards the Hartsel gate.  And he had on a top hat.  This is on the ranch, a top hat and a great big cape, kind of like Dracula, screaming and yelling.  I think he was in a great deal of pain in his head.  And some of the cowboys caught him and said the man is crazy.  And they took him in a wagon or something on down to the hospital in Pueblo.  He lived about a week, maybe ten days, out of his mind completely, and died.  Well to Auntie who was a Christian Science practitioner and didn’t believe in those bad things, she was absolutely shattered.  Mildred at that point wanted just to be alone.

 So she came up to the ranch, which had been used once in a while, but there was a man there all the time.  He would write letters from the Haver, some of those letters are still in the safe.  Haver was the post office.  And she stayed up at the ranch alone, heartbroken.  I don’t know what phase Minnie was in in Denver, maybe painting or something.  And one day somebody came over and said, “Mrs. Wessels, the man over at the JP or was it the 63, the one right by the Antero on 285.  He said that man I think is going to die, he’s terribly sick.  His name is Thomas McQuaid.”  “Well,” she said, “that’s terrible, you mean he’s alone over there and dying?”  They said, “Well, he’s not married and he doesn’t have any family we can see.  He’s awfully sick.”  So just like her mother had done for Mr. Hall, Mildred goes in a buggy with a horse over to the next ranch to take care of her neighbor whom she’d never seen in her life before.  And there was one attractive man.  He may have been my great-uncle by marriage.  He had so much charm and humor, but he could be so gruff.  And I guess she’d never met anybody like that.  He had gone through third grade, I think, maybe fourth grade.  He had to read out loud, he couldn’t read in his head, so he sort of muttered through the paper.  And they fell deeply and happily in love for the next fifty years, I think, I don’t know how long they were married.  And he came over to live in the Hall Ranch, the big house.

And—goodness, I don’t think I’ve told you about the houses—I will later.  He came over there and there was an agreement that if she died, he could stay there forever.  And he would make the ranch enormously big.  But when he died, it would go back to the Hall side of the family.  It seemed fine at the time and that’s how it ended up.  The only thing is the bank made us sell all the land that he had accumulated during the marriage, 80,000 acres he had, and the bank made us sell it all back for taxes, except the little part that the Halls had originally.  It was a disaster, the tax part of everything.  And now all those trailer parks, even the Antero, everything, all the way down to Hartsel, that used to be ours is gone.  And I think little houses are going to come in.  What little bit we’ve got for goodness sakes, protect.

You can probably find out more about Tom McQuaid by the people around here now, he had such a reputation for extremism.  In the first place, he looked like a sort of evil-minded, twinkly Santa Claus.  He had a leering twinkly look, he was very Irish, of course.  This is how his life began.  There was a man called Bernard McQuaid, and a wife, I can’t think of her name.  And they were Irish.  I don’t know when the potato famine, was, but I’m sure at that point everybody in Ireland wanted to come to America.  Well, they didn’t have any way to get over where they wanted to go, they wanted to go to the West Coast.  They had heard by telegraph and everything that gold was over there at Sutter’s, which is pretty near San Francisco.  To get there they had to go by boat from Ireland down underneath South America and then back up the West Coast.  There wasn’t any Panama Canal.  So the trip was awful.  I think it took months, sailboats and so.  They finally got to San Francisco.  Well they never got particularly rich, I don’t know what they did in Sutter’s Mill, but it was a madhouse by that time.  The gold rush was full of steam.  And they began to have children and children, I don’t know how many, maybe eight or nine.  I don’t know who was oldest.  You could find that out if you wanted to because there are some McQuaids still in Seattle.  And you can look at the cemetery there in Buena Vista and figure out a lot of them.  Well when Sutter’s mill got broke and San Francisco was a madhouse, they got an ox team and a sort of covered wagon thing and they went east to Colorado.  Only pioneers I ever heard of that went east to get to the Rocky Mountains.  Somewhere along the way Uncle Tom got born.  So by the time they got to Colorado he was about a year and a half.  What they did for a living I suppose was the beginning of ranching.  It was the beginning of barbed wire.  It was a whole different thing—mining wasn’t as much as cattle by then.  And so I think they were small time farmers.  The mother—I wish I could think of her name—lived in Buena Vista.  I met her once, that would be Uncle Tom’s mother, think how long ago that was.  She was sitting on the front porch smoking a cigar.  I was in front? shock.  I could hardly look at her at first.  It’s the worst thing I ever saw.  And Uncle Tom, of course, was brought up a Catholic, they were all Irish-Catholic.  But he didn’t care about religion one way or the other, just a priest was a priest, and you know, give them a dollar.  He had a lot of adventures as a young kid.  He didn’t go to school much.  But he was very eager, very—well, like a leader—right away.  By the time he was twelve or thirteen he had rounded up a couple of bandits, gone and got the sheriff.  He became a sheriff later.  He was just so alive.  And Mildred was so charming.  So if he would be very brutal with the men that  worked for him, underpaying them, you know, not mean, not disagreeable, just hard.  And then Mildred would be very charming and give them a little something extra from the kitchen and not tell him.  She kept the books, he never figured that one out.  He never had a wallet, maybe nobody had wallets, I don’t know.  He had like a little pocketbook, a purse, and inside he had all the paper money rolled up in a lump with a rubber band around it and he kept that in a purse.  And he was very, very careful about cash, but Mildred would figure out about things like bank accounts.  They grew very successful.  One time, though, when he was pretty young, like teenager, he had three thousand head of Herefords.  And during one sort of roundup moving along, moving the cattle, they got a terrible blizzard and all the animals tried to get away from the blizzard and they bumped into a wire fence.  And so the first ones squashed into the wire and the second ones, you know like a stampede, and he lost several thousand head of cattle in one night.  They packed up and they froze and they suffocated.  It was a nightmare.  But he just went right ahead and started making money again.  One time the Society of Cruelty to Animals got after him because a cow was dying when it was having a calf, so he roped the calf and pulled it out, killed the cow.  And that was considered very cruel, I don’t know, I’ve never seen cows have calves, but it horrified everybody.  Another time it was the sheriff, and he had about twenty men in a posse.  And he ended up hanging a woman on the Fourth Street Bridge in Canon City.  Years afterwards, oh, I mean he was a hundred and one or something, and I was sitting in a chair and he was in bed, and I was just sort of reminiscing with him, Andy had died.  And I said, “Uncle Tom, do you ever feel sort of guilty, you know, about hanging that woman?”  And he looked at me kind of puzzled, and he puffed on his pipe, and he said, “Well, she was stealing mules.”  That just justified it in his point of view.  There was one man he really respected, and he loved him.  Well, he had never met him, but it was his hero.  Jesse James.  I think he was a sort of bandit, I’m not sure about Jesse James.  But there was a book about Jesse James and Uncle Tom would read that about every two years.  And he had to read it sort of softly to himself, out loud to himself.  And then he would say, “Boy he was a hard one.  Ooh, he was a hard one.”  He just felt that toughness was the most a man could be.  Not intelligent, not merciful, just tough.  But he sparkled with it.  He loved to make a good deal.  Some of them were kind of sad to watch.  During their marriage, and I would come up there in summer.  The ranch would be growing and growing because…there was a dust bowl period and people would come out from Texas and Oklahoma and think, oh, we could have a farm.  And they’d take out some land.  I don’t know what you call it when you get it free from the government.  And they would take this land and build a little house and build a fence and have a milk cow and a couple of chickens and at the end of a year and a half or two years they were starving to death.  The weather was horrible, nothing would grow.  So then they’d go over to the McQuaids and say, “Well, we think we want to go to Oregon, would you like to buy our place.  It’s got a house and a well and a fence and it adjoins you.”  And Uncle Tom would say, “Well, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”  And they were all packed; they were ready to move.  And they expected at least $500.  They even had a pipe organ in one of those houses they had to leave.  But Uncle Tom wouldn’t give them another nickel, just write down the bill.  But Auntie would go out and give them a lot of canned goods and stuff from the back door.  She would be crying but she couldn’t fix it.  That’s one way the ranch grew, by waiting for settlers to go broke and move away.  And all those houses that were scattered around, a lot of them are the bunk houses now, or the library.  Uncle Tom would tell the boys, the cowboys, to go get it.  And they’d knock the house down and bring it back and put another bunk house back there.  That’s why the ranch kind of looks like a little village with all those cabins.  Some of them were no good, some were very nice.

Another thing about Uncle Tom, he liked to tease people.  He was merciless.  One person he liked very much I’m sure, was Molly, you know the German one that was sort of indentured to us.  And he liked her of course, but she was so prim and so proper, and he was very riddled.  And so one day he said, “Molly, this is ridiculous going around side-saddle, I’m going to put you on a regular Western saddle.”  And she said, “Oh, Tom, I couldn’t do that.  Oh, no, it’s not ladylike.”  By George they picked Molly up, physically picked her up, and she was pinching her knees together and pinching her feet together, she would not get down and opened up onto the saddle, she just wouldn’t.   She stood on the top of the saddle, screaming, “Tom, Tom, stop.”  And Slim took one of her feet and Uncle Tom took the other and pulled her apart and down open onto the saddle.  And he said later, “It was just like getting a clothespin across a log.”  She just yelled and screamed.  But finally she rode a horse just like other people.  She was really very prim, very proper.  Had a very slight German, well not exactly a German accent, but a way of speaking, that you could tell she’d come from somewhere else.  All she did day and night it seems to me was crochet.  Every nice pretty thing you’d find around the ranch, kind of like lace or tablecloths or bedspreads, Molly crocheted.  She could do a full-size tablecloth in about a month, which takes the average person a year or two.  She didn’t even look when she was crocheting, just flew along.

There was one man who was kind of in competition with Uncle Tom and the Salt Works Ranch.  I think his name was Sam Hartsel, I don’t remember.  But he had the other ranch.  You know if one person got thirty thousand acres, the other one would get forty.  They’d hear about it, but they never met.  And once they met years later at  cattlemen’s convention, and afterwards, I guess it was Hartsel, said, “Who was that son-of-a-bitch at that meeting?”  They said, “Oh, that was Tom McQuaid.”  He said, “My God, if I’d known that I’d have killed him.”  They had this feud going on for years and years at the cattlemen’s association, but they cut each other cold always.  It was just babies, masculine jealousy, I guess—who was the most successful.

The way he ran the ranch was very sensible.  During the winter there was a main German cook, woman, called Nanny.  She’d come down in the morning and get everything done, then go up to her room and lock the door with a padlock on the inside.  I don’t know what she was scared of, maybe Uncle Tom.  And she stayed there maybe fifteen years, Nanny was around.  She slept next to the bathroom in that corner room, always with a padlock.  She was sort of weird, but a very good cook.  And the ranch really was hard work in those days.  You had to cook with wood and coal and stoke all the fires; there was no propane or anything.  And they stuck to a sort of city kind of code of manners, maybe because of Auntie and going to Wellesley and all that.  They did laundry every Monday, and it was scrubbing, you know, on a washing machine.  I mean that you really rubbed up and down on the dirt.  They would do all the sheets and all the pillowcases and hang them outdoors where they whipped around in the wind out there.  Then on Tuesday they would iron.  I mean sometimes there would be like twelve white  linen sheets, iron them all; iron the pillowcases.  Starched certain things and didn’t starch other things and to iron you had a little handle and all the irons were metal of course.  The handle was wood, and you’d grab up the next iron that was hot and grease it with kind of paraffin that was in a rag and make it slippery; and then iron for a while.  And then when it got cold you had to switch to the next one.  It took all day to iron a week’s worth of sheets and pillowcases and tablecloths.  They always had a dining room tablecloth.  But Uncle Tom was so sloppy that they put a kind of a napkin thing—no like a hand towel—under his plate so they could change that every day and not have to change the tablecloth every day.  But the boys and Nanny ate what they called out back.  They ate out in the log house.  Nanny had to carry all those great big trays and later, much later, Clara and Red McHale, they ate out back and carried all the food both to the dining room and to the boys.  Then they would eat alone in the kitchen, I mean Clara and Red.  Sort of halfway between.  They never ate with us, and they never ate with the boys.  But there weren’t any boys in winter, maybe two.  But when they were cutting hay, when they were rounding up cattle all of a sudden there would be twelve and fourteen, kids mostly, a few grownups like Slim, but mostly—there were some right out of the reformatory—they ranged from sixteen to twenty-four. Most of them had their own saddles, used Uncle Tom’s horses.  They got about ten dollars a month plus room and board, but of course they were fired as winter came.  I don’t know where they went, but they were cowboys in summer. 

And so then they began to fix the house better; they put some kind of a gas thing in a tank out by the kitchen, and you poured water on it and that made light and the gas lights.  And later, of course came propane, and later came the explosion of propane.  But at that point we already had electricity.  Elaine put the electricity in.  We owned it jointly at that point, so she said she was going to put the electricity in and I said you mustn’t bore holes in any of the woodwork, put the sockets and things in the plaster, because you can always fix up the plaster.  So luckily we’ve never wrecked the floorboards and things like that that were carved by the ship’s carpenter.

Then the Christian Scientists.  I don’t think Mildred Wessels McQuaid ever admitted how sick she was.  But she got sicker and sicker and she would pray and read the Bible all the time Uncle Tom was out, I mean outdoors, and then when he would come home around five or six in the evening she would change to a nice dress, fix all up and everything and look perfectly lovely and welcoming and the hostess as he would come back and she would give him his bedroom slippers; he would lie there on the living room sofa and puff on a pipe and she would take off his cowboy boots and put on is bedroom slippers.  She babied him totally.  But during the morning when he was out and in the afternoon when he was out she was like a little ghost, praying.  She wore a sunbonnet when she’d go outdoors.  She was so thin.  I guess it was cancer—she never said, nobody ever dared ask.  But one day, long after, Uncle Tom was lying on the sofa, she said, “Tommy, I’m going up to bed.”  He said, “I’ll be up soon.”  And she went upstairs and Clara McHale, who was working for her, said, “Is there anything I can do for you?”  Auntie said, “I think you better ask Tommy to come upstairs.  I think it’s very important.”  Well, Clara went flying downstairs and said, “Mr. McQuaid, come upstairs, quick, quick, come on up Tom.  She wants you right away.”  He thought, “Ah, oh, well, heck.”  So he goes slowly up.  “What do you want, honey?”  And she was gone.  So he sat there; and he was crying hopelessly.  “What am I going to do?  What am I going to do?”  And of course Clara was trying to take care of him, trying to get a doctor in case Auntie wasn’t dead, and getting Red back upstairs—what to do, what to do.  A dead woman suddenly in the room.  Then they thought about her sister, so they called Granny down in Denver and said, “Mrs. DeSoto, Mrs. McQuaid has passed away.”  Granny said, “That’s impossible; there is no such thing as death.  You wake her up.  You tell her to get up right this minute.”  (sobbing)  Well it was just chaos around there; I don’t know what happened.  Somehow Elaine got to Denver—I think from New York.  I was in New York, too.  I guess, we both went to Denver.  And Uncle Tom was just like a baby, you had to just lead him around; he didn’t know what was happening.  And Elaine and I and, of course, her sister, Grandma DeSoto, we sat on the little love seat in the back music room, you might say, in Denver, for the funeral.  And in the front living room were all the Christian Science students and the few cowboy rancher people unloaded the chairs all in a row that Olingers had rented and turned it into kind of a funeral parlor.  And the piano was back there in the music room and there was Uncle Tom, Elaine, Granny and myself, just family, up there.  And of course it was a Christian Science service.  Since there isn’t any death, there isn’t any such a thing as a Christian Science funeral.  You can make it up any way you want to; you can celebrate leaving somebody but they don’t call it a funeral, exactly.  So Marilyn Vandeberr’s father, Francis Vandeberr, was running the service, you might say, he was the mortician.  And the casket was there and the piano was there and there was a Christian Science, what do you call it, a reader.  And there was a piano playing woman and a young man to sing Christian songs and hymns.  So the young man stood up and sang, I think, “Saw ye my Savior,” something very touching and good, and sang very well, Grandma immediately stood up and said, “Young man!”   You could hear her of course, through the whole two rooms.  And he stopped; nobody usually speaks at a funeral except the minister or the singer.  And Grandma said, “Young man, you have a very fine voice, thank you so very much,” went and got her pocketbook and gave him five dollars.  And she said, “Now you may go on.” And they went on with the funeral.  Well of course Elaine and I were on the brink of emotion anyway, because we loved Auntie.  We got hysterical.  We couldn’t laugh out loud, but we just shook and shook, gritted our teeth and shook.  Uncle Tom never even noticed.  I thought Mr. Vandeberr was going to die laughing; he had to go out in the pantry and close the door.  He was just a wreck from laughing.  But Uncle Tom and Granny were crying.  And we finished the funeral, went out to the cemetery in the lap? car.  Elaine and I couldn’t laugh, the whole way we couldn’t laugh.  I’ve never laughed so hard in my life and yet I was crying at the same time. 

In a way Uncle Tom was very dependent on women.  He wouldn’t admit it; I don’t even think he was aware of it.  But the minute Auntie died, he turned to Clara McHale.  She was about forty and her husband was about thirty.  He was a cowboy and he became the foreman.  Red McHale, he was a darling man.  And he loved Uncle Tom and obeyed and carried out any orders as Uncle Tom grew older, Red McHale took over, but always subservient and always cooperative with Uncle Tom.  And he married Clara.  Somewhere, I don’t know where; Clara had been married before.  I’ll tell you about the McHales another time.  But he was sort of the heir-apparent to how to run the ranch.  And he had his own cattle as well as Uncle Tom’s cattle towards the end of their relationship.  So when the bank made us sell all Uncle Tom’s cattle because of taxes, for God knows what—a quarter of a million or something—just for the ranch, we had to sell the cattle.  Red could keep his cattle.  So he kept them there for several years before Elaine kind of took over.  And when Aunt Elaine took over she had her cattle and Red sold his and moved to Canon City; that’s how they got that little house down there.  Uncle Tom’s will was very confusing.  I think the bank and lawyers made it up for him, because there was a glaring mistake.  He wanted Red and Clara to have a certain sum, I forget how much.  No—it was only Red that was going to get it and Clara was just going to get $10,000 period, because she was married to Red.  And of course Clara lived many years after Red died.  So the money that Red was going to inherit had to go legally to Elaine and me.  Well we felt very guilty about that because we had our own share earlier.  So we let Clara have it for her lifetime, I mean the income part.  That’s how that got so involved and close and legal in banks—it was a nightmare.  But I really don’t think Uncle Tom had any idea what he was doing and how fast he destroyed everything he built just by the way the taxes and the bank were.  Because it was a very successful ranch—it wasn’t mortgaged, it wasn’t in debt.  The taxes just whopped it right down to where it began.

At one phase in Minnie’s life—she was the Denver one—at one phase in her life she had a married beau.  It was a judge, very respectable, a great big man, I won’t tell you his name.  He was quite a well-known judge from California.  And he came about once a year to see Granny.  And she would of course bring him up to the ranch.  And he was a dapper-dan of a judge.  And Uncle Tom would just sneer, thought he was the silliest man in the world.  One time we were having dinner at the ranch and the phone rang, which was out in the hall on the wall, the kind with a crank.  And it was Granny.  She was bringing the judge up and they had gotten in trouble in the car.  Because in those days it took seven hours to drive from Denver to the ranch, it was just gravel, it was awful.  And so, I could hear Uncle Tom saying, “Well, where are you, Minnie?  What are you doing at Trout Creek?”  She said, “I’m not at Trout Creek, I’m in Trout Creek.”  She had driven off somehow, into Trout Creek.  The judge wouldn’t get out of the car, there was about a foot of water, it was kind of high off the running boards and things so he was still in keeping dry.  And Granny was trying to get them towed back out of the river.  It was a ridiculous episode.  I remember that judge pretty well.  Nothing much came of that. She married DeSoto later.  But never sex, it was all just flirting and cute.  And she was very cute.  Even General Grant one time when she was very young, President Grant, I guess I don’t know if he was president then or just a general, he had to judge a kind of horse show up in Leadville, and Granny—no, no, it was Minnie—Minnie was the one on horseback prancing along in front of the general.  And she won the first place, and it always irritated Mildred, she said, “No wonder you won.  You were the only woman in the whole thing.” All the rest were men.  So there was one prize for the best man and of course one prize for the best girl, and that was Minnie.  She just loved to be the little star.  But it was really mother that had the feminine brace and talent for the theatre.  Minna was pretty flighty, really.  One time you remember I told you Mrs. Hall, Mary, had cousins and sisters and things and one of them was cousin Nette, I don’t know maybe she was Nettie, maybe she was Antoinette, I don’t know.  Anyhow she came out to visit and she was best friends with her cousin Minnie and Nette.  And one day they got invited, they were teenagers of seventeen or something, they got invited up to Fort Laramie, in Wyoming; it was sort of an Indian stockade thing for the cavalry to protect the white people or something.  They were all up there, they gave a dance for the officers and they asked the daughters of people to come to the dance.  Well they had to have a chaperone.  So that must have been Grandma Hall’s sister, she was the chaperone.  Well Minnie and Nettie wanted to go out spooning with the officers.  What were they going to do with the chaperone, because she’d be in the way.  So they got some laudanum, or something, it’s what they gave babies in those days to make them sleep.  And they gave a big shot of it to Grandma Hall’s sister.  Well she passed out cold on the floor.  They were so scared they’d killed her that they couldn’t go to the dance.  They had to stay with her all night, and bring her to with smelling salts and everything.  They had a terrible time up there and it was kind of a scandal because they had practically killed their aunt.  They must have been as bad as teenagers are now.  Well, when you think how silly Minnie was, just think how different Mildred was.  There she was at Wellesley.  And then she was culture-crazy, but in a good way, I think.  She read beautifully out loud.  And she read me the whole of Wordsworth, I think—I mean Longfellow—I don’t know who I mean.  I mean the one that wrote “Hiawatha.”  And she wrote poems herself, not very good ones, but very romantic ones.  She read aloud beautifully, like Miss Hilleth, really.  I don’t know how she had that quality in her, so that until she got very religious and she needed her religion to get through the day, she was so sick.  But there are some very fine books there in the library, all of which Auntie had studied at college and loved and read aloud.  Entirely different from Minnie.  They loved each other, but they were like black and white, completely different.  Mildred was so patient.  Minnie was wild and—oh, on the subject of cooks and maids—Mildred was very considerate and shared the work.  Minnie was a nightmare of bossiness and fire.  One time there was a cook in Denver at the Gaylord House.  She was crazy of course, absolutely crazy the cook.  And Grandma fired her.  And the cook said, “I won’t go.”  Took off every stitch of clothes she had on and got in that middle bathroom tub and said, “You can’t get rid of me, I live here.”  What did Minnie do, she went and got the police.  Meanwhile Grandpa Murphy was sitting in the living room, saying “Minnie, you can’t do that.  You shouldn’t do that.  The poor soul.”  The police came, went right upstairs.

Tape 2, side 2

I don’t know why she always had cooks, because she could cook better than they could.  And she wanted a three-minute egg for breakfast.  So pretty soon the cook came in with an egg that could pour across the rug, it wasn’t cooked at all.  So grandma said, “No, no, cook it three minutes.”  The next egg that came out to the dining room was hard-boiled like Easter.  “No, she said.  You idiot.  Use the little hour glass.  That’ll tell you when it’s three minutes.”  Back goes the cook and this time a big explosion, she’d put the hour glass in the boiling water with the egg and of course it blew up.  She got fired.

One time Grandpa Murphy—he was very gentle, very sweet man.  He was a Quaker through and through, the perfect Quaker.  But he put up with all these Christian Science women and they all went back to Boston to the mother church.  There was Mildred, Minnie, Grandpa Murphy, mother and me.  I was probably six or seven.  And we stayed in the Parker House Hotel.  And all the women went to church and I got left alone with Grandpa Murphy.  And I don’t know what possessed me, I couldn’t have disliked him, I did like him very much.  But he was asleep in an armchair and I was bored to death.  And they had spools of thread.  I don’t know why.  Maybe they were to mend things or something.  And I tied the thread to the back leg of his chair, he was asleep and snoring, and I just walked around and around and around, like Gulliver’s Travel, I guess I’d heard that.  And I wound him into miles of thread from his ankles to his throat, into this wooden armchair in the Parker House Hotel.  And then he woke up.  Mad—he couldn’t budge.  And he couldn’t swear, he was a Quaker, but I’d never seen him so mad, I thought he was going to burst.  And finally he made me by sheer demanding, go get the elevator boy to get scissors if they had any, to cut him back out of that chair.  He was always very kind and good to me, but I don’t think he would have thought I was a very nice child.  I don’t know what possessed me to do that.  But I think I was probably mad because I couldn’t go to church with the women. 

He was a very, very gentle person.  And he had a very good job before he married Granny.  Because he was so much older, I think he was retired because of his health.  He was the D&RG, that’s the railroad, Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, auditor.  And so he knew lots of people in Salida and he would go over to the Salida Snaba? hospital, it was the retirement home for the railroad and he would go over to see his friends once in a while, and I’d wait in the car outside in Salida.  And I’d look at those fountains, I guess you all know how I felt about the fountains; it was an awful long time, later, about sixty years later that I got them fixed.  Because they were lovely when I was a child.  But I couldn’t go into the retirement home because it was like a hospital and I was totally unaware that people could get sick or get crazy or anything, he always left me in the car.  That same hospital, later on Uncle Tom broke his shoulder, some bull crashed through a fence or something and smashed his shoulder.  From there on his arm was just sort of slanted up to his earlobe, he said he didn’t have a shoulder on one side.  But he stayed at the Salida hospital, too; by that time it was for your health, not just if you were retired railroad people.  And of course it wasn’t very big, either.  All that big wing has just been added in the last fifteen or twenty years.  And the railroad went right by there.  I think Grandpa Murphy was married before to someone called Augusta, or something like that, and she had died, so he was a widower.  Now Grandpa Murphy, the Quaker, the second husband of Minnie, was an older man, but best, best friends with a man called Frank Frueauff.  So they started the Denver Country Club and they were sort of successful business men, one was a widower and one was a bachelor, and they were very charming, very gallant and nice.  And very successful financially and socially in Denver.  So when Grandpa Murphy married the mother, his younger best friend Frank married the daughter.  It was a sort of a foursome in a way, not exactly on the same wedding day, but as a group, Grandpa Murphy and Minnie, Frank and Antoinette.  They were sort of two couples, although a generation apart. 

I’m getting kind of tired of this.  I just want to tell you, I’m going down to another tape after a while, but for today, if I’ve lost some dates, call or go yourself to the Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.  The office is very vague, and there are several Halls, it’s not an unusual name, so they could get mixed up.  But you can find where everybody is all together.  There’s Grandma Hall, my little baby sister that only lived about four days, Virginia, there’s Minnie DeSoto, Mr. DeSoto, Charles Hall Sr, Charles Hall Jr, Mildred McQuaid, Mr. Wessels; but Elaine, who was the favorite of Uncle Tom, she didn’t have a father, you see, she didn’t remembered daddy at all, she was much too young, a year and a half, when he died, so Uncle Tom in image was her father, and she wanted to be his boy.  And she loved horses and whatever he did she did too; they were a team.  I was the sissy, I’d stay with Auntie Mildred and we’d read Hiawatha again.  “On the shores of Gitcheegoomie.” It’s a wonderful poem.  But we’d be in the house, or then I’d be reading Booth Tarkington or Tom Sawyer or Louisa Alcott’s ‘Little Women,’ that kind of stuff.  Elaine would be out on a horse galloping around with Uncle Tom.  So Uncle Tom and Elaine are buried in Bueney, but most everybody else is down in Denver.  And he didn’t even care that Auntie was buried with her first husband, Mr. Wessels.  He didn’t care about anything after she died the same way.  He just had Clara as a best friend, they sort of lived together with Red, the happy husband of Clara. 

I guess I was sort of afraid of him.  I just dreaded him, he teased me terribly a couple of times.  I was in that stage like Minnie; I, too, was a redhead, giggly and wiggly and I’d hang out there on the front gate when the boys were coming in in the evening, watering the horses and all.  I’d be out there sort of flirting a little bit.  I was what, thirteen, fourteen.  And one of the cowboys, his name was Arlo, I don’t know why I remember that so well; he was terribly attractive.  He had just been let out of the reformatory, it’s not a pen, in Buena Vista.  I forget what he did, steal money or something.  And he was hired for the summer. And he loved to tease me because I was a snooty little eastern girl from back east.  But one time I was going to Hartsel with a list of  everything and do the shopping at the Hartsel Mercantile Company for Auntie.  And so he gave me the list and added some things the boys wanted and I go into the Hartsel Mercantile Company, and I’m the city girl, everybody knows, you know, I’m from New York from a private school, I’ve got on rolled stockings, I’m a real eastern flapper.  And Senator Locke owned the Mercantile Company and Mrs. Locke was working there.  So she said, “Hello Margaret, what can I do for you?”  And I said, “Well, here’s the list that Mrs. McQuaid wants for the ranch.”  And I gave her the shopping list.  She said, “All right, read it to me, and I’ll check the items.”  So I start off, “Ten pounds of road apples.”  Well the whole mercantile company died.  I had an audience of horrified, hysterical people.  I guess you know what road apples are unless you’ve never been near horses.  Arlo had written that on the shopping list.  Well, we got that straightened out; Mrs. Locke called Mrs. McQuaid, and said what I’d said, and then Mrs. McQuaid realized  I hadn’t meant it the way it sounded.  We got that social problem straightened out.  Oh, that Arlo was evil, I think.  Another time I was hanging around the boys again.  And Uncle Tom said, “Come here a minute.” Up by the red barn.  They had a truck up there with a pig in it.  I don’t know why on earth they had a pig.  We never had a pig or slaughtered one that I know of.  But there was a pig in the back of that truck.  It wasn’t a wagon, it was a truck.  He said, “Come here a minute, Margaret.”  And lifted me up, and put me in the tailgate of the truck.  He said, “Hold this,” and he gives me a pig almost as big as me.  Pig-looking thing.  And fat!  And I had to put my arms around it and hold it so it wouldn’t jump out of the tailgate.  Then he said, “Come on, boys.  Let’s go have some dinner.  Hang onto that pig, we’ll be back later.”  And they all went off and left me at the barn.  So, of course, later he came and rescued me.  He says, “Don’t hang around the men anymore.”  So I didn’t. 

Another time, I think it was a year or two earlier.  See I went there almost every single summer for at least two, three weeks.  And the summers then seemed very long.  Getting there was hard, all trains.  Getting back to the school in New York it was an awful effort and change, but we got used to that.  Commuting, you might say.  It took two, no, it took three nights and two days.  You got there early in the morning.  And the time in Chicago was just a waste of time.  There was about eight hours of hanging around and changing stations. It was awful.  But, still, I think mother had that deep attachment to Mildred.  Now she couldn’t come out there any more.  The altitude got her and she’d had a heart attack already.  But they would talk on the phone for hours.  I think they spent as much on the telephone as they did on everything else in the world.  Every night in her life she spoke to her mother and certainly once a week to Mildred.  But she couldn’t go back to the ranch because she couldn’t breathe, just couldn’t.  But Uncle Tom wouldn’t come east, so Mildred never came east.  It was just two different worlds, you had to jump from one to the other, they just wouldn’t blend in—the east and the west.  For instance, Uncle Tom wouldn’t have lamb, ever, ever, in any form.  So things like lamb chops, you know,  out of the question, it was either beef or pork or ham or chicken.  But lamb was for the Mexicans.  I think they had practically a war there for a while, because the Mexicans had sheep, thousands of them, clouds of sheep across South Park.  And they would come over in great waves and take the grass and its roots.  They are terribly destructive.  They don’t mean to be, that’s just the way lambs eat.  So then there wouldn’t be anything for the cattle.  That’s probably why barbwire got invented.  So that they couldn’t cross cattle country and take all the grass with them.  But it became sort of racial, sort of social, it was the Mexicans versus the Americans.  It was the lamb versus beef.  It was really a serious, don’t lets discuss it, problem.  And nobody ever killed anybody or anything, they just saw to it that there was a deep division.  It also had to do with Catholicism and Protestants.  The Mexicans were Catholics, the Irish were Catholics, but the ranchers mostly were Protestants.  So the Ku Klux Klan didn’t have any Negroes to pick on.  The Indians were gone.  The Ku Klux Klan started picking on the Catholics.  One time they burned down Bernie, the father, McQuaid in Bueny.  They burned down his barn.  You know, just because he was a Roman Catholic.  The Ku Klux Klan rode one time in the Head Lettuce Day parade in Buena Vista.  Elaine was in the very same parade.  They all had on their white hoods and long sort of costumes on their horses.  About ten of them.  I don’t know who they were.  I suppose the local people knew.  It was just another group like the Elks or the Masons, but very much in costume.  Well the Shriners were pretty fancy, too.  The Shriners had funny little hats.  Sort of a fez kind of thing. 

At the time that Uncle Tom died, he’d been a widower for maybe twenty years.  Even towards the end the television people from KOA came up one time and taped him.  I think he was about a hundred and four years old; they came up and taped him.  I wish we still had that tape, it might be somewhere.  And he was sitting in a nightshirt in a wheel chair in the living room with a lap robe on.  And he got interviewed, which he thought was ridiculous.  Then he went back to bed.  And I don’t know why he died, I suppose just plain old age.  He used to say to Clara, “the whole damn thing’s no good any more, cut it off.”  He was very tough about sex and things, bathrooms and stuff.  He didn’t care what he said.  But he never swore, you know, not bad swearing.  And Mildred would always say, “Now, Tommy, Tommy, you shouldn’t talk like that, you really shouldn’t.”  It didn’t do any good.  And then he’d read the paper out loud.  She’d just sit there and rock back and forth.  She didn’t mind him smoking.  He always had a shot of liquor the minute he woke up and then he never drank that I knew of during the day.  But at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning the first thing he did was take a straight shot of bourbon and that seemed to do for the whole day.  No they didn’t have things like wine or beer or anything.  It was either whiskey or forget it. 

I just remembered at one point in her wild life Minnie and cousin Net went to Italy.  I can’t think why, but they stepped out together.  They were just girl cousins, look how much trouble they got in up there at that dance, where they had to dope up the chaperone.  Well now they were middle-aged widows, I suppose, off they go to Naples.  And the Bertolini Hotel in Naples has an enormous, endless staircase all the way from the waterfront up to the front door.  A big, wide, terrace kind of thing.  Minnie used to tell this story and Nettie’d get so embarrassed.  But they drank white wine in some restaurant and then they were going back up to the Bertolini Hotel to go to bed.  I don’t think cousin Nettie had ever had a drink before in her life, and she had to go to the bathroom.  They had in front of her a staircase like almost a city block of terraces going up to that hotel.  And as Minnie told it, halfway up the staircase cousin Nettie let fly.  What a mess! How embarrassing.  Of course they left Naples right away.  Then they went to, it must have been Rome, that’s where the Appian Way is.   Now they were Americans very superior to all these Italians.  Grandma Minnie took a little knife kind of thing and dug out a brick from the Appian Way.  Which is, you know, a terribly valuable thing that you’re not supposed to touch—Julius Caesar put it there.  And put it in sort of duffel bag thing she had and brought it back to America.   And people said, “Well maybe you shouldn’t have done that, that’s a desecrating of art and architecture.  You shouldn’t have dug that out.”  She said, “Oh, those foreigners don’t realize what wonderful things they have over there and we just have to rescue them.”  And that was her point of view. 

I’m getting kind of tired, I’ll quit this tape and jump over to the Frueauff’s.  Maybe I’ll think of more things later, but that’s all I can think of right now.  I’ll jump over to the Fueauff half of my world.

Tape 3 Side 1

Now I’ll tell you about the Frueauff’s.  They were Moravians.  Don’t get that mixed up with Mennonites, that’s a whole different religion.  They were Moravians because part of Germany was called Moravia and it had it’s own church, a religion.  I think it broke away from the Lutheran.  It was a very Protestant, German religion. It still is a perfectly good church but not many Moravians are in America, there are a lot in Denmark, Holland and Germany, that part of the world.  And they’re the closest, I guess, to Presbyterians.  If there isn’t a Moravian church, you switch to Presbyterian and back and forth, they’re very close.  Well, way back, there wasn’t a Germany.  Germany was a whole lot of little states.  Each one had a duke or a prince or an earl or something in charge of it.  And Moravia was its own self.  And there was Bohemia and different German states.  Austria doesn’t count, that was a separate country.  Anyway, the church was a very intellectual sort of one, they ran schools and the Frueauff’s were pastors and principals and writers and artists—intellectuals, sort of.  And finally they moved out of Moravia, I don’t know why, political reasons, and they went to Denmark.  And a generation or two later, they came to the United States.  There were already Moravians here, but I mean, when the Frueauff’s came it was about the time, right at the time of the American Revolution.  I think they felt a little like in the middle between the Americans and the British at the time the Americans were breaking away, so they sort of stayed neutral like the Red Cross.  If the English and the German soldiers who worked for the English were on one side got wounded, or the American local people got wounded, they took care of either side.  That was true in New York, true of mostly in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was a very big German colony.  You’ve heard ‘Pennsylvania Dutch;’ well it really means German Dutch (Deutsch).  So, when the Frueauff’s came over, there were three men—grandfather, father, son—all called John Frederick Frueauff.  So there was John Frederick Frueauff the First, and the Second and the Third.  The Second is the one that came to the United States.  And he was head of the Girls’ Moravian School, sort of a boarding school for young Moravian ladies, either in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or Lititz, Pennsylvania.  And he was the head of that school, he’s buried there and that’s called the Frueauff building.  And then there was another John Frederick Frueauff who was his son.  And to me that’s the clear one because that was my grandfather.  The others  were just mysterious relations far off and dead.  But my grandfather I was very proud of, I never met him, he died before me.  But he was sort of the star hero of the family, this is why.  He was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, his father head of the school.  He had some brothers and sisters, I’ve lost track of who they were.  He did have a brother, I think called Herman, who went to Alaska at one point.  Anyway, he was educated well and it came to the time when he had to go to college and the Moravians all looked at each other and said there just isn’t a decent school in this country.  There was only Yale or Princeton or something.  Nothing fit for a Frueauff and a Moravian, you have to go home.  So they sent him on one of those tall sailing ships all the way back to Europe and he went to a university in Germany called Heidelberg.  It’s famous for people fighting duels and cutting their cheeks and getting great scars of battle.  It was also a very good law school.  I don’t think he fought any duels, but he went all the way through law school.  Somewhere in these family records are his graduation papers and who was in the class he was in.  And he graduated; he was a lawyer.  And he went to France, to Cannes.  I don’t know what he did there, but took some special courses and he went to Berlin and he came home.  He was probably away two or three years.  And then they said now you’ve got to get married.  That’s absolutely the next thing; you have to marry a Moravian girl.  And there wasn’t anybody specially.  No, wait, now I’m getting the wives mixed up.  First he did marry a Moravian girl, and they had two children and he practiced law as a lawyer.  Well, the first child, I think her name was Ellen, and the second child, I guess that’s when the wife died.  So there he is a widower, pretty young, with Ellen.  And then comes the Civil War.  So of course he gets in the army, he’s on the northern side.  That means, of course, against slavery.  And as a lawyer, sort of and a gentleman, I don’t know how he got to be an officer or anything like that, but he did get to be a major, horseback, with a bayonet sort of sword-looking thing.  And when he was in the battle of Chancellorville he got wounded, not mortally by any means, but definitely wounded.  He was out of action for many months.  And then he was in charge of his own regiment, Pennsylvania men in Gettysburg.  That was a terrible battle in which his responsibilities were really worse than what a major usually—there just wasn’t anybody higher in that little group.  So he had to fight as a general might fight although he was only a major.  And he and his regiment are all on the monument if you ever go to Gettysburg.  All right he was still a youngish man in his late twenties or something.  “Now,” they said, “You’ve got to remarry because your little girl doesn’t have a mother.”  There wasn’t a Moravian girl for him to marry, but there was a Presbyterian girl, of Scottish ancestry.  And her name was Clara—Taggart was her middle name.  Her young name.  And then she married—she had to become a Moravian, get baptized and everything, for Grandpa Frueauff to marry her.  She was a teacher there at the Lititz Moravian school, sort of an assistant teacher.  And not particularly pretty, but very pure, very correct, very proper.  I mean, I don’t know about Scotch people, but she fitted in with the strictest Prussian German that ever was.  And they all approved of her very much.  Annie Day, that was her name—Annie Day Taggart.  So she became the stepmother and by the time their marriage was over she had produced six boys, no girls.  Well, they had three or four of the boys when the war was over.  He was sick and tired of the Moravians.  I don’t mean he was against them, but there had been all kinds of church trouble and schisms in the church and he finally got sick of it, and he decided to set out for himself.  So he drags—by now there’s a train—he drags the little girl and the new wife and all the little new babies to Leadville, Colorado.  It was a good place to go.  He spoke German and French and English and Spanish.  So he was invaluable at the school, became head of the Leadville schools.  He was a judge, of course a lawyer.  He did one dumb thing, he put what little savings he could have had in various silver mines and gold mines.  Like any dude, of course, he lost his shirt there.  But he had a nice house and a maid and he was doing very well in Leadville.  Now let me tell you how Leadville was.  It had wooden sidewalks.  A lot of the buildings were there that are there right now, big brick buildings with a lot of gingerbread fancy stuff.  They had their own house and all these little boys, Ellen, of course, the stepsister.  I honestly can’t tell you which of the boys was the oldest.  I know my father, Frank, was the boss of the boys, the leader.  But I have a feeling that Will, he was kind of dumb. (laugh) I guess that’s all said of a Gump, kind of a gawky thing, and I don’t think he had one crumb of leadership in him, Uncle Will.  He was boring.  And my father Frank was a little short redhead, not bossy, but somehow he always got everybody to do exactly as he thought.  And it always turned out right, I mean, he didn’t just boss them around and get them in trouble.  He bossed them around and got them organized.  And he was very short and very red-headed.  And nickname was ‘Fruey’ or ‘Stuffy.’  I don’t know why ‘Stuffy’ but that was his nickname.  And he bossed his brothers.  There was Will, Frank, my father, then there was Uncle Fred, Uncle Charley, Uncle Harry and Uncle Houston.  Houston actually wasn’t born yet when the story changes.  But the other boys were there in Leadville, and of course they went to public school.  And they all had black high boots.  They didn’t lace up, they buttoned up.  And they had red tips on their toes and heels.  They must have looked awful, but that was the style then.  And they had wooden soles, not leather soles.  So the amount of noise they made when all the Frueauff boys with those shoes would walk down the wooden sidewalks, it was just deafening.  And Uncle Harry, he was a redhead, too, but very shy and kind of wistful.  And Uncle Harry had a pretend vacant lot.  It was a big mess of a lot with junky houses and broken wagons and everything.  And that was his pretend place.  It was like a castle to him.  He had hideouts and stuff on the way to school.  He’d often hide out under the junk in the vacant lot and never get to school.  And Daddy got a job, oh, he must have been about nine, he got a job with his Father and Mother’s permission, to work in a soda fountain.  Now that was sort of like a drug store but with a kind of like a lunch counter.  And they had ice cream cones and they had milk shakes and chocolate sodas, things in big tall glasses.  So of course my father was just wild to get at the ice cream, a nine-year old boy in a cream parlor.  The boss was very understanding.  He said, “Now I tell you what, Frank.  Today, this first day, you don’t have to really do anything.  Just look around and you’ll catch on.  Tomorrow you can work.  Today why don’t you just eat.”  Oh, Stuffy thought that is just heaven.  So he climbs up—remember he is a little tiny guy with flaming hair—climbed up on the top of the soda fountain stool.  And he had a malted milk.  Then he thought he’d have a soda.  And he said he’d have a chocolate marshmallow nut sundae.  Then he felt a little faint so thought he’d go breathe a little bit and then he came back and had more.  Anyway, he really never liked ice cream again.  And the next day he went to work, and began to save his money and began to make sense and was no longer carried away with the product.  And he also sold newspapers—everybody sold newspapers—I don’t know who bought them because everybody sold them.  Anybody that could walk was selling papers all over town.  Sometimes they had an opera, but I never heard anybody mention that they went to the opera, maybe the grownups did.  But the boys know.  But they had a traveling show that came to town in Leadville.  And I think that was Daddy’s really first love.  There was a wagon and they opened back part of the wagon for seven of the most beautiful women in the world, according to Daddy, who was about at that time maybe nine or ten.  They were called the seven Sutherland Sisters.  And they all wore a different color, beautiful dresses.  And they all had miles of long hair.  Probably, to tell you the truth, they were wigs, because they were all hair to their waists, and beautiful waving hair, probably wigs.  And it was to sell hair tonic.  I don’t know how much hair tonic poor Grandma Frueauff didn’t have to buy out of pity, because her sons were, all of them, in love with the seven Sutherland Sisters.  I don’t know what other entertainment they had, they never talked about friends because they had each other.  But I’ve met men since that were of that generation and they all were friendly together.  It was a pretty rough town, but the Frueauff’s being the children of a judge, and of course they switched to Presbyterians because there weren’t any Moravians.  They were pretty prim and proper, I don’t think they got in much excitement or trouble.  If there was a lynching or a robbery or a holdup or anything, I never heard them mention anything rough.  And yet the stories of Leadville sound very rough.  But they were protected from it.  Well, they grew more grow-up and growing up and just beginning to be ready for high school and all of a sudden, judge, grandpa, John Frederick Frueauff, who was then about oh, let’s say forty-six, forty-eight. Died, bang.  And all that gold and silver stock wasn’t worth a plug nickel.  And there was Grandma Frueauff who really had no worldly experience beyond obeying the principal of the school or obeying her husband.  Pregnant—who was going to get born, let’s see, Uncle Houston hadn’t been born yet.  So she’s six months pregnant with five children and not a darn nickel.  But everybody helped.  I don’t mean gave like charity, but arranged for the funeral, and arranged arrangements and arranged loans and all the boys grew up in a terrible hurry.  I guess they all got educated all right, they all graduated.  They moved down to Denver, and each one of them as they came along graduated from East High.  I think some of them are still on the alumni records of East High back in the 1880s.  Well, let me see now.  They had to take care of their mother.  Pretty soon she had a baby, that was Houston.  Oh, and I forgot to tell you Charley got crippled, nobody knows why.  But one of his legs just didn’t grow as long as the other leg.  It was about a noticeable four or five inches different.  Wasn’t a thing the matter with it, it was just shriveled.  So he wore a shoe with a kind of an iron hoop underneath.  Really a rocking back and forth hoop.  So he walked kind of like a sailor, rolling along as he walked.  He didn’t seem to care—he must have cared, but he never acted like he cared.  And none of the boys even had time to get into any kind of real sports.  They’d play stick-ball, but no, they weren’t athletes a bit.  And they’d scramble through school as fast as they could.  Every nickel of selling newspapers and bottles and whatever, took care of Grandma Frueauff.  And she stayed sort of, I don’t think she ever did work, it was work enough to take care of those kids.  But they worked and somehow after about, it took fourteen years for them to really be solid young men citizens of Denver.  And at the end of fourteen years, the baby that was not yet born when they had to move to Denver, Houston, he went to a senior prom at East.  He wasn’t a senior yet, but he went to the prom to watch.  And dropped dead.  So Grandma Frueauff, it was just, you know there was her last, littlest baby, dead.  And the boys were extremely kind, extremely generous, extremely conservative and thoughtful.  And took wonderful care of her.  And she kept them up to snuff as far as speech and manners and behavior.  And before you knew it they were all in good jobs and good friends and sort of getting along in the community with very good reputations.  Well now meanwhile, I’ll tell you about Daddy.  Daddy gathered them all together and he said, “Now look.  All of us can work except Charley.  Charley being a cripple with that hoop on his shoe can’t run around on a bicycle or do any of those physical kind of things that we do.  What can we do where he can use his head and just sit there?”  So they all pooled their allowances that they had saved up and sent little brother Charley to law school.  They figured that was where you could use your head and it didn’t matter about your feet.  And he went to the university in Wisconsin, I think, maybe Michigan, I forget.  And became a real full lawyer, and a darn good lawyer.  He was the brains.  But Daddy was the plotter, the planner.  Will, a perfectly quiet, kind of chewing on a toothpick type.  Fred was—he would have been wild if Grandma Frueauff wasn’t very strict every minute.  He’d sneak a drink quite often.  And Uncle Harry was very gentle and very good and very helpful to Daddy, sort of like his right hand man.  Well, the first job that Daddy had that he told about—I think he’d get sick of selling newspapers or talking about it.  He had a bicycle and his job was to go to the Denver Gas and Electric Company, which was run by a man called Henry L. Doughrty, and let’s say that Frank was about sixteen or something.  His job was ride the bicycle with the basket on the front with brand new light bulbs in the basket.  Safely wrapped up, of course.  And you went from house to house and rang the doorbell and your job was to say, “Ma’am, would you like a special bonus that the gas and electric company are giving you.  We will give you two light bulbs for the price of, you know, for no money at all, just exchange for the one that you’ve got.  Because, you know, good will and good relationships.”  And he would then pick up the light bulb that the woman had which wouldn’t burn out.  And give her two light bulbs that eventually would burn out, like all light bulbs do nowadays.  And so for about a year he collected all the valuable perfect, flawless, living-forever light bulbs all over Denver and gave two for one all over town.  Got to be friends with the housewives, made a very good impression on Mr. Doughrty, became a manager, and up and up and up until he was an equal partner.  It took quite a while for him to do that, it took him maybe ten years.  But in the meantime he made very good friends, always with older men.  His very best friend was a man called Edward Roberts Murphy.  The two of them and some other men, too, started the country club together.  But Mr. Murphy was certainly fifteen years or twenty years older than Frank.  But when Frank, as I’m sure you realize, married my mother Antoinette, Mr. Murphy married my grandmother Minnie.  So as it was like a team of women on one side and a team of men on the other side.  They all got, the four of them became related all within a year.  It was a great romantic and astonishing thing to Denver society, two very popular bachelors being swept away by these, the red-headed Minnie and the blonde Tony.  Oh, then the company got bigger.  It got very successful.  It began to branch out.  It branched, for instance, to Pueblo, the Springs, Arizona, Oklahoma, you know it just spread.  And finally Denver simply wasn’t big enough for it, it became a thing called Cities Service, it served cities.  Their gas and their electricity.  So it moved to Wall Street.  And Mr. Doughrty built a perfect tower of pop art, you know, fifteen floors of gingerbread, it’s still there at Wall Street; it’s quite a classic.  And Daddy and Uncle Harry moved back east to New York.  Uncle Will stayed in Longmont, he had a hardware store or something, and we only saw him Christmas.  Ellen went back east and got married and never had any relationships any more with the Frueauffs.  I think maybe Grandma Frueauff was just a little bit too much of a mother, a stepmother, and Ellen kind of escaped back into Pennsylvania.  And then Uncle Fred they sent to Bartlesville, that’s the oil area of Oklahoma.  And he lived in a hotel and had a couple of beer all the time and ran the oil fields and would come east for Christmas.  And was very, very happy and friendly with the family.  He never married, but I think he had a girlfriend from little remarks that were made years later about his death at the hotel. And I don’t know, that was sort of gossip.  And of course Charley now was the brains.  He became sort of a little cold and belligerent.  He had pinch glasses, you know the kind that pinch on and pinch off and leave a scar on the sides of your nose.  He was a very good lawyer but pretty rough, I don’t mean physically or verbally rough, I mean legally rough.  He got the legal end of City Service into his own company, in other words he didn’t work for City Service, they hired him and his company.  Uncle Harry was in charge of City Service publicity. Things like a radio program, City Service Sunday Night Opera, or something on radio.  And Daddy was like the vice president.  And he was in charge of running around to all the cities all over the United States—there were a hundred and sixteen of them—that he was the board of directors of.  So half his life was just spent going to from one meeting to the next and in those days they didn’t travel on the airplanes.  So he practically owned the railroads.  I mean every porter, every conductor, “Hello there, Mr. Frueauff, see you again.”  You know he just lived on trains.  He’d come back to Mother and Elaine and myself when he could, but it was a terrible responsibility.  He didn’t have much fun.  He didn’t know how to drive a car, for instance, and Mother did.  That always seemed a little odd to me.  But he had Flynn, his best friend was his chauffer.  And he had a car in New York, but he didn’t know how to drive.  He always wanted to play golf. And he had the heaviest bag of golf sticks ever you knew.  But I bet he didn’t get to play five times in all those years; he was just too busy.  He liked baseball but Mother looked down on baseball terribly so we only went once that I know of.  He didn’t seem to have much fun that I could ever notice, the theater horrified and bored him; we never went to the theater.  Sometimes he would go out to dinner.  Mr. Doughrty and Mother did not get along, not one bit.  I don’t think they ever met.  He wouldn’t come to the wedding.  After all he was the head of an oil company and a Presbyterian.  And Mother was a Christian Scientist and an actress.  And yet he sent literally tons of silver as a gift.  And every birthday—he was diabolical—he would arrange so that Daddy would have to spend Daddy’s birthday with Mr. Doughrty.  But Mother couldn’t go because they would always be bachelor dinners.  They don’t have them any more except maybe for a wedding.  In those days there were always bachelor parties, bachelor banquets.  Even one time when we had a private house in New York, Mr. Doughrty literally made Daddy give himself a bachelor party.  Well what are you going to do with a wife and a governess and two little girls and a nurse and God knows how many women workers, turn it into a bachelor thing for one party?  Well, Mother had to do it and then she had to go to a hotel and get out while the bachelor party went on.  But she had a sense of humor about it.  She could see the ridiculous side of this, it was dozens of men all in evening clothes and music in the halls and champagne and everything, but no women.  Mother rented a bunch of manikins, you know the kind in department store windows.  (sound stops mid-tape)

Tape 3, Side 2

The light went out so I changed over to the other side, I hope I did right.  Oh, the manikins.  She put them in chairs down in the dining room, up in the living room, over in the library, all around the house in beautiful rather glamour-y clothes, tea-gowns and things.  So that there was a sense of flowers and femininity.  But not a female in the whole building.  Full of men giving themselves a bachelor party.  Just so Mr. Doughrty and Mother wouldn’t have to mix.  I don’t know how to tell you I always felt a little sorry for him, like he was planning how wonderful it was going to be.  But he didn’t live long enough to get there.  He had a terrible lot of money, and two little girls, I’m sure he really loved us, and a beautiful life and a beautiful house.  And one summer when we were up away for the summer, all the women and children that and then the fathers would come up for the weekend.  But they worked all summer in New York.  So he would come up for the weekend.  And then one hot summer he didn’t feel very well and they were repainting the house, he went over to the Plaza Hotel for a couple of nights to stay over there because of the smell of paint.  And he didn’t feel very well so he didn’t go to the office.  And he went over to the big house to talk to the housekeeper one day and there were some pictures of him.  They were sort of like negatives ahead of time, a print with a number on it, you know, you had to pick out the one you wanted to order later.  And he’s showing them to the housekeeper, he said, “Now do you like this one, what do you think, we never liked this one.”  Just standing in the hall looking at the pictures.  And Boom, dead.  Forty-eight.  And everything he’d built, and everything he loved, everything.  Just left standing around.  Well, Grandmother Frueauff—of course they had a telephone in those days, but they didn’t have airplanes.  So first they had to call Colorado to say “Frank has died.”  It was easy to tell the brothers, but how to tell a mother.  She was in Yellowstone Park with her chauffer and a maid, motoring and looking at the scenery.  So first they had to notify her, that took a day or so.  Then they had to get her back to civilization out of Yellowstone, onto a train, then it takes three days on the train.  You have to change trains in Chicago, before the funeral.  So there were five terrible, awful, hot days with Daddy on the living room sofa, waiting and waiting day after day until Grandmother Frueauff could get to New York.  I, I, of course I was only ten, so I’m very confused because I don’t remember a funeral like a funeral in a church.  I think we had the funeral in the house, but I couldn’t swear to it.  I think we were in the playroom which had a stage at one end and the chairs kind of like the audience were put in.  I know that down in the cellar of that house, which he’d collected a big wine cellar and everything;  he never ever, ever thought of drinking, but he also never thought of not being able to serve whatever you wanted if you were a guest.  So we had a dandy wine cellar down there.  And one day while we were waiting for the funeral, and it was so quiet and so big and so dark in that house, and I went down in the cellar, I can’t think why.  You’ve never seen so many flowers.  Really, you never have.  There were big horseshoes that said things like, “Good-bye, old pal.”  There were armchairs made out of carnations, there were sprays of orchids, there were blankets of roses, it was a nightmare of suffocating flowers.  It was a big, big cellar, too, maybe like fifty feet by forty feet.  You couldn’t have brought the flowers up to the funeral.  You couldn’t have brought the

flowers out to the cemetery.  I don’t know what happened to them.  Very much like a flower mart of made up bouquet things, lots of ribbons, lots of cards.  But they were stuck away in the cellar because you couldn’t live with them, you couldn’t have them in a living room.  Well then they had the funeral and he was buried in Woodlawn, which is sort of up north of Manhattan in the Bronx.  It’s a big old-fashioned nice cemetery.  And of course by that time Grandmother Frueauff was there and all the brothers.  And the only two cousins I had, Harry Jr., and his sister, Mary Helen.  And two wives, Will’s wife and, oh, Harry’s wife.  Uncle Charley had never married because, I don’t know, Grandma Frueauff was just so bossy he didn’t need a wife.  He had a wonderful Japanese, no he wasn’t Japanese, he was Philipino, Arthur.  And Arthur simply took care of everything.  Ordering how the apartment should be.  So Uncle Charley lived a very dignified, not wild, very proper bachelor life.  And then to the astonishment of everybody, oh, I guess it was after Grandmother Frueauff died, and she was ninety-four, he suddenly married a woman called Hazel Gepper, whose first husband had been a sugar baron in Cuba.  And she was a character, she was fun.  I’ll tell you about her another time.  But she kind of took over and glamoured things up a lot.  And Uncle Charley’s apartment was just not glamorous enough for Aunt Hazel.   They bought an apartment house on Washington Square.  I guess that would have been on the west corner.  The whole block, of that apartment house, and kept the two top floors.  Only it was like upside down; when you got in the elevator and went up to Uncle Charley’s apartment, you went all the way to the very top.  And there were the living rooms, and no, no, up there were--.  Yes, the living room, the dining room, the kitchens, terraces and stuff like that .  Then you went downstairs to the kitchens.  It was just absolutely upside down from what you’d think a house would be.  And then Aunt Hazel—that was her name, Hazel, she was fun—she had at one time done scenery, décor, for Hurst for Marion Davies movies.  One was called ‘Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall’ and Aunt Hazel did all the, not the scenery part, not the walls, but the furnishings.  She was very up on things like Gothic and Medieval and armor and spears and drapes.  It was really unbelievable the things she could dream up.  The living room as she fixed it up—Uncle Charley just said, “That’s Hazel for you” and let her do it.  The living room was kind of oblong, but the ceiling was kind of recessed upwards, oval-shape.  And up there in the oval-shape curves were lights; you could push buttons and the ceiling would go starlight, dark blue with little stars.  You push another button and it would get dawn on one side, or evening on the other side.  No clouds, I’ll admit, but we didn’t go that far.  But that ceiling was—people would play with it forever.  It was up high enough and really very beautiful, but ridiculous.  And then of course all the furniture in all that pink and blue sky underneath.  They had white French —French furniture with white damask.  And there was Uncle Charley out of Leadville with the rocking horse shoe.  And of course they had very fancy cocktails.  They had the first tv set I ever saw.  It cost a fortune; it was awful looking.  It didn’t work very well.  And it only worked for about an hour a day.  They had to look in the paper to find out when it would even happen.  And then maybe the picture would only be up on Fifty-ninth Street being broadcast and Uncle Charley would be down on Washington Square, so it wasn’t much of a miracle at first.  I remember one time seeing my sister Elaine playing the piano on television several blocks away.  It was very blinky, it was all black and white, but it was a miracle of modern to us.  What else didn’t Aunt Hazel have.  She always wore either purple or gold.  Purple and gold, P G—we nicknamed her P G, she didn’t mind.  She had dozens and dozens of pairs of Chinese pajamas, purple and gold.  Oh, it could go to pale yellow or to lavender, she’d compromise a little bit that way.  Oh, the telephone was marvelous, it was in a sedan chair.  It was out in the front hall near the elevator.  A sedan chair.  And you could sit in there and telephone, and close the curtains and be like in a little silk telephone booth.  And Arthur always fixed it because we had to go every Sunday, I mean it was just part of life.  Sunday, lunch at Uncle Charley’s.  Mother escaping, Elaine and me stuck.  But we did have Mary Helen and Cousin Harry, I called him Bud.  The four of us at least could sit among the grownups and be bored to death every Sunday.  And of course there was a billiard room.  All the men after coffee was over and everything at lunch, by that time it’d be about three o’clock.  And the men would all go and play billiards.  And the aunts and the cousins from Pennsylvania and different women and us and the children would have to sit and wait for the men to get through playing billiards.  But Bud Frueauff—Harry Frueauff, Jr.—being male, he was allowed to go on in with the men. That would irritate me to death every Sunday.  He had a Rolls Royce.  I don’t think Arthur drove, he must have had some spares(?) chauffer.  I’m sure Uncle Charley couldn’t drive.  The Rolls Royce was lovely.  But not because it was a Rolls Royce, I wouldn’t know a thing about engines.  But how it looked, it was little and it looked like it was made of wicker.  You know, like French wicker woven in and out and in and out—it was metal of course—but somehow sunk into the metal in such a way that it was inlaid into the car.  It looked like the whole back three-quarters of the car was wicker.  It had a marvelous horn on the front and they had a fur lap robe.  I still don’t know who drove it.  We had our car, but it wasn’t anywhere nothing—it was just a big old limo, compared to Uncle Charley’s.  Uncle Harry just sat in the back.(?)

One thing I remember at different Sundays at Uncle Charley’s, were people that he would drag in.  There was, for instance, a man, I think his name was Norman Thomas, Thompson, something like that, who traveled all over the world and made like newsreels.  And he’d come back and there’d be a newsreel that he had made of Tibet or Columbia or Zanzibar, you know, fabulous travel movies he did.  Somehow, I think Uncle Charley admired people who could get out and do physical things liking climbing the Himalayas.  And I think he probably backed some of those for a sort of vicarious adventure.  He was much too dignified, well, no, one time he did go a little crazy.  He decided to shoot ducks.  I’m sure he never even had a slingshot as a child.  He bought a big place, of course by now they were all very successful in New York.  He bought a big place in North Carolina, and it had a lake.  Nobody could go there but men.  So Bud Frueauff could go, but Elaine and Mary Helen and I couldn’t go.  Only the men could go and  didn’t have a house but had what they called a lodge and a lake.  And it had a thing called a duck blind.  I don’t know whether you’re blind or they’re blind, but anyhow, it separates you from the ducks.  And you sit out there and float around with a gun and then you shoot ducks.  I don’t know why.  And if you don’t have any ducks you get ducks put there so that you can shoot ‘em.  He’d suddenly get inspired to do this and everybody in City Service saying oh, this is a great thing and they’d go weekends.  Well of course Uncle Charley gets out there. The wind is blowing, the duck blind tips over.  He’s got that hoop thing on his shoe and it’s just a miracle they could save his life from drowning.  Because he couldn’t possibly swim.  I don’t think he knew how to swim, but I mean with that shoe on, even you couldn’t swim.  So he sold that place; I don’t think it lasted the whole, duck blind thing didn’t last more than about a year.  Then he bought a place in Greenwich, another dream for Aunt Hazel.  Oh, she loved fixing up this one.  And she really went too far in the living room, because it had to have wall lights, you know what I mean, little, every eight feet or something there was a light sticking out of the walls.  She put helmets, medieval army real helmets over each light bulb.  She switched the light bulbs to red.  And now you had these terrible grinning faces with teeth that sort of drop up and down like a drawbridge, with the light shining through the eyes and the teeth all the way around the living room.  And then spears criss-crossed over the fireplace.  You wouldn’t have been surprised if King Arthur walked in.  In the middle of Greenwich.  Everything else was sunny and happy and fluffy.  But this one thing still had the mark, you know, of Aunt Hazel and the good old days of William Randolph Hearst silent movies.

One time during the Second World War, you know we were furious hating the Japanese.  Anything Japanese was bad, bad.  And at that point by the will of God Japanese beetles, which are awful, they look like cockroaches, they’re just awful.  They just infested the whole East Coast.  Maybe the Japanese put ‘em there, I don’t know.  And Uncle Charley had these wonderful roses imported and planted and very special.  And the Japanese beetles were eating up his roses.  And he went into a towering fit of getting rid of the beetles.  And you couldn’t spray them for some reason, I don’t know, had to do with the war or poisoning plants or, I don’t know.  He couldn’t spray them.  And he’s trying to figure out some way to save the roses and get rid of the beetles.  And Arthur is running around frantic, trying to keep him calm. And he was in real apoplectic rage.  So he gets carpenter people to invent a thing, how can I describe it to you?  If your hands were made of metal and tied together at the wrists, and you clapped your hands.  That’s what he invented.  So you carried this thing, with such a strong spring on it, you know, if you had put your hand in the middle, you would really have been very badly injured, it was so strong.  And he would glare his way, rolling on that hoop, through the roses, squashing and squashing and squashing the beetles.  And Arthur saying, “Mr. Frueauff, Mr. Frueauff, you squash rose, too.”  He didn’t care.  You never saw so many stems with dead beetles and squashed flowers.  And he squashed everything in Greenwich that he could lay his hands on.  They got rid of those beetles all right and finally got the squasher away from him.  It was really a destructive weekend.

Then Aunt Hazel, who did drink a terrible lot; and I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, but anyway, she died of cancer.  Not of drinking.  But she died.  By this time I was pretty grown up.  And she was like maybe fifty-eight, sixty-five, somewhere in that age.  She died.  And the next thing you know, to everybody’s horror and amazement, Uncle Charley had a real girlfriend.  She was a newspaper woman, peroxide blonde, from Texas.  Her name was Catherine Craven.  And she had a young woman friend, very attractive, called Kay Sommersby.  They were best friends.  Kay Sommersby was a knockout brunette, whom Eisenhower was reported to have been a big romance of all through the Second World War.  She was his assistant, I don’t know what, Colonel or Major or something like that.  Whether there’s any truth to the gossip of it I kind of doubt, because Mrs. Eisenhower was perfectly civil.  Because she was always included in everything, she was no tramp.  But anyway Kay Sommersby and Catherine Craven were good women friends.  And later on Uncle Charley and left Catherine Craven an awful lot of money.  And they got invited to the Eisenhower inauguration, you know there are sort of a series of parties all over Washington.  They got invited to all of the doings there, so they needed two dates.   And they took Paul Fanning, and another man, I don’t know who the other man is.  And had a limo and went all the way from New York to Washington, went to all the parties and came back.  Paul Fanning’s highlight—he had to rent a tuxedo to get to go.  It was a funny, funny relationship.  You couldn’t help but like Catherine Craven.  She was like a career girl hostess.  When the family would go up to Greenwich for the weekend—she had her own room, everything was perfectly moral—but she was the one that would arrange what you wanted for breakfast, or who was wearing what or what you needed done.  It was like she took over Aunt Hazel’s responsibilities.  And Uncle Charley just thought nothing of it, he just went on with his bullying, cold way.  Sometimes he’d make little gestures that were done so cold you didn’t do much back, but you remembered them later.  I know one time he took Paul and me and a whole bunch of people to the race track.  And just as we were all going on into the track he handed each person fifty dollars.  And said, “Have fun.  Don’t tell me if you win or lose.  It’s all yours.”  He treated everybody a little stand-offish like that.  You know, there was no way to say, “Oh, no, I couldn’t.”  You just almost took it like a tip.  He had a partner, I never did like him, but for a childish reason, that he was once very rude to Mother.  But his name was Alton Jones.  They called him Pete.  He was the third in command at City Service.  And Pete Jones became president after Doughrty, after Daddy.  Finally it got to be him.  But he and Uncle Charley were very, very best friends.  And one time Pete Jones gave Uncle Charley a miracle of a gift.  It was about as big as fifty cents, maybe not quite, but thinner than fifty cents, of a gold coin.   I don’t know what the denomination of gold coin it was, bigger than a quarter.  And yet in that slim little watch it popped open, everything worked in it.  In those days they didn’t have batteries, it had to be wound, somehow.  But the whole watch was as thin as a dime, that thin.  Well that was Uncle Charley’s favorite object in the world, he couldn’t believe it, he opened it and he closed it, he opened it and he closed it.  It was a miracle of a thing.  I don’t know who made it, maybe Cartier.  But Pete Jones was a smart man.  When my father died, he didn’t have ten cents in a checking account, it never occurred to him.  He didn’t have a will, he was too busy making, literally, millions, to be bothered with anything.  And so a law suit developed like you never heard; it lasted for three years.  Uncle Charley couldn’t be a part of that law suit because it was my father’s lawyers suing City Service to get what they owed him for a lifetime of work.  It finally ended up an awful lot of money.  It turned out all right for us.  But during that period Mother didn’t have fifty cents.  Well, she did have a big chunk for a while, but she spent it.  And so she went to Uncle Charley and she said, “What am I going to do?”  He said, “Well good heavens, Antoinette, sell the house.”  Well it’s not so easy to sell a five-story New York house.  It takes a year or so.  You have to find somebody who can afford it, who wants it, you know, it just takes time.  She said, “Well, no, I just need plain cash.  We can sell the house later.”  So Pete Jones and Uncle Charley smiled to themselves, “This is one dumb actress.”  They said, “Well there’s one thing that Frank owns outright.  It’s called the Louisiana Farms.  It’s a big area of oil wells that are underwater.  And we’ll take that for a hundred thousand dollars and give you some change while you wait for the house to get sold.”  So Mother said, “Oh, I never even heard of it.”  And they said, “Yah, that’s in his name so you can legally sell that.”  So she sold Louisiana Farms to Uncle Charley and Pete Jones for a hundred thousand dollars.  And eventually, the income is about three hundred thousand a year forever and ever and ever since.  And it ended up, of course in the Frueauff Foundation money.  But even with a sister-in-law they got their last nickel, all right.  And yet they’d be very generous right back.  The first time I got married they gave me the most beautiful party.  Jewelry, all kinds of stuff.  The same with Elaine, the same with Mary Helen.  When Grandmother Frueauff was still alive she would come always, it was like, here comes the queen.  Everybody had to arrive, and she would be sitting in a chair and you’d come up one at a time and kiss her and speak a little bit, and step back and the next person would come sniver(?).  She had a cane and a long skirt to the floor.  And when Mary Helen my cousin got engaged to a young man that worked for City Service, he was a lawyer.  And of course, he had to be introduced to Grandmother Frueauff.  So he was dragged in—he was scared to death to meet her—you know, he sort of bowed in front of her and said what a….how he’d heard so much about her and he was so thrilled for the pleasure of finally meeting her and all that stuff.  So she looked him over a little bit and then she said, “You may kiss me.”  So he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.  And she nodded and dismissed him.  I don’t know if she ever spoke to him again.  It scared him almost to death.

She had been very, very funny back in her lifetime.  I don’t know anything about her father and mother or anything except that they were sort of foreign people and very moral and righteous.  I know she had a doll.  And she was sitting on the grass wherever she was by the Erie Canal.  And some boat or something spilled oil into the Erie Canal.  And it spilled along and then it caught fire.  So the whole darn canal was just a quiet river of flames.  And her doll fell in.  She told me that part.  That to her was the very worst, to  watch her doll go floating out there in all that oil and fire.  And then one time, when she was a teacher at the girl’s school in Lititz.  Now maybe she was not really a teacher, kind of a teacher’s assistant.  And they were, of course, school girls, all Pennsylvania girls.  It was all during the Civil War.  And she was bustling them upstairs, you know, “On your way.  Run along.  Hurry up.  Don’t dawdle.  Don’t chatter.”  You know, pushing the girls on up the staircase.  And somebody said, “President Lincoln has just been shot.”  Everybody just froze on the staircase, all up and down the school.  And this one southern girl said, “Well, good.”  And Grandma Frueauff hauled off and slapped her in the face.  And then had Moravian remorse, and had to ask God’s forgiveness, because you never strike another person.  But her first instinct was to knock the girl cold in the middle of this proper school full of hoop skirts in the middle of the Civil War.  I guess that girl probably lost every friend she had.  That was an awful thing she said.  But years later I slapped a girl at Hewitt’s.  And somehow I told Mother and Mother told Charley and Charley told somebody, and you know, and Grandmother Frueauff….(end of tape)

Tape 4, Side 1

As I was saying, Grandma Frueauff was furious and just gave me hell for having hit the girl in school.  And then she kind of slowed down and patted my hand.  And said, “The reason it upsets me is because it reminds me of something I was very ashamed of.”  And then she told me about hitting the Southern girl the day Lincoln was shot.  So although she wanted you to behave a certain way, she could understand that sometimes you did wrong.  I very rarely had any personal talks with her; they were very formal, very respectful.  Being at her apartment, though, in Denver, was fun.  I only had to go one day each time I went to Colorado.  All the rest of the time I stayed with Minnie B.  But always there was one luncheon with Grandmother Frueauff.  And then we didn’t really know what to say to each other.  And she had two things that we didn’t have at our house, that I respected and admired and adored.  No grownups thought they were worth anything, just junk.  One was a stereopticon.  Well you had thousands of postcards with the same picture on both sides. But, somehow, when you put it in the machine and looked through into it, it had depth.  And you know, something has always been the matter with my eyes, I don’t know why.  But I don’t have what they call depth perception.  But on that stereopticon thing, it was great.  I could almost reach around something like the leaning tower of pizza or the sphinx or something—it had depth.  I could watch those pictures forever and ever.  She had two or three shoe boxes full of them.  And the other thing she had was called a kaleidoscope.  Just a bunch of brightly colored crumbs of what, I don’t know, maybe rock or something.  And every time you moved it, even the least bit, it made beautiful, beautiful puzzle-looking pictures.  They were always equal on every side.  I never could understand what was going on inside, but I could watch those two things forever.  And Grandmother Frueauff quickly found out that’s what I liked so we spent most of the afternoon with those two things.  She had a companion, just a respectable, school-teachery sort of woman, and a cook, and I suppose a maid, because somebody waited on table, maybe it was the cook, I don’t know.  And the companion would take dictation and pay the bills and do all the handwriting type of thing.  But one thing was absolutely the law of the land around there.  That was she wrote every one of her sons every week.  And every week every son wrote back.  I can’t imagine that they ever didn’t.  You know, it was just like breathing, you had to do that.  On Sundays always.  Well, it reached the point where Grandmother Frueauff was writing from west to east across the paper and then turning the paper around, I don’t know whether to be economical or whether to—maybe she couldn’t see it—and then she would write from west to east again, so that it made a criss-cross, and was terribly hard to read, of course.  So finally the sons got up their nerve and they said “Mother dear, it’s very, very difficult for us to read your letters, because, you know, naturally, sometimes you overlap your sentences, they go one on top of the other.  Why don’t you dictate to Miss,” whoever the companion was.  Well, she was horrified, because the things she wrote to her son were not a servant’s business.  These were family, these were private letters.  There wasn’t anything private to be said, but that’s the way she felt about it.  Any family things you could not dictate.  They had to be personal.  So they argued over that for about six months.  They couldn’t read her letters and she wouldn’t dictate, and back and forth.  All of a sudden she got inspired.  Now, she was about eighty-eight or ninety when this peachy idea came.  She went in the car with Bert the chauffer to East High School where all her sons had graduated, where one son had died.  Enrolled in a touch system typewriting class and poor Bert, he didn’t have any reason to want to write at all, he had to take touch system, too.  And for about six months they took the touch system on the typewriter.  Then she could come home and had got herself a typewriter and she could write her sons and the servants wouldn’t be able to be, you know, in on the dictation of the letters.  It was that private.  She wasn’t idle, she was about ninety-four, and she was rattling away on the typewriter the last five years of her life.

I’m sorry to jump around, but now I’m going to have to tell you the history, sort of history, of City Service, because that was the only company that we ever sort of got backbone money out of.  I mean, the ranch came and went, different projects, but the City Service thing is what made us be a solvent group of people.  This is how it started.  It started as the Denver Gas and Electric Company by Henry L. Dougherty.  And then daddy got the idea of kind of spreading out, robber baron style, monopoly style, whatever you want to call it.  Mr. Dougherty looked exactly like George Bernard Shaw, you know, the white sharp goatee, sort of noble, brainy-looking face.  He was very, very pure.  He never had a date.  He never had a drink.  He never had a cigar or cigarette.  He was spiritually a leader of good money.  Very good business man.  And he had crazy ideas.  That was his idea, that switching the light bulbs thing.  Daddy’s ideas were more toward spreading the company bigger.  I don’t know why, but aiming them out of Denver.  He sent his brother Harry down to take over the Pueblo Gas and Electric Company.  And my cousin was born there in Pueblo right across the street from where we lived much later.  Well, anyway, the company got so big and so successful and spread out to so many cities, you know, branches, as I said, about a hundred and fourteen by the end of it.  Serving all the cities with gas and electric.  So they moved to New York, to Wall Street.  And became an Eastern big company.  Everybody says it wasn’t a monopoly, it wasn’t a holding company.  But I think it was.  I don’t know what else you could call it.  Of course they had stock.  And they made all the people that worked for them buy a little stock.  Or maybe they didn’t buy it, maybe they got it for Christmas.  But everybody was invested in it, it was like a nest of being interested inwards.  No employee was just hired for a short time; they lasted forever, they were very loyal, they were very respectful, they were very hard-working, enthusiastic, in every town.  Well, there in New York, Mr. Dougherty built this monstrous big building called the City Service Building.  And he had the top two floors.  And he was kind of sickly, I don’t know what was the matter with him.  But anyway, at night he would go to bed and then push a button, and the whole wall of one side of the building would open and he would shoot out onto a terrace and breathe the good fresh air high over the dirty city below.  And then in the morning he would push a button and his bed would go back into the City Service Building and the doors would close.  And that would be his bedroom.  He had a little kingdom up there.  And of course as he got older he got sicker, he had to have a trained nurse.  And eventually, long, long after daddy was gone, long after I was grown up, Mr. Dougherty got so sick, he had the trained nurse, he married the trained nurse.  And the trained nurse had already had a daughter.  So he adopted the daughter and that daughter got to be a very rich heiress when she was already about twenty-three.  I don’t have any idea, it was never mentioned, whether mother or Mr. Daugherty ever met.   Maybe they met and had a sarcastic kind of fight.  Maybe he would refuse to meet her, but mother’s contempt for him and his contempt for her was hopelessly deep.  I think it bothered daddy, but he’d just, at five-thirty he became mother’s; at eight-thirty a.m., he went downtown and became Mr. Daugherty’s.  He lived a sort of double life like that.  Mr. Dougherty used to print 365 little pieces of paper every year, that were on a kind of holder.  And everybody that worked for City Service had one of these things on his desk and you would tear that page out each day.  And there would be a new good thought from Mr. Dougherty on it.  I mean perfectly cliché things like locking the barn after the horse is gone, you know, that sort of thing.  It enraged mother to have them around.  Daddy tried to keep them at the office, but they’d show up quite often.  But that’s the way Mr. Dougherty thought, and was, and lived.  And Daddy never criticized it, but you could tell he had a little bit more sense of humor than that.

I’ll have to tell one little humor thing I might forget about him.  He wore a thing called a cutaway.  It made him look a little bit like a penguin.  It was short in front, I mean, the coat was short in front, kind of like a vest, and then had two tails in back.  I think the pants were striped and the coat was black or the other way around.  It was a sort of an afternoon type suit.  And it was very short and kind of dumpy, anyhow, so he really looked awful in that, but, somehow, scary, a little powerful.  One time, the man that doing very well when I was older, I said, “what was my father really like, from man to man, because I only knew him as a little girl.”  He said, “Well, sort of like a red-headed Mussolini.”  Oh, dear.  I didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, he didn’t scare me.  They used to tease him because he made a little bit of money one year and double the next, and double the next, and more and more.  It got to be almost a joke, “How much have you got today, Frank,” kind of thing.  And so they called him Midas.  And I didn’t know the story of Midas.  One day one of the grownups said, “You’d better be careful, don’t you let your Daddy touch you.”  And I said, “Why?”   And they said, “Because, then you’d turn to gold, and you couldn’t dance any more, you couldn’t smile, you’d just be gold, you’d be stiff.  You stay away from him, he’s a dangerous man.”  And another time at dinner at Uncle Charley’s we four cousins were scattered out around the grownups, there were about twelve people at lunch, and it was sort of expected that every once in a while a child would say something; it was sort of my turn to make a remark.  And so I said, “Daddy,” I think I was being kind of show-offy fresh, and I said, “Daddy, what’s a robber baron.  They talk about it at school.”  So, of course all the grownups laughed and all the uncles looked at Daddy and said, “Well, go ahead, Frank.  Tell her.”  And he grinned a minute and he looked me right in the eye and said, “I’ll tell you, sport, it’s kind of like Robin Hood.”  He was fun.  He was lots of fun.  Grownups were scared to death of him.  The cousins and I just climbed all over him, we loved him.  No, I’m exaggerating, we didn’t climb all over him because he was pretty neat.  And one time he had on that cutaway and he had a little office, this was in the big house, he had a little office off the living room.  And somebody had given me a pogo stick.  You know what a pogo stick is?  It’s about as tall as a broom, and got two little pedals on each side down at the bottom.  And if you stood on those pedals and jumped it bounced you way up in the air, I mean, four or five feet up.  You could really hop along like a grasshopper on this thing.  It was the fad that year to have a pogo stick.  And as I walked by Daddy’s office, he had gotten on my pogo stick and he was going around his desk with his cutaway tails out in back, flying around and around as high as he could jump, and he got about half way around the table and he saw me.  And he got off that pogo stick and said, “Ahem, here you are sport.  I just found this.  Now you must pick up your toys.”  I took it away.  We never mentioned that I’d seen him playing like a little kid like that.

I’m sorry, I keep jumping around in my head.  I’ll get back to the history of City Service.  After they moved to New York they grew.  They got just enormous.  By the time, well, by 1922, ‘23, they were not only gas and electric, they had also hit oil.  So, with gas, electric and oil, they had sort of a monopoly.  And then Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, had a man working for him called Harold Ickes.  And Harold Ickes went on a vendetta about monopolies.  Later they did the same thing to the telephone company and chopped it all up, that’s why you’ve got all these crazy companies instead of one big politically controlled Bell company.  You have all these other phone companies.  Well they tried to do the same thing with City Service.  They dragged all my uncles and all the executives from City Service—but Daddy was dead by that time—out to Madison, Wisconsin, and they had a trial.  It went on for nearly a year.  Was it a monopoly or wasn’t it?  And they would have to give up either the gas or the electric or the oil, they couldn’t have all three.  So all the uncles were sort of on trial but in goodly company with every oil man.  But Grandma Frueauff, of course, being very proper, she didn’t know  they were on trial for anything bad.  She just thought they loved Wisconsin.  And she would always say, “My boys are spending so much time up there and they’ve written me for several weeks, they’re all in someplace there enjoying it’s wonderful to have them all together.”  Well, of course it ended up dreadfully.  They chopped up City Service.  They said, “Hurry up and choose.”  And they chose oil.  It took about another forty years for the company to slowly dribble its way into just being a half-baked, badly run company with holdings here and holdings there and stock options in a big mess.  But it was worth three billion dollars, which was a terrible lot in those days.   It was eighth highest on the Dow when they sold.  They sold to another oil company, I don’t remember it’s name, and then eventually that company, too, has gone.  The whole thing got wiped out.  It probably lasted all in all about sixty years.  The Denver Gas and Electric Company was all right.  All the things they held and controlled together simply separated and went right on doing gas and electric and oil and stuff all over the country.  They weren’t anywhere near as important or as rich or as powerful as the Rockefellers.  I never talk about the Rockefellers.  I thought of the Rockefellers as really dreadful people.  People that hired guns and shot workers.  People that put the Pinkertons in business and killed a lot of people in Pueblo.  I thought of the Rockefellers as quite a villain.  And the sons as very stupid.  We talked about them a lot.  I never quite got it clear in my mind what they owned, what they did.  They had a thing called Standard Oil and for some reason switched it to Exxon.  It was still the same company; they just changed the name for all I know.  The whole oil business was Presbyterian.  I can’t explain beyond that even into the Hunt Brothers that had a monopoly on silver.  They all loved monopolies.  They were all Masons. They were all Presbyterians.  They were a pretty sober, dignified bunch.  All the oil people.  They weren’t wild a bit.  Maybe some of the lesser fry, you know, below the board of directors, manager people.  They might have been wild.  But the executives were a very stuffy bunch.  Not high hat.  Not social and goodness knows not intellectual.  One of the biggest rows, well it wasn’t an out loud row, but an undercurrent of irritation in our family between mother and daddy, was about Troy.  Mother loved the Greek myths, the Roman myths, Homer, all that kind of thing.  Daddy had never even heard of it and he could care less.  But some man, I think his name was Schindler or something, came to America and raised an awful lot of money through people just like oil men, raised money to dig up in Turkey where Troy was, to dig and restore the old town so that things like the Odyssey could be proved to be true.  The Iliad really its just plain history.  So they came to Daddy, of course Daddy wouldn’t give them a cent, he said you’re just a German crook, just a con man.  And even when he did dig up Troy and did find that it really was true and they proved everything.  That everything Homer said got proved.  Daddy wouldn’t believe it and Mother would believe it and they would have these big arguments.  To him it was like Red Riding Hood and he was just not going to be bothered with it.  To Mother it was just pre-Bible times, sacred and beautiful.  They never got together on that subject at all.

All right, back again to City Service.  All the uncles broke up after that.  They still, well, for instance Uncle Charley was a lawyer he didn’t need City Service any more.  He had a good law firm.  Uncle Will had a hardware store.  Uncle Harry still worked for City Service, until I think he died before it blew all up.  But he had lost an awful lot of money in the stock market crash.  Uncle Charley somehow got tipped in advance and he didn’t lose.  Daddy was gone.  Uncle Fred was gone.  So when the downhill part happened, it wasn’t really particularly sad, it was just quieted down.  No more chauffers, take a taxi.  And Uncle Charley, when he died, left two million dollars and he said, “Put it in a trust, a foundation thing in the memory of my wife Hazel, for health, education and welfare.  Don’t give anybody a cent if they take money from that damned government.  Only for individual charitable things like that.”  So Uncle Harry was the person obviously to take over the reigns of running it.  There were only men in it.  Let’s see, there was Uncle Harry, the head, Mr. Farrell, Jimmy Farrell, who was Uncle Charley’s young partner, almost his adopted son, a man he was very fond of, he was a lawyer.  There was Mary Helen’s husband, my husband, Paul Fanning, Elaine’s husband, Herb Stranahan, Bud Frueauff Jr.  Somehow there were, I think, seven men and a good secretary, and that was it.  Well, pretty soon I got divorced, so Paul got kicked off and I got to be on.  Elaine got divorced, Herb got kicked out, Elaine got to be on.  So they said, “Well this is terrible, you know, this one poor man,” so Charles Klein, who was Mary Ellen’s husband, he stayed on so they were both on.  Same number of people always, four trustees and three executives, one of which was president, always seven people.  And then Uncle Harry died and it fell to his son, Bud Frueauff Jr, to take over.  Really all he had to do was keep his eye on the investments and then they had a meeting every year to decide who to dole the money out to.  And they had to stick to the IRS rules.  But Bud was uncanny at what to buy and what to hold, rarely to sell.  And he accumulated, and he doled out just as much as legally you had to, so the capital of the foundation kept growing and growing.  By the time he died it was eighty-three million.  And the stock brokers would look at him in horror, in awe, because they always want you to buy and then sell and buy and sell because they get a commission whether it goes up or down.  But mostly he held, saved and bought more.  And of course stuck to all the rules about what to give to.  Once in a while, if we pushed very hard we’d get something that wasn’t health, education or welfare, like, I just begged and screamed until they gave $10,000 once to the ‘Tall Ships.’  You know, one time when all the ships went into New York Harbor, it was at the time they were restoring the Statue of Liberty.  But very rarely; it just stuck to the routine things it should.  It always helped the Moravian College.  As a matter of fact they named the gymnasium for Grandma Frueauff, which I always thought was funny, the idea of her even looking at a gymnasium was impossible.  But every year they still give to the Moravian College.  They’ve so run out of Moravians by now that the president of the Moravian College isn’t a Moravian any more.  But they have enough students, the buildings are exquisite.  Big stone quiet Pennsylvania buildings, both in Bethlehem and Lititz, and maybe many other places.  The idea of them going up to Alaska and trying to turn Eskimos into Moravians didn’t work very well.  The Russian Orthodox had too much of a hold up there with the natives, so that burst of proselytizing, it just didn’t work out.  So I guess the Moravians in their respectable way are shrinking practically to nothing.  Mostly it’s family pride.  So like Presbyterians you couldn’t tell the difference, anyway.  Oh, another thing that most oil people were—Masons.  Being a Mason is a big secret to women.  The men that are Masons never tell, they’re on their honor they’ll drop dead or be struck by lightning or something.  They can’t ever tell what it’s all about.  But it’s very anti-catholic.  That’s about all I really know about it.  But Daddy got to be the very highest of a Mason that you could get to be in Denver.  They didn’t have many outside interests—baseball.  Yes, baseball was the general once-a-year get together thing that Mr. Dougherty would sit in a chair and survey.   And all the clerks and partners, and just whoever was working for City Service, I don’t know how many people, but maybe like a thousand people would get to a big park, Bear Mountain Park, up near West Point.  They rented it for the day.  And that’s the only time I ever in my whole life remember meeting Mr. Doughrty.  Daddy led me up and presented me and I curtseyed and he patted me on the head.  He liked Mary Helen.  And he sent Mary Helen orchids every year, even when she was three and four and five years old—orchids for her birthday.  I just met him once; the difference was our mothers.  I didn’t resent it.  It kind of surprised me because everybody else liked mother.  Maybe he was jealous because Daddy loved Mother.  It was a strange kind of atmosphere.

I don’t remember if I just said the person that ran that monopoly trial was Harold Ickes.  And his son now works for Clinton.  They both stunk.  Let’s see—Oh, there was a cousin, I don’t know what relation, but I’ll figure it out.  It was a cousin of Daddy’s.  Then maybe her mother and Grandma Frueauff were sisters.  I don’t know, anyway, there was a very nice woman, very well educated, charming, nice woman, called cousin Mary Helen.  She lived in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and her name was Mary Helen Taggart.  And she loved Mother.  I think out of kind of defiance at her stuffy other relatives.  And she loved Mother.  And in her will she left Antoinette Perry—she didn’t put Frueauff, just Antoinette Perry—the Frueauff candlesticks.  They were just a pair of big sterling strong heavy leaden German candlesticks.  That was awfully nice except Mother had already passed away when Mary Helen Taggart’s will got read.  So what are you going to do with the candlesticks when the person that was supposed to get them was gone?  So we said, “Well, I have a daughter, Antoinette Perry Fanning.  Let’s give them to her.  It clears up the will and it’s a nice thing for one of my kids to have a Frueauff thing.”  So we gave her the candlesticks.  But you won’t find them, they got hocked.  I thought that was awful, but you couldn’t un-hock them, I didn’t know in time.  I hocked things of Mother’s, too, but they always got un-hocked.  Well, let’s see, then the other will, of Grandmother Frueauff.   Now she never was rude to Mother, but neither would an ice cube be, I mean, just a slight nod and maybe, “Antoinette,” and that’s all.  Mother was always polite, but if she could possibly think of a way to not be there at all, she wasn’t there.  She was always in Atlantic City trying out a play or home buried in a script with a deadline, it was something, she’d get out of it all the time.  Now Mother had chosen the plot where my father was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.  And she picked it because it was very big and full of trees, and kind of like the woods.  Kind of like Hansel and Gretel, kind of.  Up on a high hill, lots of fluffy trees and lilacs.  And it was just going to be a woodsy lying in place for Father and Mother.  Romantic.  So Daddy was buried there and that ended that.  Mother would go back from time to time to the cemetery but there was no headstone, there was no statue and it drove Grandma Frueauff crazy.  She wanted a monument.  She wanted a stone portrait of Daddy with practically a gold crown on her boy.  And Mother wanted lilacs and fluffy trees and romance.  So in Grandmother Frueauff’s will—the reading of the will was a black moment in my life because it came from New York all the way to Denver and they rented a long big living room place at the Brown Palace and all the Frueauffs were there to read the will to all of us at once, counting wives and nieces and cousins and everybody, there were probably eighteen or twenty people—and finally came a very acid sentence in the will.  It said, “I leave the Frueauff clock to my daughter-in-law, Antoinette Perry Frueauff, on the condition she marks my beloved son Frank’s grave appropriately.”  Period.  So embarrassing.  Thank goodness Mother wasn’t there.  But anyway, of course Elaine and I were there and we told Mother right away.  And she said, “Oh, good heavens, how silly.  Frank wouldn’t care one way or the other.”  But somehow she knew that in the eyes of everybody she was wrong.  She couldn’t just live it up in romance any more.  And so there’s a plaque at the head of her grave with name and date and we ended up with the clock.  The clock is now at the ranch in the library on the mantelpiece.  I don’t know why it’s called the Frueauff clock.  Maybe it’s German.  I don’t know a thing about the clock itself, it’s just a big clock.  But it works.

Out there in the barn at the ranch, there are also a big box of pretty dreary little water colors.  I think they’re from Moravia, I think it’s that long ago.  Little water colors, sketchy things, of scenery, that Uncle Eugene must have painted.  I don’t know much about art, but I don’t think there’s anything special about them.  There are just dozens and dozens of little water color sketches.

I can’t think off hand of other things about City Service.  They paid you very often in stock and you were supposed to hold it.  When that law suit of Mother’s to Daddy’s estate, when it died and was settled, is what I guess I mean, in settling that they gave Mother two million dollars worth of stock.  And they said, “Now you know you can sell it little bit by little bit, but don’t suddenly dump two million dollars worth on the market in one minute.”  And she put it up for where you don’t pay for the whole thing at once.  Anyway she used it as a sort of collateral, so when the stock market crashed, bang, all that stock was gone and Mother was flat out broke, and actually owed City Service.  But it was so obvious you could never pay it back nobody ever went that far as to try and get it back.  It was just wiped out all in one day. 

You can tell, I’m sure, how much I liked my Father.  And he had so many sides to him.  To Mother, of course, he was a little bit strict and “Come now, Antoinette, get rid of those strange people” you know, like all the Broadway kind, because Bartlesville is coming to dinner, get rid of Greenwich Village.  And he also was in a way, as far as I know, the best teacher I ever had.  And that goes for some good teachers.  For instance, with me, he’d come back about five-thirty, not every day of course but often, he’d come back every day about five-thirty from Wall Street and go into his little home office.  He had a secretary down at Wall Street called Miss Shevlin, and I had watched one day when Miss Shevlin was taking dictation and she wrote in shorthand.  And I said that was the darnedest thing I ever saw in my life, all these wiggles and scribbles and Miss Shevlin could read it right back, it made sense to her.  I thought it was marvelous.  So he would  sit me in the armchair across from him in his little home office and say, “Miss Frueauff, would you take dictation?”  I was maybe five, six, and I’d say “Yes, sir.”  And I’d get a yellow—it always had to be yellow—paper and a pencil and say, “I’m ready, sir.”  And then he would start and dictate a letter like, ‘Dear Sirs:  Yours of the 43rd was received for a total of 218.11.’  “Would you read that back?”  And I’d say, “Yes, sir.”  And I would read back all this, what I had heard in my head and what I had written down as rubbish on the paper.  And finally it would get so he could dictate me an entire letter and then I would read it back.  And sometimes he’d correct me very seriously.  We played ‘office.’  What he was obviously doing was training my memory, I mean my quick memory.  Because when I finally did go into theater I memorized a terrible lot in that couple of days before I went on the stage.  Pages and pages.  It was no trouble for me to memorize and echo it back.  It was just no trouble at all, he taught me how to do it.  Of course it would never last.  One time I was in a play and playing the lead, and it was a flop.  And so it was up on the bulletin board we had to close on Saturday.  Said goodbye to everybody, took my makeup and went home.  And Sunday afternoon the phone rings and said “we’re going to run another week.”  I could not remember one word of the play that I’d been in the week before because I had turned it back off.   You can remember something and then you can turn around and on purpose forget it.   I had a terrible time re-remembering the play just closed forty-eight hours before.  But that kind of memory was only one of the things he taught.  He taught lots of other things.   Sometimes he and I didn’t agree about taste.  He was always reading what he considered good children’s literature.  Some of it was very good.  I certainly enjoyed the Bobbsey Twins.  I certainly enjoyed Black Beauty, cried a lot.  But, he got a book, let me see, what was it called, Pilgrim’s Progress.  That was the silliest, most boring, infuriating book ever I had to listen to.  And every evening he would come while Mother was getting dressed for dinner.  He would sit and read Pilgrim’s Progress.  It never occurred to me it had anything to do with religion.  I thought some nut peasant man, kind of like King Wenceslaus, is out plowing through mud, climbing over barriers, sloshing through rivers.  Where is he supposed to be, Colorado?  Well, I thought it must be some friend of Daddy’s, and he’s got to read me this book because a friend of his wrote it and he’s being polite.  It turned out to be a big classic; I didn’t know that for twenty more years.  Another time somebody gave me a book called ‘Princess Pearly Pateen and her Sworeau.’  What rubbish! So the governess would read that to me.  And we got through it in about three nights.  It was a bore.  And then Daddy, who’d been on one of those railroad trips, lawsuit things, he came home, (?)  his head, “I got you the finest book, you just wait till this evening.” And by George it was ‘Princess Pearly Pateen and her Sworeau’ over again.  He couldn’t have liked it.  Nobody could have liked it, but he laughed where he was supposed to laugh if you were five years old, it was the worst rubbish.  I had to listen to that and I never told him that I’d already loathed it.  There were some bad books mixed in there with the good ones.  The best book of all nobody read out loud, it was pictures. It was called ‘Sabertooth.’  It was a rather big book, almost big as a magazine.  Mary Helen and I would lie on our stomachs on the floor and say “Shall we look at ‘Sabertooth’?”  And Mary Helen would shiver all over and I would say, “Well, well, all right, but just a little bit.”  So we’d open the book just a little bit and see this awful tiger.  It was about cave men.  Sabertooth looking in the cave; if we didn’t light a fire quick, you know, it would come in and get us.  And we’d close the book quick, because we could hardly bear to look.  And then we’d open another page and Sabertooth would tearing some poor antelope or something in half and then we’d have to close that one and forget about all the blood.  It was a wonderful book, scared us to death for a long time.  Once she stayed at our house.  Uncle Harry and Aunt Lena had to go because of Dutch Oil and City Service.  Right the minute the First World War was over they had to go to Europe so they dumped Mary Helen on us, which suited me fine, because now I had a little sister.  See I was like about, oh, six, and Mary Helen was about three and a half or four.   But she was so smart.  You talk about an intelligent human being, it was awful, she was so smart.  Anyway, she came to spend like two weeks while they went over to Holland, someplace about oil.  She immediately broke out with the measles.  Well, you can’t have the measles if you’re a Christian Scientist.  So there wasn’t any danger of mentioning measles, it just wasn’t mentioned in our house.  But Mary Helen was all full of spots, and she wasn’t a Christian Scientist, she was a Presbyterian.  And they put her in the guest room.  And I was on my honor, you know.  You can get as near Mary Helen as the edge of the rug.  But on your word of honor, no nearer.  They didn’t say about catching the spots or anything.  So, all right, I would obey.   I was a very obedient little girl.  I just rolled up the rug.  It was a throw rug.  And rolled it up and stayed at the edge of the rug and we could play checkers or anything right there on the edge of the bed.  And I didn’t get measles anyway, so God was on our Scientist side protecting me, anyway.  Bud Frueauff was different; you see he was the son of Uncle Harry’s first wife who died when he was a teeny little baby.  So he didn’t remember his mother and then he got Aunt Lena for a stepmother and Aunt Lena was jealous because he was going to inherit Frueauff money I think was why.  Anyhow she treated him really badly, almost Ella Cinders cruel.  And they sent him off to boarding school when he was very little.  And then when he was at home, Aunt Lena and Mary Helen are not going to sit around and play with a boarding school boy.  He had a crystal set.  Crystal set, I don’t if it had crystal in it or what.  It was just about forty different pieces of a radio and you had to put it all together.  Big wires and stuff, it covered half the dining room table.  And he’d play with that crystal set.  And once he got a prize fight on it.  The one where Gene Tunney got hit and then stayed down too long or something.  I don’t know, it was a big scandal.  Like he stayed down eighteen seconds instead of ten and he shouldn’t have been the champion.  I don’t know, it was a big fuss.  We heard that on the crystal set.  And of course he liked to tease Mary Helen.  I don’t think he disliked us, but we were girls.  One time he said, “I’ve got some ice cream for you.  Come, I’ve made ice cream.”  Well, anything was possible and we wanted ice cream.  So we went back in the bathroom.  He had two lily cups with what looked like ice cream, so we ate it.   What it was was snow from the bathroom window sill.  This was on Riverside Drive.  Dirty snow on the window sill, mixed with Pepsodent tooth powder, which was pink.  And you sloshed the two together and it kind of foamed up.  Well, we were awfully slow-uppy on that one, we didn’t swallow much of it before we started to foam ourselves.  So he got punished for that.  Another time we went to see a movie.  Of course black and white, of course silent, called ‘Safety Last.’  Harold Lloyd was the leading part.  And he had to avoid his landlord because he didn’t have any money and so he couldn’t pay his rent and when the landlord came in to beat him up or kick him out, he had to hide.  So he put on an overcoat and jumped up in the air.  The coat caught on a hook and he pulled up his feet.  And so when the landlord came in there was just the overcoat hanging there and you couldn’t see any of Harold Lloyd in it.  And he went out and he got saved.  Well we thought that was a wonderful idea.  And we were playing hide-and-seek in Mary Helen’s apartment.  And Aunt Lena was busy doing something else. And I got in Aunt Lena’s fur coat, I think it was a squirrel coat.  I got in her coat and somehow got me hooked up onto the wall on the hook.  And hung there and Mary Helen couldn’t find me.  But slowly, and terribly, the hook came out of the apartment wall with a big chunk of plaster.  Slowly I could feel it snowing down and crunch to the floor.  And I don’t know, I guess mother had to pay Aunt Lena to get that part patched up.  The whole front hall was just a disaster.  And I wasn’t very heavy.  I guess you’re just not supposed to have people in the coats when you hang the coats.

Like I told you, Mary Helen—that’s my girl cousin—she was so intelligent it was sort of sickening.  Except about one thing she was awfully dumb about.  And that was Santa Claus.  She really believed there was a Santa Claus.  Just like Chief of Police, there was a Santa Claus.  And everybody warned me, for heaven’s sake, never tell her there isn’t a Santa Claus.  I said, all right, I’ll never tell her, I never believed it in the first place.  I wasn’t supposed to.  It was to me like a fairy story, Peter Pan or something.  It didn’t worry me a bit that there wasn’t one.  We acted out the Santa Claus stories.  But when Mary Helen did find out there wasn’t one she almost cracked up.  I mean, for days she wouldn’t talk.  I think they had made fun of her in her mind.  They’d mocked her, they’d treated her like a baby and she was much smarter than they were.  And it just killed her.  Well, anyway, she was awfully little.  I always compared her to cowboy boots; she was about as tall as a goodly cowboy boot.  And when she’d be standing by the door, she had to reach up to lean on the door knob, to lean her hand up there.  And then she’d put her other hand on her hip.  This tiny midgety thing, she was so alert and so cute.  Big brown eyes, dark red hair.  And one day I looked at her and I said, “I don’t see how you can have brown eyes.  Aunt Lena has blue eyes, Uncle Harry has blue eyes, everybody in our family has blue eyes.  You must have been adopted.”  “Oh, dear,” said this little cowboy boot leaning up to the door knob. She said, “There’s no use trying to explain to a Christian Scientist about the Mendelian Theory.”   She couldn’t have been four.  She was really scary.

Now there’s a side of the Frueauff’s that I’d like to tell you, and yet, everybody winces when you mention it.  But it wasn’t the Frueauff’s, it was most of America of that category and class.  It was most of New York.  There was a very definite wall between Jewish people and Aryan people.  Now then the Aryan people could include Catholics, Christian Scientists, I think, but the Jews lived on the West Side.  They were always treated very fairly, very nicely, very business-likely.  But there was still a kind of wall.  And sometimes there would be wisecracks about it.  And of course the Negro thing, heavens!  I didn’t even know the word Negro was a bad thing or would hurt anybody’s feelings.  It’s all through Mark Twain.  It’s all through Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I mean, it was just a word that described black people.  I didn’t even know there were black women, I thought there were just black men called George on the train.  The first time I saw black women and children at Coney Island, I almost fainted I was so excited.  They’ve got wives, they’ve got children, come and look!  I was out of my mind I was so excited for them.  I never met a Negro.  All our servants were Europeans—governesses, one was a Norwegian, one was American, one was English, you know, they came and went.  No Negroes until the theater.  Then in the theater it was different.  Well anyway to get back to the Jewish thing.  Once in a while there’d be some crack about ‘damned Jew’ or some word like that.  I don’t mean they did anything, they just weren’t friends.  One day at dinner somebody was making some crack about that ‘damned Jew’ he thinks this..  I said, “Is that true?”  That if Jesus Christ comes back he can’t join the country club?”  So I got sent from the room for being fresh.   But I think they felt a little badly.  But years later, after Aunt Hazel had died, Uncle Charley had that big apartment house where he lived in the penthouse part.  And Mrs. Roosevelt rented one of the apartments in the building through the lease manager.  Uncle Charley didn’t know a thing about it until it was all legal and done.  “Oh, God,” he said, when he heard about it.  “This is only the wife of the president.  Now we’re going to have niggers in the elevator.”  There was such a wall that you didn’t think it hurt them any more than it hurt us.  It was a permanent wall.  I know at Hewitt’s one time Rita Mitchell’s father and mother had rented a house in Tuxedo, and they had Charlie Chaplin for the weekend.  A big star.  I thought Mother was going to faint.   She said, “The Mitchell’s had a Jew for the weekend?  You’ve got to be kidding.  Margaret, you’re exaggerating.”  I said, “No, Mom.  I know it’s true.”  It was like that we couldn’t believe it as the wall came down.  And it did come down.  And of course around the theater there never was a wall in the first place.

I’ll tell you how much it changed…oh, by the time of the Second World War it was completely changed.  All these awful things that you hear about Hitler.  And we realized we hadn’t meant it to be rough like that, just social.  And so the very next president after—in City Service—Pete Jones was a Jewish man, Gene Berger.  And everybody sort of relaxed and said well thank goodness those old prejudiced days are over and we got ourselves a damn nice Jew.  It was still there, but it had melted a little.  And Aunt Lena, Mary Helen’s mother, Uncle Harry’s wife, was from Missouri.  And she’d talk about the darkies.  And I figured that one out without having to be explained that the darkies were the children of Negro people that lived in Missouri.  I don’t know what they did for a living, maybe they were service, maybe they picked cotton.  There were some very good songs like that.  There was a show called ‘Showboat’ that was all about prejudice and stuff.  We sort of realized it was wrong but still went on making little cracks.  You wouldn’t have thought of mixing.  Except in the theater.  In the theater, as I say, then skip it, it was a case of either you’re good enough or you’re not.  That went also for the black people because really most of the night club entertainers, all of them in Harlem were blacks.  They were marvelous.  Most of the music was from black people.  And then poor George Gershwin wrote an opera called ‘Porgy and Bess’ with all the love and enthusiasm and compassion in the world.  And the Negro people had a perfect fit and said Porgy was worse than any Uncle Tom.   And I never could see what was wrong with Uncle Tom, I thought he was a kindly, loving, good man.  But to the Negro people he wasn’t.  He was a weak one, he should have fought back.  I must say, it must have been sickening that they had shows where people—white men—all put black on their faces and then pretended to be Negroes.  And had what they called a minstrel show.  They were good musicians, they sang well, they played band, but down underneath they were really making fun.  And I don’t think they knew it hurt.  And then terrible stories would come from time to time, from the south.  Somebody would lynch somebody.  Lynching always was racial.  And I never could quite understand.  It usually was like gossip that some black man had in some way insulted or hurt or offended a white woman.  Boom, there’d  be a lynching.  There were an awful lot of them in the twenties.  But there was so much other cruelty, so much other…electric chairs and murders, scandals.  It was just part of badness.  I didn’t really pay all that much attention.  I didn’t really quite believe it.  I’d never been South.  Mother and Daddy had one couple…

Tape 4, Side 2

Menard spoke.  I felt sort of sorry for her, I thought maybe she had a cleft palate or something was the matter with how she spoke.  It turned out she was a Southerner.  The first time I’d ever heard that accent.  It embarrassed me terribly.  She sort of “wha-a-a-a.”  And she’d say, “Oh, ya ah the cu-u-test.”  And it would just kill me until I found out that she was a southerner.  But she hadn’t lynched anybody.  She was a very nice person.  A lot of those executive couples that came and went in Mother and Daddy’s life, some of them played bridge with Mother and the men would talk business.  I don’t what they talked.  He liked Pete Jones very much.  He liked Dewey Bailey very much.  And a man that he met that easterner, not a Leadville type, an eastern establishment type.  His name was Townshend Burden.  And Townshend Burden had a bunch of sons, one of them was Dennis.  And they were very good friends.  But the reason they really stayed friends was they had two Denver wives.  They had Mother, from Denver, and then Mrs. Burden had been Florence Sweeney, and so—Sheedy or Sweeney, I forget which—from Denver, also.  So these two women were having a lot of fun with chauffers and limousines and new clothes and big houses, having fun in New York and not being high-hat about it, enjoying it thoroughly after the ordinary suburbia of Denver, they were in heaven about it.  Well Daddy was looking at the grocery lists and he was looking at the meat lists, and he was looking at the checkbook and it was just awful.  So finally he called Mother in and he said, “Antoinette, this has got to stop.  This has got to stop.  Half of Ellis Island is sitting down in our kitchen, eating us out of house and home.  We’re spending about ten times as much on the servants as on ourselves.  Our meat bill could support somebody in Leadville for five years.  This is criminal.  It’s got to stop.  I’ve talked this over with Towny Burden and his bills are bad, too.  And right now we want to tell Mrs. Burden and you you’re going to have to have a budget.”   I didn’t know what a budget was but Mother did; she turned quite pale.  And she said, “Well, all right, I’ll try, but you know you can’t just feed them cereal when we’re having squab.”  And he said, “No, we can all have the same food, but we don’t need to have this much, this is ridiculous!  People that work for us are bringing their cousins in from Ellis Island and eating lunch here and then going to look for a job.  It’s got to stop.”  Well, Mother didn’t like being criticized, no young woman would.  And neither did Mrs. Burden.  So they get in our car, which was a limo—I don’t know what make—but you know, where the chauffer is up in front of the glass.  And they’re sitting in back and they had a big beautiful lap robe.  And they said to Flynn, “Go down to the Fulton Street Market,” which was a fish and beef, you know, meat market. “Yes, Ma’am.”  So down they go.  Well this big limo sticking out of this slummy, smelly, wet and blood and hoses squirting on vegetables and meat and fish.  It stunk down there.  They bought a half of beef—no, they bought a whole beef, and had it cut in half.  Now, how are you going to carry a half of beef, think how big it is.  Of course the head wasn’t there, but still.  They put it on the floor of the limo.  All this blood and beef.  “Stop at the Burden’s and leave half the beef with the Burden’s and take the other half to our house.”  Well, that’s the way to cut a budget.  It cost the Lord knows what to reupholster the rug and the lap robe, they were just so drenched in blood and fat and gristle and everything.  But the subject of budgets never came up anymore.  The men just shut up and paid.

In case this jumping around of mine is a little confusing to you, I think I ought to admit, Grandpa Frueauff, that would be the Gettysberg-Leadville one, his father had a grandfather and a grandmother.  The grandfather and the grandmother were brother and sister.  So the children that they had were first cousins.  So Grandpa Frueauff is the child of first cousins.  Don’t blame it on the Moravians, Europeans did it all the time.  I don’t think there’s a law against it, but it might explain a little bit Frueauffs.

You never met the Burdens.  I never saw them after I was grown up.  When Daddy died and Mother went back in the theater, the Burdens disappeared from our lives.  I don’t mean they were rude about it, they just melted away.  They stayed social.  And the only time we ever would hear from Mrs. Burden, it would be after an opening night of Mother’s.  She’d come in almost every time and say, “Well, it must be a hit.  Florence Burden wants house seats.”

I don’t want to go on with this, I’m sick of it.  I guess I’ll think of other things later.  But, if you—whoever’s listening—want to know more, there are a couple of very good sources besides the barn.  Bradford’s book called ‘Plymouth Plantation.’  That’s all the Mayflower stuff like a diary of the first several years of landing in America.  If you want to know where people are that I have spoken about, a few are in Woodlawn in New York.  Some are in the cemetery next to the Frueauff house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  And most of them are in Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.  You have to wander around a little bit because the Hall group are in one place and the Frueauff group are in another place.  They didn’t mix their dead.

 

End of Tape