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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0047, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
George Watts Hill, born in 1901, spent most of his childhood growing up in Durham, North Carolina. In 1918, Hill attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He describes what life was like in that community during the early twentieth century. Hill left UNC in 1924 after finishing both a bachelor's degree and a law degree. After his marriage and subsequent ten-month honeymoon trip through parts of Asia and Europe in 1925, Hill returned to Durham, determined to continue in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather, both of whom had by that time become pillars of the business community in Durham. Hill describes how his family was responsible for the building of two hospitals in Durham and his father had begun to make a name for himself in banking, having established the Durham Loan and Trust Company (which later became Central Carolina Bank). Because of his perspective from a position of business leadership, Hill is able to offer a unique description of the development of Durham as a center of commerce during the early twentieth century. He describes the roles of various leaders in the area, such as C. C. Spaulding and members of the Duke family, and he discusses the impact of the tobacco and textile industries on the community's growth. During the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s he pursued various business endeavors, notably in insurance and banking. He helped to found various insurance organizations in Durham, paving the way for the establishment and growth of North Carolina Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Simultaneously, he worked with his father to build their banking enterprises, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, they were in a position to offer loans to smaller banks, thus ensuring their economic survival. During World War II, Hill left North Carolina in order to work for the Office of Strategic Services. When he returned in 1945, he picked up his business endeavors where he had left off. To those efforts he added further forays into land and business development. During the 1950s, he was a prominent figure in the development and rapid growth of the Research Triangle Park. In addition, he tried his hand at dairy farming. Throughout the interview, Hill focuses on descriptions of business leadership and formulas for economic success. He also addresses such issues as balancing work and family, the importance of public service (such as his work with the UNC Board of Trustees), and changing ways of life in Durham and its surrounding areas.
George Watts Hill was a prominent business leader in the Durham area during the twentieth century. He offers his perspective on the changing nature of business and its impact on the community. In particular, he describes his business endeavors in such areas as banking, insurance, land development, dairy farming, and public service.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Maybe we'll start with your career at the University of North Carolina and what Chapel Hill was like in the years that you were there right after World War I.
It wasn't until '53 or '55 that I was elected to the board of trustees, I don't remember exactly.
No, I want to deal with your college days.
Oh, college.
Let's start there.
Have to go back a little bit further. Billy Carmichael and myself were in the same class, 1917, at Durham High School. His wife was also, May. And I was the third man scholastically in class, a preacher and a teacher's son beat me out. I was sixteen and I gave Billy Carmichael my scholarship to Chapel Hill so he was a class ahead of me, class of '21, I was '22 at Chapel Hill. I went on to Hotchkiss Prep School. Tore my knee all to hell playing football up there because I weighed 175 pounds and I as tall as I am now. They didn't move me, I played tackle. I kept that side of the line; I made the team. My grandfather had been a great friend of old Dr. Beelor, the headmaster, and that's why I went to Hotchkiss. And it made sense. My boys went to Millbrook School, Connecticut where we again knew the headmaster very well, and my grandsons went to Millbrook. The thought of a southerner going north to prep school made sense to me because then they came back and graduated at Chapel Hill, as I did, in the class of '22.
But scholastically, you were third in your class. Why did you go to Hotchkiss for more academic preparation?
My father and mother thought I was too young to come to Chapel Hill and
meet all the problems that were involved—women and gambling and all the
rest of the stuff.
Was this because of your knee?
Because of my knee. And they did not operate in those days but they put me in what they call counter irritation. They put me with towels from waist down and put me in a bake oven, and then they'd throw me in an ice cold shower, and I'd faint. Then the nurse said, "Aw, to hell with it," and she took off her clothes and came on in there with me.
You didn't faint!
No, I didn't faint that time.
This would have been the winter of 1917?
'17. And then I came to Chapel Hill the fall of '18 and graduated in the class of 1922. That was during the war, and I lived at Mrs. Battle's boarding house where the eastern portion of the Ackland Museum is, as a freshman. And then I had cottages in various and sundry places. John Shaw of Charlotte took me under his wing. And I had a little cottage, near the Coop; I ran the damn thing for two years, got my meals free.
Now is Cooup, spelled c-o-o-u-p as in …
C-double o-p.
C-double o-p.
And I had a very big cook, I forget his name, a little bitty Henry and the cook, and we fed the boys, there were two cabins there. Then I ran the SAE house, I built it. That was the second house, the SAE fraternity; my father had built the first one which was on the campus to the west of the present library, the Deke house, and then the SAE house. And that burned.
The first house burned?
Dad built it when he was here in college, he was the class of '89, I think. And I built the present fraternity house, it's still there. The first one in the original fraternity court. It's a disgrace now, I understand.
It's in pretty bad repair. I want to talk about the atmosphere at Chapel Hill at that time. But, what about the atmosphere in the country in 1917, 1918? How did young men like you feel about the war, what the country was doing?
Well, I was disappointed that I couldn't participate in the war, too young, but at Chapel Hill I was a member of Captain Allen, as I remember, the Canadian, the non-SATC boys.
OK, you're going to have to explain that.
Student Army Training Corps, or something like that.
Did they have an ROTC?
All the campus, all the dormitories were barracks. And the students were not permitted to go off campus. Those were all members of the SATC, Victor Bryant was one of the head ones. George Denney was the captain in our non-SATC. You remember George?
Uh-huh (affirmative)
And I was number two in the group and we as non-SATC had the run of the campus. I started, as I remember, the selling of apples and other things on the campus to the boys who were in barracks and couldn't go downtown.
So now, these were men who were in military training.
They were in military training. Luther Hodges was here; Victor Bryant was
here. And they went on to Plattsburg and got their officer position. I
remember November 1918 when the war was over, Pass Farrington who became
a doctor in Winston-Salem, a fraternity-mate, friend, came running
across the campus from South Building without a damn stitch on.
"Weeeeeeee, the war is over, the war is over!"
Now, the non-SATC, you did military training of some nature, is that right?
Oh, yeah, we had far greater military training than the boys in the barracks in SATC because there were about 150 of us or something. That was real training.
Did you march?
Oh, hell, yeah. We had some false guns, wooden ones, that looked like guns but some of the boys on campus had real rifles. And the Emerson Stadium was there, that was before 1926, I think it was, when they built the new one. Mother was a Grey Lady; she organized the Grey Ladies in Durham. Everything was gung ho for the war. As I remember, when I graduated in '22 there were only 2300 students here. There was a lesser number back in '18.
Was there pacifism on campus?
No, not the slightest. Everybody was gung ho, going to Europe.
Very patriotic.
Oh, hell, yeah, no question about it.
How did you feel about President Wilson, for instance, in a specific sense?
Oh, I don't remember any thought one way or the other.
How about about the issue of the League of Nations? Was that a topic?
Nobody gave a damn.
Nobody cared about that.
We were going to go to fight. Period.
So were you disappointed in a sense when the war was over and you were cheated?
Yes and no. We didn't know what we were doing to ourselves.
Now, did you know people like Sam Ervin? Did you have friends who were participating in the conflict?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I knew Sam and a lot of the old—well, there were a lot of older boys that were seniors and so on. Hell, I was a damn little freshman. But I had to behave myself.
Alright, what about the atmosphere on campus at this time? What was Chapel Hill like?
Franklin Street was unpaved; there was no asphalt. The Pickwick Theater was there and you had to be careful, you had to sit in the back of it because if you sat even three rows down somebody'd hit you with raw peanuts on the back of the head. Franklin Street—that's about all there was to Chapel Hill, as I remember. Collier-Cobb and all that crowd. We went downtown, walked the streets as they still do, but there wasn't much to it. Old Mr. Durham had an automobile, I forget his first name. And he used to drive us to Durham. We had a hell of a time getting back and forth. The train ran to the station out in Carrboro and you could take the train and go to University Station and come back. Well, that was a hell of a mess. Well, you stayed on campus, you just didn't run around.
Now, if I remember correctly, the first women came to campus in 1921 or '22. Is that correct?
There was, yeah. Jonathan Daniels and I started out together in the same class, but Jonathan was smarter than I and graduated in three years: Howard Patterson the same way; he was smarter, though he graduated in 1921, Jonathan in 1921. I was football manager so I had a lot of other fish to fry, fraternity and so forth, and I didn't take my studies too seriously one way or the other. What did we start on?
On women.
The first woman was admitted to the campus in the early '20s.
Right, I think it was '21.
Jonathan and I had a vote on the campus. We ran the vote and it was against co-education and the next day the trustees, my father, Josephus Daniels and old Judge Parker, I remember, were members of the board executive committee. They approved women coming to the campus and the first woman admitted was a Chapel Hill girl. I don't remember her name but she was not particularly impressive from a looks standpoint or action, a great big woman, I remember. Terrible, terrible. And from then on, slowly, they were limited at first to Chapel Hill residents and then the door opened.
Why did you not want to see it co-educational? I would think boys would want to have girls on campus.
Well, we weren't interested in women to start with, and we liked what we had. I can't give you any other reason.
OK. Well, what things were you interested in? Obviously, sports were a big part of life, and fraternities were a big part of life.
Fraternities were a big part. There were fraternities and
non-fraternities. And the non-fraternities were strong. I can remember
going down to Battle or Ehringhaus or whatever the damn three
dormitories down on Franklin Street were called. Sam Caffey and Mary
Worsham were blind and we'd go down there and read to them, read their
lesson to them—they lived there. We just didn't go off campus except to
Franklin Street and I used to take boys home to Durham and mother always
was happy to have somebody come over for supper or something like that
and she called us "some awful eaters."
Now, did people put much emphasis on academics at that time? You said you had lots of other fish to fry.
I don't remember particularly one way or the other. They put emphasis on
athletics. Basketball didn't amount to too much and then again it did.
Billy Carmichael, Sis Parry, and so forth, that was before Cartwright,
the younger brother, came into the picture, a beautiful player. Billy
was beautiful and it was just lovely to watch him. He used to play in
the old Bynum gym. And we got up in the gallery, the track was up there.
That's where we had our dances. And the social life was very important
and we used to bring girls in later. They stayed with Mrs. Klutz, which
is now a fraternity house on Franklin Street, a
Now, who were your great athletic rivals at that point?
Virginia, because it was before the days of Duke.
Duke doesn't come until '23, I guess it is.
And when Duke finally came into the picture we kind of looked down our noses. We went over to play on the old field. Duke was young.
But Virginia was the …
Virginia was—no question there—the big game. As I remember, Virginia was turned down by the faculty here because Johnson was on the Carolina team, played half-back, Runt Lowe, and God knows who, Bill Blount, and so forth, you remember. You know of Bill, went on to be president and chairman of Liggett & Myers. The game was called off. So a bunch of us got together and we brought Reinhart and the Virginia team down to Chapel Hill.
You mean independently?
Yeah, hell yeah. And we had the game, and I remember sitting on the grass as manager. I had the receipts and so forth, and I remember sitting on the ground with two tin boxes full of money and counting. What was it—$16,000 or something like that? And Carolina beat Virginia 7 to nothing.
Would people travel between the campuses? Would they go up to Virginia for the Virginia game and Virginia students come down here?
Yeah, yeah.
That must have been quite a haul from Charlottesville at that time.
Oh, yeah, it was terrible, terrible. No question. By automobile.
Or train, I guess on a train to Danville, Virginia, and then on up to Charlottesville.
Sure, sure. Take the old Southern. We'd go to Greensboro and go up on the Southern.
Now, what about some of the old professors that were here? Do you remember some of your professors and the people who …
Oh, yeah, very, very, well. Dr. Drew Patterson (I was just a member of
the Patterson family) Mary Patterson, Howard of course, and they lived
down on—hard to believe—corner on Franklin Street and Hillsborough. And
I was in and out of there all the time. That group of four boys, took
very handsome girls down to Bynum for a week-end. We had two canoes and
four horses,
Now just one thing about parties. If you'll excuse me, in some ways life in those days sounds very unsophisticated in modern terms.
Well, I'd say so. We had fraternity parties and there was nothing untoward about them at all.
Were they chaperoned?
Oh, hell, yes, of course. You took that for granted. And there was no monkey-business or foolishness at all in those days.
How about drinking? Was there a lot of drinking?
I remember hiring a cook by the little old cottage that I had that the four of us lived in in my sophomore year: Bill Guthrie and Emerson Tucker, John Shaw from Charlotte. And I remember Emerson Tucker from Durham, and Guthrie from Durham, getting drunk, and I remember chasing Tucker all over the campus because he said something I didn't like and I couldn't catch him. But he was drunk. And John and I did not drink, period; we never thought about drinking.
Some people did.
Oh, yeah. And I can remember Rick running into the fraternity house and standing there on the bottom of the steps (the stairway coming down), and knocking the hell out of anybody coming down the stairs drunk. He beat the hell out of them. I'd just knock them down. That's the way we controlled drinking.
Now, what about the university acting as some gauge of morality as far as the students were concerned? Did the university make any attempt in religious or other things to … ?
I don't remember any. No, the university ran itself. South Building. President Chase, long, tall, very distinguished man, and Charlie Woolen, business manager, he was the one I worked with as football sub-assistant, assistant and as manager.
Is that Woolen of Woolen Gym? Is that where that comes from?
Yeah. Charlie Woolen and for many years I remember, oh yeah. And we used to take the football team to Yale every September on the train.
That would be a big trip.
That was overnight. We'd get up there and they'd beat the hell out of us. That was in the days that Yale had a real football team. And I don't know why we went up there. And we went to New Orleans one year, played Tulane. But the rest of the time it was around here.
That brings up an interesting point. What was the image that you had of the university at that time? In other words, today, I mean, sometimes you hear "The University of North Carolina: The Harvard of the South." Did you look on yourself as an academic equal of places like Yale?
No. Never thought about it. We just went to class. And we went to class,
I don't know when the kids go to college anymore? I have a step-daughter
in Greensboro, a junior, she's
You had classes on Saturday.
Oh, sure. We started at eight o'clock and we went through, lab in the afternoon, and you finished up three to five o'clock and classes until twelve o'clock on Saturday. Sure, never thought about it otherwise. You worked like hell.
But you didn't really concern yourself about the national ranking of the university.
Oh, never thought about it or gave a damn. There were only the three institutions at the time—Chapel Hill, Greensboro (and Greensboro was full of women and nobody paid any attention to it), and State College, oh we looked down our noses at State.
As a technical school? Was that how it was viewed?
Oh, that was a "cow college" and dairy and what have you. And, oh, Chapel Hill was way up above them, no question about it. We played State in football because we had to. I don't remember the university administration participating, getting in the way of the school or the students getting in the way of the university, faculty.
Now, what about compulsory chapel, though? Wasn't there compulsory chapel at that time?
Oh, sure, sure. Several times a week as I remember and it slowly petered out, eventually, after I left college.
Did you take chapel seriously?
No, it was just one of those things you had to do. You didn't worry about it.
Alright, now your degree was in …
A B.S. in commerce.
Commerce. What was a commerce degree like?
That was the second
A "slide," we would call it.
When I was football manager, I attended two classes in geology and passed
the course. I was football manager, what did they know?
Now, did you have a sense at that time that you wanted to go into business? Was that clear to you that that's what you wanted to do?
Yeah. After my hospitalization, I became very much interested in medicine. I used to stand on crutches and watch operations.
Now, this was when you came from Hotchkiss, right?
Yeah, when I came back from Hotchkiss. I used to go watch the doctor's operate.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Did you know that you wanted to go in business and you referred to the fact that you had been in the hospital and so on.
I developed an interest in medicine. My grandfather had built a hospital back in '95 and rebuilt it in 1907. My father was president.
This is a philosophical question in a sense having to do with philanthropic activity, why did he build a hospital?
His wife had all kinds of troubles, kidney troubles, nephritis, cystitis, God knows what all else. And she went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He was born and raised in Baltimore. She was from Hagerstown. And his father was the first wholesaler of Bull Durham tobacco. He came down here in '75 and became the secretary-treasurer to W. Duke, Sons, and they added "and Company" for him. Old man Wash Duke, Ben, and Buck Duke. He owned a fourth of the old American Tobacco Trust and got out in 1913 so he wouldn't have to go to jail under the Sherman Antitrust Law.
It was broken up at that point.
That's right. When it was broken back into its component parts. He built
it because there was no hospital in Durham, for one thing. He built it
where McPherson Hospital is
You said a pest house; how do you mean? You mean a place they didn't want to go in a sense?
People didn't want to go to the hospital. And I say advisedly a pest house. It was a place where, if you had a bad disease or something, you went to die. Period. And old Dr. Carr, A. G. Carr, was their doctor and he was very instrumental in bringing the hospital into being. My grandfather built it, ran it, endowed it, and, you go back and look in the records as I did: thousand dollar debts, ten thousand dollar debts. Hell, that's all there was to it. Eventually it became the public hospital and he built another one in 1907. He built the Watts Hospital which is now the School of Science and Math. My father built it, my grandfather paid for it: the administration building, the surgery and one ward building. Men on one floor, women on the other; eventually another ward building was built. When he died, (was it '21 or something like that?) he left money for the Private Patient Pavilion which I built. I'd gotten into the hospital business by that time.
Now, was this done out of a sense of social responsibility? Why would he?
My father walked in the office one day. I went to work in 1925 in my
father's office, $250 a month; I lived on the
Ablekopf?
Isidore Ablekopf. Great friend of mine. His father ran a little grocery store on the northeast corner of Morehead Avenue (you know where that is?) and Jackson Street, which is one street over to the east from Duke Street. And we lived where the highrise is today on Duke Street. And the Lyons lived on the corner of Morehead and Duke. We lived this side of it, in the old house that had belonged to my grandfather. It had been built in 1875 when he came down here. When he rebuilt the "pink elephant" as I called the tremendous house that he built on the hill. It had been moved down wall by wall because they didn't know how to move a whole house. It had been rebuilt on the property when we came down from New York in 1903 or '04, or something like that. We moved into this house, my mother, eventually my sisters, and me.
Now I was asking you about the question of social responsibility.
I was the only son. I had this interest in medicine, as I say. But there wasn't anything for me to do but go to work, go into business. Period.
Now did your father impress that on you?
No. That was my decision. He owned the then Durham Loan and Trust Company
and the Home Savings Bank, where Guaranty Bank is now. He had started
Durham Loan and Trust Company when he came from New York. I went into
the bank in 1925 without a
Alright, well, I've lost a couple of years in your life here. Now, you graduated from college in 1922.
I took two years law and I graduated Chapel Hill and I was the youngest
man in my class. And I never thought about it one way or the other. I
missed Phi Beta Kappa because I busted the hell out of accounting.
Now, you obviously were intelligent enough to pass the course. You obviously don't have too much trouble dealing with the figures. Why did you fail the course?
Then I studied law because my father was a lawyer. And I wanted the law. And as I said, I passed the bar in August, I didn't have but a two-year course.
So that's August of '24.
I went through the summer school in law and passed the bar. I was the second man to leave the law exam in the old Supreme Court building and I thought I'd busted the hell out of it. But I went on to Asheville, I caught the sleeper to Ashville, I was engaged by that time, and I told my wife-to-be when I got there, I said, "I busted the hell out of it." She said, "Well, we're going to get married September the 24th, the invitations are out, already engraved," in those days. And I said, "Well." It was not in the actual paper the morning that I arrived in Asheville. My name was not there.
On the list of those who had passed, you mean?
Uh-huh (affirmative). So finally I had sense enough to call the News and Observer in Raleigh. Mr. Daniels was still
the head of it, as I remember. Frank was running it. And they said they
had not published the names west of Greensboro, but I had passed. So we
got married.
So did you practice law?
$52 and a half. I quit.
Now what does that mean? You're going to have to explain that.
Well, I collected one note for $400, I won't tell you the name. The note
was past due. The statute of limitations had run against it and I wrote
one letter and collected the $400 note from a man and I charged him $52
and a half. Period. That was the extent of my law practice.
That was enough for you.
Got married.
OK. Now, you got married in …
September 24, 1924.
'24. That was in Asheville? Did you get married in Asheville?
No, it was in Baltimore because she was the daughter of the Reverend
Duncan McCullouch who owned Oldfield School for Girls, one of the great
old girls' schools, and it's still a non-coeducational, still a girls'
school, thereby hangs a looonnngggg
So you were married in Baltimore?
In Baltimore. And I remember the church vividly. It was an Episcopal church and it had flags on both sides of the chancel all the way down, all the way through. It was beautiful. It looked like old European.
Now, were you an Episcopalian?
Presbyterian. Congenital Presbyterian. My grandfather had come down here
as a Lutheran and there was no Lutheran church so he went into the
Presbyterian church, the nearest thing to it. And he became ruling elder
for 25 years, and Superintendent of the Sunday school for 25 years; a
great churchman. And my father followed him as eventually an elder. And
I declined to be elder because I wanted to take a drink.
You should have been an Episcopalian. Then you wouldn't have had to worry about it.
I married two Episcopalians.
So this was the Baltimore of H. L. Mencken at this point, a very aristocratic community, with many German-Americans represented in Baltimore at that time, and a sophisticated community. Was it not?
Oh, Baltimore was a very sophisticated place. That was before all the development that Rouse did down in the harbor and so forth. My grandfather's family lived out at Catonville, out on the southwest suburb of Baltimore; had a farm. I remember as a kid going up there. Watts Carr, Sr. used to go up there every summer. I went there as a kid twelve, thirteen. And they had Guernsey cows, had a very fine herd of Guernsey cows, where I fell in love with the Guernseys.
I was going to say. That's where the Quail Roost Guernsey herd has its origins.
I brought some of the three titters and one-eyed cows down from up there at the time of the dispersal sale.
Now, where did you meet your wife? Your wife is from Baltimore, you're from …
My sister and my wife and Margaret Carr, Claiborne Carr's daughter, granddaughter of old General Carr, thereby hangs a tale. He was corporal in the Army, the Confederate Army, and he came home and declared himself to be a general. And he was known as General Carr from then on.
I thought people just claimed they were colonels?
Don't you put that in the transcript!
No.
But, you ought to know that. But they all were—Marcia Davenport, the writer—they were all members of the senior class at Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. You've heard of Shipley School?
Oh, yes.
And my sister must have had, or some of the girls claimed that she had, trouble getting a beau for the spring dances, so she invited her brother. I went up there. God knows when that was; that was '23, I reckon. And I went there and we had two dances, card dances in those days. Two dances with the gal—Anne McCullouch—who became my wife. I caught the milk train out of Philadelphia down here and went to class the next morning and she was invited home in Durham by my sister immediately after Christmas. So she came down. We were engaged ten days later and I said, I remember vividly, what I said, I asked her to marry me and she was "so and so," and I said, "I'll give 'til tomorrow. I'm going to put you on a train tomorrow night for Baltimore," where her home was, out in the country, "and I want to know by tomorrow." Period. So I found out later that she sat up all that night and talked with my sister's governess and told me the next morning that she would marry me.
Let me ask you a personal question about yourself. That implies a certain
amount of … what term do I want to use? … of decisiveness on your part.
In other words, it didn't take you very long to make up your mind and
then when you made up your mind you wanted an answer. Would you describe
Yeah, yeah. I've been that way all my life, I reckon.
OK, so you make up your mind what you want and you go out and get it. And that's it.
Oh, yeah. Sure. No need fiddling about it. I have no stress. I learned a long time ago my present wife is stressful, things bother her, she's much younger, she's 57 or 58 or something, her second marriage and my second marriage, but she gets all tied up in knots. I just kind of go along minding my own damn business. Always have. And stress can tear you all to pieces.
So when you make a decision you put aside, you don't sort of go back and mull over it and say maybe, maybe, maybe.
Oh, no, no, no.
Are you a risk taker? If you make up your mind quickly there's a certain amount of risk involved.
Life is full of risks. In the banking business you've got to know what you're doing for one thing, and you make up your mind if you want to do it. Period.
And do you make mistakes that way?
Oh, sure.
What do you do about your mistakes?
Well, you try to correct them. Eventually, I was a vice-president, and
eventually president, and then chairman of the board, you see that on my
curriculum vitae. And I'm still
One more question on this issue of personal style. What about dealing with subordinates? Do you give a subordinate a lot of room to make decisions and to make mistakes?
Sure, sure, sure. Got to. I have always followed the general principle that I listen first what his thought might be. Then we discuss the situation and we decide. He may decide, I may decide. That's that. Go on about his business.
And so you give your subordinates plenty of room.
I listen. I'm considered one of the best listeners in Durham. And I don't pat myself on the back about that, but I mean that's just one way of doing things.
One wonders, though, where does this sense of confidence come from? That you can make up your mind quickly and that you can put your mistakes behind you? Where does this sense of confidence come from?
Well, my grandfather was a confident man, for one thing, tall, slender,
six-foot-two. And he used to walk me to school at the old Morehead
Grammar School, down Jackson, middle of the street. He'd stroll right
out and I'd keep up with him. And I'd lean over and he'd hit me in the
back. "Straighten up," I can remember, "straighten up, you little devil,
straighten up." He never cussed or anything like that. He smoked cigars.
I learned something there. And I was very much disturbed when the family
would send the carriage for me or send me to school on a
So, maybe you absorbed in a sense a personal style.
I think so. He used to come home and talk to us at the table and tell us what had happened, and so forth. I'll never forget one thing he told us. My two sistes were gaga when he said he knew a preacher was coming to see him and wanted a thousand dollars, which was big money in those days. To make a long story short, he met him at the door with five dollars cash and handed it to him, patted him on the back, and the preacher went away happy. That was big doings as far as we were just kids. I don't know how old we were.
Now as an example, although it violates chronology a little bit, I want to go back for a second to your college career. You said you built the SAE house. What do you mean by that?
Well, I was in charge. I selected the architect, I followed the architect, I told him what to do. Atwood and Nash had—I forget now who built the damn thing. Got the contractor, followed the contractor, paid for it, did the financing. I remember it didn't cost more than $25,000, something like that.
But you took a lot of responsibility.
I was responsible. Period. I didn't ask anybody. I just built it.
OK. It's incredible to think of a nineteen or twenty year old taking the responsibility for building a $25,000 building which, as they say, was real money at that point.
In those days. Well. When I came home after ten months overseas honeymoon, thereby hangs a story.
Yeah, I want to hear about that.
One of the first things my father did was say, "I wish you'd build a store building," which is now occupied by Rolls, or was; God knows what's there now on Main Street. So, I got an architect, contractor, and we built a three-story limestone front building. It was a hell of a nice building. He had organized Tilley's store, put them in there and they went bust. And it took me eighteen months to clean the damn mess up and lease it to somebody else. That was one of the first jobs I ever had.
Did your father lean over your shoulder on a project like that and say, "Well, let me see the drawings and let me be sure that I like that," and so on, and so on, and so on. He let you do it.
He had his office in the northwest corner of the Trust Building, which he had built when he came down from New York. It was the first real office building built in North Carolina, 1903-04. Then the secretary's office, then I had an office. And my grandfather was across the hall.
And you were accepted as a decision-making participant in the process, then?
Well, I was told, I was asked, not told, I was asked to do so and so and I did it. Period.
Alright, we'll conclude this in a moment but tell me about this honeymoon that you went on.
My father was a very generous man. And he asked me, he said, "I wish you would look at your grandfather's," my grandfather had died, "situation in South Korea. And I have business that I'd like you to attend to in Shanghai. Would you like to go to Korea and Shanghai on your honeymoon?" I said, "Well, that's pretty damn good." But we discussed it with my wife to be and we decided, fine. We got to Shanghai.
How did you go? How did you travel?
By boat.
So you had to take the train across the country?
We went to New York, got married in Baltimore and went to New York; spent the night; caught one of the American Line boats that had a small number of passengers, a freight ship, that kept going around the world. Every few weeks another would go around. We went to Havana, spent two days in Havana. Went on through the Panama Canal. Came around to Los Angeles.
Now was this a kind of luxury liner?
Oh, no, no, no. It was a passenger-freighter in those days. Oh, there might be thirty passengers and upper and lower berth, simple. They stopped for two days in Havana for freight and so forth and went to Panama, to Los Angeles. I had flu in Los Angeles so we left the boat. Were there for two weeks.
Los Angeles was a small town in those days, was it not?
No, it was a good size.
Really?
I remember we stayed the night at the Ambassador Hotel, and we stayed there two weeks. It damn near broke me. The Ambassador was the hotel in those days. Then we went on to San Francisco. We went to Santa Barbara by automobile, and went to San Francisco and we caught another one of those boats to Hawaii. We were in Hawaii three or four days, and so forth. I was recuperating. Went to Japan. We got to Japan shortly after the earthquake had destroyed Yokahama. And we landed at Yokahama and I remember my wife getting in a rickshaw. "Gone in the darkness."
You thought you'd lost her, right?
I thought so. But eventually she showed up.
Was destruction from the earthquake still obvious?
Oh, yeah. The steps to the American Embassy, or consulate, or whatever it was—there were three steps, I remember vividly. Period. Cement something. A whole side of the hill had come in. Oh, it was something. It wasn't far from Tokyo. We went on to Tokyo and the Imperial Hotel, which had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright—earthquake-proof.
It sort of floated.
And spread all over the hill. And there we met a gal who was the first
white girl born (thirty-three years before) in Japan. The wife of
Trustcon Steel people, I can't remember the name. I thought about it the
other day. And she gave us use of
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
… Japan at that time, so you were something of an oddity, I assume.
I had on knickers, the kind that went over the knee. I remember walking along and seeing little Japanese boys kneeling down and looking up under my coat, and times we stopped so they could see what the hell I had on. Quite a feeling.
You describe the scene on the railroad car
The scene of seeing this gentleman nude. So you went to Seoul.
Went to Seoul. A missionary met us in a car, a Ford, and he had a missionary woman with him. The two girls sat on the back seat. I sat on the front seat with this missionary and we drove down to Taiden and on down to Sungchun and Kwanchu on the west coast, became mountainous. And he was driving through the mountain country and talking to the back seat and just driving ahead and finally I took the damn wheel, got him out of the way, the preacher. We got to Sungchun or Kwanchu, I don't remember which it was. My grandfather had established a medical missionary station there and had a one-armed doctor, he lost an arm shooting "gwoog" (pheasants), as they called them, and they had a little native hospital, a big Japanese hospital, a very big building, and no Korean would go to the Japanese hospital.
How did he happen to establish a hospital in Korea? That was a very distant land.
Well, the church was interested in Korea.
The Presbyterian church?
This was the Presbyterian church, the First Presbyterian Church of Durham. And, I don't know, somebody talked him into building a little hospital, a medical clinic, and they preached and took care of the patients, all together. And the preachers came from over here in Richmond, Union Theological Seminary, southerners. I remember Anne and I coming back to the church eventually in Durham and talking to the congregation at night service, Sunday night, in which we lambasted the preachers, both of us. And we said they weren't worth a damn. But they'd preach the gospel, yes, but it was not what you and I would like. But the medical side of it was marvelous and they were doing a great job of developing Christians.
And serving the medical needs of the area.
And this preacher had seven children. And I remember a great big bed and the baseboard was far away from the floor, and you could lay there and see the old Koreans going by in their white long gown aand black horsehair hat. And I heard a knock on the door and the amah, the maid, said we'd better get up and I looked out the other way and I saw the four-holer with seven kids lined up waiting to get into the four-holer. And I said, "Yeah, I thought we better get up."
The bathroom was in heavy demand at that point.
And we stayed there two or three days and then caught the boat and went to Shanghai and stayed in the Astor Hotel, the only hotel in Shanghai in those days, 1925.
Along the "bund" as it was called?
Along the bund. And I remember when we first started upstairs there was a China boy laying across the threshold. By that time I had picked up enough Pidgeon English, so I said, "What you do, boy?" He said, "Me key boy." I can remember it vividly. He reached up on the top of the lintel, got the key, opened the door, and laid down beside the door. And that was it.
That was his job, was to open the door and watch the key.
And then a knock came on the door, that's while we were unpacking, and I said, "What you do?" "Me give miss bath." I said, "No, sorry." But he drew the tub and she took a bath. The water, when you pulled the plug in the tub, the water ran down the side of the room through a little channel and out on the sidewalk. The "john" worked.
Shanghai interests me as an international community; were you aware of that?
We were sent by this girl, the first white girl born in Japan, to her
sister, who was Mrs. Atkinson, the wife of the "number one" man in
Shanghai, Standard Oil. Call him the mayor, or whatnot, he was "it." She
sent us to her sister
We were talking about the international community in …
The Bund was filled with sampans. And they lived on the sampans, some of them never got off the sampan.
Was the British presence very obvious there?
Oh, yes, no question. And there was no problem. We went out to Crow's antique shop. The day after we were there the irregular troops came in and tore it all to hell. We could not go to Peking, as we wanted to, on the Blue train, because the irregulars stopped the train every so often and killed everybody, and what the hell.
Was the revolution very apparent in China at that time? I mean the disruptions…
No, not particularly, but when we went aboard the ship to sail to Hong Kong, we went in a hail of bullets.
You're kidding?
I'm not kidding you.
The irregulars were shooting?
Yeah. Oh, hell, nobody paid too much attention to it one way or the other. We didn't bother.
Did you have the sense of a society coming apart? Of the dynasty not able to maintain? Things went smoothly at that time.
The rickshaws, no automobiles. You went by rickshaw.
But you felt relatively safe, secure, as a foreigner.
I never thought about it, as I remember thinking back on it.
We had an Asiatic fleet there, there was a ship that sometimes came to Shanghai. Did you ever see any American military presence in either Japan or China?
I eventually knew at Virginia Beach a retired naval officer who was the ensign, the only naval officer, American, in the Far East, when he was an ensign on the Yangtzee River.
There were patrol boats, they had, river patrol boats. An author from
here in Chapel Hill wrote a book called The Sand
Pebbles, in fact, about the Yangtzee patrol boats and what they did
in the '20s and '30s and what life was like.
The name of Julian Timberlake.
Then from Shanghai, where did you go?
We went to Hong Kong and it was quite a city, very, very British, controlled by the British. I don't remember the hotel or anything but it was nothing to compare to what you see now from photographs. And we went to Canton on the riverboat and came back. And then we went from Hong Kong to Bangkok by boat and we spent a week in Bangkok. We spent a week any damn place we wanted.
You had a photograph in there of Pnom Phen.
That was—I have to stop and think a minute—French Indochina. We went from
Bangkok to French Indochina, as I remember, or may be beforehand. Now
Vietnam, we went to Pnom Phen first. And, oh, yeah. We went down south,
we caught a little bitty boat, a little bitty thing. And I used to go
swimming off the boat with a very big fat Chinese captain. We got into
Bangkok eventually. And we went on from Bangkok to Calcutta, up to
Darjeeling, and that's where we met the Irish golf champion, woman, a
long story there. And we went on to Ceylon, that's where we met her, in
Ceylon. And then we caught the boat from
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah. American officers, the same boat.
Line, the American Line.
I sat in the dining room with an American officer with a drawn pistol for three days.
What did your wife do? Did she stay in her cabin or what?
No, no, we just … You meet certain things and you handle them and you
just go on about your business. The Chinese crew had been attacked by
the Filipino stewards, or vice versa. They had been playing Fantan on
the stern of the ship and a Filipino blew them up or messed them up. The
China steward, a great big fellow (the same one who we'd had across the
Pacific, the same boat), he said, "Missy, lock door tonight." We'd just
had a curtain to get the breeze, never air conditioning in those days.
We were in Cairo, Luxor, Kharnak. Eventually we ended up in Rome, and
that's where mother sent us a cable that she was sailing on the
Aquitania, such and such a date, meet her in London, period. We met her
in London. I had cabled my father from Cairo to send me three thousand
dollars. Well, he did, but he took it out of my savings account. I had
$3.61, I found, when I got home.
Now, how long did this whole trip take?
Ten months.
Ten months.
And we met mother. We were going to spend the summer in Europe. We were there. And we met her in London and we came back with my two sisters on the Aquitania.
From London.
From London. Southampton. That was in June or July.
What a trip!
It was a gorgeous trip, to tell you the truth. But we had enough money saved from the return trip, Shanghai back to New York, to go the other way. We stretched it out, except for that three thousand dollars.
Now, what would you say was the long term influence on your life of that trip? Did it influence and your view of the world?
Well, one, the memories. Two, we had a hell of a good time. We had
twenty-eight pieces of baggage including two golf bags, and I never
touched them from the time we got on the boat in New York til I got
back.
You can't find a porter now. Now, I'm trying to get a sense of what it was like. Did you dress for dinner at this time?
No. We dressed in Darjeeling. I took a dinner coat, of course, and
Darjeeling was the only place that had a British custom. This was a rest
camp up in the mountains, Darjeeling. Some, no we didn't dress in
Colombo. Well, it was a fascinating trip and the memories, I haven't
thought about the trip for a long time, but a lot of things come back
and there'll be more Newsweek, and Time, and Fortune, and so on. But you've been there and it's different.
It's completely changed. And it hasn't changed.
I'm jumping ahead in a sense in thinking about your involvement in international affairs at the time of the Second World War and wondering whether this trip gave a sense of the world that was somewhat different from that of your colleagues that were …
Oh, I think so, without any question. I was a member of the "Committee to Defend America through Aid to the Allies" prior to the war, the Second World War. And I worked like a dog for that and I had the southern aspect of it. And I remember Hodding Carter. My job was to persuade people, newspapers, writers, and stuff, to change from isolationist to interventionist. And I went on then, it eventually turned into something requiring that I go to New York every so often. Oh, that damn train was just back and forth, before the days of planes. And to New York, I can't think of that man's name who's the head of the thing; we used to meet at the old University Club, a group of us. Herbert Agar. We threw Bob Allen out because he talked. We had confidential intelligence, British and Fench intelligence, and I think we did a job.
Well, I want to go into that on a next visit.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
We left off last time, I think we were up to the mid-1920s and talking about your marriage and your honeymoon and your coming back and more or less getting started in business.
In 1926.
'26.
'25, the fall of '25.
What was Durham like in 1925?
A little town. That's about all.
Was it a center of commerce?
Oh, no, no. It was, I don't quite know how to describe it. American and
Liggett & Myers tobacco companies, real manufacturing, then
Imperial Tobacco, had a receiving station where… The tobacco market was
a real thing in Durham in those days, four or five big warehouses and
the farmers brought their tobacco in and the tobacco companies bought
it. Imperial bought a lot of tobacco and shipped it to England, it being
one of the companies that Mr. Buck Duke had organized back in the early
days of the first few years of the century. And when he had gone to
England and took over several British concerns and organized the
Imperial Tobacco Company to handle England, and American Tobacco to
handle North America, and the British—American Tobacco Company to handle
the rest of the world. He thought big.
Was it a company town, in a sense?
Yes, the Erwin Mill owned a great many houses, small houses, three or four rooms, all in a row, all out in west Durham. And the same thing applied to the Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company, that's the proper name, had similar houses in east Durham. And East Durham was filled with textile workers; West Durham was textile and the tobacco workers were scattered all over in Durham. Durham was 50,000 people or something like that at the time, whereas now it's 125,000.
Now what about the black community in Durham?
The black community was strong. It's always been strong as far as I can remember in that now they're 45 percent or something like that of the population of Durham. But then it was far less. They have a much higher birth rate than the whites and all kinds of problems.
Was there a black elite? A black business and intellectual elite?
There was a black bank that was started by the doctors, Dr. Spalding came into the picture. Spalding started the insurance company, the North Carolina Mutual, which became the largest Negro life insurance company in the world and still here. Some of his descendants and relatives and so on are still running it, Kennedy and so on. But it was a shirt-tail of a business to start with. And I remember my grandfather and father assisted Dr. Merrick and one other man to start the company; they put up some money and showed them how to do it and so forth, and then they went on their own. Grandfather and Dad have never had any part in the operation at all and eventually the North Carolina Mutual became one of the outstanding businesses in Durham as represented by a building that's fifteen or twenty stories high on the old Ben Duke home place. They bought that block and built it. There's a long story about that building but that's that.
Were there any of the Duke family members still in Durham at that time?
Buck Duke was, and Ben Duke was, in the old Fidelity Bank. And when my
father first came here, and I may have said so before, that they did not
pay interest on savings accounts and my father had a real fight with
them because he started what's now the Central Carolina Bank, it was
then Durham Loan and Trust Company and Durham Realty and Insurance
Company in the old Trust Building. And he paid 4 percent interest on
savings accounts regardless of whether people came in and demanded it or
asked for it and so forth. And Mr. Buck Duke, Buck and Ben were in the
the
Duke bank and the bank in Durham at the time,
eventually they started paying interest. You had to go in and demand it
before they'd pay it. And it's interesting that in 1937, I think it was,
when we built the office building, I built, which is now the CCB
Building, that we had reached roughly ten million dollars of total
assets. That was a lot of money in those days. And the Fidelity Bank was
the same and we were passing, we were slowly creeping up on the Fidelity
Bank and so they joined, or merged, into the Wachovia. Mr. John Wiley
was the president and Mr. Kirkland later took his place when Wiley died.
They all lived over on the Morehead Hill section, the Wileys, the
Whites, the Moreheads, the Watts, the Hills, and so forth; that was the section of town. My father, when he came to town
or shortly thereafter, organized the first real estate residential
development in Durham, which is now known as Club Boulevard, from the
water works east to Watts Hospital, and now the Science and Math
complex.
I used to live on 2133 West Club Boulevard, the house that Walter Biggs built. So I know that.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Walter became a member of the city council and then he had an unfortunate situation.
His son got in… Well, anyhow …
That's another story.
We'll have to take that off the tape. I'll tell you, I heard a funny
story, I think it was Ben Duke that it was attributed to, that somebody,
that Duke was going with a woman of loose morals and some member of the
family got him aside and said, "You can't do this, it's hurting the
reputation of the family. That woman has slept with every man in
Durham." And he thought for a moment and he said, "Well, Durham's not
such a big town."
I never heard that one.
I'm not sure. I think it may be apocryphal.
Well, I think so because Ben Duke was—he looked like Disraeli, almost,
was little and, not shriveled up or anything like that but he was very
delicate looking, whereas Buck Duke was [with exaggeration] great, big, full, great, big stomach, tough.
Country boy; well, I mean, they were country people for a long time.
Oh, sure, they were country people.
Old Wash Duke lived out in what is now the Duke Homestead on the northern
portion of Durham. They had the tobacco barns. And he started in about,
as I said last time, building the hogsheads and so on, had a belly on
them so that they could roll them to Wilmington to ship the tobacco to
England. But the troops that were stationed here just west of Durham two
or three miles out at the end of the Civil War, broke into the tobacco
barns and stole the tobacco. That's how the tobacco business got
started. They scattered all over the United States, then they wrote back
for some of that
Sounds like a Virginia plot.
Well, it was very typical of Virginia. They'd take the full credit for everything. North Carolina in those days was known as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit, "— Virginia and South Carolina. Of course, South Carolina had been settled a long time ago and Virginia had the Cavaliers. And North Carolina was settled by the third and fourth sons that didn't have a cent. They'd come over from England and the Moravians and various and sundry different groups of people, the Germans.
The Valdesians.
And so forth. So we had a working group fo people in North Carolina in the early days and they did a good job.
Now, was Durham considered to be a center of commerce for all of North Carolina at that time?
No, I wouldn't say a center of manufacturing of those two, tobacco and
textiles, but old Raleigh looked down on Durham. Raleigh was the
center—the state capital and so forth—and Hillsborough had been the
capital back in late Revolutionary days, and they looked down their
nose. Everybody looked down their nose at Durham. They didn't do that in
Winston-Salem, for some reason. Greensboro was a little town.
Winston-Salem was in the tobacco business; Reynolds was just blooming
like a rose. But old Durham was the fourth or fifth town; it was a town,
it wasn't a city. Raleigh was leading, Charlotte, Asheville, now Durham
was what number five or six in the state. No. I can remember walking to
school, public school, that was back in 19—well, I graduated in 1917,
and so that was, I skipped two classes, so that was 1907 or something—we
used to walk to grammar school and then went on to high school which is
now the Durham Art Council building. But you never thought about it one
way or the other. The big houses were on Morehead and the little houses
were east Durham and west Durham and the middle houses were on Dillard
Street. Now Dillard was where General Carr had a big, almost a, well I'd
call it a gingerbread house, a tremendous damn thing on the corner of
Main and Dillard and eventually Mr. Toms's home, where the bus station
is now in Durham. Main Street was—my uncle, Isham Hill had a reasonably
small house on Main
They manufactured the only silk stockings during the Second World War. I talked to them, from Washington in the OSS, and I got the complete production of silk stockings and would hand them out, or would have them given out, in Lisbon to various sources of intelligence. aAter I got the intelligence or my people did, we'd give them the second stocking, so that they had a pair of stockings.
You give them one at a time.
One at a time. Unless they produced they didn't get it because Lisbon, Portugal, was a hotbed of intrigue of all nations—German, French, what have you.
Because Portugal was neutral?
Neutral. Spain was neutral.
Now, going back to this 1925, mid—1925 period, as a young man entering business, going into business with your father and thinking of things on your own, did the world look bright to you? Did it look like this prosperity was going to go on forever?
I never thought about it one way or the other. I was busy. I lived on the corner of Morehead and Willard Street in a little house before Mrs. Morrison gave up her life interest in the big house. And after that happened I had to move up there. That was during the period of kidnapping and so forth that was going on all over the country.
Now Watts must have been born …
Watts was born in 1927 or '8, something like that. And I had bars on the
windows and so forth. We were set apart because we had a governess to
take care of the kids. I was working, hell I didn't pay any attention to
them one way or the other. My first wife did. We had three children;
every three years we had another kid. I remember the first automobile
that ever came to Durham. I tried to drive it on what's now Chapel Hill
Street at Duke. It cranked on the side and you had little red roadster
business and so on. I drove the first automobile we ever owned, a Buick;
I met my father at the station because he went to New York by train. And
the train came into the Union Station and we had five railroads serving
Durham at the time. I think one or two are here now. I was fourteen as I
remember and drove him home. There were very few automobiles in the
community. We still had a horse and a buggy and a carriage and a
victoria. The victoria burned up when the stable burned up one day. I
used to go with my grandfather on Sunday morning, or Sunday afternoon,
down to the Pearl Mill, as they called it, which was at Duke and Trinity
avenue, as I remember. He taught Sunday school there and I used to drive
him in the buggy and go
Was there a trolley line?
Oh, hell, yes, a trolley route. You could ride the trolley from east Durham out to Lakewood Park, which was a recreational park in the southern part of Durham. Now it's a shopping center.
Did you have any impressions at that time of national politicians and the policies of people like Coolidge and Hoover and whether they were doing a good job or not?
Yes. Well, I have to think back. Coolidge was a Yankee and, I guess, very quiet; Hoover was a big fellow in many respects and just full of, in my opinion, full of bull.
He had been a businessman, or a mining engineer.
He had been in Europe and so forth and on all kinds of rescue work and so forth. He was president when the bank holiday came to North Carolina and, as I said before, he asked my father if he couldn't slow it down.
Oh, I didn't know, you didn't tell me that. Now let's.
The crash comes in the fall of 1929 and then intensifies in '30 and '31.
'31. We had our bank holiday in North Carolina because it was coming up from Florida and in South Carolina and Hoover called my father and asked him if he could slow it down or stop it, which we were able to do. As I remember, no bank in Virginia …
That was to slow down the runs on the bank. There were people taking their money out.
Well, just busting because of that. And we had a little bank, it was a million and a half, as I remember, I was a vice-president at the time. My uncle Isham was running the savings and loan and his son was working in the bank, in the cage. Dad was president, and as I told you about the money going—it's in an article here—feeding it out the back window and people flatten their noses on the window of the corridor and then coming in and making their deposit. We saved the Negro bank, Mechanics and Farmers, we saved the Citizens' Bank.
Now, by saving them you made loans to them?
Yeah, we put up some cash and made a loan. The Merchants' Bank, Mr. Clements, busted, had closed its doors. The First National Bank, as I remember, the First National Bank busted. That was the Carr bank. General Julian Carr was the president, and Claiborne Carr, a director, in what's now the North Carolina National Bank building on the southeast corner of Main and Corcoran street.
Why did your bank survive when these other banks …
Well, as I said before, I went to Charlotte and brought back some money,
$500,000, and to Richmond and brought back some more money,
$750,000—cash that my father put up in the Federal Reserve Bank, bonds
and what have you, to get the cash, and Dad kept buying notes, taking
notes out of the First National Bank, buying them. Just couldn't take
them out fast enough. The bank had over loaned, and so forth, and the
Merchants' Bank the
Now, what was the bank called at this point?
The Durham Loan and Trust Company. Eventually it was changed to Durham Bank and Trust. And when we, as I said, when we merged the University National Bank in Chapel Hill into the Trust Company, as we called it, spoke of it, we changed the name to Central Carolina Bank because Durham, as one of these articles says, Chapel Hill just wouldn't use the word Durham, period. They wouldn't agree to it. So we used Central Carolina, which was by then the area in which we were in business.
Now, on this issue of banking and, obviously, your father must have had the confidence of a lot of people and have given the perception of stability, is that correct? How important would those …
He was one of the strong characters of the community, one of the leading
characters, people—not a character, exactly. He was the son-in-law of
George W. Watts, who had been in the tobacco business and retired. Dad
was wealthy compared to the majority of people in Durham, and he owned
the farms known as Hillandale and Croisdale Farm, fifteen, eighteen
hundred acres northwest of Durham. It belongs to my sister Frances Fox
now,
Did he put any of his own money into the bank? In other words, did he take money out of capital to help keep the bank afloat or was it simply by getting loans from the Federal Reserve?
He took his own personal money, Mother and Dad's. They called me in, my wife and I, one night at home. They lived in the concrete stucco red-roofed house he gave to the city in memory of his wife. I remember being called over there by my father and him saying that he had put up everything that mother had and he had, made it available in the crisis, and what did I think? And I said that anything I have is yours. And I turned to my wife and she said yes; she didn't have anything particularly but I did. I had received some trusts from my grandfather Watts back when I was 25 and they had multiplied. I had some, I didn't have a whole lot. But it was that approach to life that whatever you had to do, you did, period.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
No, no.
Jumping back and forth.
Well, I think we sometimes have to follow a line of thought or a line of discussion without being too bound by the chronology. So, you were saying that your father just decided that the thing to do was to make personal investments in the bank to make sure …
He started the Durham Morris Plan Bank, and he went on, as I said before, to Home Security Life Insurance Company, now known as Peoples Security after merging it into Home Security.
Let's pick on that. What date would that be?
1916 or '17. Two men had started it, two brothers had put fifty thousand dollars in and it was busted almost. Within six or twelve months Dad was asked to come in with them, which he did, and, as in everything else, he had controlling stock. Just enough. As he had in the bank, he was the controlling stockholder, had more than fifty percent of the stock in the bank, and the same thing with the insurance company. And he was very active in the insurance company and he put me on the board.
Now, what sort of things did you do? What was your role?
I didn't do anything except agree with the management, for awhile, and
eventually I became vice-president, then president, and eventually
chairman of the board. Then I got
Didn't he go to Taiwan as an adviser?
No, he was in Burma. "Over the hump" two or three times, and so on, tall, grey-haired fellow. Took him to a basketball game Saturday.
But now, back to the Depression, back to the 1930s.
And the insurance company was a little thing and it just slowly grew.
In the Depression, were you depressed about the Depression? Were you concerned about the stability of the economy and whether the country was going to recover?
Not particularly. Too busy. Scratching at local things, at that time. We had no national approach, as I remember, one way or the other. My father was in the legislature; I don't remember when. He served two terms in the senate. He had been on the city council when he first came back from New York. He'd been quite a politician in New York and he was a liberal, not as we consider liberal today, but very liberal for those days. Not like Proxmire or whatever you want to call them. I served on the city council for eight years as a youngster. That was '27.
Yeah, the late '20s, I know.
The late '20s. I remember the city owed, I found out, $900,000—invasion of the bond fund. And I got off the city council when we had paid it back and had $250,000 cash in the bank. I became chairman of the finance committee and we had the first city manager in North Carolina, as I remember. Rigsbee was the city manager when I was there, and then Bob Flack took his place. Rigsbee went on to something else. We became great friends. I was a real youngster, because the rest of the council were old men.
You were 26, 27, 30 years old.
Different people, Coy Smith, Carpenter, Lyon. But I worked at that. Didn't get any pay for it.
Now, what about your attitude toward, say, Franklin Roosevelt when he comes in in '32.
Oh, everybody was gung ho. The first thing he did was to declare a national bank holiday. He had been governor of New York state and had done a great many things and he came in at a time when he was a white haired man, "a white haired father," no question about that. Jonathan Daniels, a great friend of mine, Josephus Daniels's son, we'd been in college together, he was smarter than I, he graduated in three years, he was one of the president's assistants (he had five or six). And that was '33. And then he went on for two and a half terms, as I remember. I could get about any information I wanted through Jonathan.
He was in the press office, I think, he was sort of the press officer. So you had a positive impression that he was doing good things for the country.
Oh, no question about it. Roosevelt petered out when it came to the end of the war. He was a sick man, and Stalin and Churchill took advantage of him, no question about that.
Now, in 1933 …
It's a bank holiday.
Well, it's a bank holiday, but that's the same year that North Carolina Blue Cross/Blue Shield began? Tell me a little bit about that.
'33 was a big year in my life.
OK, tell me about that.
I organized, at my father's request, the Central Carolina Farmers, which
eventually was combined with FCX and was recently sold to Southern
States. We operated, my father had an old mill down in east Durham. It
had been Pearl Mill, that was the name of it, and we made that
available. I brought a man, Tilson, from Sparta in western North
Carolina, the county agent, and we organized this farmer's exchange to
serve farm people where they could bring their produce—corn, grain, what
have you—into the old mill. We would buy and give them cash for it and
we in turn would manufacture and sell it to other people. But it made a
market for farm produce, a market that was not available anywhere else.
We had an outlet in Roxboro, one in Chapel Hill. It's still there, back
behind Carr Mill in Chapel Hill. That mill was another one of the Carr's
that busted eventually; they
Why did you do it?
Oh, Dad had asked me to and it was rendering a service. I don't know.
A farmer's cooperative is in the old populist tradition, I mean, political …
Well, it came through. My father had learned in 1913 when he came back eventually as chairman of the American commission to study rural credits—Germany, Italy, and England. That's when he got interested in farm credits. And after women and liquor shot down five chairman, he came back as chairman and organized the first one, Rural Credit Association, now Credit Union at Lowes Grove, North Carolina, which is right down the road. And out of that grew the federal farm finance, basically, for farmers and for little people that couldn't and get the needed funds from a bank. Eventually, 1933, we organized Central Farmers Exchange and it developed into a tremendous business with big silos and mills and chicken business. It was a tremendous thing—five counties.
Now you say a service, did your father have, and did you inherit from him, a sense of obligation and service in a way to the public?
It was not obligation. I never thought of it that way, one way or the other. But you had a job to do and you just did it. There's no way I could be pressed.
I think you're being self-effacing, in a sense.
No, it's just that I never thought about it and my father was
tremendously interested. He was running the farm, he was interested in
the farmer. He was always interested in, he called it, the little
people, the little folks. And the bank was organized. We didn't have big
people on the board. They were middle-sized people, because the big
people owned the Fidelity or the Citizens and they were already there,
the so-called "big people." And when he took over the Home Savings Bank
he found that the big people, who were the directors, had busted the
bank. It was busted through too many loans, no collateral. He went to
work and straightened that one out. He made them pay. They couldn't
understand that, the Carrs and others.
Alright. Now, in '33 there also was the North Carolina Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
There was the Blue Cross. Dr. Davison, then of Duke University, he came down here as the chief resident from Hopkins—had been in England and he had had some relationships, some knowledge, of hospital insurance; not what we'd organized here but something on the way toward that. And it was a Depression time and I was running Watts Hospital at the time.
Now you say running, you mean as an administrator?
No, I was president of the board, unofficial president, you might say,
and my auditor in the office was Bo
Now, this was all non-profit.
All non-profit. And we eventually—it was then Blue Cross—I helped them
buy forty or fifty acres where the Blue Cross is now. And I got Alec
McMahon eventually (Alex was then the secretary of the County
Commissioners Association, headquartered in Raleigh) I got him in as
president of the Hospital Savings, our opposition. We were fighting each
other. We had a smaller number of members than Hospital Savings, but we
had more cash and greater investments and so forth, than Hospital
Savings. Eventually we went to Greensboro and I preached a sermon and
"got the Lord on my side," as the old expression goes. We combined the
two and John Harris, became the president, and Joe Eagles of Wilson,
then business manager in the university, was vice president of savings.
We combined the two into "Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina."
Savings had been able to obtain the Blue Cross, which was
hospitalization, and Blue Shield was medical. They had obtained approval
of the use of Blue Cross hospitals and they had kept Hospital Care from
getting Blue Cross. And we, the three of us (a hospital man, a doctor,
and I was the public representative) went to Colorado Springs. Again
Now, I'll ask the same question I asked about CCF, why did you do this?
For Watts Hospital and Duke Hospital. We organized it. They needed the money and by prepayment of insurance they could through its members receiving the funds, could also pay, part pay, and reduce the amount of charity.
Did you see also that this was a public service that you were doing?
Well, I never thought about it, but it was an effort that would get
proper payment—cash available—into the two hospitals at the time. And
Lincoln Hospital was the black hospital at the time and, I can't say
black, I call it colored, and they had their problems and it helped them
to a more limited degree. But, we learned a lot from Duke Hospital as
Watts Hospital is in a continual fight with Duke Hospital but a very
Now let me ask you, I think I almost can anticipate your answer to this question, but mid-1930s your children were born, you were involved in business, you had built a couple of new enterprises, what were your ambitions at that time? What did you want? Did you ever think about what you wanted to accomplish when you got to be an older man?
No. Quite honestly, no, I just kind of went along, you might say. As I said earlier, my father never gave me any particular direction one way or the other. And I got into the swing of things and one thing leads to another and there you go.
So you would not describe yourself as an introspective person?
No, no, no, no. It was right on the surface, just always rolling.
And to follow through on the point, you were not measuring yourself against some goal. You didn't set yourself a goal as a young man. I know some young people that say, "Well, I want to make a million dollars," or "I want to earn more than my father earned," or "When I get to be fifty…"
No. I didn't give a damn. I had enough. I had property, stocks and bonds,
from 25 on, I was busted to hell before that. Mother and dad didn't give
me anything. I had to work for it. And I had to get a salary, and got
married on the salary of $250 a month. I don't know who paid it, whether
the bank paid it or dad paid it or whatnot. I never thought about
OK. Did you worry about what people thought about you?
No. Didn't give a damn.
I believe that.
Because I could take care of myself, financially.
But you were pretty confident about what you could do, that you were not gauging yourself by other people's standards.
No, no, no, no. I didn't have any guidelines or anything else. I just did—I did what seemed to be needed.
Did you have a lot of physical energy? Did you work long days? Did you work hard?
Worked hard, played golf. Used to go down to Pinehurst for the weekend, for a week after Christmas, take six horses. The first Mrs. Hill was quite a horsewoman; her father said she'd been born and raised on a horse from Baltimore. We had an old steeplechaser, and we had thoroughbreds, hunters. You would have thoroughbreds instead of run of the mill. Six horses, and of course, with Anne, we'd take them all over Virginia and South Carolina and show them in horse shows. I don't know, we had plenty of time to go.
But now you must have realized that you were being more successful than lots of people. Would you attribute that to intelligence, to energy, what would you attribute that to?
Well, I … Again, I'm sorry to have to say, but I just never thought it
one way or the other. I had enough
But as you describe, though, the things that you do, I don't want to get into this in too much detail at the moment, but you describe yourself as being constantly on the move, constantly thinking of new ideas, constantly creating whatever.
Whatever I developed, it needed this, that and the other thing. The bank was grown, it had grown to ten million dollars in '37, and 1/2 billion in 1986.
When did the new Central Carolina Bank Building, when was that built?
It was '37.
This was in the midst of the Depression, Mr. Hill. Did you not realize that, by some people's sights, this wouldn't be a good time to be investing?
Well, no, the Depression was over.
Oh, well, there were ups and downs but the Depression, measured by unemployment and other things, was …
We had the hotel by that time, and my father had bought the bonds from the widows and orphans, $384,000 as I remember the figures, at the time the hotel went bankrupt, the Old Washington Duke. Dad just walked in and handed over the $384,000 worth of bonds and took over the hotel. Period.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
You might say Durham was financially the gardenspot of North Carolina.
Insulated, in a sense.
Insulated except for Raleigh because of the state government. And, no, the effect didn't apply like it did to Winston-Salem. Well, Winston was pretty good because of Reynolds and insurance companies, but Asheville and other places were going to hell.
Now, did your attitude toward Franklin Roosevelt remain positive through this period? Let me tell you what this question is based on: some business people liked Roosevelt at the beginning but then, after his second election in '36, began to turn against him.
Well, I think that's true. But you couldn't do anything about it and had to put up with it. And you did the best you could. We had old Bob Doughton and others who were good congressmen. You just did in spite of it, you might say.
Carl Durham must have been in …
Because he was a strong character. Oh, he was a congressman from the area, tall, lanky. But, no, you just functioned. That was Washington, that was way off yonder.
Did you know that great New Yorker cartoon of the
wealthy people dressed up in their tuxedos and one group is going by the
other and they say, "Come on, we're going down to the theater to boo
Franklin Roosevelt in the newsreels." Were there business people here
who hated Franklin Roosevelt? Who thought the country was going to hell
in a hand-basket? Socialism and communism were …
Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. But they didn't make much noise one way or the other. We were busy.
It was a Democratic state, too.
We were busy and much more interested in city government and state government and didn't pay too much attention to federal government, as I remember.
Now what was going on in the university? Did you have connection with the university formally during this late period?
My father had been a member of the board of trustees for forty-five or
forty-eight years. I think he and I have been longer members of the
university family, you might say, than any family in the state, in terms
of service on the board, the controlling board. No, he used to come in
with something scratched on an envelope and asked me to draw some plans
for him, as chairman of the building committee. And I would. And we
developed an organization of architect and contractor and
Boshamer? I know there's a Boshamer Field.
No. Kenan. Bill Kenan, a classmate of my father's. I was football manager. The things that bothered me more than anything else, I think, was the fact that I wouldn't tell anybody that I injured my knee at prep school and therefore couldn't play football.
Why wouldn't you tell anybody?
I don't know, just one of those crazy things. I took it out vicariously as sub-assistant, then assistant, and then manager of football. Those were the good old days when we played in Emerson Stadium. No, I was big enough to play football and people used to ask, "Why aren't you playing football?" And I never, well, would say why.
Now in the 1930s, Frank Porter Graham was president.
Yeah, a great man.
Yes, what were your relations?
A great, great man. A great thinker. And Chase, before him as I remember, I not sure which, at the moment.
I think before.
I think before. He was a very tall, very dignified person. I knew him
well. And Frank Graham I knew extremely well
Was Frank too liberal?
Oh, he just despised him because he was too liberal. And I, I liked him
very much. And I thought I understood him and what he was trying to do.
See, there were only 2300 students at Chapel Hill when I graduated and I
left law school in '24. And no women, well, a few, at the time. And it
was slowly developing. And back in the, what was it, the '50s here, I
went on the trustee board and helped eventually elect, well, Gordon Grey
who was very, not pompous, but very formal, formal is the best word for
it. And we had a man in-between Gordon and Frank Graham, I don't
remember just exactly who was in there. But I was in and out of South
Building all the time. And I was very much interested in the university
before I was on the board and my father being on the board, there was a
lapse of two years before I went on the board. And he got off the board
eventually, he and Josephus Daniels and Judge Parker, as I remember. I
don't remember any of the other members of the board. They were the key
people; they controlled the board. In those days, they operated the exec
committee for a hundred members; a hundred members met twice a year,
hell, it just didn't amount to a hill of beans. But the exec committee
met monthly and, when I served on the board, it met monthly with twelve
people, and eventually fifteen people. And Bill Friday made a mistake,
but that's that,
Well, I want to talk about that in some detail maybe next time. How about shifting gears for a few minutes and talk about the end of the 1930s and the on-coming of the Second World War, and what your reactions were in the late 1930s toward the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the needs that rose once Hitler attacked western Europe.
Well, Hitler was, I think what southern people realized, a devil incarnate and they just couldn't believe anything he said one way or the other. He was going to take over the world. We organized the "Committee to Defend America through Aid to the Allies" but we were not in the war. England and France were and we understood why—it was self-preservation, no question about that. And McMillan, Harold McMillan, was Prime Minister, as I remember, in England. He damn near gave the world away. But in spite of him, others saved it.
But there were lots of people in the United States and I'm sure here in this area, who felt that it was no business of the United States.
Oh, no question. There was a very strong isolationist approach in spite
of Roosevelt. The South slowly came along and became interventionist, I
think it led the rest of the country. And all the middle West was a
mess. I was in New York every week, Wednesday, every Wednesday, at the
old University Club, and I forget the man who was the chairman of it-
'41 when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, December '41. But this we're talking about, the committee was before the "destroyer for bases" vehicle, and so on.
Oh, yeah, yeah. We sort of persuaded the president to give the fifty destroyers to England. They were old, yes, but they were effective. Seven hundred and fifty 75s: 75,000 machine guns, and 750,000 rifles, after Dunkirk. It was an interesting progression, I'll never forget. And we shipped a lot of stuff. And in due course, that was World War I, and World War II was a different picture. No, that was World War II, sure, sure. World War I, I was too young.
But now, why personally did you take an interest? I've wondered for instance, did your internationalism come from your parents? Did it come from your travel around the world? Where did it come from?
I think it was a combination. I'll never regret having spent as much time as I had back in '24 and '25 to go around the world. It gave you a different approach to life and an understanding of a lot of damn things. But, no, it was Francis Miller, you know him?
Yes, I've met him.
From Virginia. Got me into the damn thing and also got me to know Whitney Shepardson.
Dean Acheson was involved; I know he was a spokesman at some point.
I didn't run into him.
Joseph Alsop?
Oh, yeah. Joe, we fired. No it was another one we fired off the group because he talked too much—Bob Allen. We had British and French and Italian intelligence and Herbert Agar.
Herbert Agar, that's right; I've met him also.
Was acting as chairman of this group. I was one of the southern, the only southern member of the group. Joe Alsop. Bob Allen—oh, boy, we fired him. Joe Alsop was a very strong member.
Very outspoken. I knew of his pro-British sentiments at the time. What was your impression of what Roosevelt really wanted to do at that time? Did you have the impression Roosevelt wanted to get into the war? Or what did you think he was thinking?
I had the feeling that he was trying to bring the country along to an approach. I think he realized, and Jonathan and myself used to talk about it, that he realized that if we didn't get in the war, we would be isolated, by ourselves. And I think he had a very definite plan that he was just working at the best he could under the circumstances. Pearl Harbor came along, that was a God-send to Roosevelt. There was no question, whang! that was it. No, it was a fascinating thing to me to see how this country just slowly changed from completely isolationist point of view to, they were ready. When Pearl Harbor came they were ready, they were ready to go. There was no question about it.
This is an area that particularly intrigues me. Do you think—in studying it I see the same thing—do you think it was that they grew to see that the United States was too big and too powerful to stay out and that we did have an interest in this? Or do you think it was simply sympathy for Britain and a hatred of Hitler? Or was it …
Well, it was a combination. The South particularly understood the picture better than any other area.
Why do you think that was?
Well, they'd had the hell beat out of them, for one thing, in the Civil War, and they'd just grown up with it. They were basically British and there was a French influence in various places. But it was a subconscious feeling of friendship; it was the mother country. I don't think the far West and the middle West felt this way. They were just hell to bring into line. I'd say the South first, then the North, and then it went on across the nation.
Of course, there were some isolationist congressmen. "Bunk 'em" Bob Reynolds from western North Carolina …
Oh, my God, yes. He was a bastard!
… was opposed to aiding the allies.
What'd he expect?
Well, you've been into this so far deeper than I. I was just on the fringe of the whole thing.
Well, no, but you were there and you saw what was happening and what the attitudes and reactions were. And you invested a lot of time in this didn't you? I mean, you say every Wednesday, but it must have taken a lot more time than that?
For a year and a half, two years, there wasn't another damn thing that I did. The local stuff was so much, oh you played with that, yes, you messed with it, you kept it going.
Now, what did your father think about this? Do you recall?
Well, he was older by then, of course. In '33 he was—graduated in '89—so that'd put him 68, born in '68 or something like that, at the end of the Civil War. That was '31 and '33, he was 65 or something, he was getting along. He'd been in the legislature.
But did he ever say to you, "Don't get involved," and that sort of thing, "that's not your business." Or, "You really ought to be doing…"
Never, never. He never tried to hold me down one way or the other. He never gave me any advice one way or the other, for or against.
That's interesting.
We were always friends. Mother the same way. She was off on her business.
Well, I think we ought to conclude at this point.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
You have a VCR I see. Have your figured out how to program that so that you …
Oh, yeah, at times. Sometimes I do.
I have to look at the directions.
My youngest son John is an electronic expert and he comes in to do that and the thing works. I have a hell of a time with the TV every now and then. I punch the wrong thing. Anne has to come in and play with it. She doesn't know how, but she just does it.
I'm very sympathetic. Today, Mr. Hill, I'd like to talk about your family and your recollections of your grandparents, and of your father, and of your early childhood. We started, I think, really talking about your college years, and we haven't talked very much about your earlier childhood. So let's go back to Duplin County, in at least 1869, and your father and your grandparents. What can you tell me about them?
The Hill grandparents, the father was a great big man and was very
active. They had 10,000 acres of land and I don't know what happened to
it. They don't own it anymore anyhow. And my father was the youngest of
eight children, I believe. One brother ran a savings and loan in Durham;
One was consul in the consular service in Rio de Janeiro—Uncle Ed, great
big fellow; another one was a doctor in Jersey City and came down
eventually to North Carolina. He was married to a very important
socialite in New York—very important, she thought—and he came down and
Maybe she didn't find Durham too sociable?
And there were two unmarried sisters. And one of them always carried, Aunt Sally, always carried a comforter with her wherever she went; summer or winter she used that comforter, just like one of these characters.
Linus in Peanuts.
Peanuts, that's right. The same way. And they lived in Faison and died down there. And then the old house, the third house that was left—two were burned down by the Yankees. And Grandmother Hill was a little bitty woman. I always understood she came from Pepignon, France, which was close to the Spanish border; I don't know about it.
Now, do you remember her?
Oh, yeah, faintly. But she taught my father Latin and Greek before he went to college. She was very intellectual and her husband, he just retired and read Shakespeare and the Bible. Period. Sat on the porch with his hat on, I remember that. As a kid, I never thought about it until you asked the question. My father taught school in Faison before or after he came to Chapel Hill and I imagine it was after he came to Chapel Hill.
Well, I think, from reading the little sketch you gave me in that little
brochure Billy Carmichael apparently graduated from high school at 12
years old and then worked in a store. I think maybe he also taught a bit
at that time because he
Probably worked in the store there and taught for four years, as I remember the story.
But my father was a great "raconteur" and he just loved to have somebody come in the house and, after we'd moved to the new house as we called it where the Junior League is now, he just loved to lay back in his chair. He had a chair in the corner with a light, and tell stories. Oh, he was something. And the kids were just pop-eyed listening to him.
Now, did he talk much about his life when he was a young boy?
Oh, he talked about everything. There was no subject that he didn't know something about, whether he knew or not, but he told the story anyhow, and the kids just loved it. All kids up to twenty years of age and so on. And they'd just sit spellbound and at the table. He always sat at the head of the table and mother at the foot of the table. We gathered around and we always had dinner in the evening and had a little breakfast room where there was no problem; you could eat when you got damn good and ready. They had servants, three servants—a cook, a butler, and a maid—and a chauffeur. The stable was where the cows were in those days. We had raw milk, and I had to milk them, and always had three cows brought in from the farm.
Now this was in Durham.
In Durham. And they had the stable, where we had several horses, and eventually it was turned into a garage, and the horse, a victoria and a town carriage were eliminated.
What is a victoria?
A victoria is a great big carriage, the back seat, oh, like an umbrella almost over the back seat but it didn't go over the little dickey seat.
Oh, OK. The driver sat up front.
The driver was up on a box up above, and so you couldn't see the horse. Then the town carriage was another straight box. The British taxicab is the nearest thing to it, with the driver up above. We had a bobtailed horse in Durham. The family must have been in fairly good financial circumstances to have those two pieces of equipment that they brought down when they came to Durham. Now how they got them here I don't know, I don't remember.
It must have been by train, I guess, or I guess, some things could have been moved my.
Well, I imagine … Of course, I was, as I remember, three years old when we came down from New York City, and I don't remember anything about that one way or the other. And we lived in this old house that had been moved by my grandfather. My grandfather had built it in 1875 and they moved it down the hill, immediately in front of where the highrise old folks home is now on Duke Street, the southern side of Morehead.
Well, now, let me—your grandfather lived in Duplin County.
Grandfather Hill.
Grandfather Hill was born in Duplin County and then he stayed in Duplin County.
He stayed in Duplin. Born and raised and died down there.
OK. Who is this who had the house previous to this? Grandfather Watts?
Grandfather Watts came from Baltimore. He was the secretary treasurer of the W. Duke Sons and Company, and he built a house. You know what you would expect in '75. And, oh, I don't remember that house being there because he rebuilt and moved the house down the hill for us when we came from New York City. Well, he built a new house, I call it the "pink elephant" in '95. So that was 20 years later, and he built a tremendous thing.
Moving a house at that time must have been quite a project.
Well, they moved it wall by wall, room by room. They couldn't move a whole house; they didn't know how to do it, couldn't put it on rollers and take it down hill. Well, there was a big difference, forty or fifty foot, difference in height, and across the street and so on. The street then was Macadam, and eventually it was paved. But I remember vividly the brick paving in Main Street and the Macadam roads around. We used to go out to Lakewood Park as children on the trolley car, eventually in an automobile. But those were great days.
Well, now, let's see. So your father grew up in Duplin County around Faison, in that area. And then at sixteen, or so, he came to Chapel Hill.
And graduated.
And came here.
He and Mott Morehead were similar classes, or maybe one year's difference, I'm not sure. They lived next to each other in South Building. And there were not many university buildings in those days. The three—South Building, Old East, and Old West, and I think New East and New West—but I don't think there was anything else, as I remember.
Apparently, he gained a great love of the university in those years. He certainly always said this, that the university had given him a great deal and so on.
Well, I think that's true. There were very few people here at the time. I don't remember how many, but less than a thousand students, or something like that. He was very active here at Chapel Hill. And I just don't know. He was a good student. Dr. Hume, as I remember, telling the story, but I wasn't here; I didn't pay any attention to it. I was in school, both at grammar school and later in high school. But we jumped classes. He was very active in business, very active on the city council, the bank, the insurance company. That was 1916. I was fifteen at that time. I never had any trouble, one year. So that was easy. No I don't particularly remember. He was very vocal and very knowledgeable.
Was he an intellectual? I think he gave a graduation address here.
I wouldn't be surprised. I don't remember. Archibald Henderson knew more than I remember.
Did your father refer back very often to the days at Chapel Hill and what he remembered and the people that he remembered and so on?
Not particularly, as I remember.
Was he athletic, do you know? Did he play sports?
Oh, no, no, no. He played golf and he used to go with my grandfather Watts to Palm Beach when the Royal Poinciana was in full flavor before it burned. And they played on the golf course there. And mother would go, and grandmother, the big veil, the big hat, and all that sort of damn business. I vaguely remember some of that.
Are there family photographs from that period and so on?
Oh, yeah, come on back here in the room for a minute.
Guernsey's milk makes a big difference. And the Holstiens were less than three percent. Then I organized the milk plant so that I didn't have to bottle the milk as I did originally.
Well I want to go back. We looked at the picture of your grandfather Watts. Can you tell me a little bit about him?
Well, he, again, was the youngest member of his family, as I remember.
Very erect, six foot two. Very precise,
Western Maryland.
And she was very frail and they only had one child, mother.
And her name was Annie?
Annie Louise Watts. And I remember mother talking about skating on the pond that they had at the house in Durham. Skating on the pond. You just don't think about those things today. The world has changed. And she was married in 1898, shortly after my father came back from the Spanish-American War, I think, or something, somewhere in there and lived in New York. That's about all I remember.
Alright, now, to pick up on your father's career. He came here to Chapel Hill, graduated, must have been 20 or 21 years old at that time; we can check.
He went to Columbia University, New York, as I said. Passed the second
year law exam, Columbia gave a complete
Sturkey? S-T-U-R-K-Y?
S-T-U-R-K-E-Y, I think, Hill, Sturkey, and Andrews. He practiced law in New York for close to fifteen years and then came down here. It must have been a successful practice. He was a member of Troop A, New York cavalry, in the North Carolina society, and a big Democrat.
A Democrat?
Oh, Democrat. He ran for Congress and lost. He was too liberal. A Republican won in those days. To hear him tell the story.
That was back in the days of McKinley and William Jennings Bryan and all those folks.
You know better than I.
There were very strong political feelings in the election of 1896, for instance. Very strong feeling that it was radicalism versus business. And Hannah and various other people got involved in the campaign, Mark Hannah and so on. So that a Democrat in some ways was considered a bit of a radical or a maverick.
He was not a member of the Union League Club.
OK.
And they lived on 72nd Street West, which was then right at the end of
Riverside Drive and apparently was a nice
Did he ever tell you or talk about any of those major figures of the day; of people like Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, who was quite involved in New York politics?
I remember Roosevelt myself, when he came in front of what's now the Duke Woman's campus. He spoke on a platform on the end of the train. And I went to see him because my birthday and his birthday was the same date of the month, October 27th. He was born some time, God knows when. October the 27th, that was mine. And I wrote him, I still have it someplace, a letter congratulating him on having been born on my birthday. And I got the cutest little note, envelope like that, signed by him, theoretically, I don't know that it was, and how proud he was to have been born on my birthday, the same date, from the White House.
I'm sure that your father would have at least been well aware of him because he was commissioner of police in New York.
I don't remember him talking about it one way or the other.
Commissioner of police in New York and …
My interests were something else. I didn't give a damn about it.
OK. Did he serve in the Spanish-American War?
Oh, yes. He was in Puerto Rico. And the unit, Squadron A, went down
there, as I say, the ship foundered just
There was not much fighting in Puerto Rico, actually, so.
So, that was just that.
So he went down there in 1898, must have gotten back, the war was really over in August of 1898, so he must have come back soon thereafter. Returned to New York, returned to his practice in New York, and then …
Got married.
Got married. And then in 1903 or 1904 he comes back to North Carolina. Do you know why? Did he say why?
Yes. As I commented the other day, his father-in-law wanted him, wanted the family, to come south, come back home to Durham. And he offered him $1,000 a month and Dad was down here—the dates are confusing—but he came down here and the first month he was here there was $1,000 on his desk, on his blotter, as he called it. And he looked at it for two days, according to my father, and then he went across the hall, he having built the Trust Building by that time, it's still there, and told my grandfather that he had no business and handed him the torn check. Made my grandfather so damn mad that under his will he gave him 290 thousand dollars, or something, when he died—$1,000/month for every month.
That was his back pay?
That was a thousand dollars a month. And my father used to love to tell
that story. My grandfather had no business because he had stopped
business either in—1911, I think, when the Sherman Antitrust Law broke
up American Tobacco Trust. And we lived, you see, right next door, next
block, from my grandfather's house. And I've got those damn pictures
here someplace. You'd be amazed. And I lived there about half the time.
And I can remember reading the old World's Work laying
on the …
The magazine?
… the window seat in the library, and this desk was in the library, this rug was in the library, and a lot of these books came from my grandfather, sets. I never bought a set except for the genealogy of the horses on the middle shelf up there. I haven't kept it up. It's an unusual thing and it's the beginning, it's the first on through to '45 or something like that. I lived there and read all through World's Work during the war.
World War I.
World War I, as a child, in the beginning of the world war. I can remember laying down on the couch on the elbows looking at the World's Work.
Now, your father was a Democrat, but did he get involved in Democratic politics when he came here?
He eventually became a state senator. He was never in any federal office.
And he was on the city council back in the days when it amounted to
something. Later on in later life.
Do you recall—now you would have been fifteen, sixteen years old when the first world war was coming and Woodrow Wilson was president—do you recall your father ever talking about Wilson or about the war or what he thought we ought to do, whether we ought to get in, whether the Germans were our enemies, or any of that?
I came over here in '17, the fall of '17, no, the fall '18, and I'd been to prep school, tore my knee to pieces and came to the hospital. Yeah, that was the fall of '18, the end of the war.
I think that this relates, and I don't want to belabor the point, but I think it relates to some of your father's later activities. How would you characterize him politically? Was he a liberal-moderate? A populist?
He was a liberal Democrat, I'd call him. Always interested in the little
fellow. And I've heard him many, many
Now where do you think this came from, in his life? Do you think this came from his grandparents or his parents, this idea of service to people, of an obligation, or whatever?
From his mother if anybody, but I don't know. He's always, as I've told you, paying interest on savings accounts, that was the little fellow always. The big fellow could take care of himself, he wasn't worried about him at all. But the little fellow needed some help.
Alright, so he comes back to Durham and gets involved in business with the bank.
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
So he came back and he got involved in what kind of business interests?
Real estate business, organized the first real estate development, Club Boulevard West. Bought 1800 acres slowly. He was always buying the land next to him, always spreading himself. And he had a dairy farm.
When does the dairy farm come? Was it at Crowsdale originally?
Hillandale originally. Then slowly, later on, he built a brick,
thirty-cow stable where Crowsdale club house is now. He planted the
trees out in front of there and so on. They lost one of them. But he had
a grain and tobacco farm
Now you said you had to milk the cows sometimes.
I had to milk the three cows in the cow stable. The horses were in the other stable with the carriages. And I remember vividly the victoria and the town carriage. Go to school in the town carriage later.
To be accurate, I mean, to be precise about this: his father-in-law wasn't involved in these businesses; your father initiated these things on his own?
His father-in-law was vice-president, stockholder in the Fidelity Bank,
as they called it; that was the Duke bank, the Dukes were president and
vice president. Then my father became, when my grandfather died, he
became vice-president. And when the Fidelity Bank was merged into
Wachovia, he became the largest stockholder in Wachovia Bank through
stock that he had inherited and had bought and still controlled two
other banks, the old Home Savings Bank which we merged into the Trust
Company in '37, what's now CCB. But Durham Realty and Insurance Company,
fire insurance, now known as Southland, was in the back of that next
building. I can remember vividly the back of the first floor of the old
Trust Building. And the bank was on the right hand side
No.
That was the installment loan bank that eventually was combined with
another bank in Durham and is now lost sight of. Guaranty Bank takes its
place in taking care of the working man, you might say. He started that.
I think Morris Plan Bank became the Guaranty Bank. And where old Home
Savings Bank used to be he built the Temple Building which is
immediately to the west across Market Street from the Trust Building.
The Elk's were on the top floor, the third floor under the roof, and
eventually the life insurance company was on the second floor, and the
Home Savings Bank was on the first floor of the Trust Building. And I
lowered the steps. In those days they had ten steps high to the main
floor. The postal telegraph was on the west side, and the barber shop,
all ten chairs, was, oh, the barber shop was a tremendous thing. Durham
Realty was in the back. And I lowered that damn thing some time after
'31 or '33 or something, I lowered it to sidewalk level, and then built
an addition of sixteen foot, you can see it back there now. I built that
because the city was talking about widening Market Street and I didn't
want to see it widened, so we built sixteen foot before the city could
move.
The Washington …
The Washington Duke Hotel, named after Wash Duke. That had been a community operation, financed it in bond issue, and so forth, all kinds of graft. Oh, yeah.
Now, so your father was involved with the bank that became the Wachovia Bank.
Eventually. He owned stock in it, but he owned the old Durham Loan and Trust Company, which is now CCB and the old Home Savings Bank which was merged into CCB later, it's name being changed sometime whenever we combined.
With a bank here in Chapel Hill. But now, wasn't there competition between these banks, between Wachovia and Central Carolina?
Oh, yeah. It was the old Fidelity Bank. And as I told you, the Trust Company, as we called it, had merged the Home Savings into it, was growing faster than Fidelity and we'd gotten on a parity with them, $10 million or something like that. And Fidelity became frightened and joined, merged into Wachovia. And, hell, we fought them like a bunch of damn tigers, always have. Wachovia is a very fine bank. It doesn't bother us any more. Central Carolina is so dominant in the area, Durham and Chapel Hill, I imagine we're ahead of the North Carolina National Bank in Chapel Hill. But I know we're way ahead of all the other banks put together in Durham and we're ahead of them. It was logical, the home office.
OK, now then. So your father got involved in the insurance company, in farming, in city politics—city council, in banking.
He stayed interested in politics and he became quite a devotee of fluoride in his older days.
How do you mean?
He was against fluoride. He thought it was the work of the devil.
Did he fight against Durham fluoridating it's water and so on?
The fluoridation of water. And Durham just went right on ahead in spite of him. Oh he was, well, he was seventy or eighty, or something like that. But I can remember vividly. He was a man of strong opinions. Very definite opinions. He was a father but he didn't interfere with running the house, he didn't interfere with the children.
Now who disciplined you? Or did anybody discipline you?
No, I don't remember.
Were you afraid of your father?
No. No, we got along beautifully. But, he beat the hell out of me two or
three times, but I deserved it.
What was your reaction to going away to prep school?
My grandfather was a great friend of the headmaster, that's why I went to Hotchkiss. It was unusual. I was a special student because I had graduated from high school, and prep school is supposed to prepare you for college. I played on the football team, made the football team, which pleased me very much. We had no football team at high school; we had a basketball team, a great basketball team—Carmichael and so forth. But I just went there because I was too young to go to Chapel Hill.
Did you hate leaving home? Do you recall your feelings? Were you homesick?
No. I can remember catching a train to New York and met my grandfather there and he introduced me to the lady who became his second wife—my grandmother had died in 1915. This was 1917, at the old Waldorf-Astoria. I can remember vividly having breakfast or lunch with him and he introduced me to Miss Sarah, as he spoke of her. And she became his second wife and then went on until his death.
Now this was your grandfather Watts.
Grandfather Watts. She became Mrs. Cameron Morrison, moved to Charlotte, and he was governor, and then a senator, and then he lost out and they moved to Charlotte. They had a beautiful house.
So did he take you up to Hotchkiss?
No. I caught the "rattler." No problem. As I remember, I never thought about it, just one of those things that you do. Hotchkiss was up Poughkeepsie way.
Now, on John Sprunt Hill. So when you came back from your honeymoon, he was already well established in all of these various areas. Did he ever talk business philosophy with you at all?
No.
Just sort of what was to be done, and what needs to be done.
What needs to be done and I did it. I'm sorry, but…
No, no, that's fine. Now he also was very involved in the university at this time.
Oh, yes, yes. He was a trustee of the university for 45 or 48 years or something like that. He and Josephus Daniels and old man Judge Parker from Asheville, I believe it was, they were the bellwethers of the then exec committee.
He built buildings. For instance, he built the Carolina Inn. Is there a story connected with that?
I was the owner's representative you might say. He had organized a
contractor, Thompson, something Thompson, and had organized the
engineer, Atwood, who built the Yale Bowl, and Arthur Nash, who was a
very fine, very delicate colonial architect. I was the owner's
representative and worked with them til the Inn was built, and then got
Gatman by name as a manager, a little Jew boy who was smart as hell. We
ran it, I say
Do I understand, is there some story that your father had tried to convince the board of trustees to build it and they weren't interested in building it and he said, "I'm going to build it anyhow."
I don't know anything about that. No, he had been to Princeton and stayed at the Princeton Inn and that gave him the idea as a home for alumni and friends of the university on campus. And I've been working for the last five or six years to bring it back to where it had been instead of a location for vocational education and the room rates are low and this, that, and the other damn thing. I got into the new addition because Archie R. Davis, architect, he then had his office in the office building, and I just happened to be in his office and saw the plan and asked what the hell that was. And he said the Carolina Inn, and we talked about it, and moved the ballroom to where it is now and moved the cafeteria to where it is now; they had been reversed. And the present lobby of the Carolina Inn used to be the cafeteria and was pine paneled, not ornate but very fixed, you might say. And I got my finger into that as a frustrated architect.
Well, it certainly turned out very well. It certainly is a handsome building.
They use the new entrance. The walk-in entrance from Cameron was locked,
I found out a few years ago, and got the damn thing unlocked. The old
driveway entrance, they don't use
It really is. Now a bit about your father's life during the 1930s and this period when you were back here. Did he travel very much? Did he travel abroad? Did he go travel around the country?
No, he'd been to Europe in 1913, he was a member of the American
commission to Europe to study banking and so forth. That's where he got
his idea about rural credits, in the Reifheisen in Germany and so on,
Italy, England, Denmark. No, I don't remember him going to Europe at any
other time. Mother had gone. My grandfather Watts had taken her to
Europe to get away from my father and he wrote letters to the boat, a
letter for every day. And the last, according to him, the last
letter—the day she landed, she had one for every day, it took ten or
eleven days or something in those days, and all he had done was "I love
you"—and the last one put a red-hot poker through the pages and so
forth. Came back and got married.
Now your father, obviously …
He stayed here, and went to Ashville to play golf, went to Pinehurst to play golf. A great golfer. And pretty good. I'm three or four inches taller than he was, for some reason, I don't know why.
But he was a big man for the day, though, was he not?
Well, five foot eleven is not, well …
I think probably average height at that time was five foot five or five foot six or something, so he was a bigger man. Alright, did he go to Florida, to Palm Beach?
Oh yeah, Palm Beach, with my grandfather usually. Back when I was a kid, I remember, I went down there when I was ten, twelve, and drove the mule-drawn streetcar, and I remember the Royal Poinciana. And sit back in the palm groves. Streetcar went out to the Breakers on the ocean and we used to go swimming with the men, had the long bathing suits.
Long bathing suits …
Oh hell yeah, I remember them vividly.
Now those were the days of the Flaglers and William Rand Kenan and so on. Did you know these people?
Oh yeah, sure. Lily Kenan married Mr. Flagler, and they didn't have any income tax in 1913, until 1913, as I remember. And I know my grandfather had to pay seventy-two percent during the war, as I remember as a kid. I was twelve and thought he was going to be destroyed financially. He had no business. He was clipping coupons and cutting dividends at the time. And when he died he told my father, he said, "I've given the women too much money." It was ten million dollars apiece, to Mrs. Morrison and the same thing to mother. And he died of cancer. He was operated by Baltimore surgeons in his bed at home, and they found all kinds of things, just closed him up.
He said he'd given them too much.
Given too much. He was very philanthropic, for those days especially. And he had given Watts Hall at Davidson. He was very much interested in Davidson; he was Presbyterian. And Watts Hall at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, and he was a great devotee there, and all the preachers used to come in, it was something terrible. I hated them. I just didn't like them. They bothered me. They were so sanctimonious.
I was just going to say, I'm sure that they were.
Oh yeah, it was just terrible.
Its just an interesting aside, but after the breakup of the American Tobacco Trust, James B. Duke went in to Duke Power. Was your grandfather ever interested in…
Duke Price Power in Canada? No.
And an aluminum company, and so on. Do you know whether your grandfather ever took any interest in those enterprises?
No. Oh, he may have had some stock; he had some stick in Duke Power, I know, because it came down through the family. But, no, old Buck Duke just went on. Ben Duke had built by that time a house that used to be where North Carolina Mutual is today, that block.
I remember that house. I can remember that being there.
Brodie Duke was near the railroad, in a tremendous gingerbread house.
That was a half-brother, the renegade half-brother. And my father tells
the story about Brodie: came into the bank when it was just a shirt tail
of a bank, and talked with
Oh he was something. He screwed every woman he could get his hands on.
Maybe that's the one that I've heard my story about ‘Durham's not such a big town.’ Maybe that's who it was, Brodie Duke.
Ben was very, as I said, reminded me of pictures I've seen of Disraeli. And I knew Mary Duke, his daughter, well. Buck and Ben went to New York eventually and had big homes in New York City. And Mary eventually came back to Durham after she married, was it Angier Biddle, I believe. When he died, she lived in Forest Hills. I remember selling a house to Jim Cobb, fifty-two thousand dollars for the whole damn ball of wax. But she became kind of nuts.
Did you ever know Doris Duke?
All too well. Because she went to Chapel Hill, not as a student, but as one of the girls, and I tolled off to escort her because I was tall. And she was tall. She must be six foot or something. And she was very precise and very withdrawn. I saw her place in Hawaii. I haven't had anything to do with her since … our paths just didn't cross.
Well, she was pretty busy getting married, I think. And carrying on with Perfurol Rubiroso. Wasn't that one of her husbands? I think so.
He was the one who had fainted when the New York lawyers had drawn up a marriage agreement that only gave him a hundred thousand dollars in Paris, and he just passed out.
He was one of the outstanding citizens in the community, no question about that. My grandfather Watts was very quiet and very church-minded and so forth.
Did he have enemies, were there people who didn't like him?
My father? Oh, hell yes. Naturally.
I would imagine, anyone who is that powerful, everyone wouldn't agree with.
But, its just like when I ran for the City—I was appointed to the City Council—but when I ran, and I mean I really ran, the folks in east and west Durham, the mill people, voted for me. Forest Hills, oh hell, they voted against me. Now, why, I don't know. Jealousy.
It's interesting to speculate about it, let's put it that way.
I can say that now.
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
… another world. An association, and they've kept up with people. Why, it's just like my youngest sister's daughter's boy (I have to figure the relationship there) had gone to Williams, which is fine. He chose Williams. My kids all went to Chapel Hill. And then went elsewhere.
I want to complete today talking about your father. We had gotten in your life and your business life up to the time of the second World War. Your father was, by this time, as I think you said in the course of our conversation, getting older. He would have been in his sixties or so …
But still very active.
Now what were his interests in this latter stage of his life, and when you came back after World War II and so on?
He was a great reader, and became a church man, an elder. And was a power in the church. I didn't like some of his selections for preachers but that's that. But you can't get rid of them in the Presbyterian Church. He kept his finger on business, and right up until a few weeks before he died, he was still the major stock holder in the bank. And the major stock holder in the insurance company. And while he was very friendly and so forth, when it came down to yes or no, why, he called the shots.
Did he come into the office regularly?
Oh, yes, he was there five days a week, and had a big old black couch,
leather covered, and he used to sleep there in the afternoon. He'd have
a little breakfast, a very little
Do you still have those?
Oh, I still have them in the office. I'm just waiting to get somebody to go through them. It'll be tremendously interesting. I read some of it. They didn't have xerox machines and didn't have carbons in those days.
It went in the letter book.
Dampen, and it made the impression, and there was the record, the permanent record. He was very careful about his business and so forth. He became interested in Union Theological. That was his outside interest outside the university. He spent a great deal of time on the university, a great deal of time. He was active, like me, I'm still active in the bank, and they're very good to me, and if they're not, I raise some hell about it.
Now did he continue an active interest also in things like the growth of Blue Cross Blue Shield, and so on?
He didn't have any interest in it.
He didn't?
No. That was news to him. The hospital, he turned over to me, period. That was it. He didn't bother me. I ran it, with a director.
How about things like the farm?
He ran the farm. Oh hell yes. He had eventually the grain and tobacco farm, which is on Hillsborough Road, there where the City Water Works. And he built the golf course, and he was a great golfer there. That was the first park in Durham, and he gave six or eight, all the parks in Durham except the Ben Duke Park on Mangum Street. Every park in Durham has … white and colored. He was very careful to have some colored—I can't say black.
What was his view on race?
He was against it.
He was against it.
That's the best way I can express it. Oh, he helped Lincoln Hospital and he helped the Negro Life Insurance Company, as my grandfather did. And he gave the land to Lincoln Hospital, and was very much interested. It was a Duke proposition, they spent a lot of money, for them, for those days. Fifty, sixty thousands dollars, hell, is nothing now. Oh, Dad was very civic minded. He worked with the Academy of Music where the old hotel used to be, which is now a parking lot that I built. And we built the Civic Center out of some of the brick from there.
What about North Carolina Central? Did any members of your family or any others have anything to do that college?
No. He knew the old man Spalding. He knew the leaders and he didn't have much use for them. It was the niggers to him, always were. You don't say that any more.
But that was a different time.
Oh, sure it was.
In fact, I don't imagine there were very many people who had any other preference.
They had a thousand slaves when he was growing up, and couldn't get rid of them. His mother had freed them. She was running the farm. She'd freed them, but couldn't get rid of them. Oh, fifteen years before the war.
Oh really, oh before the war.
Before the war, and couldn't get rid of them.
They stayed, and stayed around?
Oh hell, sure. Had to feed them. They had no where to go. They didn't know anything different.
That's wonderful. I didn't ask you, but I assume, if he was born in 1869, four years after the war was over, did you ever hear him refer to the aftermath of the war and what it was like in the South after the war at all?
No. He came on to Chapel Hill and went on to New York.
Now you must be able to remember Civil War veterans and Lee Days, Lee memorial days, and that sort of thing.
Oh hell yeah. Didn't make much impression. That was that.
I was interested in what you said the last time about American attitudes toward the Second World War, that Southerners had a different view of war than other people because we had lost a war…
You're darn right.
… and had a sense of what was involved.
At the Bennett Place, the surrender, the Confederate troops were given mules, allowed to take their mules with them, which was a godsend because they had no motive power in those days. And that made it possible to start growing some crops.
I'm one of those who views Sherman, not as bad a man, as I think lots of Southerners view him. And our family farm in Georgia was burned by Sherman when he came through. I don't have any love for him, but on the other hand he was a better friend to the South than is sometimes thought. He realized, for instance, the mules. That was Sherman there at Bennett Place and he realized that was tremendously important. Also, if you look at the statistics, the South doesn't really get over the Civil War until the twentieth century. There wasn't any Marshall Plan or anything else for the South. It was still suffering into the twentieth century.
No question about that.
Well, any other recollections about John Sprunt Hill that you think historians …
You'll learn more from those monographs than I know.
No, I'm not sure of that at all.
Because Archibald Henderson was a great friend. There were some great old professors back in those days. We have them now, but I don't know them, don't have the contact with them. They were few and far between, old Dr. Hume, and oh, I remember Archibald Henderson.
I don't know how far you've gotten into any of those monographs.
I've read what they had on it.
I don't know what, he was tremendously interested in North Caroliniana …
The North Carolina Collection and so on.
There were two ladies that—they're both dead now—that he paid their salaries and their living expenses and what not, that ran the Collection. Mrs. Cotton was one of them I think … I just lost track of the names. He thought that the library was the center of the university. I remember when the library was built, the Wilson Library. That's why it was located there, because it was then the center of the university. There wasn't any School of Business.
Can I ask you what you think about the architecture of the new library?
Oh god a'mighty. That's a Walter Davis.
It's a wonderful facility inside, but I must say that it is …
I've never been in, I have no interest.
Speaking as a working scholar, it is a very useful facility, but I don't
think it's very attractive. I like the style of the old Wilson Library,
I must say, a good deal better.
That's quite true. Kenan Stadium, Emerson Stadium, before that.
Well, the buildings and the library, all of those things.
… the Alumni Building, Phillips Hall, the Carr Building.
[END OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE B]
Mr. Hill, I'd like to talk about your World War II experiences, about what you did and what it was like. You were in the O.S.S.
I was in the O.S.S. back, as I had previously said, working with the
"Committee to Defend America," thanks to Francis Miller, of Fairfax
Virginia, and Whitney Shepherdson, of the Foreign Policy group. Herbert
Agar acted as the chairman. I worked with them for a year before we went
in the service in the war, and I was at home enjoying myself. I was too
old, I thought, to fiddle with this mess, and David Bruce, who lived
across the Virginia line, called me and said, could I come to
Washington, they wanted to talk to me. So I went to Washington that
night on the Rattler. Didn't have planes in those days, as I remember,
particularly. And we talked, he talked to me for about an hour, and I
said, "Well what do you want me to do?" He said, "Come on up here and
help me." I came on home, got my stuff together, went back to
Washington. My wife was ga-ga. She didn't know why I was moving so fast,
but he said he wanted me so I went on up. And I said, "What do you want
me to do, Dave." He said, "Just help me." That's the only instructions I
had for about two years. It was interesting, and I had an office, and
one of the things I did was to keep moving people around. I was number
twenty-three. Arthur Roseborough, who had been Foster and Allen Dulles's
manager in Paris for twenty odd years, a Rhodes Scholar, had come back,
and he was number twelve or thirteen up there, and he was handling the
French desk. We had fourteen—as
Now this is David Bruce?
David K. E. Bruce. When he came back he called me in and said, "What the
hell's going on here?" I said, "Well looks like a mighty pretty office
to me." I never did tell him who did it. And it was good, because he was
head of intelligence and he needed a proper office. Another job we had,
which was just an
Tell me about David Bruce, he later became ambassador to the Court of St. James.
He was forty-three, a great big fine looking fellow, married to Elsa Mellon, who was a drunk. He eventually got a divorce from her. Later he traded with Whitney Shepherdson, who had been in charge of the London office, and Whitney came back in charge of the Western Office and David took the London office. I think I mentioned, he called me up one day and said, "I'm sending a girl over to you to take care of, will you find her a job in O.S.S.?" And I said sure. It turned out to be Evangeline, and about three months later he married Evangeline. I didn't know anything about it at all. I put her in my office. The office became so crowded that for three days one time I had to step on a desk to get to my desk in the back. Oh, that was par for the course.
How about Bill Donovan? What kind of a person was he? Wild Bill.
Short, paunchy, always asked you the question. I went to New York one
day, I had to take some messages to New York, top secret. So I was in
uniform and I went up to the St. Regis—we had a suite—and I went into
the suite and there was Bill naked as a damn jay bird with a girl on his
head and a girl
Now what kinds of people were these; I've heard of some O.S.S. officers referred to as intellectuals, and eccentrics…
They were. They were a bunch of crazy damn people. A few business people. I remember Bill Vanderbilt was the worst of the group. He was then governor, past governor of Rhode Island. He was just a stuffed shirt, just hot air. The boy who was in charge of the eastern Mediterranean, Greece and so forth, was nuts, complete nuts. He did a good job. There was every conceivable kind of person there. The Research and Development did a remarkable job. They had a tremendous number of scholars attached. They ha five hundred people or something in it eventually, and they laid it out: where to go and why to go and so forth. For instance, I was called in by General Donovan one day. He said, "I want complete information on Africa, electric lines, transformers, air ports, sea ports." I repeated, "You want full information." "Yes." I said, "Thank you, sir," and I left. I went to R and D and told them what I wanted, and they came up with it in about three weeks. They had the whole damn thing laid out. This was prior to any invasion attempt. What happened to it I don't know.
It probably became very useful. I think people think of intelligence activities always being cloak and dagger sorts of things, and a lot of it is routine, as you're saying.
No, and at these camps we trained all kinds of people. It was amazing to me the number of people that came from Europe to America during the war, and we'd take their clothes away from them before they could go to a dry cleaner or laundry where they would put the marks on it that show under ultra-violet because the Germans knew that and that was a dead give away. After I got to England in '44, I was the outfitting man in '44. We had organized a brewery that used to be across Key Bridge. The street car made a big circle and came back, and there was a brewery over on the right hand side.
What is now Crystal City or something.
I don't know. It's gone anyhow. Roslyn. And we had collected these clothes from everybody. You'd be amazed at the bales of stuff that came in. And we segregated it, and when I got to London in '44—I was there in '42 and '44—I had a British captain, a lovely woman, a wonderful girl, we had the old clothes racket and outfitted people to be infiltrated by plane or what have you. I took one flight with a man to be dropped, that was toward Lyon, and we went out at night, and the signal didn't come through clear enough and back we went. I got him some girls and four days later off he went. It's just that simple.
Now was this before or after the Normandy invasion in June?
This was before. Rosenborough had become a Colonel in Brereton's service by that time and was dropped in north France, the northern part of France, and rallied a lot of people prior to the invasion and then got out again. And then after the war he asked me for a job. I put him in the trust department for two years and he just didn't fit. He had bought about five or six hundred acres next to Quail Roost out here, and eventually died. His wife still lives—he married a British girl, his second wife; he divorced his first wife. I'd known him through the French desk and his wife was an Admiral's daughter, a French Admiral's daughter, and they lived with me for several months. She ran the house, squeezed every orange before she'd buy it, typical French.
Now did you lose any people? Did you have any people who went in on hazardous missions and never came back?
Oh, yeah. Oh, you'd kiss them good bye. Very few people, when you come down to it. We'd send them in in teams of three, a chief, a radio operator, and an extra one. Normally that was the racket that they had. And eventually, we helped organize—that's what old Oblinsky did, he was the head of the Jedburgs, a peculiar name. I don't know why, but small groups that went in before and after the invasion, beautifully trained sabotage and intelligence people and so forth.
Were men as well as women involved in these things?
Oh yeah. This woman I started to tell you about, the German (lived in
England, but was German nationality), we took her fillings out and got a
German dentist to put German fillings
You had to think of everything, it sounds like.
Yeah, normally. I remember a German was picked up in London because of the buttons on his coat. Somebody figured it out, picked him up.
That's incredible. Now how good were the British? What's your assessment of the British ability?
The British were damn good. In my view, they knew exactly what they were doing. There wasn't any question about it. The British and French intelligence that we had had, and the Catholic Church intelligence, prior to our going into the service, to the committee, was excellent.
The Catholic Church's?
Sure. Well, you didn't talk about it, and the British knew what they were doing. We had, of course, infiltration of a lot of French people. DeGaulle was a bastard of the first order, a great big tall, six foot nine or something like that, and he had the finest ego of anybody I ever knew.
His headquarters would have been in London.
Yeah. And eventually, when the invasion took place, I was sent over to
France. I remember on the flight— it was one of these very British days,
overcast, and the plane was filled with Generals and Colonels, and what
have you, Majors, and so on; Americans basically, some British—we got
over the channel, and you couldn't see for hell. The pilot, who was by
himself, didn't have a co-pilot. An army plane, we were sitting on a
long seat.
Do you think luck is important in life?
Oh, tremendously so. Some people are lucky, some people make their luck. No question about it.
The United States had virtually no experience in the intelligence game, did they?
Absolutely none. The military attache…
[END OF TAPE 5, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 6, SIDE A]
Was it William Stevenson?
Yeah. He was a man, oh brother, and his group, very quiet, at
Rockerfeller Center, had their office. Very few of us ever went to the
office but they would come by, and we used the British intelligence all
the way through. They knew what they were doing. One man, for instance,
that I got to know later, had been in Bulgaria or Romania, one of those
places, had been there
Did you remain stationed in London in '44 or did you go permanently to France?
No, I was in London for awhile, then went to France, and I was "Fuller Brush" man by that time, meaning that I had all kinds of gadgets. For instance, one was a cow plop, which had a compartment in which you could put papers and put it out in the pasture or what not and the man would come by and pick up that particular cow plop.
You hoped he'd get the one he wanted, or he hoped.
That always tickled me. But all kinds of damn things, and so forth. We had made riding crops with a sword in them. We had private… let me get you something here…
A match box camera, like that, that tiny?
Everyone of my jobs, somebody had the idea for. People had been
infiltrated. It was surprising how good a little photograph it would
take. We used the lens off a Recordak, or
Your job sounds like something like Que in James Bond, supplies all the gadgets to the agents. So that was your role, Fuller Brush salesman?
That was toward the end of the war, before the Germans surrendered. I made a trip, I was at Patton's army at Luxembourg, and they was bogged down in the rain and the mud. I had a little jeep and my Sgt. stole twenty gallons of gas—the army only had 100.
[END OF TAPE 6, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 6, SIDE B]
So, 1945 comes, you come back from Europe, the war is over in the Fall of 1945. What activities did you get involved in? What did you want to do?
I had gotten involved before I went to Washington. My father asked
me—well, I went to work for $250 a month. After I got married and came
back, Fall of '25, and he asked me to build a store building, which I
did. It was occupied by Rose on Main Street, next to what's now the
First Union Bank Building. That was the first architectural project that
I had full authority on. Then I organized Blue Cross with Dr. Davidson
in '33, and we started that. I gave Blue Cross an office in the Trust
Building; that was the old office building. Eventually they went on to
the mezzanine floor in the Trust Building. We had rebuilt it. That was
the Hospital Care which became Blue Cross when it merged with Hospital
Savings. The same year, it was a big year, I organized the Central
Carolina Farmers Exchange. That was all in '33. When I came back, in
'45, there were some other things. I was vice-president of the bank,
which had grown some. In '37 we built the office building, the present
CCB building, and reorganized the name. That was before the war. I went
to war because Dave Bruce asked me to, and I came back, and I don't
remember anything particular. I worked with the bank. And Luther Hodges,
whom I had barely known, asked me in '55, I think it was, to take over
as the treasurer of the Research Triangle Study Committee, a proposed
program, that Brandon Hodges, who had been State Treasurer, had been
handling
I was going to ask you, what did you have in mind, what was your idea of what this might become?
Well, by that time, Simpson had gone to Stanford, and knew all about Stanford Research Institute, and he was particularly concerned with the Institute, much more so than the Foundation. Romeo Guest had come into the picture from Greensboro, and his friend Robins at Aberdeen had put up some money and they had bought acreage after we organized it. After Archie Davis raised around a million and a quarter or something in about thirty days (surprising) we bought out Robins, paid him back. There were a lot of holes—I've got a map at the office I'll bring over here—that shows them; it's all spotty. Slowly we kept building them up. I had a forester, Mangam, that kept working on the land with Romeo. Romeo and myself worked very closely together. And we were trying to get some acreage down in the old cut over pine land. It wasn't worth a damn for anything. Septic tanks couldn't be used because it was non-permeable. About the cheapest land that there was in this whole area. We didn't pay much for it.
Were there any small communities near there?
Well, Lowes Grove was on the west side. And there was a filling station
on the east side. I think that was all. And there was a little stuff on
the north end, a school up there,
I gather you were quite instrumental in that.
Yes, well, we had worked it out. I was acting as secretary to the
Foundation. I served for twenty-three something years, through Archie
Davis, through Luther Hodges as chairman, and Archie as president.
Archie had become president of the Bankers' Association for a year and
he was the high knocker in Wachovia Bank and then retired. Archie has
hearing trouble. He's deaf as a post in one ear. He wasn't too well
then, and it's been up and down. Then Luther died and Archie took over.
And Acres Moore from Raleigh, who considered himself a great friend of
Luther's, but Luther just kind of looked at it. Well he became
vice-president, and head of the Research Triangle Service Center which
was a hundred acre area just north of 54. And it was leased to a little
Teer company for it to build, as it did, the Governor's Inn, and started
building an office building,
The Foundation has?
Th Foundation does at the moment. Profits, I would call them, but call it
surplus or whatever you want to. The Foundation gave the Institute five
hundred thousand dollars cash capital which we used up til about four or
five thousand dollars, when we got on our feet. And they slowly gave a
hundred and sixty acres; Archie and Luther never understood that they
were separate organizations. The Foundation has given a million
I was just laughing. I can see Hugh McCall rubber stamping something.
Well, he's not on the executive committee, but Louis and Watts are on the executive committee.
Louis Stephens is no easy mark either.
When you look over that twenty-seven years that you've been involved with them who do you think have been the most influential, the most creative guiding people as far as the Research Triangle?
Pearson Stuart, planner, who was a North Carolinian, went to Rhode Island and we brought him back. Pearson and I planned the lay out of the Foundation Park and set aside the acreage for the Institute. We laid out the road system, blocked out locations. The roads are so organized, the proper roads, that they can be four-laned width. And we drew up the regulations, fifteen percent building period plus parking on top of that. Minimum was six acres. They followed that straight through. We had the whole thing as "research," and they've changed that during the process, eight or ten years ago, to a thousand acres in the center for research, the "Research Application" area around it, so you could have some manufacturing. It was supposed to be prototype. Well, IBM, Northern Telecom, GE more recently. Luther Hodges was the quarter back. He called the shots, he was the front man. Damn good, damn good. Acres Moore had a very definite part in it. He was always killing something.
Was everyone who was associated with this always bullish about the
prospects of this operation. Were people
In the beginning we had a hell of a lot of holes, as I call them. The problem was to fill these holes and have a proper operation. We slowly have done it; haven't quite finished it. The American Legion refuses to sell right there on 54, a damn little old brick house. The prices have gone from five thousand an acre. We paid a hundred dollars and acre, fifty dollars, four hundred dollars an acre. There was nothing there. We hadn't had inflation. It was a big difference. Now they're up to forty thousand dollars an acre, and people are buying on the perimeter at sixty-five to seventy-five thousand dollars an acre. There's a Lebanese who's been writing to me. I asked him to write a memorandum about it so I had it straight. He had paid forty thousand dollars an acre for some land on Alston Avenue on the west side of the Park. He's holding it for two hundred thousand dollars an acre.
Did you ever envisage that it was going to be that successful?
No. Nobody did. Had no idea. But it's just come along and almost all of the suitable land has been absorbed, "liquidated," north of 54. Five hundred and six acres, I think. The National Science lay dormant for five years, and we worked that out and had a big party and luncheon in Washington. Then two or three weeks later the damn thing broke and they got the sixty seven million dollars to build the present building and take care of Dr. Raul, a great fellow.
Dave Raul.
That was south of 54 and that was the only thing south of 54. They'd been unable to buy land along the east side, south of 54. Folks won't sell it. They're speculating now.
Did you uniformly get help from political leadership in North Carolina?
Yes. Well Luther was Governor and he presented something to the Legislature and they out up five hundred thousand or a million dollars, part of the show. That's all they did. They gave the Institute some money back in the early days to buy equipment. Yesterday at the R.T.I. monthly meeting, they had developed a surplus of four million dollars for the first time in history. Normally two or two and a half. We had expended some of that so it left two million nine for the purchase of equipment. The request for equipment went to four or five million dollars, so you have to do the best that you can. Corporations have given R.T.I. computers and god knows what all else that have been tremendously helpful. The Park has done well. It's recognized as the largest acreage of any Park. Stanford is forty or fifty acres or something like that. They're just cramped, terrible.
Did you have any other prototypes in mind? Were there other places that were doing this?
There were seven different units. Battell, Columbus, Ohio, is the biggest
of the whole business. We haven't caught Stanford yet, but we're on our
way, in the Institute. It's been a model for the United States, and the
off-shoots, like
Let me ask a question that may sound intemperate in a sense, and I think I know the answer. Did any of the principals involved make money off this operation?
No.
So it's not a profit-making operation?
No. Nobody made any money. It was one of those damn things that just workout. That was one of the keys to it, I think. People gave their time and it was amazing. They still give it.
It certainly has been an amazing success.
The most amazing thing was back in the beginning when Luther raised a million and a half.
Without really having an idea…
Oh hell, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. It was Luther.
He was something. Many a time I've been in his office, as governor and
afterwards, and see those hands turn right white. He didn't agree.
What about the negotiations with the individual companies? Say IBM comes in and wants to locate there. Who works out the individual arrangements with the company?
Various executive V.P.s that we had, basically Huffman, and various and sundry ones, went around and visited this, that, and the other thing. It took GE ten years work to get them together. They had to educate them, you might say. And they weren't ready and so forth. Once IBM started their office in Raleigh and then back over at the Park, they just kept going. They've got ten thousand people working in the Park, and maybe more than that by now since the last I've heard of it. Maybe a good deal more. God knows how many thousands of dollars have been spent on physical facilities.
[END OF TAPE 6, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 7, SIDE A]
At the Institute, we have this pact. George Herbert. If he resigns, I resign. If I resign, he's resigning. We've got ten people now, vice presidents, we're looking at. We talked about it yesterday. I don't know who in particular. I have my own thoughts. You've got to prepare yourself; you don't just wait until the last minute.
Obviously this took an enormous amount of time.
We have a tremendous number of people that come in from all over the country.
What about other things on your life in this post-war period, the fifties and sixties? When did Quail Roost come to the University? When did you move from Quail Roost to here?
I built the Quail Roost house in '37. We lived there twenty-five years.
We moved over here and built this place in
I'd like to talk to you about that actually.
Did the dairy go to North Carolina State?
No. I started the dairy back in '25 or '26, when I came back. That's when I had three titted cows from my father. I went to State College and spent three months studying the damn things, in Washington in the Department of Agriculture. I came out with purebred Gurnsey cattle. We started and slowly built it up. I had a manager, one of the top men in the country. He had been the Golden Gurnsey salesman for the American Gurnsey Cattle Club. I went on the Board of Cattle Club and served a good many years. That was in Petersborough, New Hampshire. I built the damn office building that they've got, among other things, in passing.
What was the object of the dairy?
I was bottling milk and selling it in Durham. Chapel Hill didn't amount
to a hill of beans in those days. I bought
Was there really money in the dairy side, or was it more in the breeding side, or were you doing it more for fun?
Both. All three. It was the best use of Quail Roost. It was eighteen
hundred acres. I have given to State College School of Forestry some two
thousand acres on the east, all along Flat River, on the east of the
farm. It's still there. They built a great big log building and took a
lot of World War Two buildings and made shops and dining rooms and so
forth. It's a very interesting thing. I got State to build a bridge over
the Flat River. It fell down and they rebuilt it. We had at Quail Roost
an honest to god farm, an operating farm. I had twenty-five people
living on the place and working on the farm, and slowly it just
disintegrated from a cost standpoint. I ended up with the outstanding
Gurnsey herd in the United States for the last five years of its
operation. Thurman Chatham, in Elkin, Chatham Manufacturing; A.L. Brown,
Kannapolis of Cannon Mills; I got Bowman Gray into the picture; we had a
real operation. We'd have a sale at various and sundry places—four or
five times at Quail Roost itself—an auction sale. They'd bring the
cattle in the day before and folks from all over the United States would
come in. I sold a cow for seventeen thousand, five hundred dollars, and
she became the grand champion Gurnsey cow in the
We're talking about Quail Roost Farm at this point.
The quantity of milk given, and the butter fat would be 4.5 to 4.9,
whereas Jersey milk was a little richer, 5.2 or something like that.
That was the famous rich-man's-milk. The Holstein was about 2.5 or 2.9
They used Gurnsey milk at the milk plant to bring the Holstein milk up
to the 3 percent, which was the minimum fat permitted by the state.
Using my milk.
So you moved in the 1960s to this house?
Early sixties.
Did you give up your interest in farming, and did you miss it?
Yeah, about eight or nine years ago. We couldn't get the labor. People
didn't want to work, to get up at three
Do you miss being actively involved in farming?
No, it just was. Hell, my sister did the same thing. She sold out her herd about three or four years ago. I was two or three years ahead of her. She still has her Black Angus cows up on the farm, but the day of individual dairies is almost gone. I don't know where we're going to get the milk from. Big plants and… I don't know. People are not going to buy Golden Gurnsey milk any more. It's too rich.
Too rich and too expensive, too.
We sold it as a special milk at a higher price, and we sold it.
It's a very interesting thing, and I was on the Cattle Club executive committee for years. You go to Michigan or California or what the hell, just some meetings, sales, what have you. As I say, I built the building in Petersborough, of all places, way back up there in New Hampshire. That's where I learned: I always went in the women's john on each floor, and if the women's john was clean and properly taken care of, I didn't worry about the rest of the building. The same thing applies to the bank. We've got sixty-odd branches, sixty-five branches. I make a point of going in the women's john. I get a girl to see if there's anybody using it. She opens the door and holds the door and I go and take a look. I've found that if the woman's john is taken care of, the janitors are doing a decent job.
Why do you suppose that's true?
If stuff's all over the floor, I always insist that the architect build a proper place for women to have their tampons and what have you under the basin. You don't need anything in the men's room. I don't bother about the men's room.
In high school, I had a course or two in mechanical drawing, and, as I commented one time, my father used to be chairman of the building committee at the university. He used to bring me a sketch on an envelope, all out of kilter, out of size and everything. He'd say, "Handle this for me." And I would make a sketch. I had enough training to so do, and I suppose that's where it all started, by osmosis. You get into a lot of damn things. The store building in Durham, the renovation of the Trust Building, eventually the plans for Quail Roost. I built that in '37. Well, an architect has got to have some direction, and I just loved it. I would have been a surgeon if I had had a brother, but I never thought about being an architect or anything like that. I never thought of studying it; I was on the other end, on the paying end.
Do you have any principles that you operate on as far as architecture and interiors are concerned?
No, just simple. I'll always work with the dean of architecture at State, Kampnefner, now … what's his name, McKinney. I worked over here, and I've always stuck my nose into Chapel Hill because of my love for Chapel Hill and my father's former interest. Seven dormitories, all down on Hillsborough and Cameron; the woman's dorm, Old Spencer—I had my finger in that one. It really just kind of grew up, no rhyme or reason particularly. I just loved it. For the Carolina Inn, I was the owner's representative on the Carolina Inn. That was while I was in college, in Law School. I reckon that started the damn thing. I designed my own buildings at Quail Roost, the farm buildings.
As well as the house buildings.
Oh hell yes.
It seems to me that in some of your buildings that I'm acquainted with, on balance the function and form seem to be quite closely connected. They seem to work.
I've always tried to build it from the inside out and put a cover on it.
Okay. That's an interesting principle.
If the damn thing doesn't work, it's of no value. That's the thing that
bothered me about Kenan. I don't know anything about the interior. I
worked with the old hospital here. I ran Watts Hospital for thirty-five
years, and we built what's now the Private Patient Pavilion with money
from my grandfather. We built the new wing, now Science and Math, of
course, in '54, and another wing that had all the specialties—operating
room, x-ray, lab, and so forth—in it. That was a
What about including art and other things in your bank buildings?
Well, take this house. It's roughly five rooms, roughly equal to Quail
Roost. There may be a different location of the doorway or something
like that. The office has been enlarged from the shirttail thing I had
at Quail Roost. The bar has been enlarged because I realized you don't
work with something like that. The exterior follows the same principle;
I just love the old Williamsburg. That's why I got so upset about Frank
Kenan and his Institute of Private Enterprise. Big dorm here, little
dorm here, big this here, little this here; it's all out of proportion.
It's got these damn white limestone lines through it, but they're all
the same size. We had white lines on a building that Atkins had done for
us. We're building a fifty thousand square foot building, an addition,
between the Hill Building and the Herbert Building, the engineering
building. He's drawing the plans. He had white lines, and we made him
take them out. Earl Johnson, the crane man in Raleigh, is chairman of
the building committee. I'm on the committee. I've been the bad one on
the committee. We've got a different course of brick, slightly different
color, just enough so it's there, architecturally speaking. These white
lines back on the Alumni
Good definition. I'll return to that in a moment.
Because every building First Citizens has is different. It's crazy. I wanted an image, on the exterior and on the interior. You'd be amazed how much kids working in the bank subconsciously appreciate. You take the paintings out, you take the flowers and green stuff out and they just raise hell about it. They like it. They do better work, and after all that is what a bank's for. The public likes it. It makes all the difference in the world. We built in some night deposit units, and we've got a big movable screen around it. We've learned how now we don't do that because it looked like hell. You can go down here to some Durham branch and you can see it. And we've learned we don't put the night deposit next to the drive-up. People using the night deposit, basically, are in a automobile today. They come up to the drive-up and they've got to wait. You put it somewhere else where they can get out and walk up to the drive-up. You learn a few things. My boys don't understand it. They want to argue with me.
It seems to me that now many banks, like NCNB and others, put up art work and buy art work. When did you start taking an interest in this sort of thing?
Fifteen years ago. We now try to use North Carolina artists as far as that part is concerned, but it doesn't always fit. We're revamping the main office building. We're putting a glass partition between the officers' desks and we're curving it slightly. We're carrying it up six feet. Psychologically, the customer is going to have privacy. For practical purposes it's not worth a damn, because you can hear right around it. But he feels better. We did it in Winston-Salem and it's working beautifully. We did it at Greensboro. You ought to see the little bank at Greensboro, out at the shopping center. We've got our name on the building and what not. It's a big office building. They have Central Carolina Bank up there. They were glad to have us. We're hoping to build east of the Triangle, where is another question. I took my marketing developing man down with me to look at the airport, the big development just off the airport turnoff. There's a mall and so forth. They're building seven office buildings and a hotel and god knows what. The Webb people from Lexington, the same people who have a joint agreement with Whittenburg on the two office buildings in downtown Durham.
I must ask you about the architecture of another building that you must have been connected with. What do you think about the Blue Cross Blue Shield Building?
I was chairman of the building committee.
How do you like that?
I served on the Blue Cross committee—the old Hospital Care was then actually Blue Cross—forty-one years, longer than anyone has ever been tied in to Blue Cross. The boys wanted a ten-story glass building up high. In the woods, in the country? Oh. no. So we got hold of Gooley O'Dell as the architect, who then, in my opinion, at that time, had more get-up-and-go to his office in Charlotte than any of the architects. Archie Royal Davis, who did Morehead Building—well, that's traditional, basically. It's like this house, traditional. And to hell with these architects in Raleigh. They're political. I won't call the names of them all, but Milton Small, who did the Home Security, was from Raleigh.
Gooley and myself got to laughing about it and I said, "Just lay the damn building down." We just laid it down. Then it was Gooley's idea to have it so the sun didn't hit it but just the absolute minimum, and it's eighty-two percent efficient. No partitions except for a little on the executive floor, and the sun hits it about three quarters of an hour, period. What do you call it? Romboid?
It's the only romboid-shaped building in the world, I think.
It's on six pedestals.
It's a unique building. I like it. I'm very fond of that building. It's one of the more striking buildings.
It works beautifully.
It looks great too.
It's built so that if they want to build any more—and they're thinking seriously about it—they go out the back.
[END OF TAPE 7, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 7, SIDE B]
Mr. Hill, we've talked chronologically about your background, your childhood, you're college career, your ten months trip, your getting started in business, and we talked about your father, your family, his impact on you life. Then we talked about your World War II experiences, we talked about your business career, your career in the university. Today, I'd like to talk about you, in a sense, and how you look at things. I'm thinking of someone writing your biography, the kind of things that they're going to want to know after they look at the facts of where you were at what time, what your position was, and where you went next. I'm interested in you and what makes you tick and how you think. Let's start by my asking you, in looking across your life, what are you most proud of when you look across the accomplishments that you have had? What makes you most proud and happy of your accomplishments?
Three things. The results of the presidency of the Board of Trustees of Watts Hospital, the thirty-five years carrying on the work that my grandfather started and my father continued for a short while. Second, the Research Triangle program and its essence, the organization and the idea, the technical, legal approach, and basically the Institute rather than the Foundation itself. The Institute is the key element, not so determined by the general public or certainly by the officers of the Foundation, but my knowledge indicates that it is the key to the Research Triangle program over all.
Third, the Learning Development Center, now a component part of Durham Academy, in which … "learning disabled" is a general term for the kids, and I've been amazed at the reaction of parents that have come to me for this, that, and the other, almost inadvertently—their appreciation of the organization, now limited to seventy-five, max, pupils—how appreciative they have been for a maximum of two years service. It's gone on now for seven years, and I'm building an addition, a modern building to house the older students, and we're working toward putting in six computers to meet the modern approach. Instead of a quiet room where the teacher could talk with the learning dyslexia and so forth, it now will be three computers here and three computers there. The older students will write very poorly, normally, but they will put it on a computer with a word processor. This is an afterthought of a new head of Learning Development Center, and it's been a component part of Durham Academy and is doing a remarkable job. I say those three more than anything else.
Let's take these three and consider them for a moment. They fall broadly in the area of public service, it seems to me. What about making money? You're a businessman.
I'm not interested particularly. Except for the fact that I could have
made more money if I had speculated and done this, that, and the other
thing and so forth. The salary that I get from the bank is nominal. I
should get fifty or a hundred thousand dollars, but I get ten. What the
hell. I have a good stock ownership in the bank and, as Bill Burns said,
the bank had made a rich man out of him. He was going to resign six or
seven
But in the great scheme of things, I'm trying to think of the way you would talk to your grandchildren or to a young person you are trying to advise. What things would you tell them were important?
Doing a good job, both for yourself and for other people. It's a
combination. It's neither one nor the other. I think public service is a
good term. Leave the world a little bit better than when you came into
it as you go out. Things are transitory. I've had a lot of people thank
me for this, that, and the other, that I didn't know anything about.
Apparently things I had indirectly touched, not directly. But working
with a bank has been a lot of fun because, as I have said earlier at
some time, my father and I had made eighty-three loans to churches.
Well, that hadn't been done for fifteen years. I haven't had any part in
it; I'm not a loan officer. But the influence that I've had in the bank
has been a value to the bank in my judgment. Maybe I'm crazy. I'm known
in Durham as Mr. Central Carolina Bank. Somebody said, "Well, they're
trying to throw you out." I said, "Well, let them try." I'd love to get
You say that you would advise them to be involved in meaningful work and to work hard and do a good job. What if your grandchild said to you, "Well, I've tried to do a good job, but I've failed. It hasn't worked. What should I do? I'm disappointed. I worked very hard and it wasn't recognized." Kids say these things. How do you react to failure. How do you react to people not being rewarded. How would you advise someone, philosophically?
Well, a failure and not being rewarded and so forth, that's a personal
thing. A kid came to me, thirty or forty years old, and said he'd been a
failure. I said, "Why don't you look around and change your approach? Do
something different." I can't believe in failure.
There's been a book written about Why Bad Things Happen to
Good People. Do you think that good works and hard effort are
always rewarded?
No. I'm a great believer in the good lord and his actions, but he works in mysterious ways. I don't know. I've been as lucky as hell.
Let me ask you about luck.
My good wife complains, why don't I just relax? Why don't I put a couch
in the office and take a half to an hours
Intestinal fortitude, I guess.
I mean something different. Some of them realize that they're a bunch of bastards, and are acting like one, and so forth, taking advantage of people. But some of them don't. Some of your crooks do; some of them don't. Some of the big boys out grabbing and so on—they're all different.
How important is intelligence do you think to success?
I think you've got to have intelligence. No question. A dumb bunny is not going to get anywhere. It's just wasting time. The great majority of people, unfortunately, are of medium intelligence, to say the least. I think some people are given a gift and it's a shame that they don't use it, and some people don't use it. I know two boys who have grown up here, of a good family, and I've watched them. They had the financial backing, the home life, all the rest of it, and were failures, complete failures. They're off on a tangent here, there, and yonder, that doesn't amount to a hill of beans, giving nothing of themselves whatsoever, nothing to the public.
You obviously feel that giving of yourself to the public and public service is an important thing for you personally as well as an important thing for the community.
In home life, I've been very lucky. The first girl I married, we couldn't have been happier for many years until she got sick, and she was sick for quite a while. This youngster, I couldn't ask for more in many respects. Oh, we have our problems. Hell, we're human. We see things a little differently. I'm at one age, she's at another age, and you've got to give and take, and it's give and take in life. Sure.
How important is family to you?
Very important. But not all powering. You have to keep things in balance, some sense of balance.
Were you a strict disciplinarian with your children? How did you go about disciplining your children and imparting attitudes and other things to your children?
No, this gal says I'm a Mary Poppins. My closet of clothes is just so. I clean up the room here; she drops stuff: the radio or t.v. program. I'll put it right over there every night. You just do it subconsciously.
You don't button your shirt sleeves.
No. It's just habit.
You'll be interested to know that I spent a lot of time with your son, Watts, and he's the same way. He is one of the neatest people and organizers of things I've ever seen.
More so than I am, as far as his office is concerned.
I'm sure I know where it came from. It's in the gene pool there.
You asked the question, was I a hard task master. No. I didn't raise children. They were raised by my wife and a governess until they were ten or fifteen years of age. I think Watts, Jr., has a yen for public service, unquestionably, more so than I. The youngest son is just embedded and immersed in his business, electronics. I gave him at Christmas a little book that had about fifteen pages in it. We were in Washington at the time, during the war. It had been obtained through my electronic officer in O.S.S. He sat there and read this book and re-read this book and studied it as a kid, ten years old. He is beginning to change now, at fifty-odd, and is becoming more interested in people and other activities. Maybe the genes are coming up on him. I don't know. The daughter has always been interested in various and sundry activities, but she's very happy now. She had a very unfortunate life for twenty years. She came to me and wanted a divorce. I said, "You make up your mind what you want, and I'll help you." Three years later she did, but it took her three years. She's very happy with Orville Campbell, and he's very happy with her. It's one of those fortunate instances. No, I think my father was very much interested in public service in very many ways, different aspects. But he was interested in making money, too.
You mentioned three things, and one of them was that you said your father had been very interested in the hospital.
Well, my grandfather died in '21, I think. He had built the hospital originally in '95, and then he got my father to rebuild it in 1907, 1909, at the present location. On his death, my grandfather was president of the board for years and controlled the board. He was very powerful mentally and very upstanding—six foot two, very thin, very erect. I got some of that from him because I used to walk with him: I would lean over to keep stride with him and he would pop me in the back, "Straighten up, youngster, straighten up." Well now, I'd straightened up, and I think subconsciously I picked that up. But on his death, my father took over the presidency and ran it for ten years or more. As soon as I got back in '30, he just handed it to me and said, "Run it." I wasn't president at the time. He still kept the presidency to see what would happen down there, I imagine, looking back at it now. And I ran it with a superintendent and the three of us, and the board didn't amount to a hill of beans. It was window-dressing, unfortunately. Then I got out when I realized I had built from ninety-one to three hundred and one patients capacity and a lot of other things—the new section in '54 and so forth. The whole picture had changed and the local governments had come into the picture. We handed it to the local governments. The federal government had been in it. My service in Blue Cross for forty-one years, longer than anyone has ever served, was a very interesting development.
My next question was going to be, did you see yourself as carrying on a family tradition? I'm looking for influences on your life. Do you see that as a responsibility?
As a responsibility, yes.
I'm going to ask you a personal question and all of these things you're going to see the transcript on, you can take off those things you don't wish to have public. Is it a disappointment to you that your family is not carrying on the traditions, that those traditions can't be carried on?
Yes, well the world's changed and their whole approach is different from what it used to be. Durham didn't have paved streets period, but now there's asphalt every damn place. The whole world is changing.
Is it better or worse or just different?
It's different, I'd say. I don't know whether it's worse. Often I think it's worse. We didn't have t.v. when I was growing up. We didn't have radio. We played games of various and sundry, and we were happy, I think happier than we are today.
So it is different. It seems to me in our conversations that your father and your grandfather had …
They had an influence.
What other factors would you say? Who and what were other influences in your life?
Mother was certainly an influence.
In what ways did she influence you?
She represented the family to me. My father was there, but I had gone to
school and would see him at suppertime. The family always gathered at
supper and he would tell us about this, that, and the other thing. We
learned a lot, my younger
Who would punish you?
Oh, Dad punished. He beat the hell out of me one time. He whooped me three or four times and one time beat the hell out of me. I learned.
Were you a bad kid? Were you a high-spirited kid?
I think I was perfectly normal. I wasn't high-spirited and I wasn't bad, but I wasn't good. I was just like any other damn kid, I expect. We used to play baseball and football in the back yard, at what's now Hill House, on the slope with the Bryant children. I didn't have any thought about women one way or the other until I was grown, in Law School. I liked women, but I never bothered with them. I always had men friends, I didn't have women friends.
What other influences do you think …
My grandfather was a real influence because of what he represented. He was ruling elder for twenty-five years, head of the Sunday School, and so forth. I lived with him about half the time growing up, and we'd have morning prayers and evening prayers. He would lead, and sometimes he'd hand them to me to do. I just accepted them. I never thought about it one way or the other.
Was religion important to you?
Very. To him. I used to sit there and push the preacher right on out of
the pulpit and then bring him back; that was the way I listened to the
sermon. I always went to Sunday
My father was subconsciously an influence. He didn't correct me or tell me what to do. Nobody told me what to do. I was off in a room by myself. The girls had a governess over here, and I didn't think a damn thing of the governess. They were feminine, and I didn't want any part of it one way or the other. But growing up, I learned better eventually. My father had quite a different influence. It was public service rather than the church, you might say. I don't know. You tend to drift from one thing into another, and organize this or that. It's always been fun organizing something.
Any of your teachers? You mentioned a couple of people that were your professors, but were there younger teachers? I'm thinking of your formidable years.
No, I don't remember. I don't remember any of them til I got to college.
It sounds like you were like Topsy: you growed up on your own.
I'm afraid so. Oh, I had friends, acquaintances, and they had some influence. Abel Cohn, whose father ran a little store a block away, had some influence. We played together in my grandfather's backyard. No, I think you're more or less right. I never thought about it before.
It sounds that way. Some people will say, "Oh, I remember my third grade teacher. She set me on the right track." Or some will say, "I remember my athletic coach in eight grade who did this." Or "I remember the preacher in my town," or various things.
Doctors had an influence on me.
You have mentioned that.
Dr. Foy Roberson was chief surgeon at the time. Old Dr. Felts, I didn't like. He was the medical man. Generally speaking, the hospital had an interest to me. From the time I was a kid I used to go out and watch operations and so forth. I was in the hospital in New York in the era when I was sixteen or seventeen and it had a real influence on me. As I said at one time, if I had had a brother, I would have been a surgeon, but I didn't have a brother so there wasn't anything to do but go to work.
You mentioned the hospital and thinking of that as public service and both in terms of a career.
I never thought about it as a public service.
You didn't?
If there's a job to be done, do it.
Well, it was a public service, obviously.
Well, it was, as I look back at it.
In thinking about health care as a general question, I would like to jump
in time. What do you think about the current situation as far as health
care is concerned: when prices are going out the ceiling and people
expect more and more
I don't know how we're going to deal with it. I'm very much disturbed about the different influences H.M.O. and various ways Blue Cross has tried to meet some of these questions. The cost is beyond belief.
[END OF TAPE 7, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 8, SIDE A]
I think we're faced with a very difficult situation. The cost is running wild. I know Blue Cross has done everything they could within reason in the last two or three years to control pricing costs. I think the federal government has, unfortunately, as the government tends to do, has made some arbitrary decisions. I think they're on the wrong track, but I think the doctors are at fault. Apparently there is too much personal interest, a grabbing approach. And I don't blame them in many respects. But a lot of them are making too much money and there are too many medical students in the universities and colleges. They graduate too damn many people, and too few people are making money, and too many people are not able to earn what they should be earning. How to control it, I don't know. H.M.O. is a good approach. The English have carried that to a crazy degree, in my opinion. Everything's free, and it's badly abused. You go to a British hospital and they say, "Well, come back a month from now. You may have a kidney stone and need attention."
Dialysis?
Well, that, or you may have a tremendous pain. Well, that's no way to do. Then they have private on the side for those who can afford it, and that's wrong. With the population aging, I think there should be some way to handle it. I don't know how, but as you well know, Davison and myself were very much disturbed about this back in the twenties and thirties, and, therefore, Blue Cross. He'd been to England to learn some things. It's surprising that now Blue Cross is beginning to control costs, the last four or five years. You couldn't control it before. Well, they didn't have any competition, you might say. Insurance companies are trying to make money, unfortunately, and I don't blame them. Hell, that's what they're organized for.
But it seems to me that it's beyond the area in which private individuals can make the contribution like your family did.
It's the government, local, national, or state-wide, that's got to handle this thing. There's no question about that. Individuals can't do it. They can help, but they can't handle it. I've often thought that I'd like to get back into the racket, but then again, I say, ‘You're too damn old.’
We need some ideas from some place, certainly.
Oh, I have kept my finger on Blue Cross. I get the reports every month, and I make some suggestions once in awhile. You have to be careful; I'm out. I don't attend the meetings on Friday.
Alright, education is next. You mentioned health care, and then you mentioned two areas in the educational area. How important do you think education is? How good a job do you think we're doing educationally? We can be specific, in terms of the University of North Carolina or its constituents, other education in the state of North Carolina, or we can be general. What do you think about education? How important is it? How well is it being handled?
I think it's the most important—well, the second most important—situation to which we come into contact. The first is the family. Hopefully people have a relationship with their wives and husbands and children that can be helpful and glorious in so many ways. But education makes things possible for a broad body politic and for the individual. Without education, we'd be in one hell of a damn fix. I think it has changed. I'm all for public education, as in the public schools, grammar and high schools. And as you know, I started Durham Academy as a private school because public education had fallen down. Public education still has tremendous holes in it that need to be fixed. They're doing something about it, and it takes time. It takes so damn long.
Let's take a specific issue …
The university is coming along.
Are you pleased with the trends and the direction?
Well, I'm very pleased. I was opposed to consolidation at first, but now
I'm very, very pleased with the fact that we have sixteen—now
eighteen—units in the university.
Are you in favor of the policy of the state providing some funds to underwrite the cost of private education as we presently do.
At present it's a very interesting—quote, unquote—situation in that the
private institutions continue to receive an increased amount with no accounting. It shouldn't be. The state should
require an accounting. They do of the universities. They do of the
public schools. But it's politics, pure and simple. Duke University
receives millions of dollars. They reduce their contribution from the
endowment and use the funds for some crazy foolishness. It's so
unfair.
I totally agree with you, but as a faculty member at a state run
institution I have to have some special interest in that or some special
sensitivities. Would you have comment on
I helped elect him. I followed him very closely. I expect I was as close to him as any outsider could expect to be. I didn't hesitate to say what I thought to him, to advise with him. He'd ask me questions, just this past Friday a few weeks ago. I think he was a remarkable man and did a remarkable job, particularly being a lawyer and placed in a position of authority as a youngster in his early thirties. It's amazing that he was able to withstand the pressures. I think he'll go down in history as one of the outstanding presidents of universities in the country. It's fortunate that he was in the position he was in compared to people like the Chancellor of Eastern Carolina and some of the black colleges. The control that he exercised quietly and calmly. People didn't realize how much control he did exercise.
What would you think of as his greatest strengths?
His quiet approach to university activity. There was a mailed fist underneath, but he didn't let that show. He learned as he went along, and he was willing to listen and did listen, and just quietly moved. Very quietly. And he surrounded himself with good people and gave them full authority. It was amazing the way he delegated authority instead of collecting it to himself. His choice of people was surprisingly good, as far as I could see, and as far as I ran into them.
You obviously would give him great credit with having.
He made the current university system possible. He made it function. See, I lived through the period when there were three institutions. Then I remember just raising hell with Arnold King and others when they wanted to bring Ashville and Wilmington into the picture, because it was politics, straight, cold-blooded politics. Charlotte was th same way. We acknowledged that they should be a member, but say so. Don't put it on a high plain. It wasn't a high plain; it was done in Charlotte because if we hadn't added Charlotte to the university system, Charlotte would have continued to grow and taken over that part of the country. To hell with it. Ashville was the same way. And Wilmington. But we didn't want the black colleges. We didn't want some of the them, but we got them, used them, worked them.
I have so many questions to ask, I will try to keep sort of …
I may chase rabbits, but I don't mean to.
No, but each time you talk I think of other things. For instance, would you comment on the H.E.W. suit brought against the university?
It was a very unfair, unfortunate approach by the federal government, or
by the then head of H.E.W. I don't remember his name off hand. It was an
insidious, unfortunate approach. Well, a lot of things were done in
those days that weren't fair. I think the university spent an inordinate
amount of time and people in fighting it, you might say, or trying to
make some sense out of it. And they finally did work out a five
Not without largely increasing the number of out of state students you take in.
Well, they shouldn't. They should have out of state students, yes. You need that influence, but a limited number. Fifteen percent is all right.
We were talking about President Friday. Could you note or list or remember a few other outstanding individuals or people that you think of, people that are really outstanding individuals that have come across your path in the course of your years in North Carolina.
Luther Hodges, for one. Lyle Sitterson.
I'll ask you the question ‘Why’ on each one of them. What was it about Luther Hodges in your opinion?
He was a great leader, very kenetic at the right time, when he was governor of the state. Terry Sanford was a leader in many respects. I think he was over-rated in many respects and under-rated in others. All of us are; what the hell. If I go back on my personal experience: Collier Cobb, Dud Carroll, Dr. Chase, whom I knew well, fortunately. I was a youngster and he made a real impression—tall, slender, very reserved, very brilliant man, I thought.
Are there business people or others you can think of that you would cite as outstanding?
Not particularly. At the moment, off the cuff, no; I'd have to think about it.
What about Dr. Graham at the university.
Great man, great man. It was fortunate for the university that he came when he did. I didn't agree with him in everything by a hell of a sight, but you couldn't expect me to. He was a very thoughtful man, a liberal, too liberal. But you have to overplay your hand. He didn't overplay his hand—he did in my judgment, but not in his. It was just a part of it. He gave the university and the state something. It has heart rending when Willis Smith beat him for the senate, but he was not a senator. What the hell.
In the view of many he was a saint.
Yes, in many ways. And then again, no. But he brought something to the university. You have to put it all in the pot together. There's good and there's bad, and he was more on the good side than on the bad side. Let's cut it that way.
You mentioned my friend, Lyle Sitterson, also. What was it about Lyle?
I have great appreciation for his brains, for one thing, and his approach
to life. He was a very fine Chancellor. Bill Aycock was another one. I
think the world of Bill, still do. Lyle is the same way. I got to know
both of them. I made it a point. They were two of the first Chancellors,
two of the finest men first. Being Chancellors was incidental. I was a
law student and I got to know Bill. I worked with Lyle. You meet a
I want to end in a moment because we've been going on a long time.
Oh, hell, take your time.
In many ways you describe that you've had a very positive view of life; you've had a very good life; you've had a long life; you've been involved in a lot of different things. I think I pointed out to you at one point that it almost seems that you forgot your profession you were so involved. You were involved in lots of things. You had so many interests in which you took an interest and succeeded. But what things in your life have been disappointments to you?
[Pause]
Well, let me play this out a little bit longer. As a young man, you injured your knee. Some people would say, "That was a real disappointment for me. I didn't get to participate in athletics."
Well, I was football manager instead of playing on the football team. That was just that. No need crying about it. There wasn't anything I could do about it. I did everything I could do.
I infer from some of what you say that you have a capacity to adjust to disappointment or to something that may make you unhappy, and to move on to something else, to not dwell on it.
Well, I think that's right. I'm no paragon. I'm a human being, with all the faults that the human being has. I'm no god one way or the other.
But you adjust.
I've had a lot of fun, I'm sure.
But a lot of people don't adjust. A lot of people look back and feel very sad about it and dwell upon it, and so on.
Why spend your time doing that?
I'm not making a case for it. I'm not suggesting it as a way of life. I'm simply saying that doesn't seem to me to be the way you …
Well, you meet all kinds of disappointments in various and sundry things. Mine have been on the minor side rather than the major side. They haven't been the controlling aspect of my life.
Do you ever wonder why you have been so lucky?
No.
Do you think you make your own luck?
No. I'm sorry.
No, I think if you work at things—I'm fortunate that the work that I've done has continued and has developed.
How about health. I don't think I've asked you, have you generally enjoyed good health throughout your life?
Yes. I had an appendix operation in '28—in ten days those days. It's two
days today. That's the difference in health care. Howard Patterson had
the same thing. I followed it. I had my knee, and this recent operation
last May, ib nt (
But you have had good health.
I've been very fortunate, very lucky.
I am impressed, studying biography, how important physical vigor is as far as success is concerned, both political, business, whatever it might be, and also emotional success. If somebody really has a lot of illness, it's difficult for them, I think, to adjust; whereas people who are physically vigorous work hard, have long days, and that sort of thing, tend to stay happier. It seems to me to be a very important element in success.
I enjoy working. I've slowed down, of course, but the time four o'clock comes up, it's about time I get home. I don't strain myself anymore. But I just don't think of myself as being eighty-four years of age. I just didn't think about it.
Did age ever bother you? Did you ever worry about age?
No, it was just one of those things. There's nothing you can do about it, so why worry about it?
It's very interesting for me because I wrote a biography on a man who lived to be ninety-four, but about the time he got to be in his mid-forties, he began referring to himself as an old man, he began being very concerned about age, or at least saying he was very concerned about age. I always sort of suspected that he was not totally being candid, that he was saying, "I'm an old man," but he didn't look old and he didn't feel old, but he liked to play that game. I'm not quite sure. Aging became a very important factor in his life when he got into his fifties, at least. Then he lived another forty years talking about being an old man. But age is not a preoccupation?
Oh, I answer the telephone and have a little fun with it and say "Watts
Hill, Sr., the old grandfather." I get a laugh out of the girls, the
secretaries and so on. I got them right in my hand from then on.
[END OF TAPE 8, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 8, SIDE B]
We started talking about the Blue Cross Blue Shield building and the area out along 15-501 between Durham and Chapel Hill.
Have you been in the Blue Cross building?
No, I have not been. I actually have never been inside.
The colors will just hit you just like that. Each floor is colored. I mean, there's color. If you're going to have color, have color. Oh, they love it—green, red, what have you.
What about the dividing line between Durham and Chapel Hill?
I worked it out unofficially with two city managers, Taylor, a very good man in Chapel Hill, and Powell in Durham, also very good, formerly in Winston-Salem. I-40, as it goes across 15-501, is the dividing line. It's immaterial where the exact line is. It's out there some damn place. When you get down 54, you saw in the paper maybe that Falcon Bridge was …
There's a big problem with Falcon Bridge.
…that's a big part of it.
Durham is going to annex Falcon Bridge.
Oh, sure.
Now that's on this side of I-40.
No.
Will it be on the other side of I-40?
I don't …
I think it's on this side of the street.
Well, I-40 is immaterial down here. You've got the DuBose property and the shopping center going at the intersection of Garrett Road and 54. There's a hotel going down there. Do you know where the Landlubbers is? Garrett Road is the next one. No, it's not Garret Road. Whatever it is. Garret Road is policed.
I hope we're able to contain this attractive approach to Chapel Hill that presently exists.
Of course, you've got bottom land that engineers control, and it's part of the flood plan.
That's on the right hand side of 54.
On both sides. And there's a road on the west side of it, but on all that bottom land we can't build. It floods.
Then there's Finley Golf Course and the DuBose property on the other side of the road.
The DuBoses have about three hundred feet deep on the south side of 54 and the university picks up the golf course between 54 and 15-501. Bill Friday wants to build a continuation center. We've been working at it. I've a call in to Womble now. Privately.
In this post World War II period, you're involved in the banking enterprise; you're involved in Blue Cross Blue Shield; you're involved in the Research Triangle Park. In the sixties, you moved from Quail Roost here. I can think of one other notable enterprise that you're involved in.
My first wife was sick for fifteen years. She was a great horse woman—born and raised on a horse, you might say, outside of Baltimore. The doctors were here, the hospital was here, Glen Lennox was here; it was so much more convenient than me driving fifteen miles to Quail Roost, in and out. And she was cut off. That was the basic reason we moved. I bought this hill thirty years ago, ten years before we ever built on it.
It's beautiful property, it really is. Now, the other thing that I can think of that you were involved in, and there may have been other things, is Durham Academy. Could you tell me a little bit about Durham Academy and what it is you were doing?
My first father-in-law was the owner and head master of Oldfield School, the first or second oldest girls' school in the country, fifteen miles north of Baltimore. My wife couldn't go there because she was the headmaster's daughter, so she went elsewhere. She eventually ended up at Shipley School at Bryn Mawr with my two sisters. My older sister and my first wife were in the same class. Margaret Carr in Durham, and Mary Toms from Durham, it was quite a class. I worked with the Oldfield School. It was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars down at one time.
This is with Durham Academy?
No, Oldfield. The son took over up there, but I learned a lot about schools. The kids were coming along. Watts, Jr., went to public school, Morehead School. He learned how to fight and cuss, but that's all he learned. So we organized a school, a Calvert Method school, in the old Forest Hills clubhouse. We rented it.
What does Calvert method mean?
Calvert method is the Calvert School in Baltimore. My father-in-law was a great friend of the headmaster, and the headmaster permitted us to take their system, books, and so forth—the only school outside of Baltimore. They combined history and geography in class, and so forth, which was most unusual.
This would have been in the 1930s, am I right?
It's fifty-two years old now. Whatever that was.
Okay, in the 1930s.
Somewhere in there. We got a head mistress and there were seven kids
orginally. Hill, Stagg Nicholson, McCutcheon, and Muirhead lived right
behind us. I was living in my grandfather's home in those days, his old
home, where Blue Cross is now. We added a room on each end, a wing, as
the school grew. Then my father made available our old home that had
been my grandfather's, down the hill. We moved out in '13. It became a
home for indigent relatives.
Have you continued throughout this fifty-two year period to have an interest in and play a role in the development?
Yes, but not a close one. I helped Dr. Pelham Wilder, chairman of the
board, and he organized a study committee who brought Rob Hershey,
assistant headmaster and admissions officer at Woodberry School down
here. He's a young fellow. They had a hundred and forty applicants for
the job. You could just look at the outside of the folder and say, I
don't want him!
Is there scholarship money available?
A limited amount. We've got a deficit of two hundred and forty thousand dollars. I'm interested in the financial side of it. Frank Kenan has been very good. The Flagler Estate built the new auditorium at the upper school. We have an endowment of a million, two, basically Flagler money. Frank Kenan was tremendously interested in the school when his kids were there. You lose interest as soon as your kids graduate.
You haven't, obviously.
It's funny. I've done all the paving of the roads and this, that, and the
other thing. Anne said that if I didn't stop doing paving at Durham
Academy, there wouldn't be anything left for her.
Somebody is going to lose money, I think. Everybody is not going to ride
the wagon, I gather. Let's conclude today,
I used to use the law on farming. The law permitted you to lose fifty thousand dollars a year, maximum. For one out of five years you has to make a profit. Well, that could be handled. It was handled. You could take a tax loss, and sometimes it was a hell of a sight more than fifty thousand dollars. But it's a tax loss, what the hell in those days.
Look at all these things you've been involved in. You've been involved in
farming, in business, in the farmer's cooperative. That's aside from
what you're supposed to be doing, in a sense. You're supposed to be a
businessman entrepreneur who's involved in banking. That's your stock
and trade, theoretically, as I understand it. But you've had four or
five careers, or four or five pies you've had your hand in. Plus, I get
the impression you've managed to have a pretty good life,
You better talk to Anne.
Maybe I ought to talk to Anne, and maybe I ought to talk to some other people, too. I want to know what you think about this.
First, I've got no delusions of grandeur. I don't give a damn. I've been quiet. I was in politics for eight years as a youngster. Some folks wanted me to run for governor, and I said, I'm not interested. To hell with it. It's much more fun playing with it if you're behind the scenes. Just because I helped Governor Martin be elected, the Republicans think I'm a source of funds. They ought not waste all their money on the mail that comes in here. No, I don't want anything. I just want to be left alone, you might say.
END OF INTERVIEW