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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Cornelia Spencer Love, January 26, 1975. Interview G-0032. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

J. Spencer Love as a child

Cornelia Spencer Love recalls her brother, J. Spencer Love, as a bright young child educated by his own mother.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Cornelia Spencer Love, January 26, 1975. Interview G-0032. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

LEE KESSLER:
When Spencer was a teenager, was he an ambitious, a go-getter? Did he have a lot of after-school jobs?
LEE KESSLER:
Well, I wouldn't say that at all. There wasn't anything apprarent to me as he was growing up that he was anything more than a bright little boy. Now, my mother taught him, as she had taught me, when he was little and she once said that he was the brightest little boy that she had ever taught except for one of the Winstons. She had had a little school when she was living in Chapel Hill, when she was about eighteen or nineteen. Well, of course, you could just discount that as parental . . . (laughter) We were very congenial, we did things together at times. I remember one summer - well, he had to be fourteen or fifteen, you know, before we really became companions. We would get on at home and enjoy the same things and occasionally we would go to a show in Boston at Keith's Orpheum. I remember going one afternoon with him and there were a pair of comedians in straw hats who came out and sang, "When you Wore a Tulip and I Wore A Red, Red Rose." That was the first time that we had heard it. So, years later, I would say to Spencer when he was at the piano, "Please play ‘When You Wore a Tulip . . . .’". We had that sort of thing together in common.