NOTICE
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened September, 1974
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

See also Stuart A. Rice Papers

[1]

HESS: Mrs. Rice, to begin this morning would you give me a little of your personal background?

RICE: Yes, I'll be very glad to Mr. Hess. I was born November 3, 1911 in Newnan, Georgia. That's a small town about thirty miles from Atlanta. When I was only two my family moved to Birmingham, Alabama and that's where I spent the rest of my life, except for a year at the University of Chicago, until I came to Washington as a bride in 1934. I went through the Ensley High School and then entered Birmingham-Southern College, that's a small Methodist co-educational liberal arts college, and my family was very poor. My mother and father had been divorced when I was quite young and mother had no money to pay my tuition though she did occasionally get me a new dress. But I got a job and worked my way through college and I always felt

[2]

that in many ways I got actually more practical knowledge from the jobs I held those four years than I did in the classroom. I was on the staff of the public relations and press office of Birmingham-Southern and was paid a small monthly salary. I also helped in the summertime operate the switchboard and put out the mail and so forth, and went to summer school. And going to summer school every year -- because I earned the same amount of money if I took three hours out for classes as if I didn't, so I ended up with a major and two minors and about twenty-five extra credits when I graduated. But in addition to this job, I worked on a newspaper the four years. One year on the old Scripps-Howard paper the Birmingham Post, and three years on the Birmingham News, and I was paid by the column inch, and everything I got in the papers about the college, interviews with distinguished chapel speakers and news events and social events and fraternity and sorority parties, I clipped that and glued it all together and each month I measured that and submitted my bill to the college. So, if I wanted a new dress for a fraternity dance I could just find all kinds of things to write about.

And I majored in sociology and had a minor in French and a minor in journalism. And the way I worked in the office of public relations was one year the head of the

[3]

department was on sabbatical. He edited the alumni magazine, a quarterly publication, and then each week we sent out news releases, mostly to the small weekly newspapers about students when they made their letter in different sports, or they'd gotten a scholarship for graduate work. So, the year he was abroad I did all that myself. Although I was just a sophomore he'd trained me very well and had confidence in me. So, I edited this alumni magazine and did the press relations that year in addition to my regular work.

At the time of graduation, I made application for a graduate scholarship. At that time I knew that I wanted to do graduate work in sociology and preferably in race relations. Although this was in the '30's I had very little if any race prejudice. Although my mother was quite prejudiced she still let me participate in some inter-racial affairs. Since we had no colored servants, the only colored people I knew personally were well educated.

So, I made application through a very, very dear friend (well, I'll get to him in a moment), but I made application to the Social Science Research Council for a graduate fellowship of $1,000. (This was in the midst of the depression.) And I was very fortunate to be one of

[4]

six or seven southern students who did get graduate fellowships and my professor of sociology, Dr. Kenneth Barnhardt, had gotten his Ph.D. at Chicago and he said, "That's the only school to go to for race relations." And Louis Wurth was there and Robert Redfield, in anthropology, and he said, "That's the only school to go to."

So, I was awarded a $1,000 fellowship. By the time I got to Chicago, it had dwindled to $600 because of the state of the Stock Market, which was very little money to live for a year on. So, I set aside $300 which was $100 for tuition for each quarter and lab fees and so forth, and spent the $300 the first quarter on living expenses. I got a lovely room in a private home right on fraternity row because, although I was a graduate student, being in a city for the first time in my life I wanted to take advantage of a lot of the cultural things and I did some of the fraternity parties and all.

So, Christmas came along and I was broke. I had just enough money to get a day coach train ticket and sat up all night to go home and spend Christmas with mother and we talked about what I could do. She still didn't have any money to give me, though there again she would occasionally make me a dress or send me something, but she said, "Well, you've always worked since you were twelve years old

[5]

when you had jobs in the summer, and you've worked your way through college, and if you really want to finish your degree I'm sure you'll find a job." So she encouraged me to go back which I did. I'd left all my clothing and books and everything in Chicago.

So, right away I got a very interesting job in a settlement house, it was called the Hyde Park Neighborhood House. It was in an old church with about four stories and the board of directors was composed of university professors, mostly, and their wives. Ernest Burgess a very famous sociologist there was on the board and he was one of my professors at Chicago, so I'm sure he helped me get the job. And I worked for my room and board and I had saved my tuition money. Sometimes I would cook my meals in the great big kitchen. And I worked with "incipient gang" children. This was the end of the Al Capone period. In fact one night I came home, and as I got to the settlement house, I heard shots and a gangster had been killed just a block away near the Illinois Central tracks, and this was nearing the end of the gang period and these children were incipient gangsters. The toughest and the strongest boy, was the head of the gang, and what Burgess and other criminologists were trying to get us to do as graduate students, was to turn these gang

[6]

feelings into club feelings and democratic processes so that they elected the president, and elected the treasurer and other officers.

HESS: Did you ever have any success in that?

RICE: Well, to some extent I think we did. Now I worked with young boys ages eight to ten. Another girl graduate student worked with teenage girls the same way, and I think we had some degree of success. We finally held some elections and usually the strongest boy did get elected, but at least we went through the process of holding an election and explaining what an election was.

HESS: Did you ever see Al Capone?

RICE: No, I never did.

One experience we had: There was a very poor family in the community and we announced at our various clubs that this family had several children, and they were hungry. We asked our young people if they would all bring a little food from home; a can of soup, or beans or something. Well, the food poured in, but we got complaints from the neighborhood grocery stores, the children had stolen the food. So, we weren't quite sure whether that was a good idea or not.

HESS: Didn't know whether that was a plus or a minus.

[7]

RICE: We didn't know really. Then another experience I had. They warned us never to keep much money with us and so I wrote a check just for $10 anytime I cashed funds for food, that was all I would write it for. And so one weekend the head of the settlement and her family had been away on a holiday and the other graduate students had been away and so I was the only person there. And I had left my key and I couldn't get in. And this was about 6 o'clock and it was getting dark and cold and I was kind of desperate to know what to do on a Sunday right. So, two or three of my boys came up and said, "Oh, Miss Mayfield what's the matter?"

And I said, "Well, I've left my key inside."

And they said, "Do you want us to open the door?"

And I said, "I surely would appreciate it."

And they said, "Under one consideration, that you won't come up and see how we do it."

So, they went up to the door and in five seconds the door was open and all this time we thought having it locked would protect everything. Those children could have opened that door anytime they wanted to.

Shall we take a break?

HESS: That will be fine.

Mrs. Rice, being a Southerner, to what do you attribute

[8]

your liberal leanings?

RICE: Well, I think the main thing was Christian training in Sunday School. I was brought up in a Methodist church and I took the Bible literally that we're all God's children, and as a child nobody told me that colored people were bad. And the first contacts I had, with colored people, they were all highly educated, PhDs. and musicians and so forth, and I accepted them as people, But I occasionally had a rough time in the church because when I would make speeches at the Epworth League and talked about some of the inter-racial experiences I had had, which I will mention in a moment, the elders didn't think much of this and they were critical and they said, "Yes, but..." But I had the great good fortune to know some of the outstanding colored leaders of that period and wonderful experiences in informal, social situations. And then when I was at Chicago I had a very dear colored friend, Horace Cayton, who was getting his Ph.D.; he later wrote several books, one on the Negro in the steel industry and later covered the United Nations for the Defender newspaper. He had a white wife which of course to most southerners is like waving a red flag, but I thought, "Well, they neither one have close relatives to be affected and they never had children to bear any stigmatism," and I thought, "If you're two

[9]

unusual, intellectual people, you can marry across racial barriers." But now my mother was very disturbed about this sort of thing and didn't like to talk about it.

And once I went to an inter-racial meeting in Birmingham, a discussion group, and my mother was so worried that she left her job and came and sat in the back of the room to observe. I didn't even know she was there. She later told me that she was sick at her stomach to be sitting in a room with colored people, but she felt as long as I wanted to be there, it was my life and my interest and she would not keep me from doing it, but she didn't feel that I was safe in the room with colored people.

HESS: Was this before you went to Chicago?

RICE: Yes. This was before I went to Chicago. And one of the most exciting experiences I ever had, I was very active in the YWCA all during college, and as president my way was paid to an annual southern conference in North Carolina. And that's the first time I was ever in a Pullman overnight sleeping on a train, and this was very exciting to me. And I went for ten days near Ashville, North Carolina and had an exciting time.

The year before I had met a charming young negro woman who was the YWCA colored secretary for the South.

[10]

She visited the colored colleges all through the South, but at one of these inter-racial meetings I had met her and I ran the risk of being expelled from Birmingham Southern, even being on the staff there, by having her come and play the piano and sing in several languages. It was the first time in the history of my college a Negro had ever been invited there for a program. They wouldn't even allow a Negro minister to pray in the chapel they were so prejudiced.

But my college president, whom I loved dearly, Dr. Guy E. Snavely, he is 88 now, he was later head of the American Association of Universities and Colleges, and lived many years in Washington, and he was almost like a father to me. He guided me all the way through school and later offered me a teaching job. Well, he was out of town on a conference for two weeks. Also there was to be some big fraternity dances coming up on the weekend. So, this is the way I figured it: I would invite Sue Bailey to come and give a musical program for the YWCA. She had gotten her musical education in Europe and she sang in Spanish and German, and French, she sang opera, she sang classical music, and she played the piano beautifully. Well students at my college were very much interested in music. We had a great choir and

[11]

so forth. So I explained to her that we might run into difficulty, that somebody might come in the room and call the whole thing off, but she took a chance and I did too.

So she came and the girls were fascinated. The first time in their lives they had ever seen a cultured, refined, Negro woman and she was beautiful, so well-groomed and so attractive, and fairly light, and just a beautiful woman. Well, they wouldn't let her go, they just kept requesting numbers and numbers and numbers. Well, I figured that the normal course of events within two or three days they would have forgotten all about this. The fraternity dances would come along, the senior prom would come along, Dr. Snavely wouldn't be back for two weeks, so I just took a chance, and by then they would have forgotten the event. And it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

So, the next summer up in North Carolina, at the end of the conference that I went to, which was all white and all women, I was invited by Sue Bailey to her house party preceding her marriage. This was to be near Black Mountain where they had had a colored YWCA conference and there was a week between the end of the conference and her marriage. She was being married to Howard Thurmon, Ph.D., who was head of the Department of Religion at Howard

[12]

University here in Washington, and they rented two farm houses in a beautiful mountain area, and they invited about thirty people for the house party prior to the wedding, and only two white people there until the wedding. I was one and a young white man, a Howard Kester, they called "Buck". He was working for the FOR, the Federation Of Reconciliation, which was a very liberal group, and later he became a sharecropper organizer, and he was very liberal and far out for that time. All the rest were colored. And we had a wonderful week. We hiked and we swam and we chatted, oh, it was just a lovely occasion. Her wedding was an outstanding event. It was held in a pine grove in the mountains, Howard had been married before and his wife died and he had a lovely little girl named Olive and she was named Olive for Olive Schreiner who wrote "South African Farm" and other South African Veldt stories. She was a white woman, but wrote on the Negro subjects and situations in South Africa and he was greatly enamored with her writing so he named his little girl Olive. She was about eight years old and she was the only attendant in the wedding. And Sue had on a beautiful pink lace dress that just brought out her coloring so beautifully. And Howard, being a minister, decided to write the marriage ceremony himself and it

[13]

revolved around a lovely part from the Book of Ruth, "Entreat me not to leave thee, to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest I will go," and so forth. He read it himself (he had a beautiful reading voice). By that time several other white people and ministers had come from New York and Washington (they weren't in the house party, but they had come for the wedding), and they were in the Congregation. So it seems these ministers made it legal, although performing it himself. It was just beautiful.

Well, Howard Kester and I decided that it wasn't right for these two wonderful people to be in a Jim Crow car all the way from North Carolina to New York City where they were going on their honeymoon. So, he and I took some money and went to the railroad station and bought a compartment on the train for them to have as though we were going to New York. The train came through at midnight and we knew there would be colored porters on board and if we crossed their palm with some money it might be alright for Howard and Sue. They got in that compartment alright and by the time they would get north, it wouldn't make any difference. At that time no Negro could buy a first class Pullman ticket in the South. It was unheard of. It went off just as we thought it would.

[14]

We got there about 12:30 a.m. and we gave the porter on the car $5 and they went right in. That was a very exciting experience.

HESS: Who were a few of the well-known colored people that you met later?

RICE: Before I go into that, just let me finish up this. I do remember one or two of the white people who came for the wedding -- do you remember Reinhold Niebuhr?

HESS: Yes.

RICE: Well, he was there and I got to know him a bit, and there was several others that now I can't remember from the Union Theological Seminary. I think that's where Howard Thurmond received his divinity degree.

After my third quarter I ran out of money before the summer. I had finished everything for the degree but write the dissertation. So, as usual, I had to go back to work.

I got a job through a county commissioner back in Birmingham in the colored ward at the charity hospital where I was considered a medical social worker. Now I had been in straight sociology, but in that day and age the city commissioner, who was a personal friend through

[15]

his son, didn't distinguish between sociology and medical social work. I got the job beginning July 4 and I kept it all summer with a great deal to learn. Before I left Chicago, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was having its national convention in Chicago and I was asked to make a speech to the convention telling about the liberal beginnings in the South among students, what we were doing to liberalize race prejudice. And I accepted and made the speech. I doubt that I still have a copy of that speech. It probably would sound very juvenile now, but I was delighted to have been asked. During the week of the convention I had a number of very interesting talks with Walter White who was the administrative secretary of NAACP, and a bright young man named Roy Wilkins, who was a junior secretary at that time, later to become head of NAACP.

One day I had lunch in a very interesting colored restaurant in Chicago with Wilkins and White, and my friend Horace Cayton who kind of shepherded me around, and I dropped my compact and broke it all to pieces; the mirror and everything and I guess White could see how distressed I was. Well, the matter of buying another compact for $2 when I didn't have any money at all was just terrible and no compact. So, he apparently sensed this, he was a very

[16]

kind person, and he called for the waitress, and they had a little gift shop in the hotel, and he asked her to bring me a compact. That was a very generous gesture and I was very grateful and appreciated it very much.

Years later, my husband and I, saw Walter White occasionally in Washington. The first time he came to Washington and got in touch with me, I invited him for lunch at the Cosmos Club without remembering that Negroes were not allowed in at that time.

Later on we both realized that this was a difficult situation. Where else could we take him to lunch? This was still a no integrated dining room in the '30s. I explained, "He's so white that I doubt if anybody will recognize him. We could go out to the Howard University faculty dining room and take him to lunch there, but he probably would enjoy the club more."

My husband said, "I'm willing to take a chance if you are. We don't want him to be embarrassed with anyone asking him to leave." The only person at the club who recognized him was Justice Felix Frankfurter. And he greeted him like an old lost friend because they had had many contacts and many associations.

HESS: Now Mrs. Rice, at the time you were in Chicago, did you know Dr. Harold Gosnell?

[17]

RICE: No, I didn't personally. I knew his name of course, and he and my husband were very good friends and later I knew him here in Washington.

There were some very interesting people in my class. Sam Stauffer and the famous sociologist Phillip Hauser who is well-known everywhere today, and quoted in so many books and magazines, he was a graduate student at that time. Joe Lohman was one of my classmates, he later became sheriff of Cook County and I believe now is head of the department of criminology at one of the big California schools, and there were a number of others -- Ed Shills who teaches at the London School of Economics now and has written a great deal in sociology.

I finished out the summer at Hillman Hospital and it was a very interesting experience but rather depressing. The people were so poverty stricken. And then I was asked by Dr. Snavely to come back to Birmingham-Southern College and teach and I learned more sociology that year than I had learned at Chicago, trying to keep ahead of boys and girls that I had been classmates with. They were sophomores when I was a senior and to keep discipline and keep ahead of them was very challenging.

Also I had a seminar which met in my apartment, on urban research and we worked with census tracts trying to

[18]

analyze population data and so forth and criminology statistics. Towards the end of that year, about the last two months., Dr. Snavely relieved me, at the request of Kathryn Welch, an area supervisor from Washington, to do a research job in connection with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that Roosevelt had set, set up. They picked out certain counties, depressed counties, where unemployment was so great all over the country and studied these families, how they were living and what they were spending, where they got their money and so forth, and I was asked to direct the Jefferson County (Birmingham) study. I had a staff of one hundred and twenty eventually. I was only twenty-two at that time, but it was very hard to find people with graduate training in sociology. So, I did that and we interviewed hundreds of families in Jefferson County, and the city of Birmingham.

HESS: When did you meet your husband?

RICE: I met my husband at the University of Chicago. He was my statistics professor for three quarters, and he scarcely seemed to know me, for at that time he was engaged to Elizabeth Meade, the younger sister of Margaret Meade, the well-known anthropologist. He had known them at the University of Pennsylvania where he had taught. The parents

[19]

both taught at Bryn Mawr. We had only one or two dates in Chicago. We went to the theater once and once we drove out to the dunes and went swimming, but he didn't get interested in me really until that following winter when I was back in Birmingham and he used to fly down on the weekends. He was very interested in my doing the research job under Harry Hopkins, Corrington Gill and Howard Meyers. They were all personal friends of his. He had known Harry Hopkins since their social work days in New York City.

I got so interested in the project that I thought when we finished the interviewing and had shipped all of the material to Washington, I would like to work in Washington to help analyze the data and help write the report. So, I saved the money and came to Washington, at Stuart's invitation, too, and he made appointments for me at the FERA to apply for work and I later in his papers found a memorandum he wrote to Corrie Gill saying, "For God's sake take Miss Mayfield on your staff and save me from having to fly down to Birmingham every month. It's getting too time consuming and too expensive." And I thought I'd get the money then to go back and finish my master's and write my dissertation. But then later that spring Stuart and I were married, on May 29, 1934 and had a very lovely wedding and went to Europe for two months on our honeymoon

[20]

with a good bit of hiking. Our wedding was on the campus at Birmingham-Southern in the woman's building, on commencement day so my students and my faculty friends could come, and the man who baptized me at age seven or eight was then head of the department of religion at Birmingham-Southern, and he performed the wedding ceremony. So it was very pleasant.

HESS: Let's discuss the project that you mentioned just a little bit more. Tell me then about the project and about your part in it.

RICE: Well, I don't remember the exact details too well. There were printed questionnaires of over a hundred questions and these were filled in by an interviewer on a personal visit to a huge number of families, white and colored, who were on relief, under the Roosevelt administration. They were asked the amount they got, and how they spent it, and how many children, and their living conditions, problems, etc. I was the director of the whole project in Jefferson County. Many of the interviewers were women who had never done this kind of work and I had to train them. We had training courses, and we had a huge office in one of the public buildings in Birmingham. And then I had to check over the questionnaires and see that they

[21]

were properly filled. I didn't check every one, but samples. Each week we shipped so many questionnaires completed to Washington, and if there were any questions or any mistakes they would write us. And then I had a resumes staff who would make a preliminary report. If we had five hundred filled out that week they would make a resume of the average money they were receiving, and the average number of children and things like that. And then when I was about to be married I trained somebody else to take over my job.

Shall we take a break?

HESS: Okay.

Will you tell me a few of your experiences when you first came to Washington?

RICE: Yes, I'll be happy to. My first recollection of Washington was a very important state funeral. My husband had an apartment in an old red brick home in the seventeen hundred block of I Street, N.W., it has long since been torn down and medical buildings and office buildings there. But we had an apartment on the second floor, a very charming one that we enjoyed so much. And in that winter after I came to Washington, I looked out our window and saw a funeral cortege coming out of a red brick home just three or four doors down and across the street. And

[22]

it was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' funeral and the whole Supreme Court was there and most of the Cabinet with their tall silk hats and their formal mourning clothes because in those days men dressed formally for such occasions. And we stood at the window and watched the whole procession from his home, Stuart identifying the dignitaries. Later his home was given to Harvard and then I suppose sold because all of those buildings have gone many years ago, that whole neighborhood has changed. When we moved there Brookings Institution was nearby. It was later moved, and old Friends' School and all of those medical buildings have been put there. But when I came to Washington as just a very simple small town girl, my husband explained to me that we'd be involved in official Washington life. At that time he was Assistant Director of the Census Bureau and then the year following he became head of an independent agency, the Central Statistical Board, and then years later, under the first reorganization plan by Louis Brownlow, it became the Division of Statistical Standards in the Budget Bureau. The whole unit moved over, and the entire staff, and my husband became Assistant Director of the Budget Bureau in Charge of Statistical Standards. So, he explained to me we would have certain social obligations and he didn't want it to be a burden,

[23]

but he thought if, I participated (this of course was before we had our son), it might be interesting and I'd meet a lot of very interesting people. And so I decided to do this.

At that period Government wives spent many of their afternoons leaving calling cards, a custom ending with World War II. Monday the Supreme Court wives were "at home," and Tuesday was congressional, and Wednesday was something else, and Thursday was the Senate, and Friday was the diplomatic wives. And what we used to do, unless you were fortunate enough to have an official car and a chauff, three or four of us would get together and get one of the husband's office cars and hire a messenger who would drive and we might leave ten cards on an afternoon. If we found that Madam So and So was receiving, then the driver would wait and we went in and chatted with her and had a cup of tea. If she wasn't receiving we just left our cards. Also at that time, if you were at an embassy dinner or a White House dinner you were obligated within twenty-four hours to return your card to express appreciation and so forth.

Social things that I didn't understand I made it my business to find out. I remember the first time my husband wore white tie and tails to the White House he didn't

[24]

know how to tie a white tie and neither did I. So, I went down to Garfinckels and asked the manager of the men's department to help me. He said, "Oh yes, I often help new brides learn this trick." He brought out a head of a man and he taught me how to tie a white tie. So, from then on wherever we might be on trips, my husband's associates often called on me to tie a white or black tie. So, I made it my business wherever I went to learn what was expected of me and to try to do it, because I felt that anything I did properly was helpful to my husband. And when he was head of the Central Statistical Board he had to plead his budget in Congress. So, it meant a great deal to him to be well accepted and identified by Congressmen and Senators, and he said to me in making these calls and in going to these "at homes," "Please remember as many of these wives you meet, as possible, especially the congressional ones. Later contacts with them and their husbands, on a personal basis, may be very useful."

I kept a fairly accurate file of the ones I met and could actually recall a face and the correct name, and some information about families, hobbies, etc. Then later when we would meet them at dinners or receptions, those "remembered facts" often made "small talk" easy with the wife, while my husband and the Senator or Congressman were getting acquainted, on occasion, just a few days before he appeared in hearings

[25]

before their special committees.

We made a few really genuine friendships, especially Congressman and Mrs. Charles Leavy from the State of Washington. Later he returned to Washington and served with distinction as a Federal Judge. His widow is still a good friend of mine.

HESS: Did you ever meet Mrs. Truman in the latter '30s?

RICE: Not at that time. I only met her after she was in the White House. But I met all of the Supreme Court wives and was with them at the White House on a momentous occasion which we'll talk about in a few minutes. I do believe that some were later useful to my husband in his work, especially relations on the Hill.

Shall we take a little break?

HESS: Did you visit the White House very often during the Roosevelt years?

RICE: Yes we did a number of times. Because of my husband's position as head of an independent agency we were invited to evening receptions along with Arthur J. Altmeyer the first Director of Social Security, and agencies like that. And what we usually would do, we or some other couples would have a dinner party at the old Cosmos Club which was

[26]

there on Lafayette Square across from the White House and we'd all park our cars there and then we'd have a dinner party and then all of us go together to the White House. And this was very pleasant because there were so many people there we knew and it was always exciting to be in the White House with the beautiful flowers, music by the Marine Band, and to see President and Mrs. Roosevelt. They were always so charming and gracious and made you feel they knew you whether they did or not and it was very, very pleasant and we always enjoyed it. And sometimes we'd be the host of this dinner party and sometimes we'd be guests and we knew some of the Cabinet officers at that time because they served on the board of the Central Statistical Board and various deputy cabinet secretaries. Dr. Rice also had a number of contacts with Attorney General Francis Biddle and he and Mrs. Biddle were guests at one or two of our dinner parties. If my memory is correct, he was very helpful to Dr. Rice with a very distinguished German Jewish Refugee couple who were guests in our home for a year, after my husband negotiated their escaping from Refugee Camps to the United States. My husband had known him as a splendid interpreter in various international meetings, later a broadcaster until France fell to the Nazis.

[27]

And one of the most interesting experiences we ever had at the White House (I can't tell you the exact date, but when I tell you the event it could easily be looked up), we were invited to our first dinner. We'd been to receptions, but never to a dinner at the White House, and it was the occasion of the annual dinner for the Supreme Court and I was very excited and spent days getting my dress ready and what I was going to wear and Stuart a white tie outfit.

At the dinner on my right was Judge [Samuel I.] Rosenman who was very important in the Roosevelt administration, wrote a good many of Roosevelt speeches and so forth, and I think on my left was Judge [Morrison] Shafroth from Colorado. It was all very pleasant and I was very excited. I was very impressed with the gold washed silver. I'd never eaten from gold silverware and such beautiful china.

After the dinner the men remained at the table for their brandy and cigars and so forth, and the ladies went into a special room and Mrs. Roosevelt went from group to group so that she actually spoke with everybody there. A woman I was sitting next to was a nice kind of motherly looking woman and we had a pleasant talk and she was interested that I was a young bride in Washington, I was

[28]

one of the youngest women there.

Oh, and another woman that made a great impression on me was Mrs. Warren Delano Robbins and this was long before most women had the courage to dye their hair, and Mrs. Robbins had beautiful white hair, but for this dinner party she had dyed it lavender, and had on a black dinner dress with long sleeves while everybody else was bare armed, so she was the most outstanding woman in the room. And she had this black dinner dress and a beautiful figure and lovely face, sort of cameo-like against this lavender hair, and a long lavender chiffon handkerchief exactly the color of her hair which she carried gracefully. She later became the decorating expert for embassies around the world. She was Mr. Roosevelt's cousin, one of the Delanos. To me she was fascinating.

Well, this Mrs. [Owen J.] Roberts (wife of the Supreme Court Justice) I kept chatting with and in my naiveté toward the end of the evening I said, "And what does your husband do? Is he in government?"

Mrs. Roberts looked at me somewhat amused and said, "My dear, he's one of the nine old men."

And there had been much in the papers about Roosevelt wanting to change the caliber of the Supreme Court and get rid of the old men and get some new life and they were

[29]

criticizing him for wanting to -- no, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of the story. This had not come out much at this time. The next morning after the dinner was over Washington Post had a large headline. Roosevelt wanted to formally reorganize the Supreme Court and have younger men and there was much controversy and the columnists said, "How did that man in the White House have the nerve to entertain the Supreme Court on the eve of cutting their throats?"

And oh, there was material in all the press and much debate. Before I left Mrs. Roberts at the dinner, she said, "The next time I have an at-home, I want you to come and call. I live in Georgetown," and she gave me the address and she said, "Just look in the society page and you'll see when my next at-home is."

So, about three weeks later I saw in the paper that she was having an at-home from 4 to 6. So Mrs. Shafroth, (her husband had some post for Roosevelt) and I got together and went to call on Mrs. Roberts. When we entered her beautiful, stately old home, there were only about two other guests, just leaving, and Mrs. Roberts was sitting in the drawing room at a small tea table and had a uniformed maid who brought in the tea and the cookies and sandwiches and we had a very lovely time.

[30]

In the South a young woman is trained never to allow a long pause in the conversation. No matter where you are, when this occurs, after a suitable length of time, you should bring up a subject of general interest.

So when there was a long pause and nothing was said I searched around in my mind for something to talk about. So I remembered having seen in the paper that the Roberts spent the summer in this small town on Cape Cod (I'll try to remember the name for you), and that summer there had been some fascinating murals painted in a little church there and I think it was a WPA project. I can't remember the artist's name or the little town in Cape Cod, but they were highly controversial, because he painted the disciples at the Lord's Supper as local towns people in their simple New England garb and there was a big bean pot and brown bread for supper. Then on the opposite wall there was a mural of Christ preaching from the little boat in the lake and they were depicted as Portuguese fisherman, even to the figure of Christ. Well, this was highly controversial and so forth, but I kind of forgot how controversial it was, and I thought it was of general interest. So, in this pause in the conversation I said to Mrs. Roberts, "Oh Mrs. Roberts, what did you and Justice Roberts think of the murals at…

[31]

Well, it was as though I had dropped a bombshell. She started talking in a modulated, cultured voice, and it rose to a crescendo, and she said, "Mrs. Rice, they're the most dreadful things I've ever seen." She continued, "The younger generation has no respect for anything; for religion, the Lord's Supper, for Christ, or the Supreme Court," rising from her chair and her voice filling the room. What a faux pas I had committed.

HESS: One more point on that: Did Mrs. Roberts at that point say anything about Mr. Roosevelt's court packing scheme?

RICE: She didn't mention it, but you could tell it was very much on her mind, and I'm sure that she and her husband were distressed by the whole thing and -- I'm sure she did not intend to bring out such a volume of venom when she discussed it, but by that time, this was two or three weeks after the dinner, all the papers, pro and con, and many speeches in bar associations, and all this had been brought up.

But I always enjoyed being at the White House with the Roosevelts. We were only once or twice there with the Trumans, for such entertaining was curtailed because of the war. I used to sit in occasional meetings which Mrs. Roosevelt attended, and my husband loved to tell the story

[32]

on me that I was in a meeting at one of the hotels, I think it was the Mayflower, about some NYA project or something like that, and she always knitted everywhere she went, knitted for her grandchildren and the war and all. And when some speaker was making a very good point, my husband likes to remind me that I leaned over and said to him, "Mrs. Roosevelt doesn't hold her yarn the way I hold mine." And he thought that was very amusing that my mind wasn't on the speech but on Mrs. Roosevelt's knitting. And of course we, my husband and I, were great admirers of Mrs. Roosevelt and at the proper time there's a little story I'd like to tell about the dedication of the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park.

And then we come up to the war years, and we worked very hard during the war. In addition to my husband's regular job, he had a great deal to do with censorship and being careful that our statistical information from government didn't leak out to the enemy. And we had the house on Beachwood Circle, in Arlington at that time and it was just filled with people. One year we had a British mother and two children and I'll tell about how we got them in a moment, and then for a year we had two German-Jewish refugees for a year, and then later we had a chap from Brazil for eighteen months, and then a series of Army

[33]

and Navy people temporarily who couldn't find a place to live. It was so hard to find rooms in Washington, they'd be going overseas and their wife could not come for a farewell visit from Podunk or somewhere else without a room and they'd call us from different war housing agencies, knowing that we had guestrooms, and see if we would take care of them. And we did a great deal of this.

And then during that period I was director of public relations and Editor of The Cathedral Age, at Washington Cathedral which I would like to tell a little about that a little later. I took the job of a man going into service, and then after four years I dropped out and then a woman from the Red Cross overseas office took my place.

But in addition to that my husband had a big vegetable garden and I canned a great deal. I would put beans and corn and tomatoes on in a hot water bath at eleven o'clock or 12:00 and set the alarm and get up at 3 o'clock and turn them off, put more in and go back to sleep. I worked very hard. We didn't have a car so I had to depend on public transportation. Our son went to the Cathedral school, so he and I went together each day. There were no servants available and nobody to stay with him in the afternoon, so he would wait at my office for us to go home together. But everyone we knew worked awfully hard during

[34]

the war, just terribly long, long hours.

But one of the most interesting assignments I had during the war years as a volunteer was the Committee for the Care of European Children, headed by Marshall Field of Chicago who later owned the PM newspaper, and they had small committees set up around the country and we tried to get homes for any children from England whose parents wanted to send them to this country to avoid the bombing. And I worked rather closely with the State Department in their regulations for sponsoring children. You had to guarantee a certain income so they would not become wards of the state. I first tried to get the American Association of University Women to sponsor this, but they kind of dragged their feet a bit on it so I helped set up just a local committee of different people.

Somewhere in my files I have more information on this I think, but we got hundreds of children into Washington and that's how my husband and I got a mother and two children. I also helped to set up a summer camp for about forty British children including the children of some of the secretaries of the British Embassy and we did it on shoestring contributions from private people and people would give us blankets and cots and sheets. The mother we sponsored helped to manage it. They had a garden and

[35]

they raised a lot of their vegetables and they could swim in the river (down in Southern Maryland) and we did that about three different summers and it was very helpful.

After serving as a volunteer for sometime, I served for nearly a year as the paid Executive Secretary of the Civilian Defense Volunteer Office and I worked with a very fine group of women. We registered thousands and thousands of volunteers for fire watching and air raid watch and Red Cross work, and all that. And this was the first time in history that we had put volunteer information on a punch card, and they called me the "knitting needle girl". My husband advised us on this, and we filled out the cards and then had the punch operators to punch certain bits of information and we did insert something like a knitting needle and if you wanted so many night workers for hospital duty, you would put in the needle and pull it up and you might get fifty cards with that category and then you'd get in touch with them and then make appointments and so forth. And the committee that designed that and I worked with particularly was Mrs. Cynthia Wedel and Elizabeth Houghton, both still here in Washington. Elizabeth's father was the Houghton, owner of the Corning Glass Works and was our Ambassador to the Court of St. James. She got her education at Cambridge or Oxford University.

[36]

Also there was Mrs. G. Howland Chase, her husband was in State Department, and Jennie Blair, her husband was a pediatrician here, and Cynthia Wedel has recently been elected president of the Council of Churches in America, the first woman who's ever held that post. Her husband was at the Cathedral and that's how I got my job at the Cathedral and somewhere along the line there are a few Cathedral stories if you'd be interested, about Bishop Dunn and the Archbishop of York and some people like that, but I think I'd like to wait just a moment on that.

HESS: All right. One thing about Mrs. Roosevelt, she was very liberal in civil rights matters.

RICE: Very liberal.

HESS: Did you ever have any discussions with her on that subject?

RICE: Never had any opportunity to discuss that and I actually did very little on civil rights after I moved to Washington. It was too difficult to do.

I did work for one year at Howard University during NYA days. I had eight or ten graduate students and I directed all their research and supervised them and worked with E. Franklin Frazier. Students receiving NYA funds

[37]

had to be carefully supervised. He also had his Ph.D. from Chicago. He was a Negro and head of the Department of Sociology and he and my husband were good friends and we used to entertain them in our home. But we always felt a little shy about doing it because we had neighbors in Falls Church who were very critical and we did very little of that.

Horace Cayton came to see us once in Washington and I took him for lunch. He was very black and I took him for lunch at the Howard University faculty club. Several years after I worked there I had the opportunity to use that dining room when I entertained colored friends.

And another chap who was a classmate of mine in Chicago was Hylan Lewis. He wrote that very famous report of a year or two ago on colored problems and situations here in Washington. He has become a very distinguished community leader, liberal but not militant like the Black Panthers or anything like that, and I've talked to him occasionally on the phone, but have never seen him for years here.

There was one special job I helped with at the YWCA, where I was vice president of the board for a while and always active. We desegregated the cafeteria, the first eating place in the entire city to take Negroes. We felt

[38]

this was very important for during the war period there was no place for the young government workers to eat. They just had to buy sandwiches and sit in the park. So, little by little, we desegregated the YWCA cafeteria with no trouble. We planned for a long time and the transition was made very smoothly and almost no adverse reaction. I was always proud of my relations with the YWCA.

HESS: What was your impression of the general situation of civil rights, and the racial situation, when you first came to Washington?

RICE: Well, I didn't know actually too much about it. I was so involved in the activities of my husband and helping to entertain his colleagues from other countries and doing my own work at the YW, Cathedral, etc. Through the YW I worked with Phyllis Wheatley which was then a colored YWCA and we had joint meetings with them and I attended those and used to go to the Phyllis Wheatley meetings, but -- and of course, I saw the situation at Howard, but when I did think about it I was rather sad that it was so prejudiced and that at a place like the Cosmos Club you couldn't take colored guests or have colored members.

And I was very caught up in the AAUW, the American Association of University Women problem at that time.

[39]

Just after we had desegregated the Y cafeteria, after nearly a year's planning, they wanted to open the University Women's membership to colored members and I certainly was all for that because; it was simply a university requirement. Anybody that was a graduate of a well-known university could get in. Colored graduates should not be discriminated against, and I thought that that was bad, and that was when they had their lovely building at Seventeenth and I, and I used to have luncheon parties there and that sort of thing. But there was a big hassle over that and it split the organization right in two. And at that time I resigned and have never been a member again because I did not feel like fighting another year over the colored situation having just been through it with YWCA and it seemed so shortsighted. Just as they were very shortsighted about this committee for the Care of European Children. They were never a progressive group and this discouraged me because if you can't expect progression and liberalism from university women, who in the world can you expect it from? They split into two different organizations and neither has never seemed as strong since.

HESS: All right, would you like to tell me a little bit about the duties that you had at the Cathedral?

[40]

RICE: Yes, that was a very interesting assignment. I went there at the recommendation of Mrs. Wedel, whom I just mentioned, and I worked for Walter Clarkson. He was for many years, vice-president of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company and very active in the board of the Traveler's Aid Society that my husband served on with him as a community thing.

And when Mrs. Wedel got me to go to the Cathedral, she said, "Oh, this is going to be a very quiet, simple assignment. You won't have to work hard. It will be an easy job."

Well, within the first six months, I had to edit the Memorial edition to Bishop Freeman, we installed a new Bishop with the biggest show of interest in Washington Episcopal history, and worked frightfully hard on that, and the librarian was murdered and her body stuffed in a crypt in the Cathedral and I had all the press to handle and all of that. And I never worked so hard in all my life. And I said to Mrs. Wedel, "If this is an easy job, please don't recommend me for a hard job."

But the installation of Bishop Dunn was very interesting. Bishop Freeman who was the chief builder of Washington Cathedral had died about six weeks before I went out there and one of my first jobs in editing

[41]

the Cathedral Age magazine (in addition to public relations I edited the magazine), edit a whole issue as a memorial and tribute to him and his dream for the Cathedral's completion. Then they spent months finding a new bishop and they finally found Angus Dunn who was the Dean of the seminary at Cambridge, Massachusetts and a wonderful man. He had had infantile paralysis and his hands were very badly deformed (walked with a severe limp) and he didn't think he should be Bishop, with the laying on of hands, and the giving of communion with these deformities, but he was so wonderful that they insisted and he was elected and made Bishop.

And so at that time [Henry] Luce owner of Life-Time magazine was very much interested in Washington Cathedral, and decided to cover the installation for Life. He assigned five photographers, and a writer to cover it and we had an eight page spread. We had in addition to that a setup of about fifty photographers from all over the country (and overseas), and I don't know how many writers, and this was all my job to arrange, assign seats and locations, etc. It was the first time in the history of the Cathedral that they allowed photographs. And I had to push that decision through the diocesan committee and appear before these old-fashioned men. What a historical event, and how

[42]

wonderful in years to come to have these beautiful photographs, in black and white for they were not using color at that time, but to have the photographs. They debated over it for weeks and they finally said, "They can take them, if you assure us that the photographers will not use flash bulbs. This is a sacred occasion and we cannot have flash bulbs."

Well I worked with George Skadding; head of the White House press photographers and we got them to make a shot of, what is the word they call it? Anyway, one photographer representing all the local newspapers. We had to cut down somehow.

HESS: A pool photographer?

RICE: Yes, a pool. We had a pool photographer there, and then we had ladders built in along the walls so they could get up high and we had extra lighting and all this sort of thing. So, it worked out very well and they were so pleased afterwards that we had them. And Bishop Dunn is a perfectly charming and delightful man and his wife, they are just lovely, lovely people.

And one of the funniest things that happened, we had invited President and Mrs. Roosevelt, being devout Episcopalians, to come and were hoping they wouldn't because it

[43]

would be so hard to build a ramp for his wheelchair and to have a place for the Secret Service men and all that. So they turned it down, and we were quite relieved.

Well, we had the big procession and the Greek Orthodox Bishops and all the colorful robes and bishops from all over the country and foreign countries, and it went very well. We had a big luncheon for the distinguished guests at St. Albans School for Boys in this refectory and I think there was something in the afternoon, tea or reception in the Bishop's garden, and it was all a very lovely affair and about 5 o'clock that afternoon I went into Mr. Clarkson's office because he was the business manager and my boss, to sort of hash it over and discuss this, that, and the other. And he had his feet up on the desk, he was then in his seventies. He came to the Cathedral after he retired from the telephone company, so we were chatting and talking it over and I said, "You know, Walter, it's a very strange thing that we didn't have a message from the White House."

"Why, that's -- oh no." And he went to the wastebasket and started pulling stuff out and here was a beautiful telegram from President Roosevelt. So, having just about started home, I had to start and call all the wire services, the Post, the Star, the AP, the UP, and quote this to

[44]

them over the phone and Walter said, "Well, I didn't know it was important. It is just that man in the White House."

HESS: He had thrown it in the waste basket.

RICE: And Bishop Dunn had not even seen it, and if I hadn't mentioned it, it would have been lost by the next morning.

I had some wonderful and amazing experiences at the Cathedral. We planned a lot of summer outdoor programs for servicemen and women. I still occasionally see people out there.

Shall we take a little break?

HESS: Could you tell me about the people who stayed in your home during the war?

RICE: Yes, I'll be very glad to. We had a British mother and two children for a year. Of course we supported them, and they kept their own rooms and helped a little with the meals, because I had a fulltime job and a garden and canning and everything. And in some ways it was satisfactory and in some ways it was difficult. The children were not the well-disciplined children that you think of the British having. They were pretty spoiled and the first time we had spinach on the table, our son had been taught to eat whatever was put before him and glad to get

[45]

it and cleaned his plate up. But these children say, "We don't eat spinach at home and we're not going to eat it here." And we had quite a little trouble with that, but we used to take them on picnics on the weekend and do some sightseeing. Her sister was the head of the dining room staff at the British Embassy and a very lovely person and we enjoyed her a lot.

Then we had two fascinating people with us for a year, Hans and Mila Jacobs. Hans was Jewish and Mila was Austrian-Aryan and her family was very wellborn. And Hans had been an interpreter for the International Statistical Institute, fluently speaking German, English and French and he was a radio commentator for Radio Strasbourg, and was on the air twenty-four hours a day, practically, until the Germans occupied Paris; and he was on the list of their ten most wanted men by Hitler, and he knew if he were caught he would be killed. So, they were in concentration camps and my husband through some contacts he had, internationally, and using considerable money, was somehow, I can't give you all the details, was able to get money to them to assist them in getting out of the concentration camps and into Spain and on the last boat that brought Jewish intellectuals out of Europe.

And they were with us a year and we had a funny

[46]

experience. The first night they got there my husband and I were invited out to a cocktail party and left them with young Stu who was about three or four then and so he had been out in the snow and came in with wet shoes. And so Hans was devoted to him and very sweet with him and so was Mila. And he says, "Come little Stuart, we must take your shoes off." With that Stu went into a howling rage. Cried and sobbed and they didn't know what was wrong and they finally got his shoes off with a struggle and his supper, and eventually to bed. And when we got home we said, "Well, the trouble was that when we had him take his shoes off that means he has to go to bed, and this was only 5 o'clock in the afternoon and he thought that he had to go to bed."

That reminds me of another funny little incident with our son when he was two. We took him to Europe for some meetings and work that my husband had to do. And he had a little suitcase and we explained to him that he could take his favorite toys in there and that was all he could take, just what would fit in this little bag, we were going by boat and so forth. And so when we got to Union Station to get the train up to New York, the colored porter took our baggage, including his little suitcase, and he screamed and howled, and cried his heart out.

[47]

And of course it was because he saw this strange man making off with his toys and he was afraid he was never going to see them and they were his favorite toys. So, you never know what a child is going to think during such an experience.

Then the other person we had longest in Beachwood Circle during the war was -- or just after the war, was Germano Jardime from the statistical office in Brazil. We had met him in Brazil and he and his family had been very delightful and charming to us. So, he was coming to work here in the Census Bureau and we offered to have him stay with us two or three weeks until he found a room, and he liked it so much he stayed eighteen months. And we practically had to sell the house to get rid of Germano. He was just like the family and wonderful to have in our home.

And then we had various other people, particularly Army and Navy officers whose wives were here and they couldn't find a room and the housing center would call us, could we possibly take somebody for a week or two weeks?" And we had many, many, many of those people and I couldn't begin to tell you their names, but about three years after the war was over I got a big package in the mail full of sheets with my name and laundry mark on them. Somebody,

[48]

not able to get sheets, had just walked off with them, but their conscience got the better of them and they returned them to me and I was very glad to have them, but we had a large house on Beachwood Circle and did a great deal of entertaining.

One of the most interesting parties we ever had there was this one that might be a good time to tell it. This was in the early days of United Nations and I had the painters in the house. They had moved everything out of the kitchen and the dining room, and the living room, on say a Wednesday, and were just about ready to start painting when my husband called from New York and said, "I've just arranged to bring the whole Statistical Commission down from United Nations for a party Sunday afternoon. And they've even given permission for the Russians to come. This was the first time in history of the United Nations that the Russians had been allowed to come to a private home, and I want you to have a lovely party." Now, he said, "Call Harry Venneman in my office and you all work out the guest list. Now you know we'll want Harold Smith (Director of the Budget Bureau) and various people from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and various Cabinet officers, and various people in the State Department and so forth, and then fill in anybody you want. And

[49]

this will be 4 to 6, and I'll get down about 3 Sunday." He never said, "Can you do this?" or "What's 'going on?" He forgot about the painters, but when he hung up the phone I just sat and shook practically, what to do.

Well, I told the painters that we just couldn't do the painting right then, that there had been an emergency and so forth and so on and it would have to be postponed. I had no servants, so, I got two or three of the secretaries and men friends from Stuart's office and we got all of the invitations out and phoned them and telegrams and so forth, and it was a special time because everybody was interested in the United Nations and so forth, and so we got all of the furniture and everything, and it was an awful job.

And then I began to plan the menu, and I thought, "Dear God what can I serve?" Because at this period we weren't allowed to use white flour and I thought, "I can't make sandwiches, I can't use white flour, white bread, and all these people from UN we'll have to do this right." So I thought, "Well, I'll make real thin corn bread, crusty, and cut it in the middle and put Virginia ham on it," and I used soy flour and I got all the food together and the alcohol.

With all this help, the party really went off very

[50]

well. The flowers were beautiful. There were about ten from the UN and they stood in the receiving line and met everybody. Everybody seemed to have a grand time.

I was glad to carry out such assignments for my husband, but sometimes I wish he hadn't had so much confidence in me!

[51]

HESS: To begin this morning, Mrs. Rice, I believe you mentioned last time that Francis Biddle gave a great deal of assistance in securing the release of Jews from Germany in World War II. Is that correct?

RICE: Well, I don't know how many he worked with or whose problems he was personally involved in, but as I remember it he did help my husband and two or three others who were very actively involved in getting Hans and Mila Jacobs out of Germany. Hans Jacobs had been an interpreter for many meetings of the International Statistical Institute. That was before we had simultaneous translation equipment as was later used in all of the meetings, and he was a distinguished interpreter. He also had done some interpreting in Germany for high meetings there. He was a news commentator for Radio Strasbourg in Paris broadcasting almost twenty-four hours a day until the Germans occupied Paris. And he was among the first ten most wanted men by Hitler. He and his wife were both in concentration camps, in different ones, and I don't have, I'm sorry, all the information of how it happened. But we got word, say on Friday, that he was desperate to get out. Things were

[52]

very difficult for him and there was to be one more ship leaving Europe with Jewish intellectuals. And this cable came to my husband on a Friday begging for help financially to help get him out. My husband got in touch immediately with the son of Dr. Walter F. Wilcox who was an old and distinguished member of ISI and his son -- not Allen, he -- it was the other son, I'll think of his name in a moment I hope, but he was an attorney and so they debated what they could do. Now just at what point they got assistance from Biddle, I don't really remember that angle, but my husband thought, "Oh well, maybe I should wait until Monday to handle this." This was maybe 1 o'clock on Friday, but he just had a strange premonition that he must get this done. The cable sounded so desperate and so in need.

So, he cabled funds to the address that Hans had mentioned, and as it later turned out that was the last day that any funds were transferable from the United States to France and if he hadn't done it on Friday afternoon, it never would have gotten there and Hans and Mila were so desperate they had decided unless they could make this boat they would just commit suicide as their friends were doing right and left. It had been so ghastly in the concentration camps. He was wanted and they were so depressed

[53]

and so unhappy. So, there again I don't remember all of the details, but it's an incredible story how one by one they were able to pay money to this official and that official, and they finally walked out, and eventually into Spain. And they did get that last boat of intellectuals out of Europe and they came to our home and were with us a year.

And they were in pretty bad physical shape and they mostly just wanted to rest. Of course, Hans had many friends in Washington from all the meetings he had been interpreter for and he told us many incredible stories of the great difficulty that the Jews were having in Germany and elsewhere and so many killed and so many in concentration camps. It was just a fantastic story. I had hoped sometime my husband would have the time to write it down.

But later on when the Jacobs kind of recuperated and were up to it we had a very nice dinner party at the old Cosmos Club and had there the people who had helped to get them out and were interested in their welfare. And Attorney General and Mrs. Francis Biddle came that night and he made a very nice speech praising Hans for his courage and his wonderful broadcasting ability and so forth.

Now towards the end of that year that they lived with us, he went to New York City and got a news broadcasting

[54]

job with an old station (I don't know if it's still operating now), called WOR. It was a very liberal station out in nearby New Jersey and he worked for them a year or two or three and lived in New York. And then later he got still another radio job in Paris and they moved back to Paris. They had at one time or another lived in Paris and they had many friends and ties in Paris and I have the impression that some of their furniture, stored, was intact so that when they did have an apartment in Paris they were able to furnish it.

And the time of my fortieth birthday, when my husband was on his way to meetings in India and went on around the world, but I could only go part way with him. We went to Granada, Spain for ten days and then Madrid for three days and on to Paris for five days. I had my fortieth birthday in the Jacobs' home in Paris, and it was just beautiful and so artistically furnished and decorated and this just made us feel so happy because Hans always, on any opportunity he had, he always said my husband saved his life because if he hadn't been able to get out they had already decided they couldn't face life there any longer. They would just kill themselves. And Mila Jacobs that night on my birthday gave me a beautiful little antique black and gold pin with pearls

[55]

that had belonged to her great grandmother in Austria. They had no children and they wanted me to have it and I still have it.

HESS: Moving on, what were your impressions at the time of the death of Franklin Roosevelt? Where were you at that time?

RICE: Well, I was at home in Virginia. I didn't hear about it, I didn't have the radio on. And my husband heard about it just before he left his office in the Budget Bureau, and he was so stunned and so shocked. I think we had all realized that he wasn't too well. The last time I saw President Roosevelt was as he came back to Washington after his last election. And we took our son in. It was a grim, rainy, cold day, but we wanted our son to see him and so we stood under coats and umbrellas to welcome him in January. As I recall there was very little fanfare and there was not much of a very gala inauguration, because of the war.

HESS: It was held at the White House that year.

RICE: Yes. And I knew it wasn't public, we didn't know much about it. But he came back to Washington and you could tell, looking at him then, that he was not his usual

[56]

buoyant self, by any means.

On the day of his death when my husband came home he told me one of the things he would always remember, walking up Connecticut Avenue (that's when the Budget Bureau was in the old State Building, the Executive Offices are there), and everybody seemed very still. There was no conversation on the street, but as he would stop at traffic lights people were standing with tears running down their cheeks and just in sort of a state of numbness, kind of shock. And one of the things my husband did that night, and I think there's a copy in his papers, was to write a very warm letter to President Truman pledging him his support and pointing out that he was taking over at a very difficult time, but that he had every feeling that Mr. Truman would handle it well, would know what to do, but that he wanted to pledge personally to him his support and anything he could do to and through him -- anything he could do personally or through his office to make these difficult days of transition any easier for Mr. Truman he hoped he would call on him. And he got a very nice letter immediately back from Mr. Truman and I'm sure those letters are in his papers.

But people were sort of shocked by Roosevelt's death. We'd all known he wasn't well, but you sort of

[57]

had the feeling through the years he'd been President so long, and had been through so many difficult periods beginning with the depression and the closing of the banks and going right on through into the war and so forth, you kind of got the feeling he was indestructible and the fact that he could die just like a human being was kind of a shock I think to everybody.

HESS: What were your impressions of Mr.Truman, this new man that was coming in and taking over?.

RICE: Well, unfortunately I didn't have much impression of him, Mr. Hess. I never had seen him before as far as I can remember. I later did see him of course at the White House and then one night he came to the annual dinner of the Business Advisory Council held at the old Carlton Hotel and made a very good talk and a very good impression. But that particular time, of course that was before television, and people weren't exposed to the public as much as they later became after the development of television, and I didn't know much about him, but my husband seemed to respect him. The only contact we had with the family was indirectly through a former secretary of Dr. Rice's, Madeline Thomas Gore. She was from Independence and used to belong to a small bridge club that Mrs. Truman

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belonged to and she knew the Trumans quite well. And she said very wonderful things about him to Dr. Rice. She was Dr. Rice's secretary for a number of years. But she knew Mrs. Truman in a personal way and her only feeling was that it was a difficult position to put her in because she really didn't care too much for public life and the limelight of the White House, that she was much more a housewife and a mother and of course very devoted to their daughter Margaret and that this official life would be very hard for Mrs. Truman, that she would do it and she would do it well, but that her heart wouldn't really be in it the way Mrs. Roosevelt had enjoyed doing public things and traveling all over the country, that Mrs. Truman would be very, very different first lady, and that was her reaction.

HESS: During the years the Trumans were in the White House did you see them very often?

RICE: Not very often because those were war years and there weren't too many parties and official functions. We were never at dinner there, but we were at a few receptions and that was about the only contact that I had with them, just going through the receiving line. I never really saw very much of them. I didn't have the personal feeling of knowing

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them a bit as we did with the Roosevelts. And then of course later Dr. Rice was closely associated with Mrs. Roosevelt at United Nations and we can talk about that later. The only times I saw Mrs. Truman I just had the feeling that although she was gracious and all that, that this was definitely kind of a hard job for her. She was doing the best she could and as I say, was very gracious and kind to people, but that I just had the feeling that her heart really wasn't in it, that she would much rather not be in the limelight. But I had the feeling that Truman was made of very tough fiber and I think things certainly proved out that way in the things he did, continuing the war effort and finally bringing it to a close. He certainly stood his ground with the international leaders that he had to deal with and that he handled himself in representing this country and speaking for this country in a magnificent way. And he certainly did too, the way he went on with the war effort, and taking on a very difficult time because we had the impression that he had not been in on a lot of these important decisions, that he did not know much about the atomic bomb, if anything hardly, and here he was immediately faced with this terrific decision of what to do. And I think he handled it magnificently and he immediately got himself abreast of all of these intricate

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things that were going on, these highly scientific things that even puzzle a scientist much less a man who didn't have scientific training and background, but that Truman handled that magnificently and immediately got on top of all of these problems. And my husband and I both had the greatest respect for him.

HESS: Suppose we move on into your recollections of the dedication of the Roosevelt Library?

RICE: Yes, I'd like to mention that. Dr. Rice was on the committee that worked on plans for the Roosevelt Library. He wasn't terribly active, he wasn't on one of the small working committees, but he was on the general overall planning committee and very happy to serve on it.

At the time of the dedication we were invited with a group to go to Hyde Park for the dedication. And I'm sorry I can't remember the exact year, you of course, have that. But a number of us went up on the train. I remember George Elsey, a young naval officer, and a White House staff member, was there. We had known him a number of years through mutual friends and I don't remember how many others went but we knew most of them. And we went to New York City by train and then took a train on up to Hyde Park. And that was the first time I was ever on television. The whole procedure was televised

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and television was very, very new in those days. And I think it was just a brief program, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke briefly and told something of the Hyde Park area, and the old house and so forth, and some of her husband's desires about the Library and where he was to be buried and so forth. And there were one or two others who spoke, I don't remember their names. But it was a very pleasant occasion.

And then following the dedication we took a tour through the old home, the old Roosevelt home at Hyde Park, and then Mrs. Roosevelt invited about twenty or thirty of us to go to lunch at her little cottage where she was living, Val-Kill cottage, and we had a very pleasant time, and a fairly simple lunch, but it was very nice.

The thing that I particularly remember about it was going back to the railroad station at Hyde Park to get a train back to New York City. Just for something to read on the train I picked up a copy of McCalls magazine and not until I got on the train did I find that in that was a lovely article, illustrated with color photographs, of Mrs. Roosevelt's life in Val-Kill cottage, and strangely enough in the pictures that were published of her in the magazine, she had the identical dress on that she had had that day, and the identical menu that was described in the article, that she entertained very simply and usually had the same menu that her

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cook could prepare easily for small or large groups. The same menu and the recipes of all the food we had had. It gave me the strangest feeling as though I had had a camera and had photographed the whole thing. I passed the article up and down to the others on the train and they couldn't wait to get off and get a copy of this issue of McCalls, to see the whole thing we had just witnessed about forty-five minutes before.

Shall we take a little break?

HESS: Oh, all right.

Since you mentioned Mr. Elsey, ma'am, when did you meet George Elsey?

RICE: I met George when he was a young naval officer, quite young, in the early days of the war. He was a close friend of an old, old friend of mine, Joseph D. Killough. Joe had been a friend of mine at Birmingham-Southern College and then was a student of mine, he took one of my sociology courses and then I helped him to get a graduate scholarship at the University of Chicago -- in business administration. I don't remember what jobs Joe had before going into the Navy. He was stationed here in Washington for a number of years and he and George Elsey were very close friends, young bachelors around town. One Christmas morning at our home in

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Beachwood Circle in Arlington, Virginia we had a brunch about 11 o'clock. In addition to my husband's family we invited several people who were away from home.

We had an army officer and his wife who lived in Quincy, Massachusetts, the Gardellas, Major Phil Simpson from Boston, and Colonel Andrew J. Bentley who was formerly a vice-president of the A&P and here in the Army, the corps that has to do with the food and so forth. I can't think of the name of just now. We also invited Joe Killough and he brought George Elsey, a White House Aide.

And I kept running into George from time to time. Of course I never knew him as well as my old friend Joe Killough who by the way played the piano music for my wedding. And he was a very, very dear old friend and I've kept up with him. I don't know whether George was involved with this or not, but Joe had a very interesting assignment for a number of years with the -- I guess it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Combined Chiefs of Staff. Anyway, he was on the staff that went with Roosevelt to the Yalta and Malta conferences when Churchill and others were there.

And I don't remember them now, but he had some very amusing stories to tell about their experiences, some of the difficulties with the plumbing and trying to get baths, and some of the experiences of a personal nature,

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with the Russians and so forth, but Joe -- and of course, at the time that it first happened, he was first there, he couldn't talk about it for it was still secret information.

Then I kind of lost track of George and didn't know just what he did for awhile, for I did hear he was on President Truman's staff. The next time I ran into him was through my work at the Washington International Center over here on Crescent Place where they give training or orientation of a week to five or six thousand foreign technicians that are brought here under the State Department and AID sponsorship, and I have helped in this organization for twenty years one way or another, and I still go over there on Monday mornings at the coffee hour and chat with the newcomers.

And they have a week of orientation then before they go all over the United States, either universities or businesses, or airports, or places like that for training. And they come mostly from underdeveloped countries though we do get people from South America, Brazil and countries like that. We get a great many from Ghana and various other African countries, many from South Vietnam now and Korea. We used to get a lot from Japan. We don't get many now since they are so well advanced economically

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and industrially, but George Elsey served on the board of the Meridian Foundation as a personal assistant to James Webb, when he was a chairman of the Foundations Board. This was when Mr. Webb was head of NASA. And of course we had known Mr. Webb very well when he was Director of the Budget Bureau. My husband served under him. When Webb was so very busy, then George Elsey would take over and kind of run the show. So, I used to run into him over there.

And then more recently I was in touch with him when he became head of the Red Cross following General [James Francis] Collins and had that very important job. He's a fine person and they couldn't have found a better man to head the Red Cross with all of his international experience and all of his know-how in Washington. I think he'll make a very fine head of the Red Cross.

HESS: You mentioned Mr. James Webb. What was your impression of Mr. Webb and what did your husband have to say about the way that he may have handled the Bureau of the Budget?

RICE: My husband had a great deal of respect for him and thought he was very good. Of course there was always a problem as far as my husband's work was concerned. To him and his staff statistics were very important, but

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some of the Budget Directors weren't as keen about statistical problems as he was, naturally. I know he had respect for Mr. Webb, but just to what extent Mr. Webb leaned on the Statistical Division I don't really know, but of course Budget Directors are so involved in dollars and cents and getting the proper budget and the proper items in the budget, and the amounts, and they are under such pressure from the White House and from Congress and from all the bureaus and all of the departments, that it's very hard for them to cover everything. A man just has so much time and energy, and frankly I don't remember how much Mr. Webb really depended on the statistical program or not, I just don't know that much about it or remember that much about it. But when he would come to the meetings of the Business Advisory Council that I mentioned that Mr. Truman came to and Mr. [Lyndon Baines] Johnson came to -- I don't remember [Dwight D.] Eisenhower ever came or not. I just don't remember, but I do remember Mr. Johnson came once or twice. And I know that Mr. Webb practically always went, so he was interested in that phase of it. And of course the Business Advisory Council worked very closely with my husband's office and he was largely instrumental in starting it twenty odd years ago now. And Mrs. Webb was an awfully nice person.

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I always enjoyed her very much, very attractive and they were very cordial, very friendly, and we used to run into them at other parties here and there and I know that my husband respected Mr. Webb and was very pleased when he became head of NASA. He thought he would make a very good director of that. But just how close they were I don't really know.

HESS: Well, we mentioned Mr. Harold Smith last week, but there were two other gentlemen who headed the Bureau of the Budget during the Truman administration, Frank Pace and Fredrick J. Lawton.

RICE: Oh yes. Well, we were very fond of both of them, particularly Lawton. My husband there again had great respect for Frank Pace and thought he was a marvelous person.

And one story he loved to tell that he never knew how Frank Pace did it, but he would go to these parties like the Business Advisory Council and other parties we'd run into him at, and he would always have a drink in his hand. But by carefully studying him my husband said he never drank a drop of it. He would get a tall drink when he first arrived and he kept that drink all evening long and it never had to be refilled. People always thought he had a full glass, but my husband studied very, very carefully and as nearly as he could see Frank

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Pace never touched the drink, it just stayed that same height all evening. He had a lot of respect for Frank Pace, but my husband had a very deep and warm affection for Fred Lawton. Of course he came up through the ranks, and I guess he was about the only director that did. And he had been in the Bureau for many years and was a very fine, able, conscientious, thoroughly reliable, a thoroughly well-oriented person. And my husband has an autographed picture of him over his desk. He's had it for years in the study, and my husband, could get very, very sentimental when speaking of Fred Lawton. He thought he was a marvelous man and such integrity and thorough reliability, and he had a very, very deep affection, I think a more personal affection for Lawton than for any of the other directors he served under.

HESS: Before we began this morning you mentioned that you had known William Hassett and Roger Tubby also.

RICE: Yes. Well, I got to know Roger Tubby many years ago through Mrs. Brian Bell. Her husband had before his untimely death, had been head of the Associated Press in Washington and she and I became very close friends. She was one of my very, very dearest friends until her death a few years ago. She, at the time of her husband's death,

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was just very despondent and depressed, and my husband along with three or four other friends urged her to get a job. She had never worked. She was born and reared in South Carolina, beautifully reared from a fine old family there and had never worked. But she was a very close friend of the Harold Smiths. They lived next door to each other in Virginia and Harold -- she was sort of a confidant of his. He had so much respect for her opinion. She knew almost everybody in Washington in Government, the Hill and all the newspaper men and women. She was a highly respected person who kept up with all of the news and everything. So, Stuart and Harold Smith and two or three of her very good friends urged her to get a job. So she did. Her first one was in the office of [Henry A.] Wallace. And I guess that was after he was Vice President. I can't seem to remember whether it was when he was Secretary of Agriculture or when he was Vice President. Because she had so little training office wise, one of the first jobs they gave her to do was to keep his scrapbooks. So, she read all the newspapers and clipped all of the articles not only about him personally and his family, but things he would be particularly interested in, things he was doing. And then after that she worked for an office in one of the Government's economic programs and I can't remember the

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name. She had an office in one of the old temporary buildings across from the Department of Commerce for awhile, and then she was in the Department of Commerce for awhile, and she was working with Roger Tubby and a man named Clyde White. 'He had been a newspaperman I think out in Indiana, and then I think he was in the Associated Press with her husband, and then later went into Government service as a press officer. And the three of them and I, used to have lunch together almost every week there for a period of a year or two, talking about economic problems and what was going on in Government and various things like that. And that's how I knew Roger Tubby through Mrs. Brian Bell.

And we used to just have an awfully nice time and then every once in awhile Roger and his wife would come to dinner or to a Sunday brunch or something and they had a very lovely home out in Rockville, and we were there once or twice. That may have been after he left Government. I think he was involved in a newspaper in Rockville along with some other man, I'm trying to think of his name, maybe I'll think of it later.

I've forgotten how my husband first got to know Bill Hassett, but I guess maybe going over to the White House occasionally in those days when he was doing a lot

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with statistical security. We also knew Byron Price and Priscilla Price. He was head of that over-all office at the time. But my husband was very much involved in with what to withhold from publication of a statistical nature that would give aid and help to the enemy and he was on a Government committee that had a great deal to do with that along with people from Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics and places like that. It may have been through that that he got to know Bill Hassett.

Well, it turned out that Bill Hassett was born and his family for three or four generations before him, in a little town called Northfield, Vermont where we had a summer home for several years. Even when Dr. Rice couldn't get away much, our son and I used to spend summers up there alone. My husband would come up when he could for a week or two. Bill Hassett owned a family property there. Once at a country auction we found a great big colored map of the whole county in which Northfield was located called Washington County. And there on the map was the name of Hassett. And Stuart mentioned to him one time that he had this old map, and of course, Hassett was quite a history buff along with many many other interests and writings and so forth, and he said he would love to see that map and some of the names of other families that he had known and grew up with.

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So, we never got around to taking it to him until after Mr. Roosevelt's death. And as you may remember, Mr. Hassett had something of a breakdown after that. The pressure and the tension and the sadness and so forth of announcing his death and seeing through the funeral and everything. So, Mr. Hassett was rather ill for some time following that and was out in the Naval hospital. One afternoon when he was feeling better, and felt like seeing visitors, Stuart and I took this old map and went out to the hospital. We thought it would sort of cheer him up and he'd get his mind off his worries. And so we sat there in his room high up in the hospital and he went over this map and told us so many things about that area of Vermont and was so pleased to have it. And then from time to time we would run into him in Vermont or here in Washington. We used to see him occasionally at the Cosmos Club and places like that.

And the last time I saw Roger Tubby was with Mr. Hassett coming out of the Cosmos Club a number of years ago. But we saw Mr. Hassett later than that. In fact we saw him in Northfield just a year or two before his death. I enjoyed his book so much that he wrote about -- all those secret trips that he made with Mr. Roosevelt to Hyde Park and all during the war years when they were kept secret and they would leave along Friday afternoon and

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come back Monday morning, and I loved reading that book.

And there are some other things I would like to mention about Vermont, but suppose we take just a break.

When I was working at Washington Cathedral and our son would be out of school and my husband and I had talked for some time about getting a small country place up in New England somewhere as an antidote to the life in Washington. One winter when our son was about nine I answered ads in the Strout Farm Journal and places like that and corresponded with some people about a farm. We had about four areas to look in and early in the summer we went to see them one by one. We went up to Rutland by train, and then the rest of the way by bus. And anyway, we finally got to Northfield, Vermont, that's ten miles south of Montpelier and about ten miles kind of south and west of Barre, sort of a triangle these three little towns and just as soon as we got to Northfield we just loved it. We had looked at a number of farms, so-called, on the way up, but nothing had quite appealed. But we liked everything about Northfield. That's where Norwich University is.

Norwich University used to be in Norwich, Vermont across the river from Hanover, New Hampshire where Dartmouth is, but it burned. And they moved the school to Northfield, Vermont, and I think it is one of the oldest military schools

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in the United States. It also raises the whole intellectual climate of a little town because all of the farm boys can go to Norwich very reasonably if they couldn't afford to go somewhere to a boarding school. They could just live at home and work on the farm and go to Norwich. It's not a summer town, it's strictly a little year-round town, but almost no summer people.

So, we settled down in a little guest house and a nice little place to get meals, very good food. And then we met Mr. and Mrs. Richard Gaylord. He was the president of the Northfield Savings Bank and they have from time to time what they called "distressed properties." So he and his wife started showing us places around for sale. And oh, we went to chicken pot pie benefit suppers and country auctions and a little country wedding and we'd go up to Montpelier or up to Burlington and we had a wonderful time.

So, we found a beautiful place that had a view, but nothing much else. It was atop of Dole Mountain and a hundred and twenty-five acres, with a big pine forest, planted pines, and a big apple orchard and some cultivated land, and acres of just woods. And years before the hundred and twenty-five odd year old farm house that had been reconstructed had been reclaimed, modernized, burned down and left a big cellar hole with a big chimney. And

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then it left three little buildings, two of them were over a hundred years old. One was a blacksmith shop and one was a sugar house for making maple sugar and one was a little kind of study that a retired Norwich University professor had built to house his library to work in. They were the ones that owned the house when it burned.

Well, anyway, we, Stu and I, decided that's what we wanted. So, my husband came up briefly and we bought it. The view was magnificent over the little village and the sun showing on the little church steeples and we could see the Montreal express train going through at 11:30 at night on the way to Montreal, and it was just delightful and so primitive, no running water, and no electricity.

So, Stu and I spent that summer there and many others. We bought it -- a hundred and twenty-five acres for $2,000 and ten years later we sold the same one hundred and twenty-five acres for $2,000 and we'd give anything if we had it now. It's probably worth six, eight or ten times that price the way that area has been developing, but for many reasons we decided to give it up.

Well, Stu and I had a marvelous time up there kind of remodeling these little houses because you couldn't buy any lumber to speak of during the war years, or get a

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carpenter, you couldn't even buy furniture, so all the furniture we had I bought at country auctions and painted and refurbished. The blacksmith shop had two rooms that we turned into the sleeping cottage and had bunk beds built in. You couldn't buy beds, but we finally got a carpenter to build them in, and we were able through Sears Roebuck to buy two mattresses and put those in. And then at a country auction for a quarter I bought a spool bed and painted it, and we managed to get a mattress for that. So, that was the room for the three of us to sleep. All three of us had sleeping bags so occasionally we'd go out in the pines and sleep out-of-doors. And I got a kerosene stove to cook on in bad weather, but in good weather I cooked out on this fireplace, had been left when the old house burned. We took the chimney down to about fifteen feet and filled in the old cellar hole and left the stone foundation so we could seat twenty or thirty people for picnics around on the stone foundation and took down the chimney and put an iron crane in. So, that's where I'd cook in good weather.

And we had a wash shelf and all in good weather. And then we used a little kerosene stove to cook inside in bad weather. The little "Library" cottage was full of bookshelves made out of old crates and scrap lumber on all

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four walls. So, on one wall I hung the cooking utensils and one wall the china that I picked up, odds and ends here and there. And another shelf, the books that -- we'd buy at auctions, sometimes in an old trunk and it would have anything in it, old clothes and books and daguerreotypes and everything, we just haunted the auctions, but we just got more good stuff for nothing. And we had a wonderful summer there.

So, the next summer we were up a good share of the summer and my husband was up for a week or two that summer and we had been having trouble with a woodchuck, and he scared the dog, and was making all of this noise. And so my husband and son fixed up a little wire trap and we caught the thing. And we didn't know what in the world to do with it and this was still during meat rationing and we hadn't had much meat lately and my husband said, "You know they are very clean animals, they just live on grain. Why don't we eat it?"

And I thought, "I can't cook a woodchuck!"

And later we found nobody in Northfield had ever heard of eating a woodchuck and the news went far and wide, the Rices had eaten a woodchuck. And they had been calling me a pioneer woman anyway. I carried all my water a half mile uphill that whole first two summers, and we used

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kerosene lamps, and we really were pioneering. And they couldn't imagine anybody from Washington, D.C. doing all this.

Well anyway; my husband and son dressed this woodchuck. It was very fat but clean, beautiful meat. And I had an old iron pot that hung on this crane in the outdoor fireplace, so I put it on very early one morning with onions and potatoes and carrots and celery and herbs of all kinds and just simmered it all day long. And I'd constantly skim off the fat. And it was delicious and very, very good and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Well, the afternoon before, my husband and son were dressing it, skinning it, and it happened to be an unusually hot day for Vermont and they stripped off to their shorts, just cotton shorts. I had to go down in the village to do some marketing, this was Saturday afternoon. So, I had no more than gotten down there and Stuart and Stu were covered in greasy fat from this woodchuck skin, and all, when in comes Bill Hassett to make an official call. And my husband was a little embarrassed to have Bill Hassett see him fixing a woodchuck to eat: And Hassett was so amused, and he said, "Dr. Rice, I never thought I'd live to see you stripped down cleaning a woodchuck to eat." So, he had a nice visit with them (I was still away).

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And Bill Hassett hardly left until in came Dr. Raymond Wells a dentist, born and brought up in Northfield, then practicing in New Jersey. At that time was president of the American Dental Association. So, Stuart had to go all through telling him what he was doing. When I came back my husband said, "Please don't ever leave me on the weekends again. Our most distinguished guests caught me up here cleaning a woodchuck and you weren't here to fix them anything cool to drink or any cookies or anything."

HESS: All right, do you want to say a few more words about Vermont now?

RICE: That'll be fine. One of the most interesting things about our summers in Vermont was getting to know the Vermont character of some of the people. We'd always heard about the taciturn attitudes of New Englanders and particularly Vermonters and we certainly had some amazing experiences.

I had a great deal of difficulty finding a carpenter to build us an outhouse and we were very greatly in need of an outhouse. So, there was a little chicken house on the property that they didn't use to roost the chickens but to set the hens, so it was nice and clean and smelled of straw. And it had been made out of leftover window frames from the old house, with hand blown glass panes.

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Well, I looked everywhere and called everybody for a carpenter and everybody was off at war and couldn’t find anybody, but there was a man who hauled the mail from the Post Office to the railroad, "John Smith." And when he wasn't doing that he was an undertaker, and when he wasn't busy at that he was a starter for the horse races at Tunbridge, where they had horseracing all summer. And when he wasn't doing that he was a carpenter. So, I kind of took turns with all these other things to wait in line.

So, he came up and said, "Oh sure, we'll get a team of horses and some rollers and we'll move the chicken house up in the woods. It'll be nice and protected and we'll dig a pit and that will make you a nice outhouse."

So, it was very hard to buy lumber, but he finally got some lumber, and so I told "John Smith" that I wanted three holes, a regular size, and a middle size and a children size, because we had a lot of children coming to see us up there.

Well, everything was fine until I got to that. He had put the door on and had moved it and everything. Well, days and days went by and he wouldn't come up and he wouldn't come up and I was getting desperate. It was a rainy period and Stu and I would have to take umbrellas and raincoats and go up in the woods when we needed to go

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to the bathroom and it just got to be an awful nuisance. And so finally I went down to the Post Office one day and I really let myself out to "John" that I had to have the seat put in with the holes. We had to use that outhouse. And it was a nice big one and I was so proud of it and so forth. And he stood there and looked at me and he said, "By golly, Mrs. Rice, ain't nobody in Washington County got but two holes, and I don't know why you got to have three."

So I said, "All right, 'John', just put two in."

And the next day he came and finished it off and was perfectly happy, but he wasn't going to have city folks putting on airs having three seats, so we just had the two.

HESS: He thought that was an unnecessary status symbol.

RICE: That was an unnecessary status symbol. And so he put some bookshelves in for me, he thought that was all right. I had magazines and two or three New Yorker cartoons on the walls and so we just had a wonderful time.

He was interesting in another way. And this is a story that I'm sure won't ever be published anytime soon if ever at all.

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He had a housekeeper and they only had one bedroom and a double bed. They had been living together for twenty odd years and had never married because if she married she would lose her pension from her World War I husband. So, being very practical, they needed the money, and so they just lived together and everybody accepted it and nobody raised an eyebrow, and she kept her pension and "John" drew his salary, and they lived together and nobody paid any attention to it.

Another funny story about Vermont ways and philosophy. There was a man in the town and his wife got a divorce and he settled, say a thousand dollars, he didn't have much money and she went off to Montpelier to live. Well, several weeks later he got a redheaded housekeeper to come in and keep house for him and do the laundry and cook and everything. Well, his ex-wife heard about this and came tearing down to Northfield and got rid of this woman in the middle of the day. Threw her out bag and baggage. The woman kept saying, "But Mr. So and So hired me, you didn't."

"That's all right, you just get out of here."

So, the man comes home at night from work and finds his ex-wife in the kitchen fixing dinner and he can't

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believe his eyes. "What's going on here?"

And she said, "I'm not going to have any redheaded housekeeper in my kitchen:"

So, to this day they still live together. The house is divided with a hall. She lives on one side and he lives on the other and she does all his laundry, cooking and everything and he supports her, but they don't live together. But she wasn't going to have any redheaded hussy in her kitchen taking over her place. But he said, "But you wanted a divorce."

She said, "I still do, and don't think I'm going to live with you. I'm just going to look after you, but I'm going to keep any other woman from taking care of you. "

HESS: Pretty unusual people.

RICE: Oh, they're wonderful.

And one day I had an interesting experience at the little tearoom. They unexpectedly on a Sunday morning gave a leave to all the cadets from Norwich and they came flooding in, forty, or fifty, or sixty, and my friend Edith Hodgedon who ran the place didn't have any help. And Stu and I had gone in for breakfast and I saw the situation and I said, "Hodgie, you really need help don't

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you?"

She said, "I certainly do:"

So, I put Stu out in the kitchen on a stool with a sweet roll and a glass of milk and a dish of berries or something and had him sit out there. And so I waited on tables for the next three hours. I had never done it in my life but I thought I knew which side to put the plates on and take them off. And all of these boys wanted pancakes and sausage and waffles. That was the first time they had been out of barracks in a month and -- but you do that sort of thing in Vermont and people respect you for it and like you for it. They also help you out of a spot.

And I was sort of an enigma when I first went up there. The idea that anybody from the city would carry all of her water uphill, and no electricity, and that sort of thing, and would willingly want to do this. I mean some of them might have to do it, but here was somebody who did it from choice. The view was so wonderful and we had such fun. We had a great big berry patch. I never saw such big blackberries in my life. And Stu and I picked them for a couple of days and he set up a little stand in front of the grocery store down in town and sold blackberries all one Saturday, and everybody was, you know, so interested in it and everything.

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Another experience I had with the kindness of Vermonters -- when they get to know you they are so genuinely kind and friendly. We had a dog that ran onto a porcupine and just ruined his mouth. It was just full of. quills and he was so miserable and such in pain and barking and carrying on and I didn't know what to do. I tried to pull them out and, oh, he couldn't stand it, you know, he would growl and everything. And I called the only veterinarian in that area and he was out of town and they couldn't recommend anybody so I had heard that there was a doctor down in the village who had formerly been at Hanover, at Dartmouth. I had never met him, but I called him on the phone and explained my trouble and I said, "I hear you're from Hanover and my husband used to teach at Dartmouth, and I'm just desperate." It was a Saturday afternoon and I said, "I just don't know what to do with the poor animal he suffering so."

And he said, "Oh, bring him on down and I'll do something for him."

And he was having office hours. Of course his patients, people patients, not dog patients, and so he had me take him out into the barn and he said, "Now my problem is, I'll have to anesthetize him to remove these. It's too painful and there are too many of them," and

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he said, "I don't know how much anesthetic to give him without running the risk of permanently putting him to sleep."

And I said, "Well, we'll just have to take that risk because he can't get through the weekend until the veterinarian comes back."

So, he would see two or three patients and then come out and inject him a little more and we finally got him to sleep. And he pulled, oh, I think forty quills out of his mouth and tongue, just an awful thing. But I felt that was a very kind gesture. He wouldn't let me pay him. So, the next Monday I sent him a fifth of Scotch with my thanks and we were very good friends ever after that. But that was a decent thing for an M.D. to do, to help out an animal that was in such distress and to help me out. And people were always doing kind and friendly things like that.

And one of the most interesting things I did up there when I couldn't get a hold of "John Smith" to put the shingles on the backside of the sleeping cottage. It was leaking in when it rained hard, right against the bed, so he said, "I just simply have not time to do it, but there's no reason why you can't do it." He said, "I'll come up and show you how."

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So, he ordered the shingles for me and cut me a little measuring stick and helped me do the first row, plumb and straight, and I got a ladder and the thing was almost two stories high, and I shingled the whole backside of that building myself. And he was real proud of me. I appreciated his compliments, but he showed me very carefully how to do it and his confidence -- he said, "Why Mrs. Rice, you can do that. There's no reason why you can't."

Our son was too young to do it, and he got the right nails, and showed me just how to mark them and everything. So, I shingled the backside of that cottage and it was just a wonderful experience up there.

We'd have picnics and friends would take us -- particularly to country auctions. And usually the ladies aid of the church would sell lunch and we'd get food that way.

And one night we went to a benefit at a church nearby with fried chicken and oyster supper and various things, and they had three kinds of pies. So, when it came time for dessert, Stu was about ten or eleven then, and they asked him which kind of pie he wanted and kind of hesitated a little, and one of the ladies knowing boys said, "You want all three kinds, I know." And so she gave him a piece of all three kinds and wouldn't let me pay her any extra.

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"Oh," she said, "no, there are some people don't take any pie. I know the boy's hungry, so we may as well let him have a little bit of everything."

HESS: What can you tell me about some of the dinners that you attended at the embassies here in town?

RICE: Well, those were very interesting. Unfortunately I can't remember the guest of honor at the first dinner I went to at the Russian Embassy. I was still quite young then and the first time I ever tasted vodka, that was long before vodka was popular in this country as a drink. This was, oh, thirty odd years ago. And we were invited to the Russian Embassy and it was very magnificent and wonderful food and everything. And they served vodka and I wasn't sitting anywhere near my husband, and the man next to me explained it was vodka. And so I just took a little sip and, oh, it was so strong I thought I never tasted anything so strong, and a Russian woman, the wife of somebody on the Embassy staff leaned over and said, "My dear, do not sip it or it will make you very drunk. You must take the whole thing in one gulp." And it was a small glass. She and two or three of the other Russians were watching me very carefully, so there was nothing to do but take it in one gulp. But it was just like liquid fire

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going down my throat. I think theirs must be even stronger than what we buy and use now, but this was years before we used it. It was a very nice party I am sorry I don't really remember too much about it.

But later we went there to several receptions, one magnificent one was honoring five or six air pilots. Now I don't remember exactly why they were so important, but they had done some special flying, whether it meant that they flew from Russia to Washington as a special accomplishment, I'm sorry I just don't remember. But there was a long line and none of them spoke a word of English. And I remember particularly that there was present the Congressman from my district in Alabama, Congressman Luther Patrick. He spoke to each one of them in flowing, rapid English, just as though they understood. Instead of just greeting them simply in the receiving line he would stand with each discuss all kinds of things in English, and they looked perfectly blank, they didn't understand a word he was saying. I always thought that was kind of amusing.

HESS: We can't expect politicians to be men of few words can we?

RICE: No. And he certainly did talk a lot.

Then we had one very interesting and pleasant dinner

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at the Polish Embassy when Ambassador [Josef] Winiewicz was serving. My husband had had some meetings with him one way or another on statistical matters, or had met him at UN or somewhere, anyway we were there. And following dinner the Ambassador played a most beautiful informal program of piano music, almost all Chopin, which just pleased my husband so much. He always loved Chopin. He was partial to piano music as compared to orchestra music or violin music or anything. He loved piano music and this was a long, lovely evening, of just the music he loved.

Then we were very good friends with the Ambassador from Thailand. He was -- his nickname was Tuie, or it may have been his actual name, Tui Soomsai, and I spoke to some people from Thailand the other day and he's still has a very important job in Thailand, but he was Ambassador here for some time and he and my husband were quite good friends. They used to have lunch together and discuss all kinds of things and it was a lovely embassy.

And one night we were there for dinner and my husband had had his annual physical that morning and the doctor had taken quite a bit of blood for tests. That in combination with he had quite a little to drink that night, different wines and liqueurs that were strictly from Thailand, and of course all Thai food which was highly

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seasoned. And it was a very hot night, and before we had air conditioning, and he was in white tie and tails with a tight collar. As a result of all this, about ten o'clock I looked over, he was sitting next to the Ambassador's wife, and he was absolutely green and he just suddenly passed out. And everybody was very concerned and afraid he had had