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With just the right word or words at the right time, Dad, you can rescue your daughter from a bad day. read more
Page 36 of 127
Men, Don't Be a Lookie-Lulu: Fight For Focus
Men, temptation starts with the eyes. That's when compromises in your marriage start happening. read more
3 Ways Porn Steals From Your Marriage
You may think you're getting away with it, but here's your indulgence in sin fuels robbery in your marriage. read more
6 Traits That Measure Authentic Manhood
You're sure to find these character traits in a man who practices true manhood. read more
9 Things Parents Should Never Say to Their Children
Getting upset with your child for an indiscretion or disobedience is one thing. Saying these hurtful words is quite another. read more
5 Areas That God Lets Men Know He's There for Them
God gives us these five things. All we need to do is to receive them. read more
7 Suggestions for Raising Boys Who Welcome Your Input as Adults
How do you get your sons to want to come to you for wisdom, long after they leave home? read more
The Impact Paying off Debt Has on Your Marriage
What has been your No. 1 tool in leading your family through financial crisis? read more
Your Story Is His Story, So Share It
You can leave an eternal legacy when you share your testimony. Here are a few tips to make it easier. read more
One Thing Sons Need From Their Fathers
More than anything, sons are looking for this from their dads. Many don't ever get it. read more


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Top Definition
Someone who has had there balls cut off so they dont feel sexual urges.
I would hire a prostitue but I'm a Unik!
di onebigass 02 marzo 2005
Trending Now
Can you define these popular missing words?
Shortened version of eunich. Usually a castrated male. Can be a male (XY chromosomes) born without genitals (just a pee hole), or a man without any penis or sex drive or a man with a permanent case of ED.
The king used Uniks (Unix) to guard his harem.

subset: commoncrawl


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The Power of Advocacy
Congratulations and THANK YOU to Marti Hill, support group leader from Tampa/St. Petersburg area and patient for being the IMF's Advocate of the Month!
Earlier this year, Marti, along with our advocacy team, visited her congressmen in Washington to discuss issues that are important to her as a patient and to make some very specific requests that would benefit the myeloma community. I asked Marti, as a patient who hasn't participated in meetings like this before, to tell everyone what this experience meant to her.
In Her Own Words
"A Spring trip to D.C. What could be better? What I didn't expect was that the experience of meeting my legislators' staffers would be a pleasant one. But given the preparation on Christine's part, the encouragement on Arin's part, I have become a believer in the power of advocacy. One of the things that worked for me was lowering my expectations. That seemed to allow me to spend energy on getting clear about my message to these people and that made all the difference. What I wanted most of all was a conversation in which I was heard. That happened. Getting passionate about the power of research (read: I am still alive) and articulating the importance of my own story connects so many of us on this road. Each one of us has a unique story and sharing it with our legislators has the potential of bringing much needed research money to this cancer called multiple myeloma."
-Marti Hill
Delivering Our Messages
By Arin Assero, Director of Advocacy
The day started off with a meeting at the office of Representative Bill Young (REP-FL-10), who is a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and more importantly a ranking member of the Department of Defense (DoD) Appropriations Subcommittee. Because of his standing on this committee, Marti started the discussion with research and how important it is to her as a patient, which presented the perfect opportunity to discuss appropriations requests for Fiscal Year (FY) 2011.
Marti, along with the help of Christine Murphy, our Director of Government Affairs, requested that Representative Young support $50 million for the Peer-Reviewed Cancer Research Program (PRCRP), funded through the Department of Defense (DoD) Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP). In addition to that, she talked about further funding opportunities through the NIH and the CDC, specifically, the Geraldine Ferraro Blood Cancer Program, which, in the past, has helped the IMF reach out to the underserved community. In addition to research funding, Marti focused the conversation on policy when she asked for Rep. Young to co-sponser the Cancer Coverage Parity Act (HR 2366). This bill, which the IMF, along with the help of many patients, has worked on at both the federal and state levels, eliminates disparities in insurance coverage for oral and intravenous treatments. As you've heard from previous advocates, it's an issue that affects many patients.
Later that afternoon, at Marti's meeting with Senator George LeMieux's office (REP-FL), she focused again on appropriations requests. Because Senator LeMieux is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the advocacy team highlighted that, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), military personnel may be at heightened risk of developing a form of blood cancer as a result of their exposure to chemical and biological agents. In fact, the Department of Veterans Affairs presumes blood cancers to be service-connected for Vietnam veterans and offers medical and disability benefits to affected individuals. The IOM has noted this link in Gulf War veterans as well.
Perhaps, the most profound meeting came at the end of the day, where Marti shared her personal struggle in dealing with the Medicare doughnut hole with the staff of Senator Bill Nelson's office (D-FL). She was grateful that the recent passage of health reform addressed this issue, but made clear that in the 10 years that it will take to completely close this gap in coverage; many more myeloma patients will face the difficulties of finding the money to cover their treatment.
While it seems to take some time to get to real solutions in this tangled web of policies, and a lot of preparation and follow up is required to get results, we must remember - EVERY CONVERSATION COUNTS and if WE, as patient advocates, don't speak up, who will?
Thank you Marti for truly giving a voice to the myeloma community!
On October 5th, the President signed the Improving Access to Clinical Trials Act into law.


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Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professorship in Engineering Education
The School of Engineering Education (ENE) (https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE) within the College of Engineering invites applications for the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professorship in Engineering Education.
The School is vibrant, young and growing community of scholars who are envisaging ways of transforming engineering education based on scholarship and research. The programs we administer includes the first-year engineering program (2500 students), an undergraduate program in multidisciplinary engineering, a program in interdisciplinary engineering studies and a PhD program in engineering education. The research interests of our faculty are very diverse and span aspects of engineering education from pre-kindergarten through college and into engineering practice. We have an Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning (INSPIRE), a variety of labs and a research programs focused on engineering students and are planning a research center focused on learning in industry. A summary of our current research can be found HERE.
Applicants should hold an earned doctorate in engineering or education or related discipline and at least one degree in engineering with expertise in engineering education research. They must be qualified for tenure as a full professor in engineering at Purdue. We seek individuals with an outstanding record of achievement who can provide leadership in discovery, learning, and engagement based on a clearly articulated vision of the current needs and future directions of engineering education. Successful candidates will have a demonstrated commitment to diversity, collegiality, and interdiscipinlarity. They will also have excellent communication and collaboration skills and be expected to provide leadership assisting the Head in mentoring faculty and the further development of the School, in refining its strategic direction, and in programmatic support in executing the strategic plan. They will be expected to teach in our undergraduate programs, including first-year engineering, and our graduate program and develop a nationally recognized, externally funded research program in engineering education.
Review of applications will begin on November 4, 2013 and continue until a successful candidate is identified. Applicants must provide:
1) Letter of application emphasizing ability to carry out the responsibilities of the position
2) Detailed vitae of qualifications and experience
3) Statement of career objectives and your vision for engineering education
4) Statement of education philosophy and plans for graduate and undergraduate courses
5) Statement of research plan
6) Upon request, at least three references must be provided
Applications must be submitted online at the following site: https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr/InfoFor/Employment. A background check is required for employment in this position. For questions regarding the application process, please contact Marion Ragland, Faculty Recruitment Coordinator, College of Engineering (firstname.lastname@example.com). Questions regarding the position should be addressed to Professor David Radcliffe, Kamyar Haghighi Head (email@example.com).
Purdue University is an equal opportunity/equal access/affirmative action employer fully committed to achieving a diverse workforce.
Related Link: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/HomepageFeatures/Initiatives/ENE%20Advertisement%20for%20Gallagher%20Professorship%20Sep%202013.pdf


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Greentwist Garden Twine
This item is currently not available.
Additional Information
Old-Fangled, Never-Tangled Twine
- Natural twine is a longtime favorite for tying plants and supports
- Made of earth-friendly, biodegradable jute
- Comes in a nostalgic and convenient tin dispenser
In England, the gardening philosophy is simple: when something works, don't change it. This natural jute garden twine is a perfect example. Made in England and sold in a patented, no-tangle tin since 1915, it's softer, more pliable, and easier on plants than hardware store twine. A turn-of-the-century innovation that is just as useful today.
Product Details
- Approx. 500' long
- Container is 4-5/8" H x 3-1/2" diameter
There are no special shipping restrictions or charges associated with this item. For detailed information about our delivery methods and charges, click here.
We're proud of the fact that this item is shipped to you directly from our warehouse in Vermont, by one of our 250 employee-owners. In-stock items are packed with care and shipped within the next business day to ensure prompt delivery to your home and garden!


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Systemwide Events Calendar
The Vagina Monologues at UH Manoa 2013March 16, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Manoa Campus, Art Auditorium 132, Art Building
VAGINAS are making a COMEBACK!!!
Directed by Michael "Donut" Donato Assistant Directed by Amanda Stone Produced by Kelsey De Avila & Jennifer Shiiba
Pualani Armstrong, Sierra Chisholm, Jessica Ciufo, Brookie Hedrick, Stephanie Jones, Aubree Minakami, Ayisha Osborne, and Erin Price
Venue: University of Hawaii at Manoa Art Building, Art Auditorium Room 132.
Spring 2013 Performance Dates:
Thursday, March 7th with Joyful Heart Foundation
Friday, March 8th
Friday, March 15th with Youth Speaks Hawaii and ASL Interpreters available
(ALS Interpreters were originally on the 8th, but due to scheduling conflicts was moved to the 15th. We apologize for any inconvenience)
Saturday, March 16th (JUST ADDED!)
Doors open at 6:30PM Show at 7PM
Admission: $5 UH Students $10 General
Purchase tickets at Campus Center Ticket, Info, & ID Office ONE WEEK BEFORE SHOW, beginning Thursday, February 28th. Tickets also available at the door ONE HOUR PRIOR TO SHOW.
**Tickets for the 16th will not be available at Campus Center***. We apologize for any inconvenience
All proceeds go to V-DAY and JOYFUL HEART FOUNDATION.
Email us: email@example.com
"The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world." - Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
Ticket Information
Admission: $5 UH Students $10 General Purchase tickets at Campus Center Ticket, Info, & ID Office ONE WEEK BEFORE SHOW, beginning Thursday, February 28th. Tickets also available at the door ONE HOUR PRIOR TO SHOW.
Event Sponsor
NOW at UH Manoa, Manoa Campus
More Information
Kelsey De Avila, , email@example.com, https://www.facebook.com/events/240710672732773/
|Saturday, March 16
|The Wellness Center - Fitness Class Schedule
Maui Campus, Pilina Bldg., Wellness Center
|Aquaculture of Tilapia in Hawaii
Windward Campus, Akoakoa 103/105
Harold L. Lyon Arboretum 3860 Manoa Road Honolulu, HI 96822
|Geek Day at Leeward
Leeward Campus, Campus Computer Classrooms
|Writing Retreat
Windward Campus, Hale 'Ākoakoa 107/109
Harold L. Lyon Arboretum 3860 Manoa Road Honolulu, HI 96822
|The Vagina Monologues at UH Manoa 2013
Manoa Campus, Art Auditorium 132, Art Building
|Grant Carvalho, piano
Manoa Campus, Orvis Auditorium
- Highlighted dates have scheduled events.
- Select the date to view all events for that day.
Ongoing Events
- Lineage : A Family Tree of Printmakers
- The White Rose : nonviolent resistance against the Nazi regime
- Arts Exhibition: Ainu Treasures: A Living Tradition in Northern Japan
- Biggest Loser Challenge
- Phoebe Cummings: Cella
- L. Stephen Lau Water Research Endowed Scholarship 2013
- Free Commuter Cycling 101 Workshop


text:
Int: I'm Elizabeth Gettinger.
Int: And I'm Anne Steptoe.
Int: Today is June 29th, 2009. We are here interviewing – would you please introduce yourselves?
AP: My name is Antonio Pereira.
SL: And my name is – oh, sorry.
AP: Okay. Go ahead, Silvio.
SL: My name is Silvio Luciani.
AP: Yes. I came to the United States on January 23, 1966. I live in 4417 Burlington Place N.W. Washington, D.C. 20016-4421.
SL: I came to the United States in 1960.
Int: 1960.
SL: Yep. I live in Chevy Chase.
Int: Chevy Chase?
SL: After I buy a house in Wheaton. Silver Spring – Wheaton – 10513 Georgia Avenue Silver Spring, Maryland, zip code 20902. So, I came over to work at Dumbarton Oaks in 1969, February 2nd.
Int: Ah, okay. [To AP] When did you come to Dumbarton Oaks?
AP: I came on January 23rd, no, June 7th, 1971. I knew Silvio before I came here.
Int: Oh, you knew each other?
AP: Yeah, I used to go, sometimes, and work with him in the caterer's company.
SL: Because I worked with a caterer every day, almost – every evening, not just during the day.
Int: How long have you known each other?
AP: Since then.
Int: Since?
AP: Since 1970.
SL: Yeah.
Int: [To AP] And was it through him that you learned about Dumbarton Oaks?
AP: No. The point is: the lady I used to work for before I came here – she was a good friend of Mr. Thacher, which in that time – he was the Director of Dumbarton Oaks. And I had a little girl, my oldest daughter, and she didn't like children much, you know, so I lied to her and I said I have another daughter coming on. And it wasn't true. And I said, "I need to get a place to work and a place to live and all that." And she talked to Mr. Thacher and Mr. Thacher, he got me my job here. So that was fun. I came to the front door and the policeman there, by the name – Big Johnson, Big John was his nickname as a policeman, you know.
Int: Big John?
AP: Big John. And the boss there – superintendent of buildings – was Mike. He was Air Force sergeant or pilot. And he called down to Mike and he said, "There's so-and-so here, Tony, and he come here to apply for a job." And he said, "No job for anybody here." So, the man told me, he said, "We don't have any job for you. Nothing." And I said, "Tell him that I've got a letter from Mr. Thacher." I had a letter from Mr. Thacher. So he called him back and he says, "Oh, he has a letter from Mr. T," he told him. "So, let him come down." And I got the job.
SL: Mr. Thacher was a good, good, good, good, good man – a really good man. And Mr. Mike was better, the supervisor. For us it looked like a father and brother. It was very nice. The years when we worked with him, we was very well.
Int: What was his name? Mike?
AP: Mike Dziedzic.
SL: Dziedzic.
AP: Dziedzic. It was a Polack name.
SL: A Polack, from Polonia.
Int: Oh, okay.
SL: Dziedzic.
SL: Yeah, when he died, me, Santovali, another friend who worked with us, and my brother-in-law – we go see him in the funeral, in Maryland, very far.
Int: Okay.
AP: What do they call it? Near Andrews Air Force Base.
Int: Andrews Air Force Base.
SL: Oh yeah, on the other side. Yeah.
Int: What were your first impressions of Dumbarton Oaks? Your first impressions.
AP: Well – go ahead, Silvio.
SL: For me, it was very good, because I worked in an embassy before I came here.
Int: Which one?
SL: The Laos Embassy, on S Street. There was one chauffeur, one Spanish man called Antonio – Tony looks like him. And he only was there for two months, I think. And one day he come into the embassy to take Madame, the ambassatrice, outside and he said to me, "Silvio, you want to come work in Dumbarton?" I said, "I don't know. I need to ask the Ambassador."
AP: Are you talking about Villacampa?
SL: Uh-huh, Villacampa, yeah. I said, "I need to ask the ambassador if I can take it freely or not." And the day after I went to the ambassador and said, "Mr. Ambassador, if I go out, is this difficult for you?" He said, "Why? Go wherever you want to go." I said, "I found one place, in Georgetown, called Dumbarton Oaks." I want a free Saturday or Sunday. For this, I want to change. He think a little bit; he said, "Yeah, why not?" He said, "Maybe we can do without you. We'll find somebody else." And I come to Dumbarton Oaks. I like. And I stay twenty-five years. This was my life.
AP: No, Silvio, you stayed more than twenty-five years.
SL: Eh, what's twenty-five, '69 to '95, whatever. I like very much, really like the job, because, for us, it was really easy, because we know about the job. We'd clean in the morning and in the afternoon we'd do garden. And when I come here, I work for three years on Saturday and Sunday, because that was the rule. I said, "Okay. I'll take anyway." After three years, I was offered Saturday and Sunday. But in these three years I go – Mr. Mike sent me to the swimming pool; sell the postcards. I remember: 25 cents each. I no speak English – now, no speak English, anyway. But at the time, I don't know nothing! He'd write on a piece of paper, "25 cents." Mr. Mike would write for me. The people would ask, "How much?" I said, "25." That, I continue for many years. After, I don't go anymore. That stopped. When Mr. Tyler – when come Mr. Tyler, he changed all the rules. No more sell the postcards in the swimming pool. Because he was the ambassador for many years, maybe no want Dumbarton Oaks to do the things not supposed –
AP: He was godson of Miss Bliss. Mr. Tyler was the godson of Miss Bliss.
SL: For this, Mr. Thatcher, too, was friend to Mr. Bliss, and Mr. Tyler too. After come Mr. Thomson, after come Mr. –
AP: No, no, after Mr. Tyler came Constable, and then Thomson.
SL: After Thomson, Dr. Laiou, because she died of a heart attack in the – yeah.
Int: So, what were some of your duties when your first came here? What types of things did you do on the grounds?
AP: It's like he say, we used to go in the morning clean the office, and in afternoon stay and guard for the museum, and –
SL: We have to go work outside –
AP: – After five o'clock. Well, later on, Silvio became supervisor, you know.
SL: Oh yeah, I come crew leader, I come here to supervise. I do all the things at Dumbarton Oaks –
AP: – He never stop working.
SL: – All – till the day I retire. Because I don't want to retire. I don't want to leave Ms. Laiou, because she was so nice with me. I don't want to, you know. I was told by the doctor I better stop work, but I don't stop the work; I stop at Dumbarton Oaks and I still outside anyway. In the morning I sleep more, I rest, so on and so on and so on. For this, I leave here; I regret leaving here by two years, because two years after she died. I could have stayed to the last. The daughter wanted to cut me, I said, "I'm sorry, I am born in this way, I will die in this way. No story."
AP: He was born with some kind of defective heart, and he's eighty-four – he still here.
SL: I'm still here, and I still got it. For this I retire. I was seventy years old when I retire.
AP: Seventy…
SL: Seventy years old, uh-huh.
AP: Oh, he still is going to work! My wife used to go with him, we used to work –
SL: Oh yeah, I work five year or more next I retire, outside, just outside.
AP: We used to make good money, we used to have a good private –
SL: Ah yes, private work. Cash money.
AP: Cash money, you don't pay taxes.
SL: You know cash money? that's the – [all laugh]
AP: You know, the Internal Revenue Service get enough from me, for us. We pay tax for both work, for work we do. And besides, we pay 7.25 – 7.65% of the Social Security and Medicare. We have to pay both, almost 16% from the tax we made there, because – they call? – self-employer. But think of Dumbarton Oaks and the caterers we work for – we're making money to pay thousands: send the girls to school, you know. It's like, Silvio's son is a CPA or something.
SL: Yeah, right. He graduated from Maryland University. Fourty-five year old! God, some time ago…fast…
AP: And my daughters – one went to Brown, another went to Yale, and then to Harvard, and Boston University for Master's Degrees. $225,000 enough.
SL: Now it would be double, I think – more or less.
AP: But I don't regret one penny.
SL: Yeah, right. It's good for her; like my son, good for him.
AP: I was so lucky with my girls. Boy, they were so good.
SL: One time I said to my son, "You supposed to study for lawyer, because all talk too much. Never stop." I say, "For lawyer, talk all the way."
AP: You know, my oldest daughter is a teacher. She makes around sixty-some thousand dollars a year. Not much.
SL: That's enough for her.
AP: The other one was good, because she went to – she had a scholarship for John Hopkins or Columbia University for a Master's Degree. "No, I want to go to Harvard." So she went to Harvard and paid for it. $68,000 for a Master's Degree.
Int: Did your kids ever come over to Dumbarton Oaks.
AP: Oh yeah, they work in the library. When they were in school, they come here and work in the library. Yeah. And we came with them to the pool. That is a good story.
SL: I never was in the pool. Never. No time.
AP: I tell you the story. When we came here, Dumbarton Oaks was run like a private house, and we, the little guys – they call us the little guys – could not go to the pool. The pool was for some prima donnas. You know, they were the big stuff. And, I say, "My girls…" – they were swimming already. There was a black fellow who used to work for Mr. Moore, seventeen years old. He came to me and said, "Tony, can we go to the pool." "Of course, why not." Well, we go to the pool. So, he brings a girlfriend and went to the pool. They start to raise hell with them and stuff and they come out, and then they went downtown to the NAACP and came back and says: "Everyone can use the pool!" They say, "Excellent." If they knew I did that, I wouldn't be here today [laughing]. They would have fired me, because, you know, some ladies – even at lunch time, we couldn't go there because they want to have lunch, no splashing, no nothing. They were very – some ladies here, they think they own the place, you know. And it was worse off, but we made it. Mr. Moore was nice artist-guy. He did all the pre-Columbian cases and all that stuff. He was a nice man.
Int: Mr. Moore?
AP: Moore. Astor Moore. He was here for over thirty years.
SL: On carpentry. He worked down there – a carpenter.
AP: Cabinet-maker! He didn't like you to call him carpenter [laughing]. Yeah.
SL: He work very well. He made many boxes for the pre-Columbian.
AP: And the Byzantine too.
SL: And the Byzantine too, yeah, right. He was very smart.
AP: There was a lady, for example – Mrs. Hammack was the financial lady. She was a racist, that woman. We came – I went – you know Larry –
Int: Larry Johnson?
Int: From the garden?
AP: Larry Johnson; and there's another one, Villacampa. Before me, they went there to ask her to give them the – you know how much they were making, you know – a statement for them to buy a house. You know what she say to them? "What do you want that for?"
SL: For live!
AP: So, they went and bought the house. So, when I went there, I tell her, "Somebody has to come here and to call here because I'm buying a house, and I want to know how much money I make and all that stuff, if it's true what I say." And she said, "Okay." So, I – the house cost me $70,000 at that time, and I put $44,000 –
SL: – Down.
AP: Down. Down payment – because I was making $10,000 a year here, and the money I make outside doesn't count to them. Today they give houses away – that's why it's all that problem – but that time they don't give me the house. So, I put $40,000 down on the house, and 20 years to pay. I pay it in seventeen years, the house. The house today is worth $800,000.
SL: Yeah, right. That's good buy at that time.
AP: It was a good buy at that time, but it was tough. So, she was –
Int: When did you retire from Dumbarton Oaks?
AP: I retire eleven years ago. I retire in March, eleven years ago, but I stopped working before Christmas, because I had forty-two days vacation that I hadn't taken out. I never take off. If I take off, I have to go to the other job, so I'll take off only when I went – am needed – and sick-leave, I lost more than 3,000 hours.
SL: I lost so many sick-leave. I don't like to stay in the house. I like work.
AP: I probably called sick to go to the doctor maybe once or twice a year or more. And the late – I came five minutes late once – twenty-some years – I – twenty-eight years – I came in five minutes late. The rest of the year, we were here 7:00, 7:30 in the morning.
SL: More or less.
AP: I didn't like to get – you know, I used to walk to the public transportation, and if you come one minute late you may lose a day, so I was well-trained for that. And sometimes you have to sleep quick. Sometimes you go to bed at two or three o'clock in the morning, and wake at seven o'clock up, twenty-five years and work all the time. We used to work eighty, ninety, one hundred hours a week.
SL: This was exercise for us!
AP: Yeah, he never stop.
SL: Exercise. Sometime we start the Friday four o'clock in the afternoon, or five, and we finished Saturday morning at six o'clock. We go home sleep two hour and go work again.
AP: Yeah, we used to come from work to work. Go over six o'clock – The point is, we made it.
SL: We work outside, we have jobs, we have everything – the life for live. Thank you God.
AP: If you pinch for a rainy day…
SL: Because we work outside, we are what we are now.
AP: Now, you know, Harvard retirement is no good, because they give me one third, less than one third of what I was making at that time, and they collect Social Security, and we are a little better at Social Security because we worked two jobs, because we put more money on it.
SL: Yeah, because we work more year. More you work, more Social Security you have.
AP: Yeah, this thing – I get the TIAA Cref, since 1980 'till I retire, I put $200-some-thousand on it.
Int: Did you ever meet Mrs. Bliss?
AP: Yeah. I knew her, but when I came over – she died in the year Silvio came here.
SL: No, two years before. Maybe I know her, but I don't know, I don't remember.
AP: I remember because she used to go to the lady's I used to work at in Georgetown, and Mr. Thacher used to go there too.
SL: I don't remember. I no think about too much every face when I work.
Int: Sure.
SL: After she died, I think about it. I said, "Maybe I saw her before, I don't know."
AP: Miss Bliss is Mrs. – that lady used to be that chauffeur that has a Rolls Royce, from New York, used to live on 18th St. – what is her name? 18th St. and E. F St. and 18… Well, you, after seventy years, seventy-six years, our minds don't work as good… [laughing]
Int: You must remember a lot of celebrities from Georgetown – Elizabeth Taylor was here –
AP: Oh, we used to work here, across the street from her.
Int: Did you ever see her?
AP: Oh, many times. She used to go – one time she killed raccoons with poison. She poured poison around and killed raccoons.
Int: Elizabeth Taylor?
AP: Mm-hmm.
Int: In the gardens?
AP: Yeah, right here [pointing]. Right where she used to live. There was another little house here they tore down, and then after this that lady from Toyota –
SL: Yeah, from Japan.
AP: Her husband used to be a Toyota President here, and she used to own restaurant on the corner, that restaurant, that lady used to work here, and they bought that lot. After John Warner divorced her, she went someplace else, you know. John Warner, I think he went to Watergate, and then they sell the house to some guy here, and then the other guy sell another one, and then afterward Dumbarton Oaks bought it.
SL: Yeah, right.
AP: But the wall, what is here, used to go down the other side, much nearer to the house on the corner, because the lady in the corner, she is the daughter of Paul Mellon –
SL: She was very rich.
AP: This one was adopted, was adopted daughter, and she's a very rich person. The Mellons are very rich, you know.
SL: And the other lives very close to the French Embassy.
AP: Yeah –
SL: When you go in the back.
AP: I think it's a university.
SL: I don't know.
AP: When you go to the – it belongs to Harvard…
Int: Center for Hellenic Studies?
AP: Yeah, that. You know, the Director at the time when we were here, we used to go to work for them too, he was the brother of one of the Justices, Steward. Steward was one Justice at that time. He was – you know, Greek scholar and all that, was professor, probably at Harvard, and then he came as Director here.
Int: We've heard rumors about ghosts at Dumbarton Oaks. Do you know anything about that?
AP: Ghosts? ghosts?
SL: No. Christo, who invented that? Someone crazed? [laughing]
AP: I was – I know – that was Mr. Weiser. Mr. Weiser was a sergeant in the Army – is a big fellow. He was a sergeant in the Army, and he believes in that. He says he saw Miss Bliss, and another time he saw somebody with Miss Bliss on their arm.
SL: Because that's the people who work in the night.
AP: They work in the nighttime.
SL: They go around and invent this stupid tale. Nothing more. [laughing]
AP: Well, there may be ghosts, but I never see one. And I don't believe in it anyway.
SL: One guy who worked in the garden said he see this spook go through the gate. How? I don't know. [laughing]
AP: You know, some people used to jump the fence and come and –
SL: Just to say something.
AP: They used to come and go swim in the pool at nighttime, get naked there and all that stuff. You know, young fellows and girls.
Int: People broke in to swim in the pool?
AP: Yeah, they jump the fence and go to the pool. Joe knew about it.
SL: That maybe was true. But the rest – I don't know. Because that was so many people…
AP: One time I went to work in the party, Silvio. You weren't there. Somewhere in Maryland, and then they gave the ladies a swimming suit for them to go in the pool and we sat around the pool, and when they get in the water, you know…
Int: What happened?
AP: The bathing-suit unzipped, and they were all naked!
Int: Is this during an event?
AP: Yes. Oh, it was so many things. But, you know, you're not supposed to say nothing.
SL: Sometimes you have a party around the pool, people would drink a little more, go in the water to swim. Not to swim, they would just fall down. That's happened.
AP: Well, you know, they say they smoke marijuana in the park and all that stuff. If they did, I never saw it. If I saw it, I wouldn't say nothing, because we going out there to work, not to come out and tell what's up with it.
SL: One time me and one lady – an American lady – we go to Maryland. That was – como se llama? – cocaine party. You see, it look like talc. White. You see it everywhere, everywhere. I throw so many – and my son say, "For what? Why don't you take home?" "For what," I said, "for what?"
AP: We threw away afterward.
SL: I threw away so many that night. That was a crazy party. The people, they drink, drink, drink, drink. That was a pajama party.
AP: Pajama party.
Int: And that was associated with Dumbarton Oaks?
AP: Oh no.
SL: No.
AP: You remember Tony Silva, the one who had the gate, the Taylor's gate. One time we went to Elizabeth Taylor's down in Georgetown in Washington, and they gave the table she wanted to me. He said, "You want to serve Ms. Taylor's table?" I said, "Go on, take it, I don't care." So I gave the table to him, and then when he was setting near it, he poured rice right [gestures to chest, laughing] – on accident, but he threw rice…
SL: Because you put too much juice, sauce, in the platter. When you serve, you move a little bit [gestures to chest, whistling] or in the back or in the head.
AP: Well, Silvio knows –
SL: Yeah, but that's – what are you going to do? Happen, happen. It's a job.
AP: But Silvio knows better than that because he work in the embassies, where the –
SL: Oh yeah, I work really tiring times.
AP: You work in the Swedish Embassy, in Moscow, was it?
SL: In Sweden, in Moscow, in Finlandia. I was –
AP: He speak French and Russian.
SL: Yeah, before. Now I forget everything.
AP: You don't forget nothing. You still work, you still talk with your wife!
SL: I still talk with somebody. I find some girl when I go to the party, an America girl – she said, "Oh, I speak before Italian, now I don't remember." I say, "Because you don't talk anymore!" You need to talk with somebody. On telephone, or something, you remember the words. But that's what happens to me. I remember spasibo, bolshoia, dobryj vyechyer, buona sera, buon giorno, come stai.
AP: He world talk to Mr. Khampan in French.
SL: Yeah, I work in the Laos Embassy. Before I come here I work in the Laos Embassy. I need to talk French, because when I go, I don't have a job – somebody said, "You friend?" and one of my friends say "Go away, go away in the other embassy. Why not go to Lucas to give the job to you." I go there, there was a madame, a principessa, she was a princess, from Laos. The other was prince, the Ambassador.
AP: Prince and princess.
SL: Prince and princess, yeah. She receive me, said, "Parlez-vous français?" I say, "Un petit peu." She start to talk and talk, and I talk too, what I can. She said, "Yeah, you can come tomorrow to work. ten pm, she says." I go work there for a year. After, I go to Italy for ten months; I no want to come back, because after – I don't find a job in Italy, I go to the – what's it called? – American consulate in Rome. I say, "What I can do, I have my mother is very sick, what can I do? I don't want to go back now. Can I take six months extra to look?" "Is really your mother sick?" I say, "Yeah, yeah!" He said that before me – "only declare what you want – sah sah sah sah sah. After we see what we can do."
AP: He wants a letter from the doctor, to tell –
SL: Yeah. I said, "You know what? You lose today more, you cannot go back anymore." I go home, I was – I needed to ask, per piacere, it was due kilometri da Roma. I take the bus, I go – I quickly go take the bus and go home. I said, "My wife – make the baggagio – we need to go, we need to go." I come back again – after I go work in the Laos Embassy, because before when I go to Italy, I was work there, and I go to Italy, and want come back. I need to come back, because I cannot find a job. And when I come back, I go see the Ambassador. I said, "Mr. Ambassador, I come back." "Maybe you can get a job again?" I say, "Oh yeah." "Come tomorrow." "Okay." I go work again. We live there, me and my wife.
AP: He is a hard worker, he never stop.
SL: When we have the baby, she was – we are in the Laos Embassy. Yeah. They take me to work again, I work there one year more. After, I come to Dumbarton Oaks.
AP: After work, after we did that, and then Silvio became one of the supervisors, and then I get the mail-job, to do the mail. It was really easy for us. But, you know – for example, when I have bulk mail sent in that task to go out, I take ten minutes or fifteen to eat. I never want to leave nothing for the next day if it's something to do today, you know. And I used to take the mail, go to the mailbox, go to the post office – but even if I was going home for some reason, I always take the mail first off. If not before four o'clock, we have to go to Wisconsin Avenue and dump the mail there. We send a lot – I don't know today, but we used to send a lot of books –
SL: Yeah, we had a lot of activity at Dumbarton Oaks.
AP: We used to do it – a lot of books.
Int: Would you ever send objects from the collection?
AP: No, that was done only by a special company –
SL: Susan Boyd, etc., etc.
AP: It was a special company that would come and pick it up.
SL: That would come – you're right.
AP: We used to use the Federal Express and UPS. We have a contract with all of them – I don't know if it still is, but we had a contract – and we use – and then the month, I used to send the amount to the financial department, each department how much they spend in mail. I don't know what they did afterwards, you know. But they don't want us to do certain things. But it was tough for me – many times people want to send the mail out and I say, "I can't do nothing about it." Sometimes if they ask the right way, I take a package there and then I tell them how much it was, and they give it to me. But ask some professors, they came here, they own the place. "I want to send this letter, this package!" I say, "Where's the money?" You have to go to the Post Office. I can't do it. There was another one from Greece when Laiou was here – he think he could do anything. They think they own the – I don't know how it works today. It was tough sometimes. You know, I always – I was a rebel – they call me rebel sometimes because I wouldn't take it. I'll tell them no. One time – his name was Treadgold.
Int: Traygold?
AP: No, Treadgold.
Int: Treadgold.
AP: Yeah. He was a Fellow here that time; wasn't a professor here. And then he married Andreescu.
SL: Andreescu. Yeah, right.
AP: So, he came out while I was reading the paper in the front at the desk, and he say, "Is this paper for lunch?" I say, "Yeah." He say, "Let me have it." I say, "I'm reading it, and then you can have it later." He says, "The paper is for us." I say, "Yeah, it's for us." I say, "You don't think I have the same right to read the paper like you?" And he say, "No, not quite." I say, "Go to the Director and you won't get the paper because I won't give it to you." He went to Constable, and Constable says, "Don't fool around with Tony, because he don't give up."
SL: Constable was a good, good, good, good man.
Int: What was he like?
AP: Mr. Thomson – Mr. –?
Int: Contable. What was your relationship like?
AP: We had a good relationship.
SL: When we have dinner in the evening, in the house – in the morning, pass by, come to me, say, "Thank you Silvio, thank you Silvio," all the time.
AP: I think him and Laiou was the best one.
SL: Laiou was different too, Laiou was better. Thomson was very good too. Ms. Everson, the cook, was one cook, American cook. Very good. She cook so good.
Int: What was her name?
SL and AP: Miss Everson.
AP: She was in Bangkok with the State Department.
SL: The Director, Thomson – he invited me, my wife, to go to work with Miss Everson – Come si chiama? Li-li-li-li –
AP: Lilia? She still work here.
SL: Yeah, she retiring now.
AP: She retiring now.
SL: She retired last week. When was it? A week ago.
AP: Lilia.
SL: Two months ago, I was around to see my niece, because my niece work in the garden before – "Say hello to Silvio," all the time. Thomson.
AP: Not niece, your nephew.
SL: Oh, nephew! Not my niece. Something, something.
AP: Yeah, Kiko.
SL: Kiko, yeah right. Thomson say hello all the time.
AP: Constable's son – both of them – three of them – Contable's son work in the gardens, and then he became a Ph.D. And his daughter work in the library, and she was a Ph.D. too.
SL: And the son also –
AP: and Thomson too –
SL: – And Laiou work in the garden.
AP: Yeah, he's a lawyer now. He's a state attorney in Boston now. In fact, he gave me the number when I went to Boston; went to see him. And Thomson too – his son work in the garden, didn't he?
SL: No… I know the man you're thinking of…
AP: He went to Maret School. Constable's son, too, went to Maret School.
SL: Constable was – the son was – Laiou...
AP: Constable's son went to Maret School. He went…
SL: I remember Thomson, I don't remember the son. The son was –
AP: Who? Constable's son?
SL: Thomson, Thomson.
AP: Thomson, yeah. He had some problem, but I don't know what it was.
SL: I want to say, the family was very good.
AP: Yeah, both. Nice, nice lady.
SL: Attitude very good. But we cannot complain about the the the the the –
AP: They always try to treat us right, you know.
SL: Thacher was good, Tyler was good, Thomson was good, Constable was good, and Laiou was better. [laughs]
AP: When Constable come, they say, "You are in the red." And they didn't have enough money for him. And then they gave us a raise, and then every fifteen days that you get your check – I get one dollar less than I used to.
SL: Yeah, one: one fifth! [laughs]
AP: You know, they gave you a little raise, but they raise up your percentage that you pay for all the things, and then they took the one away. That's funny. But Laiou was the best, she was the one who gave us – at least me – better raise.
Int: What else did she do that was especially –?
SL: At Christmas time, all the directors come eat with us in our kitchen downstairs, every one, and now no one, I think. That's finished, that's finito. No more. Yeah. All, all, all, all. Miss Laiou, everyone.
AP: She used to take care of the liquors, have a party and everything.
SL: I was the supervisor for everything. All the party, all the –
AP: You the supervisors for the caterers too.
SL: For everything, for the wine, for everything. I was later hot.
AP: But he don't drink.
SL: Nope.
AP: I do. I like it. I like wine.
SL: I'm sorry, I no like it.
AP: I saw once, only once, Silvio drink a little ubonnet – no, not dubonnet, vermouth, red vermouth.
SL: Sweet vermouth.
AP: Sweet vermouth.
SL: Yeah, when I retired, you see that, how your sugar, it go up with the blood – because when we worked for Arthur, with the caterer – oh!
AP: The caterer is not only serving the table. We have to set the tables, we have to load the tables, set it, break down, load again, and then stoves, silver, chairs, and all that stuff was –
SL: We work with the caterer, not have just work, just serving – the rest, the preparation, take out, load the truck – that's the job, not – serving is nothing. An hour, an hour and a half, it goes by. Finito.
AP: But the rest…
SL: Ah, we did it. You remember that Greek? What he called, that Greek?
AP: James! He used to work for Miss Post.
SL: Take the –
AP: Oh you talking about – I know!
SL: Yeah, take the tablecloth, nothing – foo!
AP: Mike.
SL: Yeah. Throw it in the truck…
AP: He was a big fellow.
SL: He was very strong.
AP: Probably sixty-five or more.
SL: Died, maybe because he overdo –
AP: He was drinking too much, and eat…
SL: Yeah, that. Etc., etc., etc., etc.
AP: Another Greek that works for Miss Washington Post – Graham, Catarina Graham. We used to go there that all the time too.
SL: But there was two. One was chauffeur.
AP: One time –
SL: Chauffeur brought the car for Miss Graham, and the other one work in the back. The other come supervise when they have a party. Maybe still work. I work with him two years ago. After, I don't work anymore after this.
AP: One time, we were there. I always go to the front. When the guests come, they give me the, you know, car. And I knew most of them, you know. At that time, I probably knew seventy or more who were there, by their name. I used to have a good memory; now I'm getting old.
SL: Well yeah, I remember everything.
AP: But I was at one and, afterwards, came the President Reagan that time. He went with Mrs. Graham, Catarina Graham, to a private room. There was a woman at the top of the roof. It was cold, very cold. She was from the security service. She was on top of the roof. And he went there from midnight. They stayed till almost two o'clock in the morning talking, and I was getting inside, getting a little champagne. When the woman come down, she was almost frozen. Poor – and that time, the Attorney General – he arrived later on – when he came up to the party he fall down, and the Secret Service put him in the car and took him away. And around probably two o'clock when he left, everyone was waiting for him and all that stuff, and the woman almost faint because she was almost frozen, poor woman.
SL: I mean the police was around.
AP: Yeah. But we wanted to give her something, something to – she didn't want, she didn't drink nothing, because she was afraid.
Int: Did a lot of the people who came to these Georgetown parties also come to the parties at Dumbarton Oaks?
AP: Some, especially the ones who were the Friends of Music – some big ones here who give big money to the Friends of Music, and once in a while they had that kind of party. For example, when Reagan was running for the second term, the party for raising in Washington D.C. was either here or the ketchup man in Georgetown, Mr. Kerry: O St., 3322 O St., which many years ago used to belong to the Russian Embassy, 1600s, 1700s, 1782 or something like that. The Firestone people bought that house, which has – you know, one of the sons died in accident in River Road, and her mother and father divorced, and she used to be secretary for Mr. Bush, the old man Bush.
SL: The father.
AP: They used to be, every year, all their fundraisers. One time down there we would have couscous, and then came Mr. Purdue, the chicken fellow, and he asked how we were setting in the buffet. He come over, say, "What is this?" I look at him and say, "It's Purdue chicken." He start laughing.
Int: Did you serve – were you involved in the lunches with the Fellows? Were you working, like, serving them.
AP: Yeah, we did, for the Fellows. All we did at symposium, always. Here, in the Orangery. Everywhere.
SL: In the Founders Room.
AP: Whatever they decide to do. And you get the anniversary for the – what it was? – when the United Nations meeting took place in the – there was the other side open on the lawn –
SL: Bella Vista.
AP: Yeah. North Vista.
AP: Big party.
SL: Yeah, big party. There was a tent everywhere.
AP: Yeah. You know who it was – at Laiou's table it was the girl from Maryland, which is a Greek descendent a Serbian – at the table, she drink half a gallon of water or more. Water, water…
SL: Today was hot too.
AP: It was hot. They have good parties here. One time we had a party in Mr. Tyler's house, and then he went to take a guest to her house, you know, she didn't have a car, and then when we come back he have accident in Rock Creek Park. It was a Mercedes. He had accident in Rock Creek Park, and then one time I was walking and came a guy asking me if I knew the parties here, and "Do you think the Director – " You know, "he drinks too much." I say, "What are you talking about? Get out! I don't know nothing." He went away.
SL: Maybe his right company is – yeah, right.
AP: I have one suit that he gave to me; I still have it.
Int: Mr. Tyler? Mr. Tyler gave you a suit?
AP: Yeah.
SL: He was your size, more or less.
AP: It was a good one, with his name on it.
Int: What was the strangest things you ever saw – just funny, strange?
AP: I don't know. Maybe –
SL: We don't know now, because we don't work anymore. Change all the time – I sorry, I say one thing now. All the time I said it before, when the people ask, "Silvio, what, why don't you go – ," I say, "Povero Dumbarton Oaks." Now they say you right when you said, "Povero Dumbarton Oaks."
AP: Poor Dumbarton Oaks. But he didn't make any comments.
SL: All the time they say, "It's not the same; you right when you said, 'Povero Dumbarton Oaks.'" – Especially, you remember Eric? – the one who retired? One time, when he said, "Silvio, you're right, you're right." I said, "What, 'you're right'?" "Poor Dumbarton Oaks."
AP: You have any questions for us, we will be glad to answer if we know.
SL: We don't know now what happened, what way, what way it go, but –
AP: I don't know. The only thing I –
SL: – Together we must look like a family or brothers. You know Mariano Jimeno. He said, "Silvio, ups and downs, this no good." I said, "Why no good?" He said, you know, we are no more friends…
AP: By the way, you find out where he is now?
SL: I don't know – I wanted to ask the daughter – I forget all the time – they are not in the house they are, what you call it – daycare, but where, I don't know. Because a long time before I go into the house, in the week at that time, because the weekend he has the sister – all the family I no like – start to cry, that I no like. I go during the weekdays.
AP: I saw him probably a month ago.
SL: Maybe we go see him one day.
AP: Okay Silvio.
SL: Come to my house…
AP: He's a nice fellow. He's bought for himself because he used to have a lot of cholesterol and all that stuff and the only thing he likes is shellfish, scampi –
SL: Cheese –
AP: We used to go to the same clinic, you know. You know what the doctor used to tell him? "Are you still alive?" – because he had five-hundred-and some cholesterol.
SL: Very high, very high!
AP: He never did nothing about it.
SL: Very high.
AP: We always get on his case, every time we eat we always get in his case, but he never listen.
SL: I think happened even now that thing because no one was in the home, he was very free – he eat he eat he eat he eat.
AP: He liked to drink.
SL: Liked to get drunk. The cholesterol will go in the moon!
AP: You know, I used to drink wine every meal. For probably ten years I don't drink it unless I go to a party or something like that – I drink a little wine. But that's good, because I feel alright.
SL: But the doctor sometime recommend a little wine, red wine or whatever. I don't like – I try many times. For what? For what? I feel so well with the water, very very well – thank you God! When we go to party sometime, I see the people drink lots. I hated that. I don't know why – because I don't drink.
AP: You don't like to see people drunk.
SL: People don't like me because when you work and you are in the bar and the people want to work with you – you offer something. I never offer nothing to nobody. They hated me – because I don't drink.
AP: You never go to the parties.
SL: I have a bottle for two years, sealed all the time the same. Nobody touch, my son will not drink, my wife will not drink, I will not drink. I have one friend who come all the time, Dino Muzzio. He come and say, "Silvio, why you not throw away that bottle?" I say, "I have it for so many years." [laughs]
AP: You know, the other day my wife went to Miss Burdy – who was – she went to Havana –
SL: The one who drink champagne all the time, drink champagne. Yes, when the ladies come to the party, all the time drinking the bottle of champagne. Sometime two. She drink all the champagne, no water, nothing. I'm sorry, go ahead.
AP: She went there, and I said, "I'm going to drink a glass of wine." So I went downstairs, and there was a case with some bottles there, I took one bottle and I open [mimes opening bottle]. You know 1974, it's –
SL: Like cognac, huh?
AP: Oh no, it smell like port, oh boy! It was so good. I drink half of bottle and the next day –
AP: You know, it was little broken then. It was good. Oh boy, I like it.
Int: We're coming to the end of the tape, so we just have about one more minute if you want to share any last little thoughts before we wrap it up.
AP: I don't think anything else, I don't know…
SL: We more or less, say everything, more or less.
Int: Thank you very much.
AP: If questions come up, you may remember other things, you know. Because the last twenty-eight years, a lot of things happen, and, especially when you're 76, you don't remember a lot of them, but –
Int: Do you have a favorite story about your time at Dumbarton Oaks?
AP: My favorite story was the one with the guy at the swimming pool.
JM: Silvio, Antonio – Tony – I've known you guys for all the time I've been here – thirty-five years – this is a great treat because you know Dumbarton Oaks better than anybody really, and –
AP: What is the purpose of this, Joe?
JM: It's just history! and people are proud –
SL: You want to know what we did –
JM: And you're the people that carry the history with you. Thank you, we appreciate it guys.
Int: Thank you so much.
SL: Thank you.
AP: Thank you Joe, it was a pleasure.
SL: We are very happy to tell the story.
JNSL: I always wondered if anybody had fallen in the swimming pool.
AP: There is the story about, you know, Kazhdan. I was used to go to check the bathroom. And I would see him all the time swimming alone there. And I would say, "You have to be careful, Mr. Kazhdan." And I told the administration many times that someday he's going to have an accident there, and he's going to sue Dumbarton Oaks. And finally they said, Tony, don't worry about it; don't say anything; we'll handle it." And you know the man died there.
JNSL: You predicted that.]]>
OG: No, I came with him, because when he came in the fall '48, he came for the whole year because they offered him the position of Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He brought his wife and his two children. Nobody knew what to do with me. I was eighteen then. So, I was the proper age to go to a university. I didn't know anything about American universities. I was given the choice between Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. The only thing that distinguished it to me was the color. I still remember the three colors as being three different colors. Why I went to Harvard I have no idea. But in any event, I went there and eventually graduated from there. My father decided not to stay permanently at Dumbarton Oaks because of complicated reasons, one of which was my mother – she didn't know English well enough. And he had a good job in Paris and felt that there was something wrong with an institution that was so un-American and located in Washington. He felt totally alien to the American world, and so did my mother. It was nice to come and study for specific periods of time, but to run it, as was offered to him at some point, he felt was wrong. There were other reasons as well. That's how I came and so my first week at Dumbarton Oaks was Christmas, '48, because when we arrived in New York I went straight to Cambridge and my family went to Washington. It was an introduction to the feudal world of Dumbarton Oaks because at Christmas time, in those days, Mrs. Bliss always invited everybody at Dumbarton Oaks for a Christmas party. Everybody received a gift. She'd never known me but she knew my father had an eighteen-year-old son. I forgot what gift she gave me, but there was a little package for me under the Christmas tree. Everybody received something like this, and this was my first introduction to her. Again, afterwards my father was again at Dumbarton Oaks when I was a senior at Harvard, and I worked on my thesis partly at Dumbarton Oaks because they had the books I needed. I'd had some advice from Father Dvornik and others on the medieval subject I was developing. My first impression of Dumbarton Oaks was that nobody spoke English. It was essentially a European institution with wonderful European manners. One of the lovely memories I have of Dumbarton Oaks at that time – I can't remember exactly what year it would have been – was my mother, the old Russian historian Vasiliev, and Otto Demus, a handsome Austrian Byzantinist, and, at the time, the Princeton Byzantinist, Bert Friend, holding arms together and going up and down the Music Room, which was where the Greco painting is now, and singing Viennese operettas in German – nobody would sing them in anything but German. Then they went out and entered again singing the end of the first act of Massenet's Manon – and then three voices sort of going up. It was really wonderful to me. That was their world. Their world was the Paris opera, the Vienna opera, the Merry Widow, and so forth. America didn't exist as a culture for them. Nice and wonderful though it was, it was a world totally of its own, where tea was very important, where to be seen at the swimming pool was very important, and so to them it was part of a nice little feudal world. The hierarchy was very clearly established. Everybody knew who was who, who had the right to do what and not to do what, and all the fellows, like properly infeodated vassals, lived in the Fellows Building which now is something else. I don't know what it is now.
ABF: Guest House.
OG: Guest House, is it? Okay. In the Fellows Building some of the older professors lived in the apartments attached to that building. It was wonderful but pretty much out of the real world, which I think it always was and has remained like that. Its first impression was that of a feudal place, where French was the dominant language because Mrs. Bliss, as I would hear it, did not like anything German, and Russian was a second language. She was a great friend of Stravinsky. He composed a Dumbarton Oaks symphony for her. Vasiliev – who was a reasonable and broad scholar but not a great scholar but an absolutely adorable person with a nice little mustache and smiling face and sort of walking the way I walk now – that is an old man's walk – as an eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old, to walk with an eighty year old was sort of new to me. I hadn't encountered that. And telling stories – his stories were absolutely endless, whether it's in St. Petersburg, Australia, or Wisconsin, wherever he'd been. Father Dvornik was of the same vintage, but not as attractive. And then there was Sirarpie Der Nersessian who had an extraordinary personal history. After all she was born in Constantinople. Her uncle was the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople. She escaped dramatically during or just after World War One and then went to Paris to study. All three belonged to a little world of its own. Sirarpie Der Nersessian lived in Dumbarton Oaks with her sister. They were both very remarkable because they were very short. In the dining room in the Fellows Building – I still remember because it struck me at that time – when Sirarpie sat at the head of a table, as she often did, her feet did not reach the floor. They were sort of dangling. But those were very close family friends. To me, Dumbarton Oaks was a wonderful estate in which you do whatever you want – you read books, beautiful books. It was set up not like libraries, but on shelves surrounded by genteel living – you had a Monet here, then you had Byzantine books, then you had a nice work of art – it was your private library and your private collection, which is now being transformed into a mechanized and organized way.
ABF: Did your father know any of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks before he arrived there?
OG: Yes. He knew all the old ones. Vasiliev, Dvornik, Der Nersessian, probably Underwood and Kitzinger. No – I think he met Kitzinger at Dumbarton Oaks. Because then you had the old blokes – Vasiliev, Der Nersessian, and my father who had been students together in the '20s in Paris. So they had known each other for a long time. The new ones, the four professors at Dumbarton Oaks – I think there were four – they were Kitzinger, Underwood, Anastos and Downy. They were all supposed to be equal. Nobody knew exactly what to do with them, as the academic system was slowly taking over the feudal one. They had not participated in the exotic life of Europe after the First World War or of the '20s. Harvard had two Byzantinists at that time, but for reasons that I don't know – Constable maybe would know better – the Harvard of that time was never brought to Dumbarton Oaks. Bobby Blake, for instance, who had been one of the big allied spies in the Caucasus during the First World War, who worked for the British, in Azerbaijan in 1919, never set foot in Dumbarton Oaks. That is something I don't know – that part of the story. The Harvard establishment was not the Dumbarton Oaks establishment. Dumbarton Oaks was separate from Harvard and I think Harvard at that point didn't know what to do with Dumbarton Oaks, and probably still doesn't quite know what to do with it. The Princeton faculty was more visible there than the Harvard one. My father knew these four younger scholars, and he got particularly close to Kitzinger because they would often work on the same things, the same fields. In a way, I'm not sure that even this was very good for Kitzginer to have my father there because my father was about fifteen years older than he was. And he kind of a little bit made life difficult – I don't mean technically but intellectually – for Kitzinger who was certainly the most intelligent, the most creative of these four professors. When he became Director of Studies, two of them – Downy and Anastos – left almost immediately. I think they were upset that they weren't considered. Underwood – I forget when Underwood died – he died relatively young.
ABF: In '69.
OG: But, he was so involved with Istanbul. He was constantly there. I have a wonderful memory of him because he found me my first hotel in Istanbul, which was the crummiest hotel I've ever been in my life. I shouldn't say this, but he was very stingy in things like that.
ABF: So how was it for you, as a student of medieval history?
OG: I profited from being my father's son, so that everything was open, everybody was very nice and sweet. For my work – at Princeton where I was a graduate student, then at Michigan or at Harvard where I was employed– their libraries were sufficient to me. I didn't need Dumbarton Oaks. And I was never a Byzantinist, even though some people think I am, but I never was. So Dumbarton Oaks to me – let's put it this way – Dumbarton Oaks to me was always a kind of second home. I always felt that I knew how to operate there. I got very distressed when they built the new shelves. I thought that the old Dumbarton Oaks would disappear. And I loved to go to the symposia. Every year we had a procession from Princeton where I was graduate student to go to Dumbarton Oaks for the symposium, where you kind of saw all the big shots you had heard about or read about. That was interesting and exciting. I think the symposium played a very important role up to whatever time it was when they changed the rules, when all the people who gave talks spent a semester at Dumbarton Oaks, so that the people preparing the symposium were all working together on the symposium. So, the symposium was not like now. People work wherever they are, then come the day before they give their talk, give their talk, and go away. This was a collective enterprise being prepared. But by the time I was involved in symposia, I guess in '62, that wasn't true anymore. I flew in from Ann Arbor the day before. So, as a collective operation, it was not as successful. These later symposia did not create as much excitement as the symposia of the '50s, which were really, truly milestones – the one my father did in 1946, what Dvornik did, the first one Kitzinger did – they were really major intellectual creations. Since then it has become another meeting of professors to get their trips paid. Byzantine studies have been in trouble for the last twenty years. It's not a field that is a growing – it has been taken over by all kinds of other forces than whatever is required of pure scholarship. The great thing about the central, western, and eastern European scholars of yore, as well as the first group of Americans who were there was that they were really only interested in scholarship. They had no other agenda. Now old national types have come, and Byzantine studies have tended to become a series of competing nationalisms, going from Greece to Ukraine or Russia. It is a series of national flags being waved, and that is very destructive. It is no longer what the old scholarship used to be. It is easy to say the old one was very nice and very good, because it was connected to empires, to big countries, and not to the small countries, which we are creating now one after the other. Have you heard of Southern Ossetia before last week? Now everybody's excited about what Northern Ossetia and Southern Ossetia are going to do to each other. What I think is interesting about Ossetia, actually, is that the Ossetian language is the only Romanian language of its kind. It's the only remaining Alan language that was known in the second century.
ABF: So, can you describe – speaking of the symposia – can you describe your experience at these early symposia?
OG: They were wonderful. I told you about the old symposia. I think they have changed quite a bit. The symposiums, first of all, never met on Sundays. That would have been immoral. Nobody went to church, but they did not do anything on Sunday. You rested. The old ones met on Thursday, Friday, Saturday morning and they always ended Saturday with a lunch at the Blisses' private house, about several blocks down from the main building of Dumbarton Oaks. That was very important because not everyone was invited there. Speakers were invited, and a few selected guests. So, on Saturday morning after the last meeting, you could see the poor participants who had to go to the drugstore to have a hamburger on Wisconsin Avenue and the elect who walked down toward the Blisses' house to have lunch at the Blisses' house, which was always catered – waiters in white clothes – and where you met not only the Dumbarton Oaks crowd, but you also met some of the social people Mrs. Bliss was cultivating or who were cultivating her. It was a very social occasion, as were the dinners on Thursday and Friday – Friday dinner was at Dumbarton Oaks and comprised always the same menu, a magnificent single salmon, totally glazed. I've never seen a whole glazed salmon like this. White liveried, white-gloved characters were cutting it up to give you your portion with, I guess, some salad. I forget what was the menu on Thursdays. It must have been a meat menu, because those were days following the tradition of Thursday meat, Friday fish, Sunday sleep. Now I think that you buy your sandwiches or you buy your lunch box, which is kind of repulsive. The big thing about the symposium itself was also its ceremonial quality. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss used to arrive and sit in the back. And it was an event, like the arrival of the deacon or the bishop at a religious ceremony. They had their own chairs in the back. Mrs. Bliss would always listen very carefully, then ask the speaker to give her a copy of what he has said because she wanted to read it before she would comment on it. And she always read it and always commented on it. She always had something to say. I don't think he ever did, and I think he slept through most of them. At the symposium itself, in the front row, were the big couches. I don't know if they still have them at the symposium. Enormous couches where the very distinguished, elderly professors would sit. In my days it would have been Kantorovich, Friend, Dvornik, Vasiliev – would sit there, I think sleep a little bit. They were too old to listen to talks. It was like a royal court. You have the top princes sit in front, then you have the variety of lower aristocrats behind, and then some poor little graduate students in the back. But the graduate students were future aristocrats, so they belonged there. What hardly belonged there was spouses. That didn't exist. It wasn't allowed. We never talked about things like that. Or companions – the word didn't exist. But it was always very – you felt that you were actually into a ceremonial event. And that was part of its beauty, that even if it was a lousy paper – most of them were not, in those days – it was a liturgical ceremony to listen to it and to partake of the learning. You were supposed to understand whatever language was used by the speaker. If you had questions afterward – the questions were in most cases stupid. The questioners were not stupid, but nobody had anything intelligent to say because they had just heard a lecture, so they hadn't had time to think of something intelligent to say – except the learned disputes between people, as with Weitzman and Morey, when they were present. But that's a special case. That I think has changed quite a bit. Now it has become much more routinized, like older colloquial of academic life. It's quite different. It doesn't have that prestige of a religious act. Food was very important. The teas were served at the right moment, the coffees at the right moment, the dinners – and who went to what was very important.
ABF: Were there any particular moments at these symposia or papers or even just one symposium in particular –
OG: I remember mostly one symposium that my father directed, the one you mentioned –
ABF: The Emperor and the Palace.
OG: – The Emperor and the Palace, which was really remarkable. But, of course, he had gathered probably the most spectacular group of scholars available at that time. Just even seeing them – I was a graduate student then – those people whose books I had read or was reading, here they all were. They were living beings. And so that was one. I think the one that Sir Hamilton Gibb did in which I was involved in '62 was also important because he brought almost for the first time the Near Eastern world into Byzantium instead of Byzantium always connected with Europe. Kitzinger led one on Sicily – that was many years later – which was also very interesting, because he had gathered an unusual group of people. If you look – and you probably have them all – the symposia still now have their liturgical function, that is, all the participants gather some place and get their picture taken with each other – the chairman must be sitting in the middle. The rest may be standing, but the chairman always sits. And if you look at those pictures, they're very interesting to see as a sequence, because you can see how people age. Some age well, some age not so well. The other thing – nobody, I think, ever smiles. But I would check that, because I'm not sure –
ABF: They start smiling later. They smiled later, in the '80s.
OG: They all dressed with coat and tie, and probably dark suits and so forth because it is a liturgical act. It is a liturgical function to participate in a Dumbarton Oaks symposium, like serving at mass. It was a liturgical moment – even staying at the Fellows Building at some point. But, I think there were two apartments at the two ends which were real apartments. And my parents stayed there. And I came to visit for whatever reason and the lunches and dinners were prepared at the Fellows Building. Now you fix your own sandwiches or whatever it is. But there was a whole group of staff – black staff, from a sort of formal American servants class – were there to cook and do the bedding. And I remember when the change began to happen – I forget when it was my parents were there, and I came late. I must have gone out to dinner or the movies or whatever it is, and I came back late, and as I opened the door, I see an extremely distinguished scholar making love to a woman on the couch downstairs. Because you couldn't do it in the rooms – I forgot now why – so they stayed down. It was a very odd thing. There were two small houses, to the right and to the left. And the one to the right was occupied at some point by Dvornik. And I got very irritated once when I was a graduate student because Kantorovich was here. Dvornik also was a great cook, both of them. And Kantorovich came to cook. And Kantorovich had asked me to help him prepare the chickens. He mixed some fancy I don't know what. And I was supposed to inject it between the skin and the meat of the chicken. But I was not invited for the dinner. You see, the dinner was for big guys. I was allowed to help. I got accolades; he knew I was going to be a big guy at some point and I will eat the proper chicken. But at that point I had not acquired the right to eat the chicken that Kantorovich prepared. And similarly, much later, the person who occupied that building was called Kraeling. I don't exactly know how many years Carl Kraeling was involved with Dumbarton Oaks. It was after he retired from Chicago. He went to Yale but spent a lot of time at Dumbarton Oaks. Carl Kraeling was a very American type. He was of German origin, very Lutheran – very strict Lutheran tradition – but very American in spirit. Carl spoke four languages. My mother said once that she had to go and ask him once for something – I've forgotten now what, some practical thing – and rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, and he was naked. So, he walked around naked in his house, which is, again, the kind of thing one didn't do at Dumbarton Oaks in those days. The rooms upstairs were single rooms, and they shared the bathroom, which is no longer acceptable now. And I don't know when they started buying or renting apartments. The result was – is – that people don't connect with each other the way they did before. But that's a price that one has to pay. Nearly all American institutions were based then on single people. So my memories of Dumbarton Oaks are mostly social. They are mostly social because my direct contact with it – until I became member of the board of scholars – but that again was part of the feudal system, because Giles Constable and I were classmates, we'd known each other since the '40s, and so there was a kind of automatic reliance on the people you knew to run whatever work was needed. On the whole that was good, but not always. But it was a completely different Dumbarton Oaks then. And as well as the board of scholars, we took care of masses of little details, which before were not handled by the scholars. They were handled by some assistant at Harvard or elsewhere. And that is one of the good but debatable things that Giles Constable did: he created an administration for Dumbarton Oaks instead of a tradition. You didn't do things because Mrs. Bliss said it should be done that way. You did things because that's the way you do things. That was the good side. There were some incidents with that too. I got into trouble with one of the members, with one of the fellows, whom I was interviewing because we all had to interview a certain number of fellows. And for some reason I can't remember, she was known as a difficult person. And I remember both Ihor Ševčenko and Giles telling me, "Well, you're so nice, you take her. We don't want to deal with her." And I said, "I suppose I can handle it." And she absolutely beat me. There was nothing I could say to which she did not have already set answers. And I never felt so completely overwhelmed by an individual. I was supposed to be the powerful one that's supposed to decide her fate, and she flattened me right there. I think she's still alive. I haven't seen her for many years. It became a different world when it became so much more Americanized and involved with graduate students and assistant professors, that is, with a very specific American problem, instead of being the haven to which the world's scholars come. I suspect because there is no need for Dumbarton Oaks, from that point of view. There are many other places that have now good libraries, with Internet you can get everything anyway. So, congeniality and pleasure of being together, having breakfast together, lunch together, dinner together, and tea together – that has disappeared. The humanities do not have what here I see with mathematicians and physicists: collective work. That is, they don't work collectively. We tend to work individually. Collective work is done in excavations, but that's out of Dumbarton Oaks. And the other thing of the Dumbarton Oaks I knew a long time ago was it was involved in masses of activity outside. The Istanbul excavations, the Hagia Sophia, project, and then another one in Constantinople, and then excavations in Syria, but the big Hagia Sophia project was something – have you ever seen those books?
CW: No.
OG: Oh, you should see them because you probably would not know how to use that book. You need a whole table just to open the book to look at the pictures. But that was the extraordinary person, Van Nice, involved in the project. He was an architect. I think he went to Princeton. Many scholar-architects had done that. Underwood went to Princeton. And that's an important side part of the relationship between Princeton's adventures and architects, Dumbarton Oaks, the Near East, ARAMCO, the Arab petrol company, and the CIA. All of this was very closely interrelated. When I took a trip – when I was at the University of Michigan – with George Forsyth, who was on the Dumbarton Oaks board and who had been with us in Princeton – every embassy we stopped at had a Princeton graduate as a C.I.A. agent there, and they all knew each other. They all started as archaeologists and became O.S.S. during the war stage of the C.I.A. because it pays better than Wellesley, as in the case of one. This again is another world that's gone. Now you have creepy individuals who went to military school. You don't have any longer cultivated spies. But Dumbarton Oaks was very much involved in that. But it is interesting that Underwood was an agent there, and all the other Dumbarton Oaks activities were not done by the people that were at Dumbarton Oaks. Kitzinger was not involved; Downey was not; Dvornik was not. That was decided by Thacher, Jack Thacher. I knew Thacher quite well, but I knew him personally rather than academically. He would represent the kind of things my father was very much opposed to at Dumbarton Oaks, that is, the power of rich people, rich amateurs. To my father, Thacher was a great amateur – very cultivated and very sophisticated, but he was an amateur. He was not a priest. He did not belong to the priesthood of scholarship.
ABF: So, this was happening while you were on the board of scholars?
OG: No. I wasn't on the board of scholars until the early '70s, and I would say that after the early '60s, for about ten years, I was hardly involved in Dumbarton Oaks. Then, in the '70s, after I came to Harvard, whenever Giles Constable became Director – he sort of got me back here. But I must admit, I was not as personally involved as I had been in early times. I didn't know the people anymore; and, also, because I was also in a different field from most of the fields of the people at Dumbarton Oaks, I was not important to anybody at Dumbarton Oaks. I was important as an administrator, as a Harvard representative, but intellectually I was not important. But, anyway, it was no longer a hot intellectual center, where you talk to people about scholarly things. Like all these institutions, most of the people who were here were young assistant professors looking for jobs or people whose concern was not whether somebody discovered a new manuscript; their concern was, is the job in Vanderbilt better than the job in Oklahoma State? So, it was a completely different attitude, and much more mechanically involved. By 1990 I was already here, and I went to Harvard for a few meetings to find a successor to whoever it is who was – who was the director just before Ned Keenan? – it was Thomson –
ABF: Laiou.
OG: Laiou, it was for Laiou. Well, the Laiou appointment was a tricky one; because, first of all, Harvard professors were rarely appointed there and secondly, there was the Hellenization – a criticism made of Dumbarton Oaks, whether justified or not, that it was all taken over by the Greeks. But one could say that the early one was all taken over by Russians. Eventually, you will have the Serbs or the Bulgarians – there's not enough of them – or the Romanians taking over; and that is the drama of Byzantine Studies. It has become national, instead of being global and since nobody goes to church anymore, there was no Orthodox streak. You could say that this was true in previous generations – that they became Byzantinists because they had learned to be orthodox. They were not believers, they did not go to church regularly, but they knew the services, they knew the religion, they knew the theology – Meyendorf and people like this; my father, who's not religious at all, but knew every service. Weitzman went to every orthodox service he could lay his hands on. Kitzinger never did. They were no longer interested in Byzantium; they were interested in what happened to the antique world, the late antique world – that's what Kitzinger did. It became a different world. The collection is still a Byzantine collection, but I wonder how many of the professors ever go there, to the collection. I mean, this is a separate, public thing and, in fact, I don't think there are professors at Dumbarton Oaks anymore.
ABF: There aren't. In your opinion, do you think that's a good or a bad thing?
OG: I don't know. I think, on the whole, it is a good thing. I can imagine having two or three ancient scholars – like Kazhdan was there; but usually, you do it because you can't find him a job in regular universities. So , I'm not sure if that made sense at the time of war or with the Soviet regime; now, it is not necessary anymore. But that's something you can argue about, whether it should be a kind of temporary place, where people stop early in their career in order to form themselves properly or whether it is a place to which you come for a year of rest and breathing within your normal career. I don't know, I mean, I can argue it either way; and I can see people here who have exactly the same problem. Should it be a place to which people come with thoughts and to have peace of mind, or it a place where you go to magnify yourself to get a better job – which tends to be now that happens. So, half of our people at Dumbarton Oaks spend most of the time running out and giving lectures and showing off some place or other. And I'm not sure quite what it should be. I suppose that what an institution like Harvard has to decide – they have to set their policies for them, if they want to do that. It is no longer a great center for collective scholarship, except that it has a publication program, and the Dumbarton Oaks Papers are a very important thing. It is no longer because there are competitors for that; there are other places which do this. I don't think the kind of scholarship that Ihor represents is something that is still of significance to most people. I mean, if you read any of the things that Ihor writes, it's actually wonderful; but if you don't know Greek, German, and Russian, it becomes very difficult to understand and appreciate.
CW: Do you remember anything about the rumors of Harvard wanting to move the operation of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard?
OG: Well, my thoughts on the possibility of transporting Byzantine Studies to Harvard? You're going to be shocked if I even suggest this to Tom Lentz or anybody of that nature, but it would have been, probably, a good idea forty years ago. Now, there is no point in thinking about it. Harvard can't handle its own collections in Cambridge, and to bring all this down suddenly. When I knew Dumbarton Oaks, it was all Byzantine – then suddenly appeared all the Pre-Columbian and then the Garden. Should all three of these continue on a more or less equal footing? I simply don't know; but, then again, I don't do the budget, so I don't know where it is financially. I think it is strange bedfellows, I mean, these three things together; but maybe that is legitimate – I mean, if there is enough money, there is certainly enough space here to have all three of them. I want to go back to this question about the atmosphere of the place. Now the atmosphere of the place has changed because people are not in a monastery together. They are in a library together, whereas in the past it was like a monastery: you had breakfast together, you had lunch together, you had dinner, you spent all day together. Right now, you don't have breakfast. You still have lunch, and I'm told it's still very ceremonial: who is allowed to have lunch in the Fellows Building, who is not allowed. You have classes of visitors to the library, ones who are first-class visitors and second-class visitors. I don't know whether it's true, but in the past, it used to be a community working together, which I don't think it is now. Maybe these kinds of worlds have simply disappeared, and there's no point in trying to establish them. You're not going to invent a Vasiliev, a Dvornik, or people of that nature – they just don't exist. For instance, when Ihor tried very hard to get Hans Belting, who probably to the younger generation is the most brilliant Byzantinist or art historian or whatever you want – but he didn't want to come to Washington. One reason is that he doesn't feel at home in an American institution. And why should you bring somebody who's not at home in that institution? It's still easier to do here, at the Institute for Advanced Study – we still have quite a few people like that. Because here there is nothing around, you really live in your own secluded world with your lunches and dinners. And the world of Dumbarton Oaks can no longer be recreated. There was a mythology of Dumbarton Oaks, but it is really no longer clear to what objectives it responds. Is it a training place to prepare people for functions in American or other institutions. Usually, it has to be American institutions, because I don't think you get yourself ready for a position in Italy by coming to Dumbarton Oaks. Or it is a place where you meet for seminars and symposia? These should be organized differently, that is, where people meet twice: once to organize something, and then they do work wherever they are, and then they meet again to expose the results of their work; or all kinds of other techniques or patterns that can be proposed. I don't know, is there actually a board of trustees at Dumbarton Oaks now that is separate –?
CW: Yes.
OG: – that is separate from the Harvard one?
CW: No, I don't think it's – I think they are more or less the same.
OG: As the Harvard corporation, yeah. So to whom are they responsible? They are responsible to the Harvard president?
ABF: Probably
OG: See, one doesn't even know who runs that place. It was alright as long as the people running it were the Blisses, Thacher, Thacher's successor, Tyler, the former ambassador to The Netherlands. They were all American aristocrats, wealthy American aristocrats – they were superior to Harvard. They didn't talk directly to Harvard and didn't want Harvard to meddle with their little feudal entity. That's fallen apart. Now everything is run by the actual rule of professors, which means the bureaucrats of an academic system; and they have it different – they are not wealthy for the most part (some exceptions you have there), and it's a completely different world – and the academic world is a completely different world than it was thirty years ago.
ABF: When do you – what period do you pinpoint as the time when these changes began to take place?
OG: I think the '70s. This was when Giles Constable was Director.
ABF: This was when you were on the Board of Scholars?
OG: Yeah; and I think that the important thing is that Giles Constable is somebody who understood that. Giles knew that. Now, whether his solutions were the right ones is another questions, but he understood that there was something different – that you cannot recreate the world of wonderful, sophisticated learning – and cooking. I mean the idea of a bunch of professors cooking for each other is very interesting because all the professors I mentioned who cooked for each other – Friend and Dvornik and Kantorowicz – were all bachelors – and the whole history, which I haven't thought much about, about the intimacies of people at Dumbarton Oaks – the ones with families, the ones without families. See, Kitzinger was remarkable. He had three children, and one of them stayed in England I believe when he was at Dumbarton Oaks, but maybe two of them, I think, were little children – or only one. Anastos had a son nobody ever saw. Downey had a daughter, I think, who eventually became a professor at UCLA. Underwood had a daughter whom nobody ever saw – they were already grown-up children. They were no longer part of the community. I don't remember them showing up at Mrs. Bliss's Christmas party – but I may be wrong. In other words, there is an old myth at Dumbarton Oaks, which is cute to remember, and you can write nice little stories about it, but it has nothing to do with what Dumbarton Oaks could or should be. What it is, it is a fabulous library, and, I suppose, I'm sure it now has all the right equipment for computer work of one kind of another. It probably spends more money, just as we do now here, on all kinds of ways to improve the computerization of the place – and not on secretarial help or research assistants. Because, who needs a research assistant when everything's on the internet? But, that's true, you have to know how to use that thing, and half the time, it falls apart [laughter]. But, since Ned Keenan became director, I haven't been much involved with Dumbarton Oaks. Until then, I was. Thomson I knew quite well. Angeliki Laiou – that's different. She belongs to – because she represented a very different objective for Dumbarton Oaks than what Thomson had been.
ABF: What was that?
OG: Nationalism.
ABF: One thing, actually, that you said that I was a bit curious about. You talked about your father being a bit critical of rich amateurs, amateur scholars; but, isn't that how you would also describe the Blisses?
OG: Oh, they were not scholars. They were not trained to scholarship.
ABF: Amateur collectors.
OG: Yeah, amateur collectors; oh, collectors are mostly amateurs. But I think there is something interesting in that there was always a paradox in my father's opinion of the Blisses because he genuinely liked Mrs. Bliss; he was very fond in a social way of what she represented. She had a kind of charm and she understood intellectual theories – or maybe she acted as though she understood – that I don't know, but she understood, and she made you feel good. But she never claimed to be a scholar. She was a collector, but I think he was the bigger collector, Mr. Bliss. He was the real collector, but she was a collector too. I mean, that was a completely different attitude – and I suspect my father always thought museums should collect, not people – this is a public activity, not a private activity (which doesn't work). Was the DO faculty ever dissolved, or they just didn't replace people?
ABF: Well, they – in the '70s, basically, there ceased to be a permanent faculty at Dumbarton Oaks.
OG: Yes, well, who was the faculty? Ihor was there, then he moved to Harvard. Was there anybody else?
CW: Mango.
OG: Well, Mango, well, Mango – that was one of the mistakes. I mean, Mango was a great man, but it was a mistake for Ihor to have brought him because they are very close friends and kindred spirits. They are very old friends, but they are separate from everybody else who was there. And, therefore, you create a kind of – two bodies running everything, and both very critical of most people; and that was a mistake, that was the wrong kind of person to have. But then anyway I don't know that anybody really thought whether Dumbarton Oaks should have a faculty or not? So these guys are gone, or one goes and the other – "we'll take him to Harvard. Let's not do anything. Let's see how it runs." Was it a thoughtful decision or just it's easier to not have a faculty – because nobody ever knew. These became the years under Bill Loerke about whom the question had arisen whether he should be adhoc-ed by a Harvard committee or not; and I don't remember the discussion and decisions that took place. There was already a question as to whether Bill Loerke was a member of the faculty at Harvard or not; and similarly, you ask here why they abolished the position of Director of Byzantine Studies. Now I don't know why it was abolished. I think it was abolished when Giles became Director.
ABF: Mmm hmm.
OG: Yeah, because I think he thought he could do it. And then he reestablished it – or was it reestablished after him?
ABF: After.
OG: I would imagine so, because this is – I could see very well, Giles would feel, being a medievalist and a scholar and an academic, that he doesn't need a Director of Studies. But the moment you get somebody who doesn't get – but, again, Giles is a strong personality with strong connections, who belongs to the striped pants general staff of academia (very complicated system in academia, where you have those people who went through War College to general staff and people who did not go to general staff). And the German military always had striped pants, if you went to general staff school; and Giles, like I, belonged to general staff. We went to all the right places: the right institutions, the right degrees, at the right time, and so forth. If there are no studies, should there be a Director of Studies? I don't know, I mean, this is something – there is one now?
ABF: Mmm hmm.
OG: Who is it now?
ABF: Alice-Mary Talbot.
OG: Oh, she's still at DO?
ABF: Yeah, for another year.
OG: For another year. She is very good at it; but I'm not quite sure what the purpose of it is, unless there are indeed – or they have now Junior Fellows, Junior Fellows, that's right. So they have younger people – so Summer Fellows, that's right. They have all kinds of groups of people to take care of, so therefore it would make sense to have a Director of Studies. Do they still have concerts?
ABF: Yeah.
CW: Primarily in the winter, I think.
OG: Yeah, in winter, usually. But, this again – the concerts or even the symposia or the lectures were a big social event in Washington, and I remember for the symposium, for instance, automatically, the whole staff of the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery came to the symposium, regardless of the subject, because they had to be seen. Right now, they don't even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, I'm close to both the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery; I've been very much involved with both of these. They don't even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. They don't even get invitations any more. Just as Dumbarton Oaks is not invited to their activities. Now, in the Bliss period, the Dumbarton Oaks affairs, whether its concerts or lectures, were a social event in Washington, and you played for a Washington public; and I think this is almost gone now. Maybe they'll try to – well, it should be reestablished. In a way, this is the kind of thing people like my father thought was silly, but they enjoyed it. It was a real occasion for them to see a certain Washington establishment. This is not the political establishment. This is the establishment of the Georgetown rich, old aristocratic Georgetown families that would meet there for a concert or for a lecture – symposia, usually they didn't stay very long, because symposia bored them. Also, the nature of publication has changed so much that, is there any use for most of these symposia? I mean, we have them all the time here in the sciences; but, again, the sciences work as a team. I mean, that's quite different as a way of doing things. But, the other great thing is the social change. A cooking staff disappears when most Fellows started being married, and therefore living in apartments, and not coming – but this is a rather important issue: do you create a social collective, as the Soviets would have called it, or do you create a convenience store, to which you come for whatever you need and then you go home? We have a wonderful library here. The great thing about this library in Princeton is that there's almost never anybody in it, because it's so easily accessible that people come at 3 a.m. or whenever it is they can come and work here. But it is a luxury. It is a luxury because all these books, no one – nobody ever touches them. They're there in case you want it; and here and there you suddenly want it. I think all these institutions of research have a problem. They, as I said, become, either, like the Getty, which just brings younger people and older people for six months to do their thing, that's one way; or you're creating something together. That's what Dumbarton Oaks tried to do, and I don't think it has been able to do it anymore; but I don't think we have common questions anymore. But, that, I mean, may be the pessimism of old age. Now, what I suggest, if you don't mind, we have a very simple lunch. We could do that.
ABF: Sure, thank you very much.]]>
Organized by Dorothée Imbert, the symposium provided a critical historical framework for today's urban agriculture by discussing the multiple scales, ideologies, and contexts of productive landscapes, from allotment gardens to regional plans. Topics included the production and distribution of food in relation to human settlement and urban form, from German Siedlungen to Italian Fascist new towns, and Israeli kibbutzim to contemporary Tokyo. The conference placed particular emphasis on the efforts of modern and early-modern landscape architects, garden designers, and architects/planners to reconcile the demands of feeding cities and regions with the exigencies of urban expansion.]]>


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