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.]]>
EE: Yes, twenty-second.
GB: 2009. And we sit here together in the Fellows Building with former Fellows here in our Guest House. And we have a wonderful special guest here, Elizabeth Ettinghausen, former Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1945, '44–'45. So we were just about to talk about your, at that time, not-yet-husband, Richard Ettinghausen.
EE: Yes, for the opening of Dumbarton Oaks, Mrs. Bliss had a special invitation, the note, whatever it was. And my husband, I mean Richard Ettinghausen, and others were invited, among them Weitzmann, Kurt Weitzmann. And the question was: who would sit to the right of Mrs. Bliss? And I don't remember the details anymore. I think Kurt Weitzmann was a little older. At first she wanted Richard Ettinghausen to be to her right and then she realized or was told that Kurt Weitzmann was older and therefore he should be to the right, her right. And Richard Ettinghausen was to her left.
GB: Ah. Do you know –
EE: Of course, I wasn't here.
GB: You weren't here. And you knew about, of course, the event through your husband.
EE: Yes.
GB: Do you know where this took place?
EE: No.
GB: I guess it was the Music Room, but I'm not sure about that.
EE: I really don't know.
GB: Yeah. That's nice – choosing who's first according to seniority, that's interesting. Now, Elizabeth, we would be very interested in learning more about your first visit, when you arrived here to come as a Junior Fellow –
EE: Yes.
GB: – and how this came about.
EE: I was told that I should go to Harvard and ask them about it, because somebody had suggested that I go to – that maybe that would be a possibility, to become a Fellow here. So I went to Harvard University, and I was given the names, whom I should interview with. It was, first of all, Professor–Director Paul Sachs, and then Koehler, and also one other person, one other professor. And I'm not sure whether I met Blake there, too, Richard Blake. I did meet him here and I was very much – everyone was very much impressed by him. He was very, very nice, really, and very kind to all the Fellows. What was so exciting about him: he was married to a Georgian princess. But we were told there were a lot of princesses in Georgia.
GB: So you went to Paul Sachs and to Koehler up in Cambridge.
EE: Yes, that's right, and it was a very nice interview. He was very friendly and I don't remember anymore what he asked or anything like that. I just told him what I had done and where I had been before, which was in Istanbul.
GB: So, what had you done by then? What was your kind of scholarly –
EE: Well, I had done my MA, which I did on Byzantine tiles from a certain site, which had been excavated by the department where I worked, but it was before me so I never saw the excavation. But I was asked to work on the tiles from – Byzantine tiles from that site. Now, hardly any Byzantine tiles were known or had been excavated before that. At that time, there was a great deal of freedom in the Museum, the Topkapi Sarayi Museum in Istanbul, and I could go, which would be impossible now, of course, to go through big stacks of material – whatever it was; I mean, of course the tiles, but also look, I could find other tiles or anything like that and nobody supervised me. I felt actually a bit – I was a little bit scared, really, but of course I didn't do anything wrong; but how could I prove it? Well, it was very nice. I even was then told by the chemist connected with the Museum how to clean them, which I did, not too much, I hope. And then I worked on that and the drawing, the pictures and everything, and then for my PhD thesis I did something quite different. And then later on, many years later, I was asked by André Grabar to write an article on that for the Cahiers archéologiques, which I did. I was – I wrote that when I was, when my elder son was four months old. And I wrote it all, worked on it and wrote it all at night.
GB: And that was later, as you said.
EE: That was in – he was born in '52, so I worked on it, beginning of '53. I think it was published a few years later.
GB: Yes. So, if you'll allow me, we may come back to the interview you had with Paul Sachs and Koehler and to introduce yourself, to present yourself as a young Byzantine art historian and eager, I guess, to continue and to take the opportunity to study at Dumbarton Oaks. What did you know at that time about the Dumbarton Oaks institute?
EE: Nothing.
GB: Nothing. So, soon after you learned that you had been accepted, you arrived. And how was this, kind of, arriving time for you? How, yeah, did you get the whole institute to understand and how was the set-up at that time?
EE: Well there were three other Fellows besides me; we lived upstairs here in this building. Paul Underwood, who was married, lived outside so I met him at the library and for meals here, for lunch here. In fact, he asked me, always, to translate anything in Italian for him, which I didn't know well. I knew Latin well enough, but somehow I could always satisfy him – it wasn't too much, but still. They were all very nice, the Fellows.
GB: And you were a Junior Fellow –
EE: I was a Junior Fellow.
GB: – at that time, having finished the Ph.D.
EE: Yes.
GB: And you were a Fellow here, which meant something different from the work the Fellows, Junior Fellows, nowadays do and –
EE: Well, there was one exception. One person didn't have a Ph.D. yet and worked on this, her thesis, but she had already quite a lot of experience. It just happened that she hadn't done it yet.
GB: Do you remember her name?
EE: Margaret Ames – Alexander.
GB: Margaret Alexander.
EE: Well, Ames. Ames was her name at that time. She wasn't married.
GB: Okay, thank you. That's important. And your co-Fellows: you remember three.
EE: Well, she was one of them.
GB: She was one of them.
EE: And Rosalie Green and Josephine Harris.
GB: And Josephine Harris.
EE: Yes and, of course, we saw – there was a sensation – that we had a nun here, also.
GB: And that is Sister Monica.
EE: Sister Monica Wagner, yes. That's right. She came a little bit later. She came, I think, in spring.
GB: Aha. So you were –
EE: And she was here, of course, for meals. She was here only for lunchtime, of course. And she had to answer some unusual questions, I would feel, but she was always of good humor and she didn't mind that, because one person asked, for instance, "Well, which church do you like to go to especially? I mean, one church versus another church," and she said, of course being Catholic, "They're all alike." Actually it was Professor Vasiliev who asked that question.
GB: You were four, five – five young scholars. Young women, which is quite amazing.
EE: Not so amazing during the war. It was still war.
GB: Wow. Okay. That is interesting.
EE: I would say that's the reason.
GB: Was that a topic of this being, kind of, discussed or mentioned, wanting to work here? Or was that such a, kind of, just everyday life fact that it was not even remarked on?
EE: No, it wasn't remarked on. And the advantage was – so we were four women upstairs. At that time we couldn't have had a man there to – now of course this is a different situation.
GB: Yeah, yeah, this is very interesting indeed. Yeah. So Paul Underwood was not living here in this building; it was just the five of you – four of you.
EE: Four, yes. And of course Monica – Sister Monica, of course, didn't live here.
GB: Oh, she didn't live here?
EE: Oh, she couldn't have.
GB: No, she couldn't have. So she was here in a –
EE: The same way as Paul Underwood, coming to the library to do her work.
GB: That's interesting. Now, your work when you were here as a Junior Fellow – can you describe this a little bit, what you did, what you researched, and what kind of – what your scholarly life as a Junior Fellow was at the time?
EE: Yes. One was supposed to divide one's time half, really half and half, for research, one's own research on the one hand, and working for the archives for Dumbarton Oaks – archives of monuments, all the publications of monuments – and all details, everything within the monuments – of different regions. And each person was assigned to a different region and I, of course, was assigned to where I had been before: to Istanbul, Constantinople.
GB: So you were looking into photos, our photos of –
EE: Not just photos.
GB: Archival material.
EE: The articles, all articles that were published, all photos that were published. And also I had some photos, which I had taken, and I also contributed some of those.
GB: What was the goal of this work? Do you remember having been told a certain project mission or goal, doing this type of archival – how would we describe it nowadays? – maybe a kind of database, to set it up, on Byzantine monuments all over the eastern world, or maybe not just eastern but Byzantine world.
EE: The Byzantine world, yes, because one was doing it for Tunisia, for instance. And it could have been expanded, of course, to all regions. Rosalie Green did it, for instance – she did it for Jerusalem. And Josephine Harris did Egypt, I believe. Yes, definitely she did Egypt.
GB: So you were told to just look into what we had collected already at that time or was there a system?
EE: No, go through it – get the bibliography and except the – what was published. It is a kind of index, like the Index of Christian Art, but with more detail.
GB: Yeah, indeed with all the monuments.
EE: Which one could have updated, of course, if one had continued.
GB: Yes, indeed. Where were you placed? Where was your office and the office of the other Fellows? Where did you work?
EE: We didn't have offices. We were in the library, on the big table in the center of the library, which was on the second floor of the main building.
GB: The books around you –
EE: Yes, and sometimes one needed interlibrary loan books, which one could get. I remember, for my own research I did some of that. Maybe also otherwise; that I don't remember. But I remember specifically that I did for my own research.
GB: Mentioning the library, who were the librarians at that time?
EE: I see her in front of me and I can't think of her name now. She was very good and very nice. Actually, the person really in charge was Barbara Sessions, but the one who was active, you know, helping you with getting the particular book or something like that was the person whose name I can't think of. She had blonde hair, she was very slim and very nice, very fast always. Everybody was very cooperative. Oh yes, and there, of course, if you had something, for instance, in Russian, there was Mrs. Scheffer. And I did something absolutely terrible by having a Bulgarian book – asking her. And she said – she didn't see the cover, and I didn't think of it. Of course, Bulgarian is not Russian. It's similar. And she first said, "Oh but that's terrible Russian. That's not proper Russian." And then, but she was kind enough and she was able to – I didn't need too much, but I needed a few things.
GB: So there was one librarian. Is that correct? She was the librarian and she was –
EE: Mrs. Scheffer was just – this other – well there were more than one but I don't remember the others.
GB: What do you remember about the acquisition policy? How many books – what was the policy of acquiring books for the Dumbarton Oaks Library? Was there, kind of, a "we would get all books we know of," or what was the policy?
EE: I don't know about the policy, but I think certainly all the main books. And every week, and possibly more often, maybe twice a week, books came from the Library of Congress, also.
GB: Aha, so there was an exchange with the Library of Congress.
EE: But also with other libraries, of course.
GB: With other libraries, of course, yes.
EE: But this was more regular. Of course, this was not just for us. This was for the professors as well, or more so, perhaps.
GB: When you found any book, which was not in the library, you would have told the librarian and she would have looked into either first looking into acquiring it, purchasing it, or first looking into where we could get it from a different library?
EE: I only had the experience that she was getting it from interlibrary loan, but there may have been cases when she'd ordered the book – that's possible, too.
GB: So that was your work for hire, so to speak, and that was half-day. And then there was the other side of your research, and maybe you want to talk a little bit about the research part you conducted at that time and how it was perceived here at Dumbarton Oaks.
EE: Well, I tried to find out more about the, for instance, the representations – I mean the art of designs one finds of tiles and collectibles, where else you find them, and comparisons and so on and how it came about that one had tiles at all. I have developed more interpretations since then, of course.
GB: And was the library and the environment of help – adequate for your study and research? How did you communicate with your co-Fellows about your research? Did this happen at all or was there, kind of, everybody quietly researching?
EE: More or less it was everybody for himself or herself. I mean, you could, of course, if you wanted to especially discuss something, but basically it was each one for himself or herself, while that had been very different before, because there were seminars every week while Professor Koehler was in charge here and in residence here, which was the year before I came here. There were these seminars and working together and reporting about one's work and one's questions and interchange. And that was not the case while I was here the first year, not at all, because the professors in residence were not in the field at all. I mean, they were historians and not really interested in art history. And the second year it was Professor Friend, formerly from Princeton. He was interested in some projects – if that fitted in, fine, and if it didn't fit in then it wasn't of much interest to him. There was one person who worked with him; it was Rosalie Green, because he was interested in that project, but that was it, really.
GB: So, compared to what we have now: every week a research report; the fellows have to present and the interest, of course, not only in exchanging research ideas and topics; but presenting it to the community is very much, of course, in the foreground today. At least – correct me if I'm wrong. And I'm trying to explain this with my mind. In those years, the primary interest point in Dumbarton Oaks, having you here, was to get to develop a database and to, yeah, get this built up, and to, of course, provide the opportunity, the outstanding opportunity to, beyond that, do research in your specific area. It was more the kind of, almost a position, which – actually I say "position" because I know this structure similarly from the German Archaeological Institute, where I actually was at a time one of those – that's not the term they use – but a hired staff person to do half-day work for the Institute and half-day I had to do my research, but in a way nobody cared about that research because that was kind of an add-on to the proper hired work. Is that something, that picture I –
EE: Well, I would say it simply was not structured at all. There was no structure. You were here on your own. You could hook up with anybody else if you wanted to and if you felt it would do, it would advance your project or help somebody else to advance his or her project, but otherwise there was no structure, really.
GB: And were there meetings to follow up on the database work, on your proper assignment?
EE: No, none whatsoever.
GB: And how did this kind of –
EE: You simply did what you did and when each project – let's say working on such-and-such a church – was finished, you handed it over to be typed, because you just – there were no computers, of course. You wrote it by hand, really, and then it was formalized.
GB: I have on this list of 1944–45 another category and that's "Fellows," and Fellows here listed are Milton Anastos –
EE: Oh yes, of course. Anastasios. Anastasis, Anastasis. I'm sorry, of course. How could I say that?
GB: Yes, I see it is incorrectly spelled. And Peter Charanis.
EE: Yes, that's right and he was married to a Belgian.
GB: Can you explain a little bit where the position of being Fellows – what they contributed to the Dumbarton Oaks Harvard community?
EE: Well, they were much more advanced scholars. While the Junior Fellows were at the beginning of any career, Peter and Milton were both in the midst of their career, more or less in their midst. They gave papers at symposia; they worked on the more advanced projects. I remember Mr. Friend asked Peter Charanis to work on a special project of a church that doesn't exist anymore, but there were some records about it, a poem actually it was, a longer poem, and he worked on that, for instance.
GB: So they had similar assignments to do specific research, the Fellows, Milton and Peter.
EE: Well they – I don't think it was obligatory for them to do it, but once they were Fellows they were asked and they could agree or maybe they could also disagree. It was a special project, though, what Mr. Friend was interested in, so he asked about that. But I don't think it was, so to say, the bylaws that he had to designate a particular topic or anything like that. It was just a personal matter.
GB: And they were studying with you in the reader room in the second level of the main house?
EE: No, I think they were somewhere else, because there wasn't enough space.
GB: So they might have had offices or –
EE: I think there were some other rooms where they could be, but basically there were no offices in that sense and certainly not that everybody had an office to him or herself.
GB: What do you remember about the main house first level at that time? Was the library –
EE: No, no, there was no library. Well, there may have been some books. Yes there were books, of course. In one room downstairs, there were books. But I think there were also more general books, not just something about the early Christian, Byzantine art, but the Blisses' collection, for a private collection, some of it, I think.
GB: Do you remember the term "Founders' Room" at that time? And this place—do you remember what was going on in that space or was that a library space? Were there books in there?
EE: Yes. But it was also a kind of reception room.
GB: We will come back to the receptions and the more, kind of, social life, but let me ask you now a little bit about the other scholars, resident scholars at that time now that we have learned about the Junior Fellows, the Fellows, and you have mentioned already Albert Friend. And there were more professors in residence.
EE: Yes, there were Mr. and Mrs. Young, Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who had been professor at Wellesley before.
GB: How was the relationship with Sirarpie, she being a young woman as well –
EE: Not so young.
GB: Yeah. Right. Yes.
EE: It was fine and we usually had arranged for dinner – there was no dinner on Sundays here, so we made our own dinner and Miss Der Nersessian usually joined in. We did it together.
GB: Albert Friend – how was – he seemed to have had a major impact regarding the suggestions, regarding the research part. Is that right?
EE: Not for the Junior Fellows. Well, except for he was interested in what Rosalie Green did, but otherwise no. I mean one could, of course, ask him or get advice but one had to specially go and ask for it. He never asked you about it.
GB: And then we have at that time Edward Kennard Rand and Alexander Vasiliev.
EE: Well yes, they were professors in 1944 already and they were not art historians. Professor Rand was particularly interested in Carolingian manuscripts and he did a lot of work – not the pictures, the miniatures, but the text – and he was very much interested in all of the signs, the pinpricks and so on and that he continued to talk about time and again when I was in residence.
GB: And Alexander Vasiliev.
EE: He came a bit later. I don't remember exactly when. I would say he loosened things up and made it much more lively and interesting, because he was a very interesting person of course and very Russian in a very pleasant way.
GB: Do you remember specific – or specifically –
EE: No, he was interested in, much more interested in music, I mean also in music and so on. Actually Koehler had started that. He got us a record player and records so we could have music, also.
GB: He and the Fellows.
EE: Yes, here. It was right here.
GB: You were listening to records together?
EE: Oh, of course, yes, yes. It might have been right after lunch, for instance, or in the evening, so we could do that. That's how I got to know some music very well.
GB: Lunch is a good topic.
EE: That was on the big table, and the two professors – La Piana and Rand – were at the ends and the Fellows in between.
GB: So you had to appear, to have lunch and dinner together.
EE: I suppose so. I don't remember about dinner, but there must have been dinner. And of course, there were servants and one was served. One never got up or anything.
GB: Was there communication going on over lunch? How was that?
EE: Yes. Well it was particularly Professor Rand who spoke and you listened.
GB: Scholarly exchange or everyday small talk?
EE: Well, it wasn't very scholarly. It was not very exciting. Well, I'm sorry, but Mr. Rand was not his former brilliance anymore, and that was the reason.
GB: I see.
EE: And La Piana also talked, but always trying to be very, very nice to Mr. Rand and taking him as the head of it all.
GB: At that time who was the director of Dumbarton Oaks? It was kind of –
EE: It was – oh my God.
GB: It must have been Thacher.
EE: Thacher, yes. He came once in a while. I mean, of course you saw him at the main building.
GB: Why that? You saw him at the main building?
EE: No, well sometimes, because that's where he was, that's where his office was, too.
GB: Mhm. Do you remember where his office was? In the main house on the first level, where it is now?
EE: Yes.
GB: And, he being the director of the Dumbarton Oaks institute, filling the specific role, what did you understand of that role at that time? How did you feel about the overall mission if we want to use this word, which is of course not the word you would have used at the time, but what was the, kind of, general mission of the Dumbarton Oaks institute?
EE: Well, he was a very good go-between – the Blisses and the institute, Dumbarton Oaks, and you saw him a great deal with the Blisses. And he understood very well to implement also what Mrs. Bliss really hoped the institute would be like and he was, of course, director of the museum, which was in storage then.
GB: Which was packed, indeed.
EE: Yes, because of the war.
GB: Yes. So you did not get to see an object while you were here – is that correct?
EE: No. Some pictures I saw.
GB: Oh yes, some pictures, but no –
EE: No, it was impossible. And one understood very well why.
GB: Yeah? Why?
EE: Well because of the war, the danger of possibly some problems.
GB: Did you feel this – I mean, being here, I mean, sure we know that at that time there was quite some realistic fear or reason to be afraid. What was the situation in Washington and Dumbarton Oaks besides that the collection was stored, protected, and downstairs in storage, in the basement.
EE: Well I didn't know. I didn't know. I did know that the downstairs, the basement, was taboo for anybody in Dumbarton Oaks, at least the Fellows, because there were government projects going on. Well it was really – in fact the president of Harvard was intimately connected with that, and he came for visits from time to time. So I met him that way also because he came to lunch sometimes.
GB: The president of Harvard University?
EE: Yes. Well, it was the Manhattan Project, as I now know, but not then, of course.
GB: The Byzantine galleries being closed, because of the collection being stored – did you ever enter that space? Was it just closed because it was empty, or was there anything – I mean, thinking of the Barberini sarcophagus, for example, which was certainly –
EE: There were a few pieces I knew. I don't remember details anymore, I must admit.
GB: Well, it was a closed-off area, so it was not of any interest and, of course, it was not really a happy story, to be not up but in protection, in storage. So, Thacher was, well, trying to do the best, to make the best out of the situation and to, of course, as you said, to work with the Blisses closely.
EE: Yes, and also he was very good, I suppose, in spreading the news of Dumbarton Oaks, I assume. I mean, he was very good at parties and so on, so he knew – he met a lot of people and knew a lot of people in Washington. And I'm sure from that point of view he was very useful for spreading the word – what Dumbarton Oaks was.
GB: So there was some interest in connecting to the social life of Washington?
EE: Absolutely. But that was he alone.
GB: But not the Blisses?
EE: Oh, the Blisses, of course, were. Oh yes. But I mean not the people for, not the Fellows or the professors or so.
GB: So let's talk a little about receptions and the Blisses. At first maybe about your – as a Fellow – your meetings or whenever you had a chance to meet and talk with Robert and Mildred Bliss. Did this happen on a regular basis?
EE: She came to tea. I don't know whether there still is tea being served, probably not, but then it was de rigueur, one could almost say, to come to tea, and Mrs. Bliss appeared a great many times – not every time, not every day, but most days, or often, let's say.
GB: Was it once a week, the tea, or –
EE: No, no, every day. I mean, except for weekends. There was tea and cookies or anything. I think rather fancy, too.
GB: So that was kind of a break in the afternoon. Is that what I am to understand?
EE: Yes.
GB: Yeah. Nice. So that everybody came together for a short time I guess – an hour maximum or even two of them.
EE: Probably not as long as that. And Mrs. Bliss talked also to, of course, to the professors and to Fellows, but also to the Junior Fellows.
GB: Was she curious about finding out what you were up to, regarding your research, or was she curious about hearing your opinion about Dumbarton Oaks institute, or –
EE: No, never, no. It was rather what you were doing.
GB: Researching.
EE: What work you were doing.
GB: And do you remember being asked – Mildred Bliss asking you about what your research, what she kind of asked?
EE: No, I must admit I don't remember, but she did ask, yes. I don't know how interested she really was in the specifics. She was, I think, more interested in the general and what went on in general. And the sort of policy and strategy.
GB: When she was present, did you talk or did she mention any kind of objects in the sense of collecting, of her passion of collecting art, which we, as we see now, is quite a major part.
EE: Oh yes, yes.
GB: Did she mention this? Did she talk about, "Oh, I have seen recently something coming up?"
EE: No, no I don't remember that. I don't think that; it could have happened that she talked about such a thing to somebody, but certainly not to, so to say, everybody present.
GB: Another point which is, of course, very related to Mildred Bliss is the garden. Was that a topic or how did you –
EE: Oh yes, and I do remember, also, for instance, I once looked and said, "Well, I don't see – whatever it was, a tree or shrub or what and I was told, "No, Mrs. Bliss had changed her mind. She wanted it to be changed." She was very active in helping with the design for the garden. Of course she had a very well known garden architect.
GB: Beatrix Farrand.
EE: Yes, that's right. Who also did some work at Princeton, Princeton University, but on a very small scale there.
GB: I do not know, I cannot remember if Beatrix Farrand was – no, she was no more around. She had to agree, setting it up in the very beginning, the twenties, and by the forties, she, I think, was no more around Dumbarton Oaks, but she was certainly –
EE: No, she definitely wasn't around when I was here. And I think in some cases that Mrs. Bliss did it on her own, and I wouldn't be surprised, because Mrs. Bliss was extraordinarily intelligent and clever and just as her range of knowledge was amazing, so I'm sure she had learned a great deal from Beatrix –
GB: Farrand.
EE: Farrand, yes. And could design things on her own, too.
GB: Yeah, yeah. We know of many projects where she was really the designer and participated in all kinds of different things with a high interest in every little detail. Do you know how the gardens were administered at that time? How were they maintained? What about the gardeners and the staff?
EE: Well, I don't remember the name of the head gardener anymore, but he was an important person, of course. We always – we talked to him and so on. And the associate gardeners – I suppose they were the two who lived in this house at the corner there.
GB: The double cottage.
EE: Yes, the double cottage
GB: Which is nowadays security.
EE: And at night I understand there was somebody, a guard; there was a dog going around. I've never seen him but that doesn't mean that he wasn't there, of course.
GB: Could you enter the main house at any time? Was it, so to speak, open to go back to the office or to study?
EE: That I don't know. I only heard that, you see, and I don't know anything more about that.
GB: There was one important feature attached to the gardens at that time, as nowadays, and that's the pool.
EE: Oh yes.
GB: You used the pool? You were allowed to use the pool?
EE: Yes, oh yes, yes.
GB: And everybody shared the pool?
EE: All the members of the – the Fellows and professors, yes.
GB: Was there kind of a senior Fellows hour or –
EE: No, no it was simply whoever wanted to go, whenever, could go there and, I mean, not normally during work hours.
GB: And at that time the pool is – of course the public came to visit the gardens or were the gardens closed as well – I mean specifically in this year were the gardens open to the public? Do you remember?
EE: There were times when they were open, yes. I think it was from two to four or something like that. I think we usually went, you see, after work, so it was a little bit later except for weekends, and I don't remember how that worked with the public and the – because we certainly couldn't be there when the public came and there were – and guests could come, too. I mean if they had permission from, I suppose, the director. My – Richard Ettinghausen, for instance, was a friend of the director and therefore he could go and use the pool.
GB: And you met your husband –
EE: I met him, yes. I didn't meet him at the pool, but I met him at the library and I asked him for some advice. And also it was the head of the library, Barbara Sessions, who was a friend of my future husband, and we were good friends. She was very, very friendly and very nice and, of course, she was a friend of the Blisses, so – and so we went on some outings because she liked to walk, and we both liked to walk, too.
GB: That means, mentioning your future husband, that there were – visiting scholars, we would say nowadays – there were scholars who stopped by, who had a specific period of study time they spent here at Dumbarton Oaks. Is that what I understand?
EE: Yes, there were some.
GB: And they were sitting, then, again, in the library and next to you and the other Junior Fellows or were they at any kind of specific place?
EE: They were in various places, I think.
GB: Various places. And that must have been, then, on that second level, which –
EE: I would think so.
GB: – I understand was at that time the main library research space.
EE: I assume that's where they were.
GB: Talking about receptions, or the Blisses, Mildred Bliss especially being present in the afternoon for the tea hour or the tea gathering: were there any kind of other specific events you had been invited to?
EE: Lectures.
GB: Lectures. Public lectures? Were they open to the public, as it is nowadays, or was it –
EE: I doubt whether they were open to the public, but to, I suppose, to scholars or friends, of course, of the Blisses.
GB: In the Music Room?
EE: Yes, in the Music Room and those were always very nice events, of course, and then there were concerts also and those were special events and the finest event was, of course, the symposium. Always.
GB: Yes, the annual Byzantine Spring Symposium.
EE: Yes.
GB: Do you remember the symposia you have attended – was it something very outstanding compared to the symposia of the recent past, which you have, of course, attended on some occasions?
EE: Well, I'm –
GB: Can you describe the sort of atmosphere, the set-up, and, of course, the scholarly contributions?
EE: I suppose it would be very hard for me to judge, really, because I was, after all, at the beginning, and it all seemed marvelous, so insofar – perhaps I would say later on it was perhaps not as marvelous, but because I knew more, so no, I don't think there's any conference ever which is all tops – I mean every scholar absolutely perfect and so on. And I could, of course, discriminate much more and notice the differences much more than I could at the beginning.
GB: What was the –
EE: But it was – there were outstanding scholars who came.
GB: What was the general atmosphere compared to a nowadays symposium, where we have a lot of discussions and open the floor, of course, and ask the public – nowadays it's indeed the public – of course, the interested public, who is invited to attend the symposium. What do you remember about that aspect when – the years you were here?
EE: I'm not quite sure how I should answer that.
GB: Was it more – I mean, I, looking at the pictures we have of the symposia and the speakers, it looks to me much more formal and going of course by the appearance of the gentlemen, the speakers, and it's just that the only way, incorrectly, I guess, you project that into the audience or into the place where it took place and you think that this was probably more, kind of, formal, overall formal event.
EE: Oh, absolutely.
GB: Yeah, we talked about the symposia at that time.
EE: Yes, well, I think especially we Junior Fellows felt that way – that was the apex of the whole year. And the great scholars came and they discussed matters, and that was very interesting, of course, to hear them sometimes agree and sometimes not agree. These semi-gods acting like that, that meant something very special, of course. And the lunches and the dinners and everything – that was wonderful and speaking with those special scholars. And they were all very nice and open. Well, and otherwise you wouldn't encounter them quite so much, all that easily.
GB: Kurt Weitzmann and Hugo Buchthal, for example, both – did you meet them here at Dumbarton Oaks?
EE: Yes, I met them here first, for the first time. Later on they became friends, but that was when I wasn't a Fellow anymore.
GB: But you got introduced to Kurt Weitzmann while you were here.
EE: Yes, absolutely. Oh, yes. It was a very nice encounter. He was always very, very jovial and very nice, easy to talk to.
GB: Ernst Kitzinger?
EE: Of course, yes, I met him. Well, I'd met him before because he came once in a while. I mean, he was working for the O.S.S. at that time, Office of Strategic Services, but he came sometimes as a, just, visitor to see the people, and so I met him. And then there was the famous dance, also, yes. And I wasn't prepared for anything like that. I didn't have a formal dress, so I had to buy that, and actually the other fellows helped me with that, because I didn't know where to go or what to do, so – and that was a very nice occasion, too, and of course there were people from outside who came. Oh, yes, there was one other person, who was – he had been a fellow here. He was Greek and so was his wife, and he worked at the embassy, at the Greek embassy.
GB: It was not Milton, no?
EE: No, no, not Milton. Milton was American.
GB: Yeah. Maybe Pelopidas Stephanou?
EE: No.
GB: Um –
EE: I think it was something with "A", but I'm not quite sure. Very nice person, whom I met that way, also. Now, maybe he hadn't been a Fellow here, but he was coming to lectures and whatnot, and thus Margaret had met him. That's all I can think of. There were a number of people who came to the lectures who were not directly connected but were very much interested in early Christian, Byzantine art, I suppose, and that's how they came here—for lectures and so on.
GB: When you were here, something very specific and nowadays a rare historical moment or, actually, event took place and that is what we would call nowadays the United Nations Conversations.
EE: Well, yes, that happened during the summer and therefore we couldn't be here. Of course, we didn't know what was going on, but it was something government, we were told, or so – so we had to leave.
GB: So you were not informed in any detail about that – of course, for security reasons.
EE: Exactly, oh absolutely, and also it wasn't yet certain what was going to happen – I mean what the result would be. So many people, when one said, "I work in Dumbarton Oaks" – "Oh, you're connected with the UN." And I had to inform them, "No, no, no, that happened to take place here, but it had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks; it's just the place that was handed over to them for the summer."
GB: And as far as I remember from what I have read about it, it was indeed that the start of the fellowship term had to be postponed, I think. You had to leave, of course, for several – it was, kind of, already booked but then extended – it got into more rounds and additional discussions. And I don't know if you remember that, but that's, I think, what I gather from the reports: that the fellows had to be a little bit late, in fact.
EE: Yes, I think, I don't remember specifically but just very vaguely I remember something for me that was lucky, actually, because I had gotten sick – I had had a very severe case of infectious hepatitis while I was in Turkey and it was a sad thing, because I was told Iran has just a more liquid yogurt, and I didn't know that it was mixed with water. If I had known that – I was told it's just more liquid. If I had known that it was mixed with water, I would never have taken it. And I got very sick from that, and I had a relapse at that time. So it was good that it started later. I had to be on a diet for quite a while.
GB: One point I had noted down is about Koehler, and although you said that Koehler was not here – you have heard about that – the event or the years before, about his role –
EE: Yes, and I missed that very much, really.
GB: That is my interest, actually, when you say you missed it: so, is that in retrospect or is it that you had known already at the time when you were here that the earlier years starting in 1940, until 1943, were under a different guidance because of Koehler and how he thought that Fellows at the institute could be built up – was it that you knew?
EE: No, I didn't know about it at all. I didn't know that – how it worked before. Koehler had not told me.
GB: How'd you learn about that – do you remember?
EE: It was from, especially, Margaret Ames and also Josephine Harris, who told me.
GB: So, your co-Fellows told you.
EE: Yes, they told me.
GB: And how did they talk about that time? That was a really interesting time.
EE: They loved it. They all thought it was wonderful.
GB: Can you explain what they thought and what it was?
EE: Well, it was a collaboration. I mean, one's work was being discussed and helped by discussing it not only with Professor Koehler but with the other Fellows also, in an informal but formal way – I mean, by getting together.
GB: And that's what they called seminars.
EE: Yes.
GB: Was it on a regular basis?
EE: It was on a regular basis, yes. And that – I realized I felt a little bit footloose as a result of it, having heard what it was, because when Professor Koehler came, it was for – oh, I don't know – two days or something like that, so really he couldn't do much and you couldn't get much from that, because he came for other, mainly other purposes.
GB: But he came to visit Dumbarton Oaks when you were here. But, he did not –
EE: He didn't stay.
GB: And were there any kind of discussions between you and the other Fellows, how to, maybe, get back to this, or why this had stopped, or was there any kind of understanding –
EE: No, it was – that was never being discussed, and I didn't have the initiative at that time, at all. I was too junior, really. I mean I had to adjust to a new life. Today, yes, I would do something –
GB: It seems –
EE: – or try to do something.
GB: – as if there was a common sense that this was very much appreciated –
EE: But it was something of the past.
GB: Yeah. It was something of the past, which was not – no more the everyday life of the institute. Yeah, that is very interesting. That is very –
EE: And I would say that Margaret Ames and Josephine Harris had gotten all the groundwork done this way, and they had found all the right directions and it wasn't so important for them to get any help or further directives. But, as far as I am concerned, it would have been a great help.
GB: Were they conducting – no, actually, you had said they all had their Ph.Ds already.
EE: Well, Margaret Ames didn't.
GB: Margaret Ames didn't, so she – but you said she was on her own track, so to speak. She did not necessarily need any more guidance –
EE: Well, I suppose she was getting it also when she – where did she get her Ph.D? I forget where she got it, really. But, well, it was – for her, at that stage, it was more cumulative. You see, she had to explore more, other sites, also. But the basic part was already there – of basic directives or direction.
GB: You weren't able to take that into the next, following year, actually, or following years. I see that both of you left after that year and only Rosalie Beth Green continued to stay so that the only one to benefit was her, I think, she is listed under this '45-'46 fellowship year. You came to the end of your term – of your years at some point and you – did you know where to go and did you get any kind of support or advice from the co-Fellows –?
EE: Oh no, nothing whatsoever.
GB: – or was it just a, kind of, natural coming-to-the-end of the fellowship?
EE: That was it, yes.
GB: And when you left, what was your, kind of –
EE: Well that was – in May I got engaged, so before I left – not that I told anybody, though.
GB: Oh, yeah? No?
EE: No. Well, Barbara Sessions, I think, knew. But otherwise, no, nobody. And I got married in the fall, September of '45. And then I helped my husband.
GB: And you moved – well, you lived –
EE: First in Washington, D.C. and then we moved to outside Vienna, Virginia, to the country. And there we did a lot of work for the house, something I'd never done before – but everything. I was a contractor and I did painting and I did woodwork and I did everything. Oh, and garden work.
GB: And while you were here, in Vienna, which is not far away, by – no, actually, it's –
EE: No, it's in northwestern Virginia.
GB: Did you come back to Dumbarton Oaks? Sure, I guess, as you continued –
EE: Yes, I did. Not very much.
GB: And your husband was still working here, I mean researching, conducting research here at Dumbarton Oaks?
EE: Here? I don't think so. I mean, he came before maybe once for research but mainly for just visiting Thacher or some other friends he had.
GB: So when you decided to stay here in D.C., was this because of –
EE: Because my husband was curator at the Freer Gallery, in charge of the Islamic department.
GB: Until when?
EE: Until '65
GB: So that's a long time.
EE: Yes. Well, we had moved back then, to Washington. I was very much – I wanted very much to go back, because it was difficult, really, always that long drive and so on.
GB: And I guess you connected, then – through the professional relationship and work relationship – you connected more to the Freer-Sackler Gallery and the landscape at that time – of course, such institutions stood in a different all-around shape, I think, an organization, than nowadays – but particularly your focus shifted toward that.
EE: Well yes, one year we went to the Middle East. That was nineteen fifty-fi – well, oh, before that, one year before that, I worked at the State Department, which was actually a very interesting experience. It was in the research department on the Middle East. The only problem was that I didn't dare to discuss anything about the Middle East because I wasn't sure whether I'd read it at documents in the State Department or in the press. So I kept quiet. But I read about some friends of ours, also, who were in the Middle East. It was broadening my experience, I would say. And then, of course, when we went to the Middle East, for one year – actually it was even fourteen months – we went over Europe to the Middle East to countries I'd never been – my husband had never been – to. He knew a great deal about it, but he had never visited there. And we started, from Italy we went to – we flew, for me it was my first flight, to Egypt and the Patriarch, the Patriarch of Cairo, was on the same plane, and it was his first flight and my first flight. There were very few passengers. It was an Alitalia plane. And he would say, "Oh look down here! No look down there!" So we were like two children, really. It was very exciting.
GB: Speaking of this makes me realize that you came, of course, from Europe to America for your fellowship by boat.
EE: By boat.
GB: And not at all by airplane.
EE: No, by boat. It was, it took a month to get here, and my parents and I were the only passengers. It was on a freighter, an American freighter. And it was – well, we saw something; nothing happened, but we saw something of what – of the war, of course. First of all, it was all darkened – or blackened. And it was interesting to learn about the experience of the sailors. They were informed that I was a – well, a fairly young person, of course. They'd have to behave, so to say. So they treated me like a sister, and they told me all kinds of stories of their lives.
GB: How old were you?
EE: Pardon?
GB: How old were you at the time?
EE: I was twenty-four, I think. So it was quite an experience being exposed to American life, not of exactly the type of person I would normally meet. But there were also some, of course, who went rather into the Merchant Marine than joining the regular forces.
GB: How did it come that you were on that boat, on that carrier, as the only family, you said?
EE: Yes. Well, my father had connections, all kinds of connections. He had connections from Istanbul with the British and the Americans.
GB: And you came from Istanbul? That's where you –
EE: From Istanbul we went to Cairo and from Cairo, then, to – on the boat, on the Liberty Ship.
GB: And you lived in Istanbul.
EE: For almost five years.
GB: Five years.
EE: At first I didn't continue my studies there, and then I was advised that I could do that and I did. And I learned. I took courses in four languages: in Turkish, in German, French, and English.
GB: At the university?
EE: Yes, Istanbul University. I mean, it was professors from different countries. Of course, it was all translated into Turkish, but I took the original. One of my teachers was Runciman and he taught, of course, history, but also art – Byzantine art.
GB: Was that how you got started, the interest –
EE: Pardon?
GB: Is that how your interest got started or piqued in –
EE: Well, it was, I mean – in Istanbul you can't avoid it, almost.
GB: Well, you could have had an interest in later, Ottoman art and –
EE: I developed that there, actually, but I was extremely lucky in Vienna, because I – Sedelmeier was the chief of the art history department. He had just come in when I started. And the last term I had with him – he not only did the general history of art course (he did it over four years), but also then special courses in whatever interested him or he had worked on. And that was on St. Sophia. So I knew quite a bit about it, as a result of it. And when I saw it for the first time, in Istanbul then, the amazing thing was, I noticed the chandeliers so much and they bothered me so much that I couldn't really enjoy and understand the space and the greatness of the church. And I went out again, quite disappointed and went another day, again, and then I didn't see the chandeliers, but I saw the space and ever since then I've seen the space – and of course all the details.
GB: That is amazing to think of Sedelmeier giving a lecture, or a seminar, on Hagia Sophia.
EE: No. He had worked on that.
GB: He had worked on it?
EE: Yes.
GB: I didn't know that. That's interesting.
EE: On the baldacchino system, especially, yes.
GB: An architectural component.
EE: Yes, well the domes and the semi-domes and so on. And that's how he got to it. And that was always very interesting for me, then. I mean, I saw things differently from, probably, what – people who really know structures and so on, of course, too, but for me it was the essence or the most important part. So I saw it differently, probably, from others.
GB: And before Istanbul, you lived in Vienna.
EE: Oh yes, yes I was born in Vienna and went to school in Vienna.
GB: Now of course, you, what – that your life would be directed in quite a – by a marriage of course, and coming – something very important, that you would have, you would have never thought of that, that this was going to be life altering, so to speak, which is of course not true, but one – at the end of the fellowship, so to speak, that was quite amazing to see that you continued your professional interest and found a wonderful husband and together you could manage to work in the area of architecture, and that's what you do, up to today, which is amazing to think. And looking back and seeing this –
EE: Well, I think, actually, it was very lucky for me that in Istanbul, for instance, the emphasis was really on Near Eastern archaeology, so I also – I mean I took also history of art but also Near Eastern archaeology – so I got a broader vision, which actually Sedelmeier had started for me, because he was very much interested in the broader vision. I know some of my fellow students in Vienna criticized him: "Oh, some details are not right." But it meant a great deal to me. There were other professors who went into details. So I saw the advantages of the one and the other. But you know there are some who never see the broader picture, which is a pity.
GB: How would you characterize the Dumbarton Oaks tenure and your fellowship here, with this respect, regarding the overall scholarly interest and what you just formulated – you mentioned the broader picture – and cross-cultural exchanges and –
EE: Except for, I would say, except for the lectures and more so the symposium, it didn't further that. But I think things have changed. I mean, everything has changed. Not here. Life has changed; everything has changed. It's much more open to other cultures in general. And so, of course it would be also in Dumbarton Oaks.
GB: Yeah, indeed. Very much so and I think that is – it's good to look at this change.
EE: The broader picture.
GB: Not only the different disciplines, which at that time didn't even exist here at Dumbarton Oaks. There was no Pre-Columbian Department. There was no Garden-Landscape Department. And not only having these two other – so important – other branches or disciplines at Dumbarton Oaks, but to connect them, to exchange and to see the Fellows exchanging ideas freely across the aisle, so to speak, which is really quite nice. And I understand that this was, indeed – if we again apply this term, which is not correct, because there was no talk about a mission at that time – but if we think of the mission of a research institute, that has very much changed, you know, from an institute which was, at that time, I understand, driven by establishing at such a – I forget the term. There was a term at the time, how they called this database work. I can't remember, but I read it somewhere. But this was a kind of major point of activity of the institution, to develop this pool of material culture, evidence, records, and with that, of course, to facilitate research and to offer this to other Byzantine scholars and to everybody who's interested –
EE: I remember Kitzinger once mentioned to me that it was quite helpful for some work he did.
GB: He did. So he took advantage of that.
EE: Yes, because he knew about it, of course. And he took advantage of it.
GB: That's interesting. Yeah.
EE: If I may say one other thing, I think Mrs. Bliss would be really delighted that the broader vision has been reached, because she was that kind of – just as that quotation –
GB: Yes, indeed. Yeah, that's interesting, because, I mean, I see this, I read this out of what I know of correspondence we now know about and so on, but that you say this – that is, of course, you with your knowledge of her as a person. You have experience; you have encounters. How would you – why do you – can you expand on this? Can you – when you think of her and how you perceived her, was it because she was just the kind of lady walking into this place and embracing this place by nature of being the owner, previous owner, at least, of that place? That's what I see – what she has really created, an all-over Bliss creation, the collection they collected, the gardens they built up from scratch, the house they bought but very much remodeled, rebuilt – was that what I – was that what she, kind of – was that her realm when you –
EE: Well, she may not have known it then, but I have the feeling she would be pleased. Sometimes, you don't know exactly what you want, that is, how you can realize or what you can realize, but I think it would be – not only for Mrs. Bliss but also for Mr. Bliss.
GB: How do you remember the proper introduction? How were they introduced or were you introduced to the Blisses? Like, "This is Mildred and Robert Bliss," or, "These are the founders of the institution," or how was that, kind of –?
EE: I don't know. I only know that I just met them, and I don't think anything was said, because I was probably told beforehand, so: "May I introduce –"
GB: Because I ask – we know and we learned from various sources that they were very modest, indeed, about their donations, about participating, about funding projects, about supporting artists; often it was done anonymously. They didn't want to be named on all sorts – so, that's in a way what I, kind of, – just, you know, from being told or having read, I think that is very much confirmed through what you – you can't remember what you, basically –
EE: Of course, times were very different. So, and she was used to – both of them were used to being in certain circles and that there were certain behaviors and formalities and all that – that would be different. And I'm sure, I have the feeling they would understand the difference.
GB: They were very much open-minded regarding the avant-garde. I mean, they were very much – well, it's maybe wrong to say they were contemporary regarding their living taste of, the set-up of houses – it was very, I think, traditional and very much, of course, according to the Zeitgeist of the time.
EE: Yes, that's right.
GB: But at the same time we know – not only because they, as I said, supported artists, contemporary artists, but, of course, music – and by the way, which reminds me that you had heard Stravinsky – that you attended the premiere of Stravinsky's concerto.
EE: Yes. That's right. I heard it the other day, by the way, on the radio again.
GB: But not conducted by Stravinsky, I guess.
EE: I guess not.
GB: So that was indeed –
EE: Oh yes, indeed.
GB: Do you remember the occasion? It was while you were here on your fellowship?
EE: Yes, I think so.
GB: And you met him. You were introduced to him.
EE: Well yes, I somehow met him. I mean I didn't talk to him at length.
GB: And you may know – I don't know if you know – that later on they commissioned a piece by Copland, so again a contemporary.
EE: No, I didn't know that.
GB: And later on, late, very late, Dumbarton Oaks commissioned a piece for their—well, on the anniversary for the Blisses, 100th anniversary, and by coincidence it would just be the year we had premiered here at Dumbarton Oaks – it was indeed the year of the opening of the reinstalling there in 2008, which was the 100th wedding anniversary of the Blisses. It was a kind of nice –
EE: And, uh?
GB: Oh, Joan Tower, the composer, an American contemporary composer—she's quite known and it's –
EE: Great, wonderful.
GB: With Stravinsky, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Copland's piece, and Joan Tower's piece, which is, I've forgot the title; it's Dumbarton Oaks Quintet, or something like that – no, actually that's – I think, the Dumbarton Quintet, if I'm not wrong. And we had all the three pieces.
EE: Wonderful.
GB: And it's just wonderful to see and to hear the three different pieces and to know about the three different musicians and composers and to link all these to the Blisses as the one couple, who connected so many arts and so many visionary ideas in their life.
EE: I should, perhaps, say something that I was told, true or false – that Mrs. Bliss expected that all the scholars would just go to the garden and they would discuss things like in ancient Athens or so. And, well, we shook our heads over that – that it was not – it doesn't work that way. But, I think she would have understood that it doesn't work that way. I mean, it was understandable with her background, her upbringing, and so on – and the time was different – and it has changed and as through scholarly discussions and so on, this was, perhaps, more forward-looking, I mean different, already, formally. And she didn't know that. But I still think – I mean it's wonderful what she has done, really. I appreciate it much more now than I did then, to be quite frank.
GB: Yeah, it is again a nice confirmation of what I know only by reading letters and other articles, which have been written in the meantime about the Blisses. She very much understood the gardens as an essential part of the Dumbarton Oaks research institute and she liked the idea of the scholars walking and getting inspired and talking and exchanging ideas by walking and encountering this landscape, this extraordinary space she created, which is kind of an ideal, like, locus amoenus. And it was maybe a paradise, even, what we may call an ivory tower, but the ivory tower very much with an extension, which is indeed this kind of muse temple of thought-provoking ideas – inspiring. And it's very much what she expressed in her last will, that this scholarship and the lives of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks should never be de-attached from the gardens and from the trees, not just a nice, green landscape around the house, which is the library and collection. It's really a part of it and that's quite interesting.
EE: I didn't realize that, but I must say, personally, I went through the garden a great deal. I mean, instead of going over the street, I went through the garden, through what then was called the Fellows Building. And, well the gardens meant a great deal to me. So, in being unaware of that, it did help me.
GB: Did you see changes? Did you see changes over the past recent years? Have you looked into the gardens? Is it still the same or is it changed?
EE: No, it's very different, of course, because of the new buildings – for me, new buildings.
GB: And the public part of the gardens – the rose terrace and the fountain.
EE: There was a fountain before.
GB: Mhm, yeah, I know that. It's the setting and the park-scape parts that are totally the same, unchanged, but one should not forget that the gardens, the trees, of course, change. So, I say this because only over the past two years we have fought and had many losses, many trees lost to lightning.
EE: Oh, that also. Well, you have those ancient white oaks.
GB: Yeah. They would be interesting to – and I guess you haven't had a chance to walk –
EE: No, unfortunately not. I mean, I walked in that part [points to her left, east of the Fellows Building/Guest House] and that is, of course, entirely different, because they're, so to say, formal walks now. Paths, I should say. But that's, of course, necessary under the circumstances.
GB: That's so wonderful that you – to have you sharing all these memories with us and –
EE: Well, I hope I contributed something, at least.
GB: Oh yeah, oh yeah, indeed. It is a very, very specific year, or years, here and it's – yes – a treasure of recollections.
EE: I mean it's, of course, personal recollections and objectively it may be different, slightly different.
GB: That's exactly what we all have: personal recollections. And they each piece together, so to speak, and there's history at the end – it's history. And that's very much appreciated. Do you remember the – you remember quite well the year that was your arrival and – because I'm not sure if we are even correct in our documents. When you arrived – and you said in May – your marriage was in the fall of '45, yeah? And you –
EE: No, no. Yes.
GB: Was it '45?
EE: No, you see, I was here in '43-'44 to '45.
GB: So you arrived in '43, in fall of '43?
EE: Yes, in late fall. I didn't get here at the beginning of the year, because I wasn't here yet. I mean I wasn't here yet in this country.
GB: You arrived in this country in '43.
EE: Yes.
GB: So you were pretty new to the country.
EE: I was quite new. I also experienced Ellis Island for three days, which for me was an interesting experience. It wasn't the same for my father, of course. But I was young, you know. I could take things like that. I just observed. And actually it's very good for everybody to once experience being confined. One understands things better, certain things much better that way – [laughs] Well.
GB: Thank you so much. That was really wonderful.
EE: Well it's a pleasure to be here. And if I can contribute anything, I'm delighted, of course.
GB: Well, whatever memories and recollections you have, please continue to send us an email and share them and maybe some memories will come up and –
EE: Sometimes. It could happen, yes.
GB: This was wonderful, wonderful.
EE: Now perhaps I should say one thing about Professor Friend, because the way I put it sounds, actually, negative, I think, and I don't want that to be the case. He just was interested in certain things in a, perhaps, different way.
GB: Yeah. So I think that we have covered quite a lot: various aspects, Fellows, research, professors, social life, dancing –
EE: [Laughs] Oh yes.
GB: –lunches, the Blisses, the United Nations –
EE: Perhaps I should – I don't think that came up, actually, that we were invited also at the Blisses. I mean we Fellows. That may have been at the end of the year, but I don't remember. Maybe in connection with a symposium or something, which was very nice, of course. So I saw their house and –
GB: Their house in Georgetown. So they really cared. I mean it was – they were present and they were engaged. They were really active.
EE: It was their children.
GB: Yeah, yeah indeed. Yep. Yep. Wonderful.
EE: Well, thank you very much.
GB: Oh, I would – it's my pleasure.
EE: Do you know how to turn it off?]]>
WHA: Thank you very much.
INT: July 17th.
INT: Oh, I'm sorry, yes, today's July 17th, 2009.
WHA: Everybody's in [laughter]. Did you get TJ in over there? [laughter]
INT: Oh yes, and Thomas Jefferson is presiding [laughter]. Which is very appropriate.
WHA: Where's his computer relay?, hanging on his – I assume my computer works wireless. When they were hooking it up, they said, where we gonna put it, and I said, just hang it around his neck, he'll love it.
INT: That's great. We'll start off with: you were never a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: No, no.
INT: So how did you first come to be involved?
WHA: Well, I was trying to remember all of that, how I – my first introduction to the whole Dumbarton Oaks scene was through Walter Muir Whitehill, who was a great friend of the Blisses, and who wrote what was considered the official sponsored history of Dumbarton Oaks. Do you know it?
INT: No, to our knowledge, we've been told that there's never been an official –
WHA: Not true. Walter Muir Whitehill, who was - well, I knew him through Boston connections, and he was a great friend of some of the Adams connections, obviously up there, and he was the head of the Boston Athenaeum, and very much involved, he was on the board of the art museum in Boston and the Massachusetts historical society, he was involved in everything, and at a very early stage in my life somehow I became a part of – I would see the Whitehills in Boston, and so I knew about the Blisses really second-hand but fairly intimately in terms of what they were doing. But his book is a very key document.
INT: I would imagine so. I'm not even sure there's a –
WHA: And Walter died in the late seventies, I think, so this book would have been done, well obviously before Mildred Bliss died in sixty-nine, but anyway he was very much an intimate. Then when I came to the National Gallery, I'd been living in Princeton and I was working for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund briefly before I came to the National Gallery, and it may have been through some Princeton connection that we then – Mrs. Bliss, though she had just died, was very much a social and cultural presence in Georgetown, which meant basically Washington. And Tom Bayard – does his name ring a bell? You've come on to him. He taught at Trinity I think, after he left Dumbarton Oaks, and he was a kind of protégé of Mrs. Bliss, and after she'd moved out of the house, down on Q – we were on P just around the corner – and Tom was a friend of friends of ours in Princeton so there were all these, I suppose not professional, but just sort of these connections, and we became good friends of Tom's, so I suppose that was really the first behind-the-scenes introduction, because the staff was very, very small.
INT: What year was this?
WHA: Seventy. Mrs. Bliss had just died. We're told in Washington that they were referred to as the "Three Bs" – Mrs. Bliss, Mrs. Bacon – Virginia Bacon, Mrs. Robert Lowe Bacon – and Mrs. Beale, who lived in Decatur House, opposite the White House – still living privately in that house. Mrs. Bacon was living in I think what had been John Marshall's house on F Street, pretty extraordinary, they were all contemporary buildings with the White House, and then Mrs. Bliss was out in the country. But those were really the powerhouse figures, and this is social history that has nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks, but it's part of the texture. But we're into the transitional period of Dumbarton Oaks throughout the '70s. I think through Walter Muir Whitehill I became well acquainted with the Tylers, and it was Bill Tyler who asked me to be a senior fellow. And you know the Tyler connections to the Blisses.
INT: He was the godson, I believe.
WHA: Yes, and he was also the godson of Edith Wharton. And Edith Wharton was a great friend of Mrs. Bliss, and also Beatrix Farrand, and that's how Beatrix Farrand comes into the story, and I think that it was Royall Tyler, his father, that introduced the Blisses, I mean Mr. Bliss's mother, to Bliss's father.
INT: That was Royall Tyler?
WHA: She then became Mrs. Royall Tyler. [NB: It is unclear to whom he is referring.] So Bill – I always loved the fact that he was Edith Wharton's godson [laughter].
INT: And I think he was heir to all her papers and things.
WHA: He did, which he then negotiated – I think Yale has them now. I think that's right. I don't know, the Bliss papers, I suppose they're at Harvard?
INT: They were moved to Harvard. They originally were at Dumbarton Oaks, but Dumbarton Oaks didn't really seem to have the space or the resources.
WHA: And that's not – that kind of archival manuscript maintenance, it's just like at Monticello; we don't have any – other than a working library – we don't keep any manuscript material there. It all goes to the University of Virginia. Anything that has to be taken care of.
INT: We do have the material related to the building of Dumbarton Oaks and the gift –
WHA: You have all of that? But her plans, all of that is out in California.
INT: Oh, I didn't know that.
WHA: Well, she lived in California near the end of her life. So I know that a lot of the original garden plans, which have – all that's been documented, published, that's well-known. Well, anyway, that's the best of my recollection.
INT: Did you know Mrs. Paul Mellon as well?
WHA: Well, I did know her, and in fact when I was on the board there was discussion even then about the possibility of her giving her collection to Dumbarton Oaks, but it was clear that this was not going to happen in the 1970s, because her interests were clearly very special, and she did not want to have it being institutionalized under either Dumbarton Oaks or Harvard, and we still don't know where her collection is going to go – and maybe you do – or have not heard.
INT: I know that she's built a library.
WHA: She has, there, that's been a number of years ago. But it's not – it's fine for that but I can't imagine that being maintained in perpetuity. I suspect – I've heard rumors that there is another institution where maybe it would go, but I don't know any more than that. But she was never – was she actually ever on the board? I can't remember.
INT: I believe she was.
WHA: Her name was on it, but she – I think that she was never really active. It was with the idea I think that this would happen, but it was quite clear that this was not – that she was going in her own direction and so on.
INT: Yeah, we tried to speak with her –
WHA: No, I don't think it would make any sense now. She's 98. Her stepson is a good friend of mine – pardon me, her son by an earlier marriage – lives in Washington and is a good friend of mine, and I don't – people around Upperville never see her much. That would be not a productive avenue.
INT: Was Jack Thatcher still around the Washington scene in these years?
WHA: Oh, Jack was around, and he had just retired, I can't remember when.
INT: Sixty-nine.
WHA: He was very much a gentleman about town and knew everybody.
INT: It seems like there was a great deal of integration between the Dumbarton Oaks collection at that time, or at least the administration, and the Washington social scene.
WHA: Dumbarton Oaks was very much a Georgetown social scene. There were very few people who had any real intellectual interest in what Dumbarton Oaks was doing. It was something of a mystery. I mean, first of all, garden history – people didn't know what – that was such a new discipline or sub-discipline. Byzantine studies, that was totally off the books, and the pre-Columbian was also, really. That beautiful collection, that jewel collection – too bad you didn't get to speak to the architect.
INT: Philip Johnson. He passed away, I think.
WHA: Oh, yes.
INT: Did you know him?
WHA: I did, just briefly, when we lived in New York, but through other connections that had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks.
INT: He did leave memoirs or something like that.
WHA: About Dumbarton Oaks? Oh, well then that's good.
INT: It's helpful.
WHA: And someone else that I knew who is still I think living is Louis Auchincloss, who's a novelist and lawyer who lives in New York, who's in his early 90s now.
INT: What was his connection to Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: Well, he was a good friend of them. He would have been a much younger friend, but he would have known the Harvard-Dumbarton Oaks scene, and I remember him talking to me about how Harvard had somehow – whether his law firm or somebody that he was involved with – when the Blisses were persuaded to give Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, and he was rather critical of that. And he felt that Harvard had pushed them into it and used the threat of the war, the possible "invasion" like the war of 1812 – they ought to have – that somehow Cambridge Massachusetts was going to be safer, to own the property would add more stability. This is what I recollect Louis telling me, whether there's any truth to it I have no idea. But that was inside gossip.
INT: Very helpful to have.
WHA: Mr. Kreeger was also on the board when I was on the board. Another name that you – he's long since gone, the businessman in Washington. Does his name –?
INT: I don't think we've heard anyone bring him up before.
WHA: Well, he was – they were great art collectors, and he was on the board of the corp., and he was involved in all kinds of positions around culturally, and I guess I knew him through being at the National Gallery and because of his collection. But Bill Tyler got him on the board because he was a Harvard graduate and could stand up to the pressure from Harvard, which – there was a sense of pressure, at least in that period; the rumor was that Harvard would be happy to close the whole thing down and take the all proceeds back to Cambridge.
INT: What was the gossip related to that? Because it seems so explicit in the Bliss will that that is not what they wanted.
WHA: They were very explicit about it, and Louis Auchincloss discussed that with me about that issue, but nevertheless –
INT: Harvard will be Harvard.
WHA: Everyone read Harvard's ambitions.
INT: Yes, I think they took material from the collection up to – was it the Fogg during this time?
WHA: Yes.
INT: And that was a very big thing.
WHA: Was that during the war, when they took it?
INT: They might have taken it during the war, and then I think again maybe in the early seventies?
WHA: They could have, I don't remember. And that was not a good idea, it made everyone very nervous. And then also the friction was over the way the money was redistributed. Harvard had its formula dealing with the Bliss bequest, the proceeds didn't come back to Dumbarton Oaks, they got a fixed percentage.
INT: Really? Where was the other money –?
WHA: It was overhead for Cambridge, as we understood it.
INT: Were these for the Dumbarton Oaks professorships?
WHA: Well, all the operating funds, Dumbarton's endowment went to Harvard, you see, they would distribute it, they earned 8% and Dumbarton Oaks got maybe 4% – I don't know that, I'm just saying, that was at least – and Kreeger, who was very much of a finance man on the board, was quite outspoken and critical if ever anyone from Harvard ever came down.
INT: Were there visits from Harvard?
WHA: Well, not very often. The dean of arts and science – he was a very powerful dean, I can't think of his name.
INT: Bok?
WHA: No, that's the president. Bok came I think once during my time, and when you think how many institutions Harvard has, the very idea that he might have even come once – but the dean who was very powerful, and I think he was dean of arts and sciences but I can't remember the names. But the problem at Dumbarton Oaks – Byzantines studies at Harvard, you obviously have a connection at Harvard, but the other two areas did not and do not, and that was always felt to be a weakness in the way the thing's structured, and that gave the Byzantinists – they were, you know, not equal among equals. But that's again part of the politics of the thing. But everyone understood all this.
INT: If we could go back for a second to your relationship to Mr. Whitehall.
WHA: Whitehill.
INT: Whitehill, excuse me. You mentioned he had talked to you a little bit about the Blisses, did he have any particular stories that you recall? We're very interested in –
WHA: Not that I can recall now. I might be able to if I reread his book, but I'm sure anything he told me in the kind of after-dinner, over-scotch conversation would have been in his book and so on. He loved the style of the Blisses in terms of the way they went about supporting music and the whole civilized, really European atmosphere that really prevailed, certainly in the seventies. There was nothing else in Washington that came near that, because of the scale of it, small, intimate. And the Sunday night concerts – you had to be invited, as if Mrs. Bliss was still presiding. So it was very much a – the rituals were all figured out, and certainly carried on, with Jack Thatcher in the wings criticizing if they weren't.
INT: He was also a godson, I think, of the Blisses. Or at the very least a friend.
WHA: Yeah, he probably was. I don't remember that. But there was very much this curatorial reverence and caretaking of the image of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks as the Blisses related to it. So you had ten years – Giles Constable, maybe his father, who taught at Harvard, in art history I believe, probably knew the Blisses, and there may have been something, a little nepotism there, I don't know. He surely must have talked about that.
INT: Yes. We didn't actually get to –
WHA: Do that one.
INT: Well, I wonder if you might talk a little bit more about the European feel. Was it – I assume you must have gotten to know some of the scholars there at the time.
WHA: Oh yes, I did. And there were always European scholars, and we did see them, made a point that they would meet at the National Gallery and there was an atmosphere. Whether that goes on now or not, I don't know.
INT: We haven't gotten the sense that there's as much interaction as you're talking about.
WHA: Interaction, no. At that period there was, on a very informal level.
INT: Who were the major players there as far as academics, as you recall
WHA: Oh, I can't remember now the names again. Betty MacDougal, of course, she was somewhat controversial as a director. She was not an easy person to get along with, and people had the impression that she really didn't want anybody coming in doing research other than the fellows. And that's fair enough to understand, that it was a limited facility and so on. There was a feeling she was not particularly friendly to scholars who were not – who had a legitimate reason – who were not [fellows]. That's just a rumor and an impression I had. I think Betty suffered from the fact that while she was an art history major, garden history itself was parvenu, and didn't have full credentials at Harvard, or certainly at the Fogg. You can understand that.
INT: Well, at that time Dumbarton Oaks was really the only center –
WHA: It was really the only center. There was – the scholarship going on – there was a good deal going on in England in garden history; it has its genesis I think really after the war. And lots of the fellows and people who came up and were influential read at some of the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks. They were all international figures but I think the English garden history crowd – they quite often were members of the symposia; you can read the lists and so on. The Byzantinists, not so much. Not in terms of such a specialized field of study, as you know. With garden history, people – even though they didn't understand what the discipline was about and how it worked in terms of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks – nevertheless people said, well, you know, I have a garden.
INT: Did you have much interaction with the collection at Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: Well, I've used it, yes. The study that I did on the French garden, I used [it] quite extensively, of course. At that point I had curated an exhibition on Jefferson at the National Gallery called "The Eye of Thomas Jefferson;" my catalog you may know.
INT: Seventy-six.
WHA: In working on Jefferson I did become very much involved in eighteenth-century garden history, because of his travels and interests, when he was in France. And it was actually through that rather narrow avenue that – and I realized at that point that there wasn't a useful small volume – not a picture book, but a serious book on the history of the French garden. Which has now been translated into French and two or three other – which is interesting, you know. The French consider that an area that they – would not recognize an American scholar. Actually the French edition of that, they did really quite a beautiful job of it.
INT: Do you remember, during that time when you were interacting with it, what the state of the collection was? As you probably know, there still is no museum space for the garden collection.
WHA: No. And there wasn't any – the museum part of the garden, it was a literary collection. It was works on paper. We never ever thought of it as objects or related to anything other than just seeing it all make perfect sense. Which is the way the Blisses began the collection – what they bought and so on.
INT: So at this point it was mainly the library. Because I know at least over the years they've managed to collect some of the prints and paintings that the Blisses originally had, of gardens.
WHA: Of gardens?
INT: Of botanical gardens.
WHA: Is that in the garden studies section?
INT: That's my understanding. But it sounds like this was not at the time.
WHA: Well, there were things around in the hallways, hanging on the walls, but not in any sense as a part of the study collection.
INT: And in the early sixties things were in the garden library?
WHA: Yes. I didn't know it until sixty-nine, seventy. I'd been there but I never used the collection at that time. I guess Betty MacDougal was there at that time. There was also Alan Fern's wife, do you know her? Alan Fern was head of the prints and photographs at the Library of Congress, and then he became director of not the Portrait Gallery, but what we now call the National Collection, the American Collection. His wife was Betty MacDougal's assistant; she's in Washington. She's somebody. She was very much in the working – I knew her very well, but I can't think of her first name now. Mrs. Alan Fern. I suppose he's living in Washington; I haven't seen him in years. But it was very, very intimate and small; there would never be another person or scholar or anybody. The fellows would be in their little cubicles and I got to know some of them.
INT: Who was there, do you recall?
WHA: I'm hard pressed for names. They'd always be in, working on very interesting subjects, I remember.
INT: In your conversations with one another, did they tend to be about garden history, or the literary aspects, or theoretical? What was the tone at that time in the seventies in terms of the field itself, as you recall?
WHA: Mostly they came out of literature as well as art history, or they came out of history; it is a subdivision of history. And garden history wasn't taught anyplace – what was his name, the head of the garden there; he's English?
INT: John Dixon Hunt.
WHA: John Dixon Hunt. He's very prolific in writing; have you talked to him?
INT: Spoke with him on Monday.
WHA: I remember him very well when he was there; I think later he catalogued Mrs. Mellon's collection, or did two volumes on that collection, which is available to you. But I think that was after he was at – he's at Pennsylvania I think now. He was a very conspicuous art historian, but he came out of literature. Interesting sort of background. My background is law.
INT: How did you get –?
WHA: Well, I don't know.
INT: We talked a little earlier about your time at the National Gallery. I wonder if you remember from that experience what the relationship was like between the National Gallery, specifically, and Dumbarton Oaks; you talked a little bit generally about the close interactions between the institutions.
WHA: Well, of course, John Walker – I was there briefly when he was just retiring. I came in with the idea that Carter would become the director and I was to pick up what Carter was doing, which I did, but that overlaps a bit. But certainly the Walkers were the connection with the Blisses, an intimate part of that circle. Those were the two major international cultural institutions in Washington – I mean in the humanities, or art, not the sciences, but I can't think of any – they were preeminent. No university had international stature in Washington during those years, true? And being both non-political institutions. Those were the two places European visitors would gravitate to, one or both, whatever. And certainly the Blisses were looked upon as major figures and made famous by the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the commissioning of Stravinsky. That was a big time. And far more sophisticated than Washingtonians on a day-to-day basis ever thought of themselves being. Washington then is no different than Washington now, I'm sure, just more people.
INT: It seems like there was a very practical relationship between the two institutions as well, because even when you did the Jefferson exhibit, Dumbarton Oaks I think lent books for that.
WHA: Yes, they loaned things. We had a close working – anything either would need, we were equals.
INT: So you got the sense that during that period Dumbarton Oaks was very generous in lending out the collection.
WHA: Oh, yes, absolutely.
INT: Because we've heard different things over different periods.
WHA: Well, it depends on what department they were. There was a special – we used to speak of our special relationship with Great Britain. There was a special relationship with Dumbarton Oaks. Both institutions were sort of latecomers; the National Gallery didn't open until 1940. The same time as the Blisses, isn't that true?
INT: Yes, the gift was in forty.
WHA: Were they living in Washington? He'd been in diplomatic service.
INT: They were living at Dumbarton Oaks briefly, but it was for really only about five years, I think, before the gift, and I think the museum and collection and center didn't really open until forty-six.
WHA: Forty-six? Well, they were putting up all those Renaissance ceilings. Is the ceiling still there?
INT: And it's been beautifully recently cleaned and renovated and reopened.
WHA: I've often wondered how much of that ceiling is original. I never saw a Renaissance ceiling in Italy that big. It's huge.
INT: But it is lovely.
WHA: It is lovely.
INT: One thing we've also touched on, but I think haven't talked about directly, is of course you got to know Giles Constable very well. He's known now I think as a bit of a controversial director.
WHA: Is he? I don't know what the controversy would be or what it was.
INT: There wasn't a sense of that immediately when you were there?
WHA: Well, Giles – I didn't know him that well. I don't think Giles was an easy person to know as a personality. He's a scholar. I think the Institute was a perfect place for him. I don't know that he was particularly comfortable with administration. That was an area I don't know anything about. That's just my outside/inside reading.
INT: He must have seemed a very different director than Bill Tyler.
WHA: Oh, yes, Bill was a preeminently new administration, the skills of diplomacy. Everything was protocolé, as Mrs. Tyler used to say. And again the foreign service was involved in all the diplomatic – and that played into the diplomatic scene, which should be mentioned, certainly in the seventies, when the diplomatic corps in Washington I think was much more conspicuous and ambassadors played much bigger roles than they do now, with electronics and all the things that have changed their lives and everybody else's. But then the diplomatic corps was very protocolé as who was senior, and they didn't change a lot, and the British ambassador was always – even though he wasn't number one in the pecking order – he was always very much number one on the social scene, and he was usually somebody new, because Washington was always a prime plum slot. But to give you the sense of that, the diplomatic corps really gave the scene around Washington an international feeling. Certainly we were aware of this at the National Gallery because the embassies – we were always being asked for this or that, not loans and so on but just to play some sort of a political role in who was coming to visit, heads of state or the Queen of England or whatever and so on. We had a very close regular relationship with the diplomatic corps. But just take, for instance, the senior diplomat, when we lived in Washington, was the Italian ambassador, and his name was Ambassador Ortona, and he'd been there longer than any other, he'd been through the war; his memory of Washington in terms of diplomacy was extraordinary. But those figures very much were part of the Dumbarton Oaks scene and they were people who knew what Dumbarton Oaks was and what its function was and so on. And that was very important. You usually found the European diplomatic corps in Washington was always of a very high caliber, so you can see how they fitted into the Blisses' idea of this European salon, which is really what it was. And the salon was Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Bacon and Mrs. Beale, and they did run them; those houses were big enough, and certainly Mrs. Bacon was the only one still operating when we – and somehow we made her list so went there quite often so we got some sense of what must have been the same thing at the Blisses' – when they were actually living in the house – in terms of the way the dinner parties were given and the circle that brought them together. None of that exists anymore in Washington – nothing like that, as far as I know.
INT: We've read how one of the things that Mr. Bliss had promised Mrs. Bliss if she would come to Washington was that he would create this sense of a country estate in the city, and of course then the gardens are a tremendous part of that. And I wondered, as a specialist, just for our records, how do you see the gardens themselves at Dumbarton Oaks as they sit in terms of their importance as an American garden or the uniqueness or not and just to touch upon that.
WHA: They are very important, and Beatrix Farrand was very, very important in that whole period, one of the real stars, and the close relationship she had with her patron Mildred Bliss was very important. And she was encouraged to do things that were really extraordinary in terms of the way the whole layout was done and how they worked it out. It was a country estate and in fact the house obviously was a country estate when Georgetown was first founded. I don't know how large it was in the early – again Walter Muir Whitehill I think gives a good history. I was ex-official trustee of the National Trust when I was at the National Gallery, but then I was also on the board of Monticello, of which Walter had been on for long before I went on, and was very much involved in. He was one of the founders of the National Trust, so historic preservation was a part of this whole cultivated cultural scene that was led by people like that, and they all knew each other there, or seemed to. Does this give you any sense of the texture? And I really want to emphasize that the '70s were a transition in Washington culturally, politically, and certainly from Dumbarton Oaks' standpoint.
INT: So people were leaving Washington, or it was just a different generation?
WHA: Just a different [generation]. The atmosphere changes, the power center seemed to shift. Washington always changes. That's another whole big subject, we won't go there.
INT: Oh, well, I wonder – probably should have gotten to this a little bit earlier: just for our institutional history, you were a member I think both of the senior fellows committee for garden studies and for the advisory board, and I wonder if you might talk a little about the differences and maybe even the relationship between the two.
WHA: In my earlier comments I overlapped, I really wasn't making much of a chain. The garden program really was not too active as I remember. It was pretty much Betty's. She was running it that way; the conferences were her contribution. Speaking of the conferences, I mentioned – she was a very important senior fellow, a scholar – the archaeology/classicist Wilhelmina Jashemski, and she was the leading scholar on the gardens at Pompeii, of all things. She certainly is an international figure, recognized in her field. In fact Mary Beard, who's at Cambridge – who has a blog by the way.
INT: Yes, she does. I haven't met her, but she's come to our Cambridge a couple times.
WHA: Well, I've been in touch with her because I'm working on a book, which I managed to get a couple suggestions on, some ideas. She's been very generous and very funny. Her blog is called "A Don's Life;" she's a don, and she's a brilliant classicist and just gave the lectures at California – what are they called, the famous lectures, out there at Berkeley?
INT: Sather?
WHA: And those lectures are now online. You can hear her; it's really quite wonderful, there are three of them, they're marvelous, you can put them on your iPod. But Mary Beard, within the last few – I glance at her blog, and a lot of the time it's things I have no interest in, and she writes on a lot of things, not about the classics or anything else, but another thing. She'll really turn up some very interesting – in fact, I cite her in a footnote from her blog, which I thought she will enjoy. Her motto is "bloggo ergo sum". Anyway –
INT: She was never at –?
WHA: Oh no, but she did mention – I think Wilhelmina died or something came up – and she mentioned something in her blog because she knew everyone – and I was so delighted she did. I sent her an email, we've just been in touch basically by email.
INT: So she really was a figure from an international –
WHA: You mean Wilhemina? Yes, in fact, I helped her get this published; she had real trouble getting it published, you can imagine, and I'm sure it's wildly expensive now. But she had a technique; she was particularly interested in biological archaeology, and there was somebody at the Smithsonian that worked with her in terms of identifying plant material, spores, and seeds and all that, and this was really a pioneer work that goes beyond – not a part of Dumbarton Oaks, but nevertheless to me her connection with Dumbarton Oaks was extremely important.
INT: What was your fondest memory or the most exciting project that you were a part of in terms of your time?
WHA: Oh, I don't know about that. I think the music programs were great, which had nothing to do with anything else other than just the pleasure of it. The quality of the music program was so high.
INT: Was this the Friends of Music program?
WHA: It wasn't called Friends of Music then, it was Mrs. Bliss's musicale.
INT: We were told that there was a dress code for these, that if a fellow were to come underdressed –
WHA: Oh yes, absolutely. Oh, there's no dress code now. But there surely must be at the concert? No. Well, it was on my invitation in those days and everybody knew everybody else, and Virginia Bacon would be sitting on the front row and she would be asleep in the first five minutes after whatever they were playing, snoring.
INT: That still happens!
INT: But a lot of the Blisses' personal staff stayed on.
WHA: Were still around. I don't know that the butler was, but he might have been. Wait a minute: somebody used to bring us sherry at the end of board meetings.
INT: We spoke with Tony and Silvia.
WHA: And the gardener, the head gardener was there.
INT: Don Smith.
WHA: Is he still extant?
INT: Yes.
WHA: So you've talked to him.
INT: Well, he's up in Maine, and they're going to go up and speak with him.
WHA: I think that's extremely important. I would put him high, put him above Giles – no, not for the record!
INT: We spoke with his son, who of course grew up on the grounds in the gardener's cottage, and that was very helpful.
WHA: Yes, and that would be another point of view, another level, of course.
INT: And he was interviewed, I think in ninety-three, it must have been, about the time he retired, just because of course he was such a figure that someone wanted to get his thoughts together, but we would like to talk to him. We haven't heard though that he was Bliss staff.
WHA: Who, Don? He was not? I thought he was on the staff, but I don't know that. You know, again, could be just loosely referred to.
INT: We've heard of an Antonio who was there, who was I guess Mr. Thacher's butler. I don't know that he ever worked for the Blisses, though.
WHA: No. And I think that's probably the one I would have seen.
INT: Alfredo.
INT: Oh, yes, I'm sorry, Alfredo. And Mrs. Aston, who was there in the library. She was rumored to be Bliss staff originally.
WHA: No. She was only very unhappy. But unhappiness was not unusual at Dumbarton Oaks.
INT: We've heard she was a very stiff British enforcer of the dress code.
WHA: Oh yes, she was. But she would somehow unburden herself to me, for reasons I had no idea. Yes, of course. But I knew her; she was probably a neighbor, and I don't really know – she was in a funny way sort of misplaced there; she wasn't a scholar, and I wasn't sure what her role really was.
INT: Our understanding is that she was in charge of the Princeton Index in the library.
WHA: The Index? Yes, it was something like that probably. And there was always particularly friction –
INT: In the library?
WHA: In the library.
INT: We've heard it was sort of a tumultuous time there, and that the staff dwindled down in the library to the point that –
WHA: Oh yes, there was just maybe one person, and there was curatorial work to be done in the rare book collection and prints.
INT: There was a rare book collection at that time? Because we've heard conflicting things really about the formality of that.
WHA: Well, is it not there, the rare book room?
INT: Oh yes, now of course, but we've heard in those days – we talked to Henry and Eunice Maguire, Byzantine fellows at the time, and they would talk about pulling – this was a little bit later, when Irene Vaslef came to the library, when she was head librarian – but they talked a lot about the course of the library with the main house; they've talked about pulling these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books off the shelf and taking them I think either to Irene or to Seka Allen, who was also in the library, and that was the beginning of the rare books collection as we understood it, at least for Byzantine.
WHA: Oh, that's in the Byzantine.
INT: It must have been different for garden.
WHA: Oh yes, totally different. We never went there.
INT: How was the interaction between the programs?
WHA: Oh, absolutely none. Absolutely none. We never even knew where they were. You were talking about the sculpture being put in the garden or something – the thing that really stirred Georgetown up when I was involved there was the plan to build library facilities under the lawn, did you know about this?
INT: No.
WHA: Well this was a whole big –
INT: The North Vista? Yes.
WHA: Yes, and it was going to go – it meant removing one of the trees that had been there even going back before the Blisses, and it was going to be buried under that – what direction are we? North?
INT: Mm-hmm.
WHA: North. The North Vista. And people began to realize how much havoc was going to be wrought, digging this all up and supposedly putting it back. Hugh Jacobson, an architect and an old friend of mine in Princeton, was the architect for it. And I'm sure his plans – you want to talk to Hugh, because he ran into a real buzz saw over this, and he was a good friend of mine but I had grave reservations about the whole thing myself. I didn't feel it was going to go anywhere, so I wasn't carrying posters and picketing the place, but the feeling ran very, very high and it really had to do with the integrity of the grounds, just as simple as that. There would have been some irreparable changes if it had gone through.
INT: Were there any other major – you must have heard about the major projects going on at Dumbarton Oaks on the advisory board. Do you recall any other major projects or controversies or just discussions?
WHA: Oh, I can't think of anything. That one, of course, the extension, it had moved beyond the rumor stage, and the rumors were already pretty horrific around Georgetown, gossip and so on, as to what they were going to do. There were no published plans at the early stage, and I don't know if there ever were. And I think Giles – I think this comes under his – and it had to do with building facilities really for the Byzantinists, because the garden library wasn't growing all that fast. I don't even know now what the size of it is.
INT: I don't know now. I know that – we looked a little bit into the library in the early '70s in our research and it was something like two thousand volumes added in a year for the Byzantine collection and maybe three hundred for the garden.
WHA: Three hundred, yeah. Well, it also has to do with the level of scholarship and so on.
INT: As long as we're talking about the neighborhood, just very briefly, it's interesting because we've talked about, of course, the great ties between Washington social scene and Dumbarton Oaks at the time. But also the controversy really, and hopefully you can speak to this since you were living on P Street, between the immediate neighborhood and Dumbarton Oaks. We've heard things before, particularly about Elizabeth Taylor when she was living in the house on S street.
WHA: On S street?
INT: Senator Warner's house.
WHA: Oh, John Warner's house. But that didn't last very long, though. What was more dramatic was when Johnson appointed the neighbor to the Supreme Court – who am I talking about?, the lawyer in Washington. They lived right on R, just on the next block across the street from Dumbarton Oaks. Oh, famous lawyer, and he had to resign from the Supreme Court but there was some –
INT: Oh, he resigned – this isn't Bork, is it?
WHA: Oh no no, who never made it to the court. No, this is a famous lawyer. And the press was all up there because – and I remember going up to Dumbarton Oaks for something and the press was all around his house and a streaker came down our street because the press was all there. This was the 1970s.
INT: Oh yes, we've heard very many –
WHA: And Elizabeth Taylor, they were really basically I think out in Middleburg.
INT: Oh, really. I know she didn't like Dumbarton Oaks, you know, the gardeners being about and noisy in the morning.
WHA: Oh, that part I know nothing about; never heard anything about it. I can imagine.
INT: But were the neighbors sort of cantankerous with the center being so close?
WHA: I've never really heard anything. You know, being in Georgetown you usually heard those things. No, I think – Dumbarton Oaks kept up – obviously, because of the background of the place, they were very sensitive to its good neighbors' relationships. Giles can speak to that much better because he would get the letters and the telephone calls or whatever. It's too bad you didn't get to speak to Tom Bayard. He was very young, younger than I, and he was very, very like Bill Tyler; he was very, very protective of the Dumbarton Oaks mystique, or the Bliss mystique if you want to call it that, and I remember the first time I was up to see him, because we had mutual friends at Princeton, he said, do you want to see my office. I said, yes, where is it? He said, it's in Mildred Bliss's bedroom. Is that still used as an office?
INT: It is. It's no longer – I'm not entirely sure if Financial is up there –
WHA: Is Financial in the office now? In the bedroom? They haven't changed anything. This was very much looking like her bedroom.
INT: Really? Did you get the sense that it really was a house?
WHA: Oh yes, that part was. I was very interested in that part of it and how the Blisses expanded it, and all that's well-known, but I remember Tom taking me around, showing me all the expansion, the drawing room; they really did the whole – talk about a makeover. Big-time. When you see the original pictures of Dumbarton Oaks, that whole facade I think is new, on the south. I'm sure that's true. You can, if you know the original plans, figure out what they did, but all the grandeur really was brought in by the Bliss hallway and the staircase and all that.
INT: It's still very lovely.
WHA: It's beautiful, isn't it. What do those rooms get used for, the drawing room, anything much?
INT: There's the director of studies' office.
WHA: But the director's office is in that section, but I always thought that was a former utility room or something.
INT: I'm honestly not certain what some of those places used to do. I know when they renovated and they redid the museum and everything some of that must have changed. Because of course the building of the whole library changed everything.
WHA: It's amazing how dark it is. We're going to have to light a candle. Do you need a light?
INT: Oh, we're fine. I just want to make sure I haven't left anything out. You've done quite a good job of answering our questions without our asking them. I wonder if – we've asked a little about the beginning of garden studies, but has Dumbarton Oaks played an important role in the development and progression of it?
WHA: I think that's a very important question. Through its international program, through its fellows it certainly played a – in terms of giving scholars – a base. I never thought the collection was adequate as a real scholarly – when people would say to me, somebody would say, I'm going to apply to Dumbarton Oaks for a junior fellowship, I would say, have you looked at the collection first? Do you know whether it serves your purpose, or what other collections there are in greater Washington, if you look at the larger scene? But in terms of garden history, there was not a lot of energy behind building a larger collection. Excuse me just a moment. It's such an important question. I never thought that they pushed to really establish a base at Harvard. Betty went up there and taught and she was very unhappy, and I think she left after a year, was that right?
INT: I'm not really sure of the exact timing, but I've heard that.
WHA: After she had retired, or left Dumbarton Oaks. It should have been something they were taking a major leadership role, either at Harvard or someplace else, and as far as I know they played no role in the development, say, that John Dixon Hunt has done at the University of Pennsylvania. That's just larger because of his energy, but he's singular in the sense that there's not any others I can think of. Unlike the scene in England, where garden history has a much larger network and resources. Also garden history is built into the whole culture of Great Britain; it's part of their personality, and they see that. Gardening not only at every level, even at the academic; when you think of the great physical artifacts of gardens, the great Royal Gardens are in England, some of them, and it goes back three hundred years. So you can understand why – and we don't have anything like that, and there really isn't, in my opinion, an indigenous American garden style. Not that this had anything to do with Dumbarton Oaks but I'm just saying that we're no different from Byzantine studies. True?
INT: Absolutely.
WHA: But I never felt that Dumbarton Oaks took the leadership that it might have, professional leadership in terms of helping to build up any comparable academic programs. That may not be a factor.
INT: Do they exist now, or is this still a field that's developing?
WHA: I don't know; I'm out of touch with a lot of what's going on now. But just in looking over journals and things – I've given my own garden history library away, I don't have it here now; it was in another building here. It was a working library solely. I gave it to the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, because my family comes from there. I felt again there were no real resources for anyone interested in the subject in that part of the world. And there aren't. But I'm just saying Dumbarton Oaks never really saw its role, and there may be a lot of reasons, a lot of political reasons, academic reasons in terms of Harvard. But it seems to me they could have done more. The garden conferences, are they still going on?
INT: Yes.
WHA: I used to get the programs regularly, but I didn't attend them. I thought the subject matter had gotten somewhat off the track; just looking at it over-all, there wasn't enough interest for me, but that's just a personal point of view. The real quality of it, I don't know.
INT: Well, I think you've answered most of our questions. I wonder, unless there's anything that we've left out that you can think of –
WHA: No, I think your last question is one I haven't said enough, but I've just put in my two cents.
INT: I wonder if in closing if you might talk a little bit about what you see, especially from your position as a person in Georgetown in the earlier days of Dumbarton Oaks, what the Bliss and the Farrand legacies are for Dumbarton Oaks.
WHA: Well, the institution itself is obviously their great legacy and I don't know what one could say beyond that. I didn't know either the Blisses or Beatrix Farrand – at least her work is a physical document that is studied periodically, and worried over in terms of its conservation and so on, and that's alive in that sense, and there's a great deal of academic interest and so on quite apart from the public interest. I don't know if the Blisses are fading. I doubt if anybody other than – I think it's so important institutionally to do what you're doing, for a lot of reasons, though I don't know who or how it will be made available.
INT: It will be placed in the Archives.
WHA: In the Archives? But I've been on a number of boards and I've always felt that when board-members come on, they usually have so little historical perception of an institution, just because of the nature – by the time they go off the board it's too late, and with rotating boards and so on. So I think that having this institutional history is very important; how it's disseminated or how it can be boiled down and useful, I have no idea. It seems to me there ought to be something that could go into a kind of handbook for directors and staff and any board functionaries – seems to me that would be important. Doesn't have to be published but it certainly would be something that would be – because otherwise the Blisses are fading. I doubt the staff has any idea now. Is that true?
INT: For the most part. Dumbarton Oaks did found an Archives I guess in the eighties or around that time. So there has been some formal attempt to collect what they call "Blissiana."
WHA: Blissiana?
INT: Yes. I've just noticed, and we work a lot with the Archives, that directors of study will come down for each of the programs quite a bit and take folders. The most major players, I think. There's an attempt to look back, but whether everyone else at Dumbarton Oaks does, I don't know.
WHA: No, of course not. Beatrix Farrand is a major figure unto herself, obviously, and her collection should have been there. But nothing can be done about that. Maybe copies of all of her papers should be part of – it seems to me that would be just the normal, natural thing.
INT: Thank you so much, you've been very helpful.]]>