Mrs. Stuart A. Rice Oral History Interview

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

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

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

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

See also Stuart A. Rice Papers

[1]

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

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

[2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HESS: Did you ever have any success in that?

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

HESS: Did you ever see Al Capone?

RICE: No, I never did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shall we take a break?

HESS: That will be fine.

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

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your liberal leanings?

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

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

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

HESS: Was this before you went to Chicago?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HESS: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HESS: When did you meet your husband?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shall we take a break?

HESS: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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before their special committees.

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

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

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

Shall we take a little break?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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one of the youngest women there.

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

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

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

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

[29]

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

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

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

[30]

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

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

[31]

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

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

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

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

[32]

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

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

[33]

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

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

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

[34]

the war, just terribly long, long hours.

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

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

[35]

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

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

[36]

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

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

RICE: Very liberal.

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

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

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

[37]

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

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

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

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

[38]

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

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

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

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

[39]

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

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

[40]

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

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

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

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

[41]

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

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

[42]

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

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

HESS: A pool photographer?

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

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

[43]

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

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

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

[44]

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

HESS: He had thrown it in the waste basket.

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

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

Shall we take a little break?

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

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

[45]

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

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

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

[46]

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

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

[47]

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

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

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

[48]

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

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

[49]

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

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

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

With all this help, the party really went off very

[50]

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

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

[51]

Second Oral History Interview with Mrs. Stuart A. Rice, Washington, D.C., August 27, 1970. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library.

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

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

[52]

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

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

[53]

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

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

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

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

[54]

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

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

[55]

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

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

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

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

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

[56]

buoyant self, by any means.

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

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

[57]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shall we take a little break?

HESS: Oh, all right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HESS: He thought that was an unnecessary status symbol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HESS: Pretty unusual people.

RICE: Oh, they're wonderful.

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

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you?"

She said, "I certainly do:"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we had one very interesting and pleasant dinner

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

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

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

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seasoned. And it was a very hot night, and before we had air conditioning, and he was in white tie and tails with a tight collar. As a result of all this, about ten o'clock I looked over, he was sitting next to the Ambassador's wife, and he was absolutely green and he just suddenly passed out. And everybody was very concerned and afraid he had had a stroke or a heart attack. I managed to get a hold of our doctor, the one who had examined him that morning and he got right over to the Embassy in a hurry and said it was not a heart attack and gave him some injections and so forth to bring him around and he was out for, oh, a half hour, an hour, unconscious and they were all so worried,

So, we finally got him home. And the next day a great big container of flowers came with a note and everything. And Stuart used to laugh about it that when he passed out he did it in great style, on the lap of the Ambassador's wife and in white tie and tails.

HESS: He went first class.

RICE: Yes, first class. For several days the Embassy would telephone to inquire about him.

I have been in a number of other Embassies, but I think those were the main ones where we have had dinner.

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There may have been a few others, and in later years we went to a number of receptions in the Korean Embassy. But we never had a dinner at the Korean Embassy.

Have I put on any information about our Korean young people?

HESS: I don't believe so.

RICE: Perhaps we should, but first there is one thing that I have failed to mention. Though my husband was very devoted to Mr. Roosevelt and he considered it a great privilege to serve under him, but he also developed a tremendous respect and admiration for Mr. Truman; his difficult days and the way he took over his great responsibility, his liberal feeling, his liberal attitude, his leadership, his rugged belief in things. No matter what other people thought, if he knew a thing was right, he wasn't influenced by what criticism he had from time to time, but he was adamant on the stand that he took, and the beliefs that he had, and I heard my husband say on many occasions that as history views the administrations years from now, he believes sincerely that Mr. Truman will be considered a much greater President than Mr. Roosevelt and I heard him say that many times. And I just wanted to put that in.

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One of the most interesting experiences my husband ever had and I shared in it to some extent, was a five year contract in Korea. After Dr. Rice retired from Government at age 65 when the Eisenhower administration came in, he and Mr. Libert Ehrman formed what was called the Surveys and Research Corporation. Actually the first year or two it was called Stuart Rice Associates and then for various reasons my husband insisted that his name go off and it be called Surveys and Research Corporation. And they did various advisory statistical work for business and industry and for foreign governments. They had a long contract with General Electric and with one or two of the shipping companies to South America (United Fruit Company) and organizations like that.

So, they had a five year contract through AID in Korea. While he was still in the Budget Bureau, Dr. Rice had led a mission to Japan at MacArthur's request to help set up and advise on the whole statistical program for Japan and a sample census to determine the number to be housed, fed, etc. His work there had been recognized as a very outstanding project. So., when Korea wanted assistance to set up their first complete census after the Korean war, his organization got the contract. This ran from 1958 to 1963 and he had a staff in permanent residence

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there, a chief of party and several staff members, and they trained Koreans and used a Korean staff as much as possible. During that five year period he was in Korea about ten times. The longest he stayed one period, was six months. I went out twice with him for four months each time. In 1958 I taught English to adults at the Foreign Language Institute (under UNESCO) which was a very exciting experience and a very challenging one. I still hear from some of my students. They were Army and Navy officers, engineers, technicians and teachers and people in all kinds of professions who were being sent to this country for additional technical training. And they were studying English and they took three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, five days a week, for three months, which is pretty intensive. And I taught three hours in the morning, one hour for each group. I was busy doing other things in the afternoon, so I taught three hours in the morning and there were thirty or forty in each class and that was an overlapping situation, and so I taught four different classes of about that number, so I knew about a hundred and forty. And they were such fine people and they used to have class picnics and would take me out to special areas and out in the country and we'd have some of their games and songs

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and then they'd take me to Chinese restaurants. The Koreans love Chinese food. If there was a special event they would almost always go to a Chinese restaurant.

My husband was very popular in Korea. They loved him and were so pleased with him and his work and among other things they organized and took their first overall census. And one interesting thing, in one area they were getting very little results. And one of his supervisors asked some of the Korean workers why they had so few forms filled out, and he said, "Oh, the red pepper."

And he said, "What do you mean red pepper?"

And he said, "When a baby boy is born the family hangs the red pepper on the door, and when a girl is born a piece of black coal. And you cannot go into the house for a month after the red pepper is hung, so they were being delayed for some to fill out questionnaires because of new babies.

But my husband helped to start one or two professional organizations such as a governmental statistical association. And during the period of time he was there, he got to know several young people that impressed him a great deal with their seriousness of wanting to get graduate degrees and study in this country. So we sponsored several through the State Department. He helped

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them in other ways, advising them which schools and universities to apply to according to what their interest was. He wrote innumerable letters on their behalf for teaching fellowships, etc. They all had their A.B. degrees from Korean schools and he helped them get fellowships and scholarships. Sometimes he helped to pay some of their transportation to this country. We considered them our Korean sons and daughters and they claimed us as their American parents.

One couple we were especially devoted to, for example, we paid for their wedding and we went out to Minneapolis for their engagement party and then later for the wedding and my husband gave the bride away and it was very lovely, and they have since named their little boy for my husband, he's little Stuart Kim, and that family is Ke Chung and Young Hee Kim. Ke Chung got his Ph.D. in entomology at the University of Minnesota and Young Hee, his wife, got her Master's in entomology from the same school. And he taught there for several years after he received his degree and he has also been on various conferences called by the Smithsonian. And he's been back to Korea two or three times on business for the Smithsonian, and he is now teaching and doing research at Penn State College. And they are coming in a couple of weeks to visit in

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Washington to see me, and he has meetings here. Their little boy, Stuart, is three and a half, and we have a wonderful grandmother-grandson relation. I love him dearly.

And then there was a young man that we did a great deal for. He was called Joseph, while working on the Korea project, but his name is Lee Jay Cho and he got first his Master's degree here at GW, and we helped him a lot, and then he was back in Korea a year or two and then he got his Ph.D. in sociology at my old school the University of Chicago. And both of these young men are just brilliant. They have written books and articles and just doing magnificent work. Lee Jay was recently in Kuala Lumpur for the Ford Foundation. Now he is teaching and doing research East-West Population Center at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and we have always felt very close to him too.

And then there was a young woman who didn't get her degree. Things just didn't work out. She never seemed to adapt to western methods of study and so she went back to Korea and married a young man in the Foreign Service. She is Hae Ja Hong and she has two little girls and her husband is now in the Embassy staff at Kuala Lumpur, Malasia.

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And then our most recent one that I've gotten acquainted with, she got a Master's in library science at the Women's University of the Philippines. Her name is Tongson Hong and she recently came to Washington last winter and was married in February and is now living here and hopes to work at the World Bank in the library. My husband (and I too) was very proud of these young people and they have brought so much pleasure into our lives.

And then another experience: I had a dear friend who was an Episcopal rector in Baltimore and he had three little boys. He and his wife had been trying for a whole year to adopt a little Korean girl orphan and the red tape and everything was snafu. They were trying to get her through the Pearl Buck Welcome House in Pennsylvania and they had been interviewed several times and given their financial statement and paid their transportation money and everything and nothing happened. So, the last time my husband was in Korea they wondered if he would possibly try to cut the red tape and get her on her way.

So, to make a long story short, he did, he spent days negotiating and doing everything possible to bring this little three year old orphan to the United States on his last trip. She could speak no English, just a beautiful child, and my husband spoke no Korean. Nevertheless

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he brought her in his arms all the way from Seoul, Korea to Baltimore, Maryland. And what an experience he had all along the way, and the Griswold family was so happy. She is about eleven now and so fine. And my husband used to say over and over, "Why did we let the Griswolds take her? Why didn't we keep her? She's so darling." And for several years she called him by the Korean name for grandfather, "Halibogee" and called me "Halmonee", but later on she became so westernized that she called us just grandfather and grandmother Rice.

My husband was decorated both by the Korean government posthumously and the Japanese government, and some citations by other governments at different times during his lifetime. At the time of his death our very good friend Charles Lawrence who was on the project staff for two years in Korea; happened to be back in Seoul. He's now in the Census Bureau working with the international training and he happened to be there at the time of Dr. Rice's death, June 4, 1969. There was a little picture and story in the paper and one of the organizations that Dr. Rice helped to organize was having a meeting that week and they put in the newspaper that any of his friends who would like to come and sign the memorial book might do so and it would be sent to his widow. And so about sixty

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people came by and signed in this lovely book that Mr. Lawrence later brought to me, even including the young man who had been his jeep driver when he was in Korea, and a very sweet note. Some of them had just names and some of them little letters and they have been so nice.

Now another thing that was done, posthumously he was named an honorary professor of sociology in a university there and I would like you to read it on the tape. I'm very sorry that because of my bad eyesight I can't read them myself, but Mr. Hess will read them and then there is another one. Last fall at the Korean Embassy, Ambassador [Dong Jo] Kim gave me a decoration posthumously for Dr. Rice, but he put it around my neck and I am privileged to wear it. It's very, very beautiful. So, if you would like to read these. Now this is the one naming him an honorary professor of sociology.

HESS: "Myeongji University, Seoul, Korea, June 9, 1969, Honorary Professorship."

In compliance with the decision of the Board of Trustees of this university I take pleasure in conferring upon the late Dr. Stuart A. Rice, the title of Honorary Professorship of Sociology. This award presented posthumously is in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Korea through his efforts to develop and modernize the Korean Government statistical system. The quality of his labors will stand as the most fitting monument to his memory.

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And it's signed. Sanguine You.

RICE: Sanguine You, I know him very well.

HESS: Signed, "Professor and Dr. Sanguine You, LL.D., Founder and Honorary President."

RICE: And then this is the handsome decoration.

HESS: This is the next one. It is:

The office of the President, Republic of Korea (and this is a translation and a citation). In recognition of and appreciation for his outstanding and valuable service I take great pleasure in awarding in accordance with the powers delegated to me by the Constitution of the Republic of Korea, the ORDER OF CIVIL MERIT, DONGBAEG MEDAL TO THE LATE DR. STUART A. RICE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. While serving as president of the Survey and Research Corporation the late Stuart A. Rice rendered remarkable contribution to the establishing and modernization of the overall Korean statistical system, resulting in the accurate and reliable modern statistical system of the Republic of Korea. His excellent performance of duty has earned him the respect and admiration of the Korean people.

RICE: Thank you.

HESS: Yes. And this is a letter of appreciation and this is the translation on the left and the -- is this Korean on the right?

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RICE: Yes.

HESS: Letter of Appreciation

December 7, 1968

Dr. Stuart A. Rice
1870 Wyoming Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009 USA

Dear Dr. Rice:

It is indeed a pleasure to write you on behalf of the Population and Development Study Center of this University, to thank you for invaluable contribution to the Center in establishing its library. The two thousand books you donated to the Center constitute a major portion of the Library and the Stuart A. Rice collection, as we named it, has met our urgent need for books in the fields of Demography and Statistics. It is proving its lasting value for improving research activities and training programs in the field and demands on the collection are ever increasing. Furthermore it has come to be a most valuable resource attracting able scholars to this institution.

In conclusion, I know that the staffs of the Population and Development Study Center have been much encouraged by this significant donation, and they join me in thanking you for a kindness that will not soon be forgotten.

It is signed by two gentlemen, the first is "Mun-Whan Choe, Ph.D., President Seoul National University", and the second person who has signed it is, "Hae Young Lee, Director Population and Development Study Center, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Seoul National University."

Very good. That's a lot of books, 2,000 books.

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RICE: Yes. A lot more are supposed to go eventually when I can make the decision of what to send because some of them I've decided that I want to keep for awhile when I have my operation and can read some of them, or reread some of them.

HESS: What is the medal here?

RICE: This is the -- that came...

HESS: Oh, that's what you were wearing.

RICE: I wanted you to see it.

HESS: I noticed that this morning.

RICE: Yes.

And this is the -- I wore it for you, and this is the Ambassador putting it on. And this is the medal that you read from the president, presented posthumously by the Ambassador.

HESS: Well, that's very lovely.

RICE: Isn't it lovely?

HESS: From the president of South Korea.

RICE: Yes. And these are some of the other pictures that

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were made that day.

This might be a picture to have photostated to go with the transcript.

HESS: I think that would be very good.

RICE: I'm still hunting for a picture to give you and maybe I can have that photostated for you. That might be a good one to go with notes.

HESS: Let's flip this tape over, it's getting down to the end.

While we had the machine off and filled up our coffee cups, I noticed "Cosmos Club Bulletin" on the table, and it's July and August 1970 and on page number four, the Stuart A. Rice Merit Award is mentioned. Would you tell me about that?

RICE: Yes, three years ago the D.C. chapter of the American Sociological Society inaugurated an outstanding merit award to be presented to the leading sociologist in the metropolitan area of Washington each year, and my husband very nicely was awarded this the first year. And then the second year I've forgotten who it was presented to, but this year Hugh Carter, one of our very old friends, in fact a classmate of my husband from Columbia University, they got their Ph.D.'s together, it was presented to him this year. And at that time it was named in honor of my

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husband. So it's now called the Stuart Rice Merit Award of the Sociological Society and will be from now on, which I think is very, very nice, I was there for the award to Dr. Carter and one of the nice things they do, they have a large scrapbook and each year there is a photograph of the recipient and a Xerox copy of the merit award, usually the recipient has that framed as we have the one Dr. Rice received. It is framed and hanging here in the hall, so that each year then it accumulates. They now have the three events so far and pictures of the three recipients, and Xerox copies of the award. And of course, beginning this year, from now on it will be called the Stuart Rice Merit Award which I think is very appropriate.

HESS: That's very nice.

I'd like to ask about some of Dr. Rice's earlier reminiscences of something that he may have said of interest about his boyhood. Do you have anything to cover before we go back that far?

RICE: Well, I don't think so. And of course, we want to do a little bit on the International Statistical Institute. Maybe we'll do that and then I'll go back to his boyhood and something about his mother.

My husband was elected to membership in the International

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Statistical Institute in the '30s. It is one of the oldest international professional organizations in existence. It's over ninety years old, and except for war years it meets every other year somewhere around the world. And he has been to a great many of these meetings and I was fortunate enough to go to several with him. He was almost solely responsible for its revitalization after World War II. Many of their members had been killed during the war, some of their Jewish members had been persecuted and they did not know where they were, whether they were still in concentration camps or what had happened.

So, before the Japanese part of the war was ended, but the European part was over, my husband went to Europe I think two or three times that year, principally to The Hague, that's where the permanent office of the Institute is located. They have a permanent secretary and that's where their quarterly bulletin is published and so forth, and the affairs of the Institute go on there. He met with Dr. Gill Goudswaard and Dr. Bart Luninburg, and he also saw some of the British members in London. They were in telephone communications with some of the German representatives to just get the whole thing revitalized and going again.

Before the war there was an act of Congress inviting

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the Institute to meet in Washington at the time of the either the one hundredth or one hundred twenty-fifth, I think the one hundredth anniversary of the American Statistical Association, they thought that would be a nice time to invite them. Each time it meets in whatever country -- it is by the highest patronage, the government invites them. It's not just the membership, but it's an official thing. For example last summer when they met in London the Prime Minister opened the conference and close the conference and they were under the highest auspices. Anyway, the Congress passed an act to invite them, just before the war, to coincide with this special occasion for the American statisticians, but of course it had to be postponed. So then, it was planned to have it here in 1947. My husband was the chairman of the organizing committee.

In '47 in addition to having the meeting of the International Statistical Institute, there were other international allied interested meetings held. The International Econometric Association, the International Population Association, the United Nations Statistical Congress, and one other one, there were five of them. So, it was a very big meeting and it was the first international meeting in the United States after the war. So, everybody

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did everything they could to make this a very, very fine occasion. They raised money through private business like IBM and Forbes magazine and places like that and Remington Rand, and also some of the foundations. I think Carnegie and Ford maybe have given some money, I'm not sure of that.

And it was held at the Shoreham Hotel and the Wardman Park. Now my husband gave a great deal of time to it and he asked me as a special personal favor to give up my job at Washington Cathedral and to take over a staff job for a year on the conferences. I met with all of the committees, including the general planning committee, to dovetail social events. I met with the overall social committee, both for the members and the wives, and then I always met with the women's committee. Now the chairman of that was Mrs. Edwin G. Nourse, and there were various other outstanding women in Washington who served on the committee even though their husbands weren't statisticians. And I was the staff person to back them up. I received no salary but I had a lot of fringe benefits. I had a pleasant office next door to my husband in the old State Building, one or two secretaries as I needed them, and the State Department asked me to go at the end of the conferences and shepherd a busload of distinguished visitors to the

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United Nations (that's when they were still at Lake Success), and they paid all of my expenses and so forth, and I felt quite honored that they asked me to do this. So, there were fringe benefits to this but I worked very hard.

And we had a most successful meeting, I think everybody felt so. We did all kinds of nice things for them. We had a White House garden party. President and Mrs. Truman were not in the city at that time. It was in the early September, but they loaned the White House for a garden party and we had two or three Cabinet wives who came and acted as hostesses. We had a lovely party at the Pan American Union, sort of a reception and concert, We took them on various trips around the city and we had all of the ladies invited -- all of the foreign ladies invited to someone's home for a party. And we had Miss Frances Perkins was one of the ones who gave a luncheon. And we did all kinds of things for them and we had one lovely picnic in Rock Creek Park in which we had four sets of square dancers put on an exhibition of American folk dancing and then we invited the visitors to come up and try it too, and the caller helped them through the figures. And then as the evening wore on, some of the foreign guests, particularly the Europeans, did some of their own folk dances and this worked out very nicely and

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everybody seemed to have a gay time. We took them to a farm out in Maryland so they could see some recent farm developments and so forth and it was a very nice occasion.

One of the most amusing things that happened was one of the gentlemen from Turkey wrote my husband a letter from New York City just before he took the plane to go back to Turkey, and I can't give it to you verbatim, but roughly it said, "Dear Dr. Rice: I cannot leave your country without again expressing my appreciation for your many kindnesses. You and Mrs. Rice certainly did everything to everybody." I thought that was appreciatively, if quaintly put. In later years when things would get a little rough my husband and I would say, "Well you did everything to everybody, you can do this."

HESS: Not necessarily for them, but to them.

RICE: To them. He said "to" them. And so it was very pleasant. Now I had been to a number of these including Rio in Brazil and Tokyo, and Sweden, and Australia, and Yugoslavia, My husband went to Rome and to India and to Ottowa without me and also just before the war to Prague, In 1938 there was a meeting in Prague. I stayed in the pension in Dieppe, France. Our son was only two then. War did seem quite immanent, Hitler's Nuremberg speech,

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Chamberlin going to Munich, etc. so the U. S. Embassy wouldn't let any wives go to Prague. The meeting had to be cancelled in the middle of the night the 3rd day and everybody came out in a blacked-out train.

But these various ISI meetings were very interesting and the people so hospitable. Whoever was entertaining planned trips to see new housing developments and usually took the ladies to a fashion show and they always had a lovely farewell dinner and many, many nice things. It really was very nice and then usually they'd have one or two excursions that you pay for yourself, but they make all of the arrangements and they're kind of at the reduced rates and it's fun to go with your friends and people that you know.

Now the nicest thing as far as I'm concerned is that next year from August 10th to the 20th, it will meet in Washington again and I'll see all of my old friends and I'll help on the committee, I'm going to be an adviser on the committee, and I felt it wise to let the younger women do most of the hard work and let me be a "senior" adviser to some of these. And some of the women working on the committee never been to any of these foreign sessions and I have been asked to tell them about events and social occasions in other countries that was particularly

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nice that we might plan our programs along similar lines.

My husband was always very, very active. On his seventy-fifth birthday they ran a lovely picture and article about him in the Institute bulletin and you have a copy of that in the papers in Independence. And he had died just a short time before the meetings in London last summer so they had a very brief obituary and a very brief statement about his death and so forth, but I have been given to understand that there is a good possibility that they will have a special meeting as a memorial to him next summer when they are here, which will be very nice.

And I have two dear friends from England who are going to be house guests of mine for a few days following the meetings and then we plan to rent a car and drive up into New England which will be very pleasant. I'll enjoy that a lot.

HESS: Let's start back on Mr. Rice's earlier days. What do you recall his saying when he spoke about his boyhood?

RICE: Well, he must have had some troubles in his boyhood and some very outstanding high spots too. For example, we talked about this many times between ourselves and his sister and my psychiatrist. He always dreaded

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Christmas. He never, never, liked Christmas and this always made me very sad because I loved Christmas and though my family was quite poor we always somehow managed to have some tiny little Christmas gift and a few decorations and a holiday spirit. But my husband did not seem to have such happy memories. He started in November dreading Christmas, So, there must have been some difficulties in his childhood that somehow just didn't come through. But he apparently was a very brilliant little boy. His mother taught him to read when he was four. And she had been a teacher. In fact, at age twenty-one she was county superintendent of schools in Iowa and covered her territory by horseback with a gun to ward off wild animals. And also she was supposed to have had the only musical instrument for two or three counties, a little concertina. Later she played the piano and directed church choirs and sang right up to her death. She loved this little concertina that she carried with her everywhere in her early years. She'd play for weddings and funerals and events of all kinds. She was a great reader and she read in many, many fields and I think she did a great deal to inspire my husband's intellectual ambition, which he certainly had a great deal of.

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He told me many times he would lie under the kitchen table while his mother was putting away the dishes and so forth, or preparing food, and study maps and geographies and atlases. That was his early reading material whereas most children might nowadays would have a little books of children's stories. He grew up on the census publications and the atlas and the geography and he memorized before he was even in school, county names and lines up one side and down the other so when many years later he became Assistant Director of the Census Bureau he would astonish his staff by reading off just from rote memory, hundreds and hundreds of counties and states and they never could understand why, but that was his early reading material. His mother would set up a blackboard outdoors by the washtub when she was doing the laundry and would teach him his letters and numbers and he was reading well before he ever started to school. And he always felt that his ability to read like a model, slowed down his reading because he pronounced so correctly and so exactly that when he was in the first grade his teacher would send him up to the sixth grade to read and show the children how they should pronounce and enunciate their words. But he thought all his life, that this has made him a slow reader because he never could just read quickly to himself.

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He'd pronounce every word. He used to say he was going to take a speed reading course before he died. He was going to learn to read rapidly. There was too much material in the world to read if one read slowly.

But he was a very bright young lad and he walked a great deal. By the time he was in high school they had moved to the State of Washington. He was born in Iowa and then the family had farms in Iowa and Indiana and Michigan, and other states. His father worked on the Northern Pacific Railroad, but all that is in the part that my husband has written about his father in the beginning of his autobiography. But he used to walk many miles each way from Puyallup to Tacoma, Washington for the day just a jaunt to visit the sights and so forth, and he would walk those long distances and then in the summer he often worked on a berry train, His father being on the Northern Pacific would get him these jobs working on berry specials. So he would pack crates of berries and do them very delicately and well-packed so they wouldn't mash. And he always did very well in school. His mother was a graduate of the Denmark Academy in Iowa which was started by some people from New England who had migrated out to Iowa. His father also went to Denmark Academy for a while, that's where they met. And her

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mother, Dr. Rice's grandmother, had a boarding house for the young people who came to Denmark Academy and that was as near a college as they had back in those days in Denmark, Iowa. And they were always much interested in education and had books around. They were always a book reading family and his mother and father would take turns reading aloud at meals and at night to him and his sister many, many nights, reading the old classics, [William Makepeace] Thackeray, and [Henry David]Thoreau and all those books. So he was sort of brought up on books like that.

Mrs. Rice was a truly remarkable person. She was so interested in history, botany, geology, etc. Anytime we took her on a drive and a walk anywhere she carried a great big purse and she was always picking up specimens of flora and fauna and rocks. She'd classify them when she got home. She knew the Latin names of all the flowers and shrubs and trees and was a very brilliant woman. And she wrote a family story called "Roots" which you have a copy of and she spent several years getting together the materials for that and once Dr. Rice took her to England and Scotland when she was in her early seventies, I guess. This was before we were married. And he had several business appointments (that was when he was

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teaching at the University of Pennsylvania) and he got some rooms in the old Thackeray Hotel that was destroyed during the war, but it was right across from the British Museum and he would take his mother over to the British Museum every morning and she'd just spend the day there and have a wonderful time looking up all kinds of family data and information and taking notes and all that, and then he'd pick her up in the afternoon and they'd go out in the evening and have dinner or something.

And one day, one late afternoon, they were going out. They had gone down in the elevator and she was always forgetting things, so she forgot her gloves and she asked him to go back to the room and get them. So he told the elevator man to keep an eye on his mother and she was kind of crippled, walked with a cane, and that he'd be right back again. So, when he got back to the elevator coming back with the gloves, the man was flushed and stammering and stuttering, "Oh sir, oh sir, I -- I'm so sorry sir, but -- but, but she," he just couldn't get it out. He finally said, "But your mother is in a man's room on the fourth floor."

And my husband said, "What in the world is this all about?" So he said, "Take me up there."

So he went up and found his mother, and sure enough

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she was in the room with a young lad from Virginia who was very homesick. She had met him in the Museum that day and he was so homesick and she was trying to cheer him up. Later in the day she found a lovely old colonial map of Virginia and never to waste a moment, she thought to tell him about this lovely colonial map of Virginia and where it was, would cheer him up. So she went to his room instead of wasting those few minutes.

She also attracted missionaries everywhere. My husband was always telling yarns about no matter where he left her, in Philadelphia or on a bus or in a hotel or a library, anywhere, he'd come back and she would always have foreign missionaries in tow. In her later years she still liked to travel around by bus. She used to go various places in the summer. She would be hearing from these people for years who had met her on the bus, and were charmed by her. She was always so gregarious, so sparkly, and so friendly and so interested in everybody and everything. They'd be fascinated with her and for years she'd be getting Christmas cards from people my sister-in-law, with whom she lived, had never heard of.

We had her, with a companion, live with us one year after her health and vitality were waning. But even with all that she was still charming and she could still play

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the piano even though she couldn't remember things very well. But she was a most democratic woman and no matter who she met she was just as interested in the maid as she would have been in the Queen. She had absolutely complete democratic feelings and one night they had been having dinner at a hotel in a restaurant in Philadelphia and went back to her room and she opened her purse and there was a. good sized linen napkin. Stuart said, "Oh, mother, you've forgotten and put the napkin in your purse."

She said, "No, I didn't forget." She said, "There's a tear in it and I know those ladies over there are too busy to mend their linens, so I just brought it home to mend it for them and I'll wash it and iron it and take it back tomorrow."

But she was always doing such things. A young girl in the Thackeray Hotel interested her a great deal, her maid who cleaned her room. They corresponded for years. She sent the little maid an early copy of Gone With the Wind. My sister-in-law would sometimes come home after a long hard day at the Department of Agriculture (after she was widowed she went to work there), and Mother Ida would have a saleslady there, somebody selling hosiery or soap. And she'd take Louise off and whisper, said, "She just seemed so tired I just couldn't send her off

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to just an ordinary restaurant meal. I'm sure you don't mind fixing dinner."

Mother Ida was always inviting people in And Louise never knew how many she entertained when she wasn't there. But she was always inviting people in like that. And she was really a remarkable person.

And I think that her great intellectual interest influenced my husband a great deal. I remember well after we were married and she was getting along in years, she started in on a big thick twelve-volume history of the world and just plowed right through it, reading every word. She was particularly interested in the physical sciences. In another period and another kind of education, she would have been a scientist, there's no doubt about it and I think she inspired my husband a great deal in some of his intellectual interests.

HESS: Why did your husband decide to go to college in the State of Washington?

RICE: Well, because that's where they were living.

HESS: At that time.

RICE: Yes. He went to high school in Puyallup and then went to the University of Washington for his A.B. and his M.A.

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degrees and then several years later he went to Columbia University for his Ph.D.

HESS: Anything else of interest about any of the positions that he had held?

RICE: Well, I don't think so much. I think so much material is in the Library now that I think a lot of that will come out and be seen. Of course, as a very young man he held a quite responsible job to be so young, he was the head of the -- I can't even say the name -- it was a home, an organization, a home for homeless men.

HESS: New York Municipal Lodging House?

RICE: That's it. At the Municipal Lodging House and that was when he grew a mustache to appear older. He was so young when he had that job and he wanted to appear much older and more dignified so he told me that that was the only time he ever had a mustache in his life was at the Municipal Lodging House.

And that was at the period when he knew Harry Hopkins fairly well, and they used to...

HESS: What was their connection?

RICE: Well, they were just good friends in social work.

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Hopkins was in various social agencies in New York City and so was Stuart and they met at different places like the International House. And one time Harry Hopkins had pneumonia in Stuart's apartment. He came to see him on some matter and Stuart said, "You don't look so well."

He said, "I don't feel so well."

They took his temperature and it was about 105 and they put him right to bed and when they got a doctor in they wouldn't move him for a couple of weeks. He was terribly ill with pneumonia.

But then that most interesting period in which he was an undercover investigator for [John Adams] Kingsbury, who was Director of Public Charities, in which he became a professional homeless man. He had no identification whatsoever, and wore different clothes and nothing to identify him at all. And he made this research for weeks and weeks of trying to get jobs and standing in line in soup kitchens and all of this sort of thing and then reporting to Commissioner Kingsbury.

The police and other city employees were not supposed to just give food and lodging. They were supposed to give a ticket to the destitute and direct them to go someplace and get a job of so many hours to make up for so much food. And they were supposed to go certain

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places for clothing. They weren't supposed to readily receive these things as a hand-out. But they usually did and Stuart kept such records and wrote reports. Kingsbury was very pleased with his work.

HESS: Dr. Rice is very well-known as a sociologist and as a statistician. Which do you think that he enjoyed the most?

RICE: I don't know which I'd say he enjoyed the most. I think actually he had more formal training in sociology and more practical work experience in statistics. Most of his work, graduate school and all, was in sociology. He had some statistics, but I think he learned more of his statistics on his own. But of course, all of the years that he was in Government he was considered a statistician. He taught both sociology and statistics, but I think he had more formal training in sociology.

HESS: Any other thoughts you'd like to put down?

Would you like to tell me about some of the experiences in Georgia and Alabama? Some of the earlier experiences?

RICE: Yes, I'd like to very much. My parents were divorced when I was seven or eight after we had moved to Alabama from where I was born. I spent most of my life in Alabama

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until I married and came to Washington in 1934. But my mother had to seek employment and so when I was quite young, too young to be left alone in the summer, she would send me to my grandmother in a little area of Georgia five miles from Whitesburg, five miles from the nearest train or store. And I would spend all summer with my grandmother and grandfather.

Sometimes I would get very lonely. And they had chores for me to do because they were quite poor and that was the period when the boll weevil had devastated the cotton production in that part of the South and my grandfather had been strictly a cotton grower and things were very difficult. They did have a big garden and my grandmother -- we ate vegetables from the garden, she also canned them. And he had some fruit trees which were wonderful. She dried peaches and apples on the front porch on a big sheet. One of my jobs as an eight or nine year old was to turn those pieces of fruit over to dry in the sun. And she would put those in big flour sacks and save them for the winter. And they grew their own sugar cane for molasses, and that was a wonderful, wonderful thing for me to chew on sugar cane when it was ripening.

One of my jobs to do was the ironing -- no electric iron or anything, just flatirons, and I did the churning.

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She made butter about every day because occasionally she would sell some along with her eggs to earn a little extra money.

Speaking of eggs, I had a gruesome time collecting the eggs every morning, which was one of my jobs. Somewhere as a child I had overheard someone tell that as they put their hand into a nest there was a snake and this absolutely frightened me out of my wits and I was so scared. So, I would stand sometimes for a half an hour trying to get up nerve enough to put my hand into the chicken nests above my head to bring in the eggs. But I had to do it, but it was certainly hard.

One of the most exciting things that would happen, about every second or third week my grandfather would hitch up the horse and buggy and we would go to town -- but I have told about that in another interview. I can't do anymore right now. I'm sorry. I'm coughing too much.

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Third Oral History Interview with Mrs. Stuart A. Rice, Washington, D.C., December 18, 1970. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library.

HESS: All right, Mrs. Rice, to begin this morning let's continue on with where we were at the end of interview number two; and we were discussing your childhood in Alabama.

RICE: Yes, I'd be glad to talk about that. I was born in Georgia, but my parents moved to Birmingham when I was only two years old. When I was about six or seven my parents were divorced and I never saw my father again after that. My mother had had very little formal education and she found it extremely difficult to earn a living for the two of us, because she had no skills and no training.

But, first of all, she got a job in a department store as a clerk, but she was very ambitious for herself and for me and she took courses at night school at the local high school for several years. And in those days there was no such thing as a paid baby sitter, that had not been dreamed up, and of course, I was too young to be left alone. So, I was already in school by that time, so she took me with her and she went three nights a week and I would take my books and my lessons and sit in the back of the room and study while she took typing and

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shorthand and bookkeeping in different years.

So, later she got a job as some doctor's assistant, keeping his appointments, and bookkeeping and sending out the bills and doing various things. She was in that job several years.

And then she got a better job as office manager for an automobile parts company called the Walter S. White Auto Parts. And mother knew nothing about mechanical equipment. She wouldn't have known a fan belt from a carburetor when she went in there. But to show what a good mind she had and how she applied herself, in a matter of months she knew practically everything they had for sale. They sold parts to garages in two or three counties. They had some traveling salesmen.

For example, the type of business that Mr. White was in would be to go around to different garages and take orders for so many sets of brake lining, and so many spark plugs and things like that. And mother got so well acquainted with everything that she could help fill orders when people came in. And she worked for him for many years.

And when I was in high school taking shorthand and typing myself, Mr. White would let me work there in the summer at a very nominal wage, but it was excellent practical experience.

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As a matter of fact, digressing a bit, my first paid job was when I was twelve years old, and it was an interesting thing. Nowadays, if a manufacturer wants to get a mailing list to send out material on his product, he buys a list. In those days there was no such thing as a list. So, he had to get it himself. So, the Lindsey Pure Pork Sausage Company president came to my home economics teacher in grade school and asked for five reliable little girls who would work during the summer to build up a mailing list for him. We were given specific territories around the city and we had to go and knock on a door of a home, introduce ourselves, explain what we were doing, give them a pamphlet about sausage and wangle their name and address out of them. And for that we were paid two cents a name. And mother would pack me a little lunch before she went to work and give me streetcar fare, and I'd go off on my rounds. I had a map and I did fairly well. I forget what I made, but I worked at that almost all summer at two cents a name.

Don't you think that's interesting?

HESS: Yes.

RICE: That was my first job, and I worked every summer after that.

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The summer I was thirteen and fourteen, I was a junior counselor at a YWCA camp, and I not only had a lovely time being in the beautiful setting of camp with a lake for swimming and all, and my duties weren't too arduous, but in addition to that I made some money. And then by the time I got into high school, I was working for Mr. White.

Well, I admired him very much through the years and he was very kind to me and the first year I was married, in the fall, my mother, who had been extremely able and efficient in every way in all of her jobs, called on the phone one night. That in itself was unusual, and a rarity, because in those days telegrams and long distance calls were reserved usually for death and sickness news. I got on the phone with mother and she was almost incoherent, practically hysterical I couldn't make out what she was talking about and finally I got it out of her that Walter White had asked her to marry him.

Well, I thought it was great, but I couldn't seem to get much out of her. I listened to her and presently she hung up. So, my husband, hearing about it, said, "You'd just better get on a train and go down to Birmingham and tell your mother the facts of life."

So, I did just that, and it was a strange week. Mother still called him Mr. White, and they were very formal

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in the office. He would drive me around the city all day telling me how much he loved my mother and how much he wanted to marry her (he had never been married before), and then I drove home with mother at night and then she'd sit up late at night talking to me about did I think she could make him happy, and so forth. Well, of course, I gave them my warmest blessings. I thought it was a marvelous idea, but I couldn't persuade them to go ahead and be married while I was there. I saw nothing was going to happen right away, so I gave them my blessings and said, "Good-bye" and came home.

So, the twenty-first of December they were married, and they had, oh, I suppose fourteen or fifteen wonderful years together. And he was so good to me and to young Stuart. He just worshipped our son, and he was particularly good and kind and generous to my grandmother, which brings me back to my grandmother and the times I spent with her.

The summers when I was too young to work, mother was afraid to leave me home alone, so I spent all summer with my grandmother and grandfather on this little poor rundown farm in Georgia. The nearest tiny town, with a railroad station, was five miles. And about every two or three weeks there would be a highlight. My grandfather would have to go to the mill, taking his own corn and his

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own wheat to be ground into flour and meal. He'd hitch up the horse and buggy and my grandmother would get me all dressed up nice and clean and off we'd go the five mile trek to the nearest town. And along the way there were a couple little creeks and we'd stop and let the horse drink. It was a small village, maybe four or five establishments, a school and a couple of churches, and the mill. And so first of all my grandfather would take his wheat and corn and leave it at the mill, and then we'd do our errands.

We seldom bought anything besides sugar, salt, and pepper, and a few staples like that; coffee, tea, because they grew practically everything. After the marketing we'd visit two or three cousins, maybe be invited for dinner somewhere. It was always dinner in the middle of the day which is still true in most agricultural sections, I think. And then we'd go to the ice house and buy the biggest piece of ice that would fit in the buggy, then pick up our meal and flour and the long trek home.

I'd sleep part of the way, and we'd get home, five or six o'clock, and after a quick supper, grannie would make ice cream. She would make the custard, with rich cream and eggs either with fresh peaches or fresh blueberries or huckleberries -- no, they weren't huckleberries,

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we didn't use that for ice cream, they were too sour. Huckleberries in the South, blueberries other places -- blackberries, she'd use fresh blackberries and if she didn't have any of that we'd just use vanilla. And the three of us would sit down on the back porch and use the old-fashioned freezer with the chopped up ice and the salt. And it would get harder, and harder, and harder to turn, and it seems to me it would be about 9 or 10 o'clock before we'd have huge bowls of ice cream, and it just wasn't anything in the world ever tasted as good as that. And, of course, that's the only ice cream I ever had in the summer.

Then we used to have great social events of a Sunday, not every Sunday, but on Memorial Day (only in the South they called it Decoration Day), the 30th of May was always a big festival occasion in the church. Families came from far and wide to decorate the graves of their loved ones, mostly in wagons, a few buggies, but the wagons were most practical, because if they had several children, and big baskets of food and flowers (just wild flowers, or garden flowers they had picked to bring), a wagon was more practical. So they'd hitch the horses out in back and there'd be a service in the church. And then at noon, the tables would literally groan with the food and every woman

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was vying with every other one for her best maple cake and her best apple pie and, "Try my potato salad," and everybody would be just completely stuffed, but that was a highlight.

Do you want to stop a moment?

HESS: Well, one question: What church did you attend back then?

RICE: That was the Methodist. And -- well, I'll go on a bit further.

I had some rather thrilling experiences with them in the summertime, but I was frightfully lonely. There were no children to play with, very rarely would cousins come. I had to amuse myself. And I remember I'd be so lonely, and that was the days of ukuleles, and I had a ukulele. And I used to amuse myself at night sitting on the porch watching the lights dodging around the countryside, Way off somewhere you'd hear a lonely train whistle, and I'd play my ukulele and sing. There was the best popular song at that time called, "I Wonder What's Become of Sally."

Well, my -- not a nickname for me, actually I was christened Sally and I never used that, cause, why, when I was about two years old my name was changed to Sarah

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Alice for my two grandmothers. My maternal grandmother was Alice and my paternal grandmother was Sally, always called me Sally. And so I was just -- this was a favorite song of mine, "I Wonder What's Become of Sally." And the first time my grandmother listened to the words, she was outraged and indignant and very cross with me, which rarely happened. She forbid me to ever sing that song again. I think (and it puzzled me), it kind of hurt my feelings, but mostly I was just so confused and puzzled, "Why didn't my grandmother want me to sing that song?"

Well, I think it was her very strict moral upbringing in the Methodist Church of that period, really the Bible belt of the South, and I think there was a sexual connotation there, in her mind, that this girl had gone astray. She had become a wayward girl. And whether she unconsciously associated that name with me, and she didn't want me to become that kind of a girl. Many years later I interpreted it that way.

But I'd be very, very lonely. So, I made friends with all of the farm animals and there were some baby pigs one summer that I just adored. Unlike the New England farmhouse arrangement where everything is continuous, there's the house and then the shed, then the barn, and then the maple sugar house, all of these would go one

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after the other I suppose in protection against the severe winters with snow. But that's not so in the South. They want the barn just as far from the house as possible and still be convenient. I suppose to get away from the smells and things like that. So, the house set kind of on the hill and the barn was quite a ways down from the house. And one night in the middle of the night, I heard this horrible squealing of one of the baby pigs. I didn't stop to light the kerosene lamp, to put my shoes on, to call my grannie or anything. I couldn't have been over nine. I just raced out in my nightgown, in the middle of the night, pitch black, and I went racing down to the barn to see what was happening to my baby pig. And he had gotten caught in a fence. And I got him loose and petted him and came back. And as I came in the house my grandfather was standing there in an old-fashioned nightshirt with a lamp, with the biggest grin on his face you ever saw. Didn't say a word, yes or no, or why did you do it, or anything else. He just patted me on the back and I went to bed.

I never really learned to ride a horse, and to this day I don't know much about horseback riding although I have on occasions, ridden, but always with disastrous results of being sore and feeling I was very awkward

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on a horse. But that summer, one of many I spent there, they had a very good horse, easy to ride, and they, of course, had no saddle, they couldn't afford a saddle. So, I'd just ride him bareback. But first of all my grandfather would lead me around the barn lot and I got better and so one day my grandmother needed something from a farm about two miles away (and I've forgotten what it was), but anyway, I was sent on a mission to go over and get this thing for my grandmother, and I was a little bit scared though. But I knew the way, I had been there before with her.

So, I rode the horse, with just a rope through the bit that I guided him with, and we got over there just fine and got whatever it was and came back. And when I got back to the barn I got off the horse and took the bit and rope out of his mouth and walked over to the big heavy barn doors. And there was sort of a horizontal bar that kept it shut, and I opened the door and turned back to the horse (I've forgotten his name), and said to the horse, "Come on," and he walked in and I shut and barred the barn doors again and went on up to the house.

Well, my grandfather, I wouldn't say he was angry at me, but he wanted to impress on me that I did a very dangerous thing. He said, "You must never, never again, take the bit and rein out of a horse's mouth before you

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take him into the barn." He said, "That horse has been known to run away, even jump a fence to run away and if he had gone off I might have spent days hunting for him." And he repeated, "You must never, never do that again." And it never occurred to me that the horse wouldn't do what I asked him to, because I knew nothing about such things.

Then he used to take me hunting with him and for these expeditions my grandmother, who was an excellent seamstress took some flour sacking and made me a pair of overall. In those days there were no overalls for little girls. You couldn't go to a store and buy them. Most little girls didn't wear them, They fit very well and I was so proud of them. And that's what I wore when I went hunting with my grandfather. And he hunted two things: squirrels and rabbits, and this was not for sport, this was for much needed food, meat, when they didn't have very much meat.

He took me along on these hunting expeditions, not only because he was a loving grandfather but I was to go into densely wooded areas and scare the animals out. It was the hardest thing in the world to keep the tears out of my eyes, to see a dear little rabbit, or a dear little squirrel get killed. And I wouldn't let my grandfather

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know how unhappy it made me, but it was a great trial for me to go hunting with him. And then that night or the next day we'd have squirrel stew, or fried rabbit, or something like that for the meal and I couldn't eat a bite, and they'd say, "Aren't you hungry today?"

And I'd say, "No. I'm just not hungry." Or I'd fib and say, "Oh, I have kind of a tummy ache." I couldn't eat a mouthful. And to this day I have a hard time eating squirrel and rabbit, remembering those little animals that I had to help take to their death.

And one of the most interesting things I ever observed was a house-raising. And in later years, of course, I heard a lot about them, and knew that they had those out in the development of the West. But my grandfather decided he needed a tenant on the farm to help him, and this man, with his wife and two or three children, was coming to work for him. So, he put word out to all his neighbors, And they got there about 5 o'clock in the morning and worked all day and the new family slept in the house that night. The whole thing was done in a day and I just stood with my mouth open watching them. I guess there were twenty farmers nearby and they did the whole thing in a day.

But going back to the problem of the boll weevil,

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I really couldn't say too much about it firsthand. I've read a lot about it from time to time, but there were farms like his that raised almost entirely cotton, because that was the best paying crop. And not only did they take their cotton to market, but cottonseed meal was used for feed, you know scattered over the food that the livestock would eat.

And, of course, the big problem was picking cotton. Now, I did have some experience in picking cotton on a very small acreage that he had, and I found it awfully hard. And I didn't know how to do it much and my hands would get all prickly and kind of bleed. Well, of course, the skillful Negro cotton pickers knew how to do it, but I had very little experience in that. But I sort of heard them talk about so and so's farm, with several hundred acres all in cotton. It had been a very well-paying farm, with a very beautiful home and so forth. And when the boll weevil came, it just wiped it out completely.

My impression was that the first year it happened they thought it was just an exception, unique that one year, something like the seven year locust. And so they repeated and planted again, and it happened again, and they did this several times, and always losing money and going more and more into debt until finally they realized

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it was a scourge and that something had to be done and they had to diversify and plant other crops and do other things. And I know that some family fortunes were absolutely wiped out and they had almost nothing after that difficulty. But I really don't know firsthand, but just as a child kind of remembering adult talk and the references and implications from time to time.

HESS: Shall we cover more about your husband's early life too, some of those things that he may have done of interest when he was a young lad?

RICE: I actually don't know as much about it as I should. I've heard him tell about things from time to time, but, oh, I'm afraid that I don't remember them too much. But the one -- the most interesting thing always to me was that his mother and father gave him free rein to go anywhere he wanted to and he walked miles. He used to walk from Long Branch to Tacoma, and Tacoma, to Seattle, Washington, and that was something like twenty miles, and he'd walk each way. And then he might have ten cents for his lunch. And that was when he was just in his early teens. And he'd go off on a Saturday like that and spend the entire day wandering around a town, going into the library and just seeing everything. And they'd never

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question him when he came back, what he had done, where he had been, who he had been with. They had just absolute perfect faith and confidence in him that he could go anywhere and do anything he wanted to.

When he was about twelve and his cousin George Stuart was fourteen, the two families let the boys go to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. They went on a train alone and their parents had given them a certain amount of money to spend and they had their tickets. And that particular time, my husband and his cousin were sitting at opposite ends of the car on the train, and my husband had fallen off to sleep. And the conductor came by and waked him, shook his shoulder, and he was half asleep and he didn't understand what the conductor wanted, but knew he wanted something. So, he thought it must be money, so he excused himself and went into the men's room and pulled up his shirt and took off his money belt. They had given him money -- each of the parents had given the boys money belts. So, he didn't want anybody to see that he had one, so he opened his money belt and got out some money and went back to his seat and gave it to the conductor. And then the conductor said, "Well, don't you have a ticket?"

And he said, "Yes."

So, then he pulled his ticket out of his pocket and

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the conductor gave his money back.

I don't know where they stayed in St. Louis, I think it was the YMCA, I presume that was it. But they arrived on a Sunday morning and the fair wasn't to open until the next day, and it was literally miles in circumference and my husband and George Stuart, so eager to see the fair started out in the morning and walked the entire distance around the whole grounds, stopping every time there was a knothole or a little indentation of earth where they could lie on their stomachs and look under to see what they could see. And that was a great experience.

If my recollection is right, that was the time that they had ice cream cones, at that fair, for the first time. I think I'm right on that. But they had a wonderful experience and they mostly lived off of free food samples. He said they spent very little money on food, but every day they made the rounds of all the companies that had interesting crackers or food and tidbits, anything that was free they could get, and they'd fill up on these samples and then they didn't spend much money.

Either in the material that has already been sent to the Library, or in the material I have here that will eventually go to you, there is a very interesting newspaper clipping and their pictures on this trip. There was a

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great deal of interest in their very small town, about these two youngsters and their experiences.

HESS: When they returned home.

RICE: When they returned home they were famous, they were heroes. And they had told all about their experiences.

But, all through, his mother would encourage him to go and do anything he wanted to do after school or working hours. When he was only something like sixteen he saw an advertisement for school teachers wanted in Alaska. And he talked to his mother and he said, "I think I'd like to apply (he was only a junior in high school)," he said, "I think I'd like to take a year off and go to Alaska and teach school, and get the experience, and earn some money and see Alaska."

And she said, "Well, that's fine."

So, he wrote off for the application and when it came he filled it all in, his qualifications, his grades and everything and sent it back.

In due course, they wrote back and said they were sorry they couldn't take him, he was not old enough. And he was very disappointed and mentioned it to his mother and he said, "Did you know I was too young?"

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And she said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I didn't really. I thought it was worth a try." And he always wondered if she really knew definitely, ahead of time, that he couldn't conceivably be hired at that age, but just didn't want to thwart him in any way.

And they let him do all sorts of things. And when his sister was still quite young they let her go off to China and teach for three years and that's where she met and married her husband. She taught in Shanghai for three years, and before that she had taught way up in some isolated little Indian villages. She taught one whole winter in a one-room school room where her only pupils were five little Indians. And she spent the whole winter. There was no town or anything, it was just a little school that they had built themselves.

So, his parents let him do an awful lot of things and, of course, he was extremely active in everything at the University of Washington. One year alone I think he had five presidencies of organizations. He was president of everything, but very shy socially. When he was senior class president, he had to help organize, and run the senior dance, but didn't dance a step himself and did not attend. He never learned to dance until he was a full professor at Dartmouth College. He finally took lessons

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at nearby White River Junction on Saturdays. Dancing was considered sinful in his family.

His mother was extremely intellectual and had been County Superintendent of Schools when she was only in her early twenties. She taught my husband to read when he was only about four, setting up a teaching blackboard by her outdoor washtub. His most cherished book was an atlas. His father, a railroad man (and a farmer) also invented many things, but never had them patented or realized from them financially.

And here's an interesting experience. When his family was living in Honor, Michigan (he was only about eight or nine then), somebody brought up the idea of having a surprise birthday for the preacher's children. And his mother and others promoted the idea, and it was to be a surprise, but nobody thought of providing refreshments.

So, they all arrived to surprise the family for the children for their birthday, and the poor preacher's family had so little food in the house for refreshment that everybody got only half a cookie. The interesting thing was that the children were Ernest and Roberta Burgess. Dr, Rice discovered this years later. Burgess was later Chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago for many years, and one of the most

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distinguished social scientists we ever had. He's dead now. He and my husband used to reminisce about the hardships they both had experienced. They knew each other well while teaching and in the American Sociological Association. I had classes under Dr. Burgess when doing my graduate work.

My husband's mother was a great Sunday School teacher and I imagine a very good one, because she was a good teacher anyway. And one day at Sunday School they had the story of the loaves and fishes. And to make it real, she baked little miniature loaves of bread and cooked two fishes, and to demonstrate to the children what they were like. And on the way home Stuart claimed to be hungry and his mother gave them to him and let him eat them. And his classmates all chided him, "Oh, you're just lucky to have your mother the teacher; and you get to eat the loaves and fishes and we didn't get any."

One other nice story. When he was about five he decided to build a planet. As a small boy, and all his life, he was deeply interested in astronomy. When he decided to build a planet he got all of his playmates to work, to help him gathering stones and sand, and he thought if he took a rock and molded some sand, or mud around it, and just kept putting it together, and adding stones he could build a planet. He was very disappointed

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when the sun came out and cracked it.

Then he desperately wanted a telescope, desperately. And he started saving his money for it, and, oh, he just thought it was going to be so wonderful. And that Christmas they gave him a very small insignificant one, that just disappointed him so greatly. He had visions of a great one that would be hoisted on the roof and he'd really see the stars, and he was extremely disappointed that he didn't have that.

Then another story. When he was a little tiny boy he was at a lake and found a fish that someone had dropped there, being too small to carry home or something like that. And he was so excited about this fish that he grabbed it up and ran all the way home to his mother and went into the kitchen and he said, "Oh, mother, I have a fish, will you cook it for my lunch?"

And she said, "Why, I can't cook that fish, why, it's dead."

He said, "Oh, it's almost alive."

I just remembered a very amusing incident that happened during Bishop Dunn's consecration at Washington Cathedral when I was Director of Public Relations there. I had to cover the sermons of distinguished rectors and ministers and preachers at the Cathedral on Sunday; resume them for

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the newspapers to use Monday morning. And it helped me tremendously if I could get some notes, and some quotes beforehand, then I could go ahead and pretty well write my story and get it in and didn't have to stay there so long. I could get home with my family. So, the Archbishop of York was to preach that Sunday. I believe its the Archbishop of Canterbury who read all the ceremonial litany, for the installation of Queen Elizabeth of England but it was the Archbishop of York who actually placed the crown on her head. He was getting well along in years when he was here.

He was going to preach at Washington Cathedral one Sunday and I got in touch with him and asked him if I could have some notes from his sermon. And he said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I don't have them made out yet, but if you want to come to the Embassy about 8:30 Sunday morning, I'll be glad to give them to you."

So, I said, "Fine, I'll be there."

So, I rang the bell or pushed the knocker or whatever at 8:30, and a very sleepy butler came to the door buttoning his coat and obviously hadn't been expecting me or anybody else at that hour of the morning. So, I explained what I wanted and so forth. So, he took me into a large library, and presently the Archbishop of York came in, in

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his shirtsleeves, without his vestments on, and greeted me very warmly, but it turned out that he hadn't written a word of his sermon. And he thought it would be just jolly if he dictated it to me and I typed it out for him, which he did. So, I sat and he walked up and down, up and down, dictating his sermon and I had to tear back to the Cathedral and type the whole thing out and get it to him by 11 o'clock. So, that taught me a lesson to be very careful about asking for quotes.

Well, the next day, Mrs. Dunn, the Bishop's wife, and Mrs. Albert Lucas, the wife of the headmaster at St. Alban's School for Boys (she's now dead), the two of them were designated to take the Archbishop on a sightseeing trip around the city.

So, they got a chauffeur driven limousine and he sat between them and off they started. Well, he had been much wined and dined the week or two he had been there. He was pretty tired out, so that by the time they crossed the Memorial Bridge, he was fast asleep with his head on Mrs. Lucas' shoulder. And he slept through Arlington and the Lee Mansion area, and slept all the way to Mount Vernon, You don't exactly tap an Archbishop on the shoulder and wake him up to look at something. So, the ladies were

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very quiet and he slept merrily on and they made their whole tour and coming back across the bridge he waked himself up, and beamed on both of them, and allowed as how he had had a delightful tour and had had a marvelous…

HESS: Enjoyed every moment.

RICE: Enjoyed every moment, had a wonderful time. So, the next morning Bishop Dunn devised a sort of a medallion with a white circle of paper in the middle, and some ribbon, and some gold trimming and so forth around it, and made this very interesting facsimile with little streamers hanging down and printed something on the circle. He got one of the staff and gave him specific instructions that he was to take it to the headmaster's dining room and pin it on Mrs. Lucas' shoulder. And if you had looked closely, you would have read the words (after the chap had pinned it on her), "The Archbishop slept here."

Isn't that a lovely story? Bishop Dunn had a marvelous sense of humor.

HESS: That's very good.

RICE: I think that’s a delightful story.

About nineteen years ago my husband had to go to some meetings in India and then go on, continue through

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Thailand and Japan, Korea, and around the world. He was gone between four and five months. At that time I had a job selling real estate and our son had just entered Randolph-Macon Military Academy in Front Royal, Virginia and was rather lonesome and so I didn't feel I could be away that long. I should go occasionally weekends and take a picnic lunch and be with him.

And so, it was decided that I would go just to Spain and France, a short trip and then come home, and he would continue on around the world. But it was a wonderful trip. Neither one of us likes just one night stands too well. Instead of going one night in each city in Spain we decided to spend all our time in Granada, practically. So, we were ten days in Granada and we fell in love with the place. I believe I have already mentioned this trip briefly.

First of all we got off the boat in Gibraltar, or Algeciras, as the town is called, and the head of the statistical office of Spain had a chauffeur and car and met us there, and drove us all the way to Granada, going along the Mediterranean, Malaga and places like a magnificent drive. And we stayed in the Alhambra Palace Hotel, it was a beautiful place, and we spent a lot of time in the Alhambra. And we walked all over every street of Granada, and we just loved it.

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And one night we booked an American Express tour to the Gypsy caves. There are several thousand Gypsies who live permanently in the caves above Granada. Most have no wooden floors, just earthen floors. One of the means of support is to put on every night Gypsy dances for the tourists, and they urge you to come and they are happy to have you. And one or two caves are outfitted with wooden floors for them to dance on, chairs, etc. And they are very dimly lit, extremely dark, and you go through a little kind of tunnel as the entrance.

So, we went with a group from our bus and went down this little tunnel and entered into this room, just packed with Gypsies and other tourists. And as we walked in one of the Gypsy women rose to her feet and shouted, "Dr. Rice," and my husband was so astonished to think there was a Gypsy there that knew him. And when we peered more closely, she was sitting between two women Gypsies, but actually she was a secretary from United Nations that he had just been seeing some weeks before in a meeting, and neither knew the other was going to be there, but my husband used to love to tell that story how that even in the caves of Granada he was known.

We had a wonderful afternoon that I'll never forget. On the way over on the boat I was reading some material

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about Spain and I read a long section about the famous composer [Manuel] de Falla, and I'm sorry to admit, but at that time I knew nothing whatever about his music. But this paragraph said that he was Spain's most famous composer.

Well, while we were there some friends invited us to go to the home of a famous concert pianist (a man whose name I've forgotten). It was a magnificent home with a beautiful walled garden, and his drawing room was tremendous. He had three pianos in it. So, there were only about five of us there. And he sat down and he played, and played, and played, and in the middle of his sort of concert, he looked me straight in the eye and asked me what I would like for him to play. Well, I thought a moment, "Oh, dear:" And then this page of the book flashed in my mind and I said, "Oh, something from de Falla," and he looked so pleased and so happy. And the other Spanish guests beamed and nodded their heads. Apparently I had said just the right thing. And then he did play some of de Falla's music. It turned out that he had been a protege and pupil of de Falla's.

On the way over, my husband and I decided that since we had so many mementos of travels in our home, that this time, instead of buying anything on the trip; gifts for

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family, as we usually did, or bric--rac for the house, that we'd buy me one handsome piece of antique jewelry for my fortieth birthday, which I celebrated a few days later in Paris. And I have collected antique jewelry for quite a long time and have some very handsome pieces.

So, we took an interpreter and went into a little jewelry shop and tried to explain to the owner what we wanted, and he showed us various pieces and nothing appealed to me at all. He finally got the idea, and went back into a real dusty little office, in a huge iron safe, and opened the safe, and brought out a magnificent set of gold jewelry. It's called Isabellan, which roughly coincides with Victorian in this country, except it's a little earlier. The workmanship is magnificent. There are earrings (they were for pierced ears, but I had them made screw on), and a bracelet, and a lovely pin with pendants that can be worn either on a chain as a necklace or actually as a pin. And there are lovely little delicate birds on each piece, with little seed pearl eyes, and little flecks of black enamel to denote feathers, and it's a perfectly beautiful set. So, we decided to buy it and it was $40, and that time, nineteen years ago, $40 was an awful lot of money to spend, and my trip had cost a lot. So, we really did splurge, but we bought nothing else on

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the trip. And later in Paris, for my birthday, we spent the evening and had dinner with Hans and Mila Jacobs, who had been the refugees in our home years before. I wore the jewelry with very formal clothes. I've worn themto the White House receptions and embassy parties, but I haven't worn them for at least ten years now because we just didn't go to that kind of occasion.

Last fall I had occasion to have it appraised for insurance purposes, and of course, an insurance appraisal is often low. And what do you think it was appraised at? Would you take a guess?

HESS: I would be a good deal more than the 40.

RICE: Would you take a guess? I'd like you to take a guess.

HESS: Well, how about four hundred?

RICE: Seven hundred and fifty. And I told the jeweler that I was quite interested in selling it and paying some of my medical bills, and what should I ask for a private purchaser? And he said, "Well, start at a thousand dollars and don't take a penny under eight fifty." I wish our stocks had gone up as well as that.

HESS: Stocks didn't do that well, did they?

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RICE: No.

I wish I could give you more details on this. It will appear in one of his books out in the Library, and in many other places of reference, but my husband was the first person who tried scientifically, and statistically, to analyze voting habits. And his book was to do with the farmer-labor vote.

It was his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University in Sociology. He had gone for this degree a number of years after his A.B. and M.A. at the University of Washington. This was back about 1924, and it caused a great deal of interest. I wish I could explain more specifically how his "quantitative" method was a real foundation for future voting studies and predictions, but he's often been referred to, and introduced, as the "father of voting predictions." George Gallup, Elmo Roper, Harrison, and others in the field have referred to specific illustrations and types of work that he did at that time. No one had ever done it before.

I often wonder what would have happened if he had continued in that field. He had a brilliant idea, executed well, and then sort of went on to other fields. But I think that was indicative of him in many ways. He had so many interests, that he worked very hard on one for a

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while, maybe a few years and accomplished a great deal, and then he went on to other areas of intellectual challenge like the improvement of government and international statistics.

HESS: One question on that: Louis Bean of the Department of Agriculture, a statistician, had quite a bit to do with the statistical predicting of elections. Do you know if Dr. Rice ever discussed that with Mr. Bean?

RICE: Oh, yes. They were old, old friends and used to enjoy each other's company and discussions a great deal. Many years ago he was sometimes jokingly referred to as "the galloping Bean poll." Dr. Bean was in great demand as a speaker during election time. Oh, they had many, many talks, and sometimes my husband would preside and introduce him, when he was speaking, and you know, lead the discussion afterwards. And sometimes visa versa, Louis Bean would maybe introduce my husband.

A number of years ago, I went to work part time for Elmo Roper as an interviewer in opinion polls. I had only worked for him about six months, when my husband and Libert Ehrman started their Surveys and Research Corporation, after Stuart retired from the Budget. They were doing not the same thing as Elmo Roper, but it was in an allied field and Stuart felt that it was best for

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me to stop. So, I dropped out.

HESS: Any other matters that come to mind this morning?

RICE: Well, I think in a way I've been concentrating on him, and his activities, and some extent mine, and I've said very little about our son and I think maybe I've been saving that for the "piece de resistance".

I think my husband was more thrilled the night our son was born than any other moment of his life. I think he had started giving up hope of ever having a family. And at age 46, to have a son, was terribly exciting for him and he just adored our son. However, he was a very busy man and he did have a lot to do. And there were many times when I know that Stu would have liked to have had more of his father's time, and yet we had such wonderful experiences as a family many times. During Stu's first twelve years we lived in a beautiful home on Beachwood Circle, Arlington, Virginia, with an acre of land. And back of us was many, many acres going right down to the river. This had not been developed then, and lovely woods. And many Sundays we would take frying pan and eggs and bacon and things, and walk down Donaldson Run (now part of it is a park and much of it built on, but in those days it was all wild, and no houses), and find a nice spot that appealed to us and build a fire and cook there.

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And my husband always, as our son, "Stu" was growing up, tried to give him a factual answer to his questions and reason for everything, and I think sometimes it was a little over his head. But I remember once when he was a very small boy, he asked his father what made it rain. And my husband gave him a factual scientific explanation of what made it rain. And even I didn't understand it entirely, and Stu I don't believe could really understand what he was talking about. But he listened and I think he sensed that his father was treating him as a grown-up person. He later tried to repeat this explanation to others.

And he loved taking him places. During the war when we didn't have a car, one day my husband, in the middle of some busy work, just took the day off and the two of them went by bus up to Luray Caverns and back, and they had a wonderful time.

A little bit later, in the same way, I took a day off from my job and took him by bus to Baltimore and we prowled all around the docks and the wharves and saw the boats in and some of them being repaired and things like that.

Then when he was only two years old, the three of us went to Europe, my husband had meetings and business

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in Europe, but Stu and I stayed in France in a little pension. And I remember that's when I taught him to count. The garden had a swing in it, and as I would swing him I would count, one, two, three, four and before the end of the summer, when he was just barely two, he could count to ten just from pushing him that way:

And then I remember, day after day, after day, quoting that wonderful Robert Louis Stevenson poem as I would swing him, "Oh, how I love to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue," and all that. And this would just fascinate Stu. He couldn't understand all of it, but he never seemed to grow tired of hearing it.

But then when he was twelve my husband took him to Geneva for about two months when he was going to some meetings. And he would be busy all day, so they rented a bicycle for Stu and he rode all over Geneva and he got him a family membership to the UN swimming pool. And in the bathhouse where the men changed their clothes, Stu observed that below some crossed latticework on the floor, there were coins. And I don't know how he did it, but it was ingenious, he devised some kind of a stick, with a magnet or something, and day after day he would work away retrieving those coins of all nationalities. And the other swimmers would come in, be very fascinated

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with this project, and encourage him and so forth. By the end of the two months he had retrieved enough money from those coins to pay for his family membership in the pool. He loved Geneva.

He attended several schools. His two years at the Rhode Island School of Design were his best, I think. After two fine years there, he became interested in acting in the theater and dropped out, is still pursuing that, though it is difficult field to break into in Hollywood.

He had a brief, but very good part in "Texas Across the River" and guest roles in several TV serials. He had various interesting summer jobs. He has been a ski instructor, and worked in the oil fields of Wyoming, and he worked his way across to Europe on a freighter. He went one year to the University of Grenoble.

And we always did interesting things on his birthday. One year I gave a birthday party for him, invited his entire class to go on a canal barge trip, and packed a picnic lunch for them, and that was fun.

I don't think my husband ever entirely understood his artistic interests. He's also a sculptor. He does very well in sculpturing and he plays the piano. He's much more an artistic person than is he a scientist.

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HESS: Mrs. Rice, since you have lived in Washington a good many years, what do you see as the greatest change in Washington since you have moved here?

RICE: Well, I think, undoubtedly the greatest change is that Washington has become a colored city. And I think that has brought many problems to Washington, and regardless of my liberal feelings that I've always had towards colored people, I must say that sometimes I'm hard put to it to maintain my equilibrium. I find myself being resentful at some of the things that happen, some of the things that are done.

When I was in George Washington University Hospital in July for arm surgery, on the entire floor of some thirty odd beds, and of the entire staff, RNs, head nurse, of aids, everything, there was only one white person. The whole staff was colored, the majority of the patients were colored. I had a roommate who was colored and who was a very ill person and a little out of her head, but there was all the difference in the world in the service she got and the service I got. I felt so in the minority. I never was given a bath in the five days I was there. I had to take my own, difficult as it was. She was bathed every day. I felt I was there by sufferance only; that

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they didn't really want me there, but as long as I was there, there was not much they could do about it.

I recently had one or two, very unpleasant experiences with colored taxi cabs drivers even though I've tried to be cheerful, friendly and understanding. And it's hard to know what to do. Of course, I think the difficulty is so many of them have come from the deep South, with little or no training or education. What can they do? They're not trained to do anything, and the economic question is always a powerful one.

For example, in all of Lake Barcroft, where homes run up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars at least, there is only one colored family and that's Justice Thurgood Marshall, and it didn't cause a ripple. Nobody raised a question about him there. He had the money to buy, and he had the position and so forth.

We'll have a problem eventually in this building. I don't know how it will be handled. Anybody who buys an apartment here has to be passed by the board first. And, of course, it's a law that you can't discriminate, you must sell to anybody who can buy. But there are people here that feel very strongly about not having colored in this building. I don't know what's going to happen.

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HESS: There are no colored in the building at this time?

RICE: No. And the rental building across the way started out white and it's about 85 percent colored now.

HESS: The new apartment house across the street?

RICE: Yes, it's about 85 percent colored. We have three mixed marriages in this block alone. I know because I go to some of the block meetings, and that's the main change.

Of course, the other change is the terrific amount of downtown building, and of high rise buildings, and then the high rise office and apartment buildings in Rosslyn. The change in Rosslyn is absolutely fantastic. Thirty-five years ago you just wouldn't believe anything like this could have ever happened.

HESS: Well, you live on the corner of Wyoming and Columbia Road. Would you feel safe in going out at night?

RICE: I wouldn't think of it! I wouldn't dare go out alone at night. In fact, I sometimes almost hesitate coming home from the Hot Shoppe at 5:30, when it's gotten dark and I'm walking on Connecticut Avenue even though it is well-lighted. We've had two owners, women robbed in daylight while opening our lobby door with a key. One

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woman was attacked and her purse snatched and the man ran away, and another woman was coming from the bank. She had a hundred and fifty dollars in her purse, she was attacked at the door and her purse stolen. The lock and all the keys were changed. My next door neighbor walked across at 4 o'clock in the afternoon to put a letter in the box on Columbia Road, and then go on to the grocery store, and she never saw who did it, but her purse was grabbed and ran. And a young man was killed right in front of the building two years ago. Two young colored teenagers who had never seen him, knew nothing about him, didn't even rob him, but they had bought a gun that afternoon and just decided to shoot the first white person that came along. That happened just between our building and the next one. And the things like that are definitely disturbing.

I had an interesting experience just about two years ago. I had my little grocery shopping cart and went up to the store and brought my groceries back. And along the street, two nicely dressed teenage girls stopped me and I thought they wanted information about a bus or something, so I stopped and they asked me for bus fare. And I said, "I'm sorry, but I don't have it," with which they started taking groceries right out of my shopping cart. And I

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resented it, and I said, "Listen here, I worked hard for the money that goes into those groceries, and if you need anything you can just get yourself a part time job and earn some money." And they looked so startled, they put the food back and left.

HESS: What can be done? As a sociologist, what can be done to right the situation that we now see?

RICE: Well, I think improvement of the educational system all along the line is probably the chief factor, because if they have the skills, and the education, to get the job, to earn the money, to help better themselves and their conditions it would certainly help. I don't really know the answers. I wish I did. It puzzles much better minds than mine. But it does seem to me that education is almost the foundation of it.

For example they speak a different language. Howard University put in a course last year about this very thing to improve their speech or diction. You get some of these girls going in to apply for secretarial jobs and the man interviewing them can't understand them and yet they say that if they change their speech and speak more distinctly and clearly and go home, they are criticized and their friends make fun of them or drop them. They

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won't be friends anymore because they are uppity, they are speaking like "white man." So, Howard was trying to let it be taught as a second language, to have two languages, and use their old one at home and with their friends, but have one that can make themselves intelligible outside.

HESS: Anything else to add this morning?

RICE: I don't think so. I think that does it.

HESS: That's fine. Thank you very much then.

RICE: You're very welcome.

Altmeyer, Arthur J., 25
American Sociological Society, 104
American Statistical Association, 107

Bailey, Sue, 10-14
Barnhardt, Dr. Kenneth, 4
Bean, Louis 157
Bell, Mrs. Brian, 68-70
Biddle, Francis, 51-53
Blair, Jennie, 36
Brownlow, Louis, 22
Burgess, Ernest, 5, 145-146
Business Advisory Council, 66

Carter, Hugh, 104-105
Cayton, Horace, 8, 15, 37
Chase, Mrs. G. Howland, 36
Cho, Lee Jay (Joseph), 97
Chung, Ke, 96-97
Clarkson, Walter, 40, 43-44
"Court-Packing" plan, 28-29

de Falla, Manuel, 153
Dunn, Bishop Angus, 36, 40-44

• • Consecration of, at Washington Cathedral, 147-150
• Dunn, Mrs. Angus, 149

  Eisenhower, Dwight D., 66
  Elsey, George, 60, 62-65
  Embassy dinners, 88-92

  Federal Emergency Relief Administration, 18
  Field, Marshall, 34
  Frankfurter, Felix, 16
  Frazier, E. Franklin, 36-37

  Gaylord, Richard, 74
  Gill, Corrington, 19
  Gore, Madeline Thomas, 57
  Gosnell, Harold, 16-17
  Goudswaard, Gill, 106

  Hassett, William, 68, 70-73, 78
  Hauser, Phillip, 17
  Hodgedon, Edith, 83
  Hang, Hae Ja, 97
  Hong, Tongson, 98
  Hopkins, Harry, 19, 121-122
  Houghton, Elizabeth, 35
  Howard University, 166-167

  International Statistical Institute (ISI), 105-108,110-112

  Jacobs, Hans and Mila, 45-46, 51-55
  Jardime, Germano, 47
  Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 66

  Kester, Howard "Buck", 12-13
  Killough, Joseph D., 62-63
  Kim, Dong Jo, 100
  Kim, Young Hee, 96-97
  Kingsbury, John Adams, 122-123
  Korea, Rice family in, 93-104

  Lawrence, Charles, 99-100
  Lawton, Frederick J., 67-68
  Leavy, Charles, 25
  Lewis, Hylan, 37
  Lohman, Joseph, 17
  Luce, Henry, 41
  Lucus, Mrs. Albert, 149-150

  Marshall, Thurgood, 163
  Meyers Howard, 19

  National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., 33, 36-44
  New York Municipal Lodging House, 121
  Niebuhr, Reinhold, 14
  Nourse, Mrs. Edwin G., 108

  Pace, Frank, 67-68
  Patrick, Luther, 89
  Price, Byron, 71
  Price, Priscilla, 71

  Redfield, Robert, 4
  Rice, Mrs. Ida, 13, 120, 143, 145-146
  Rice, Stuart A., Jr., 46-47, 158-161
  Rice, Stuart A., Sr., 22-24, 32, 90-91

  • and Bean, Louis, 157
    boyhood years, 112-120
    death of, 99
    and Ehrman, Libert, 157
    "father of voting predictions", 156
    and International Statistical Institute, 105, 110-112
    and Japan mission to, 93
    and Korean honors and decorations, 101-103
    and Lawton, Frederick J., 68
    New York Municipal Lodging House, 121
    and Pace, Frank, 67-68
    and trip around the world, 150-155
    and Truman, Harry S., 56
    • admiration for, 92
    as undercover investigator, 122-123
    and voting habits, analysis of, 156-157
    and Washington State College, 120-121
    and Webb, James, 65
  Rice, Mrs. Stuart A.:
  • The Cathedral Age, editor of, 33-34, 41
    childhood of, 123-140
    church attended by, 133-134
    and civil rights, 38-39
    Civilian Defense Volunteer Office, executive secretary of, 35
    and Committee for the Care of European Children, 34-35
    Embassy dinners attended, 88-91
    and Federal Emergency Relief Project, 20-21
    and Foreign Language Institute, 94-95
    and George Washington University Hospital, 162-163
    and houseguests, foreign, 44-48
    International Allied conferences, duties, 108-110
    and inter-racial experiences, 8-13
    and Leavy, Mr. and Mrs. Charles, 25
    as medical social worker, 14-15
    NAACP convention, 15
    and National Cathredral, Washington, D.C., duties, 39-44
    and Northfield, Vermont, 73-88
    and racial prejudices, 162-164
    and religion, effect on racial beliefs, 8
    and Rice, Stuart A., 18-20, 140-147
    and Roberts, Mrs. Owen J., visit with, 30-31
    and Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin D., 31-32
    and Russians at U.N., private party, 48-50
    and Truman, Harry S., impression of, 57
    and Truman, Mrs. Harry S. (Bess), 25
    and urban research, 17-18
    and Washington, D.C., 21-24, 162-167
    and the White House, experiences at, 25-28
    and YMCA, 37-38
  Robbins, Mrs. Warren Delano, 28
  Roberts, Mrs. Owen J., 28-31
  Roosevelt, Franklin D., 25-27, 42-43
  • death of, 55-57
    and Library, dedication of, 60-61
    and Supreme Court reorganization of, 28-29
  Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin D., 27, 31-32, 61-62
  • and civil rights, 36
  Roper, Elmo, 157
  Roseman, Samuel I., 27

  Shafroth, Morrison, 27
  Shafroth, Mrs. Morrison, 29
  Shills, Ed, 17
  Skadding, George, 42
  Smith, Harold, 48, 67, 69-70
  Smith, John, 80-83
  Snavely, Dr. Guy E., 10, 17-18
  Social life in Washington, D.C., in 1930's, 22-25
  Soomsai, Tui, 90
  Stauffer, Sam, 17
  Stuart A. Rice Merit Award, 104-105
  Stuart, George, 141
  Surveys and Research Corporation, 93

  Thurmon, Howard, 11-14
  Truman, Harry S., 58-60
  Truman, Mrs. Harry S. (Bess), 58-60
  Tubby, Mrs. Roger, 68-72

  Venneman, Harry, 48
  Vermont, experiences in, 79-87

  Webb, James, 65-66
  Webb, Mrs. James, 66-67
  Wedel, Mrs. Cynthia, 35-36, 40
  Welch, Kathryn, 18
  White, Clyde, 70
  White, Walter, 15-16
  Winiewicz, Josef, 90
  Wurth, Louis, 4

  You, Sanguine, 101