Appendix B. Interviews Conducted with Julia Davis

William Theriault: You were born July 23, 1900.

Julia Adams: Yes, in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

WT: And your mother died approximately three weeks after that.

JA: That's right.

WT: Your father was practicing law ...

JA: In West Virginia, in Clarksburg

WT: In partnership ...

JA: With his father.

WT: Was he living with the Davises at that time?

JA: They had bought a piece of land and they were going to build a house, but it had not been built yet.

WT: Your mother and your father had bought the land?

JA: Yes, and they were going to build a house, and it had been started but not completed so, temporarily (this was the first year of their marriage) they were living with his parents.

WT: After your mother died, and your father continued practice, was he living with the Davis family?

JA: Yes, because he gave up on the house and sold the plot.

WT: And during that time you mentioned that you were educated until you were nine years old ... 37

JA: By his mother, Anna Kennedy Davis.

WT: And that was your original name, it that correct?

JA: That's what my mother expected to name me, because when she died I was Julia McDonald. I've written about that. I don't remember it, naturally.

WT: About how old were you when you started to spend your summers with the McDonalds?

JA: Oh, about a year old. My father loved very much my mother's family. He had been a tutor there as a young man when he first graduated from college. And he loved the whole family and he thought that they had something to offer that I should have and I think he was quite right about that. So I was always taken down there. In the beginning I would be taken down there by my aunt or my grandmother. And by the time I was five, I'd be put on the train in the care of the porter or conductor and get off at five o'clock at Shenandoah Junction where I'd be met with Uncle Will and the buckboard and brought over and spent the summer out at Media.

WT: So the train rides and the trips from Shenandoah Junction to Media that you describe in your books were train rides and trips you actually took yourself.

JA: Oh yes.

WT: When you were nine years old, you mentioned you then started school in seventh grade?

JA: Yes.

WT: Where did you go to school then?

JA: Grandmother disapproved of the public schools in Clarksburg, probably with some reason. I tried them out on my Spanish Children many years later and I disapproved of them too. And she'd also taught my father and her three daughters until they were around that age. Then a cousin came, Miss Kennedy, Miss Virginia Kennedy, and started a small private school and I was sent to that.

WT: And that was in Clarksburg? 38

JA: Yes.

WT: How long did you continue there?

JA: Well I graduated from high school, I mean from courses that corresponded to high school at the age of fifteen, no fourteen I guess. Anyway, I failed some college examinations, fortunately. If I had been sent to Wellesley at fourteen I don't know what would have become of me, and I want to Miss Shipley's School in Philadelphia for two years, and repeated my last two years of high school there.

WT: When you were going to Philadelphia, you were staying there for the school year and coming back to Clarksburg?

JA: Yes, for short vacations, I used to go to ... my father was then living in Washington ... like Easter or Thanksgiving. But the long vacations I went back to Clarksburg. And then for the summer I came back here.

WT: Is the Shipley School still running?

JA: Oh yes, very much so. I had never had a regulated life like that where you had to get up by the bell. I didn't like it much. I went through it. I graduated.

WT: Which subjects when you took your exams did you need more work in?

JA: I failed geometry. I don't know what else I failed. Latin maybe? They were my first college exams and I can't remember. I failed three to my grandmother's horror.

WT: Were those things that you got a lot of instruction on from your grandmother?

JA: She didn't teach me higher mathematics, like algebra or geometry. Of, course by that time I was in school. She just taught me reading, writing, and arithmetic. I never got on to arithmetic. I've no memory of learning to read. She just showed me a word on a page, so that's the way that word looked.

WT: You mentioned in Legacy of Love, instances of you laying on the floor with a bottle reading a book, so it seems you were quite young. 39

JA: Well I could read by the time I was four. My aunt Mary down here tells the story of me coming in one summer afternoon to the parlor where everyone was resting and picking a book out and (I was about four) and she said "What is that?" I looked at the title and said "It's the Mazes and Phases of Love." She said, "Oh, Julia, you don't want that. What do you want it for?" I said, "To squash a bug with."

WT: When you were with the McDonalds during the summer, it was more of a vacation ...

JA: Oh, it was wonderful.

WT: You were not getting any formal education ...

JA: There.

WT: You were getting something else ...

JA: I was getting a great deal. I was learning how to get on in a big family that had a jolly good time all the time. That was something to learn, too. I loved it. I hate to think how trying, even more trying than now, I would have been if I'd had only the very, very quiet household to remember.

WT: It must have been a big change being an only child as well, going into a big family ...

JA: Oh, there were endless children on the McDonald farm. Of course, I loved that too. And nobody pestered me to learn anything. And I was more or less turned loose. I was expected to turn up for meals. If you didn't turn up, you didn't get the meal. If you didn't eat what was there, you didn't eat. Because they figured you'd eat the next meal. No big deal. I was the twelfth child that my grandmother McDonald had coped with, so she was not getting into a fit about me. By this time she knew that they came, and they lived, and they grew up.

WT: Some of the information I have comes out of the biography of your father. There have been at least two biographies, one in 1924 ...

JA: That was a very poorly written campaign biography. It was written when he was campaigning and it wasn't all that tremendously and beautifully accurate. I haven't read it for years, but I remember reading it and not liking it. 40

WT: It seemed to contain a collection of speeches plus a brief biographical sketch at the beginning. The biographical sketch didn't seem to mention much about your father's family.

JA: My grandfather had also been in congress and had gotten very tired of the goings on in politics. And when my father was first being approached to run for congress, when I was about six or seven, I think. And then he moved to Washington and never lived in the house with me again until I lived in his house in London. He remarried when I was about eleven.

WT: In Harbaugh's biography on your father he said he started thinking about getting remarried about the time you were eight or nine?

JA: Probably, I really wasn't privy to his thoughts on the subject, so I wouldn't know.

WT: In April 1911 he had set a date to become engaged and apparently your grandmother Davis did not approve.

JA: The family were not very approving, but as a matter of fact she made him an excellent wife. He never would have gone as far afterwards as he did because his attitude toward a new job was always that he was afraid he couldn't handle it. And very retiring in a way. Basically very shy. He got over it, but she brought him out.

WT: So you feel she gave him some of that confidence.

JA: Yes. She was a very great factor in his career.

WT: When your father remarried and moved to Washington ...

JA: Well, he'd already moved to Washington. He remarried about, well he had finished with the Congress. He had been elected for two terms in Congress and then he was appointed to Solicitor General. It was after that that he remarried. He had been living in Washington most of the time during those two terms in Congress. And for the first term he was nominated, his father sent a telegram to the Democratic Committee that was about to nominate him, sent to him saying "Say no, John." And some friend put it in his pocket and kept it until after the nomination had occurred. And you know in his campaign for Congress he never spent a penny. Everybody is spending millions now. We can't get away from it.

WT: After your father remarried and they moved from wherever he was in Washington then into a new home ... 41

JA: It was an apartment, but a very comfortable apartment on 16th Street.

WT: And you continued to live with the Davises and McDonalds.

JA: That's right. It was a great delight to my stepmother, who had no wish to take me on whatever.

WT: That's something that you mention several times. Can you try to explain the reasoning behind that to me?

JA: Well, I think she liked to have him to herself.

WT: How about your father and his feelings toward that?

JA: I don't think he was fully aware of it.

WT: How did you feel about it?

JA: I was very happy with my grandparents. It was no disaster being left with them. I was happy both places.

WT: And that arrangement continued until you went to college.

JA: To London. That's the first time I really lived, I was there for short vacations. I was never cut off from my father. He came to see me at school and I went to see him for short vacations. I could take a friend. One time your father [Ann Davis ...'s father] she is my cousin on the Davis side, and we had a very good time and everything was fine, but it was simply a visit. It wasn't a live in thing.

WT: You started Wellesley when you were ...

JA: I graduated from Wellesley [Barnard?] in '21. Eighteen was the senior year, I started in '17.

WT: So you started at Wellesley and then went to London when your father became ambassador.

JA: I had two years at Wellesley, freshman and sophomore, and then I took the next winter in London. and then I came back and went back to Wellesley and my class graduated. And then I took ... he came back to this country ... and I took my last year living 42 with him on Long Island and in New York and going to Barnard where I eventually got my degree. I got my degree in `22 instead of in `21.

WT: During that last year you were living with your father and stepmother in New York.

JA: Or Long Island, whichever he happened to be on.

WT: You mentioned that when your father had been appointed ambassador, while you were still at Wellesley, somebody did a rather nasty interview on you. Can you tell me about it?

JA: Oh yes. I don't remember it too well, you know. It was such a long time ago, like 70 years ago. They called me the "Blue-eyed daughter of the dignified diplomat," and "Eyes are the windows of the soul." Well, you can imagine what my classmates at Wellesley made of that. "How's your soul today, dear?" They teased me unmercifully about it. "How's the dainty daughter of the dignified diplomat?" You can see how that would go at college, can't you?

WT: What do you think was the motivation behind that?

JA: I think he was just writing for the press. You know, trying to make it sound more interesting than it was. I don't think it was vicious, no.

WT: It just wasn't very thoughtful.

JA: It didn't go over very well at Wellesley, let's put it that way. I took unmerciful teasing about it from my closest friends.

WT: I was wondering if that had any influence when you became a reporter yourself, if that was something you had stored away as experience.

JA: I didn't take it that seriously.

WT: Your father was ambassador through 1921 and during that period you had come to London twice?

JA: No, I came to London once. I came in ... I didn't go with him when he when. I was still at Wellesley in my ... and I finished my sophomore year. And I came down to see him off and committed the atrocity of developing mumps. And he couldn't even speak to 43 me except through a closed door because he had never them. He was sailing with Woodrow Wilson on the George Washington when Wilson went over to the conference in Versailles. And I didn't go them. And he started his ambassadorship. And I finished my year and then went in June next year which was then 1919. I was still 18. I had my birthday after I got over there.

WT: And you stayed there for ...

JA: About a year and three months.

WT: Until your father was ready to come home?

JA: No he came back and then was persuaded once again to finish out ... Wilson meanwhile had had his stroke and he never saw Wilson that time he came home. This is all in a book of his diary, which has very little mention of me in it because it was all about what he was encountering, and which is going to be published by the University of West Virginia but seems to have fallen into somebody's pocket. It was supposed to come out for Christmas this year. It's not out yet. It will be out. I have a signed contract. And my book is there and is ready for the printer. My girlish recollections of time with him in London which is based on letters which I wrote back to the aunts who brought me up over here. My grandmothers had died by then, so I wrote to my aunts.

WT: When you came back to the United States in 1921, you transferred to Barnard, finished your degree, and graduated when you were 21?

JA: No, I graduated when I was 22. I went back, and my English professors always liked me and my mathematics professors couldn't get rid of me fast enough. You had to take obligatory math at Wellesley then the first year. Trigonometry and higher algebra, geometry. I met my first English professor, who had remained a very good friend and who had visited with us in London when she came over. And she said "How is it to be back?" And I said, "Just fine, Miss Perkins, it's wonderful." And she said, "I mean, how is it really?" And I said "It's like putting on a pair of shoes that are too tight." So when my class left I didn't see any further reason to ... I still wanted a degree which I did come down and get, but I got it as a day pupil commuting from wherever my father happened to be living, Long Island in the fall when I started and then New York in the winter and then Long Island in the Spring and then I was still going to college and I was still going to college and I did get my degree.

WT: What did you get your degree in?

JA: Well, it was just a B.A., but I majored in English. 44

WT: Your grandmother McDonald died shortly before your father came home.

JA: That's right.

WT: And I believe both of your Davis grandparents died ...

JA: They had died before I even left.

WT: Before you went to Wellesley?

JA: No I was still in boarding school.

WT: When your father came back he went into a firm as a partner that eventually became Davis-Polk.

JA: It became Davis-Polk as soon as he went into it. It had been Stetson, Jennings, and Russell. But two of them were dead and one was retired, so it was very easy to take over the firm and give it a new name. And he went in with his great friend Frank Polk who had been an assistant Secretary of State and who he had gotten to know very well while he was ambassador, and they went in together and it became Davis-Polk.

WT: The summer of 1921 you went back to England ...

JA: On a visit to my great friend over there.

WT: Can you tell me about that. You went to India after that.

JA: Yes, I had a wonderful time. The British, some of them whom I didn't know very well, they had accepted me. And the measure of that was that they say "You've been away for a while, haven't you?" And then I was invited by the son of Lord Reading, who was a great friend of my father's, in fact his closest friend when he was in England, to go to India with him to visit Lord Reading who was then the Viceroy. Well I couldn't miss that, of course, so I extended my stay by six weeks. And then he wanted, Lord Reading invited me to come with him to Calcutta. His wife was there. She was quite an invalid but I saw a great deal of her for the Christmas, and I wired for permission to do that, and my father wrote back "Come home as scheduled." So I did come back. That was the year I went to Barnard and finally got my degree. 45

WT: Can you tell me some of the things you were doing in England or India that summer?

JA: I was doing an awful lot. I don't know. It was ... I've put that in a lot of books. I can't capsule that. I thought it was the most distressed country I've ever seen. I was appalled at the glaring poverty that you saw over there.

WT: When you mention about putting it in a lot of your books, I'm not making a connection there. Are you talking about the condition of poverty?

JA: I didn't write about it in those terms exactly, but it's in the other book that the University of West Virginia is sitting on. The book of my own reminiscences. There's quite a lot in that, and unless you're a terribly fast writer it will be out long before you get this in shape. I mean it will be out, I hope, before you get this in shape.

WT: I believe you said that your father was concerned when you were in India that you might become engaged.

JA: Oh well, yes. That was Mrs. Lee, mother of my friend that I had been visiting. And there was a British general who was kind enough to want to marry me. But I wasn't going to marry him. But I cried when I told him no, and she wrote my father letters and sort of agitated him. And he didn't want me to marry an Englishman. And I didn't want to marry an Englishman because I felt even then, how could I bring up my children to be British when I want to bring them up to be American? So there was no real danger that I was going to marry. I liked him. He was a nice man. I was sorry to hurt his feelings by saying no, but he recovered of course, as they do.

WT: Where and when did you meet your first husband?

JA: When I first went to England, he was the first air attache' at the embassy that they'd ever had, of course, because we'd never had an air force before. And he had been in our air force, and he had grown up in England because his father was an American from Boston, Adams, a descendant I think of Samuel, not John and John Quincy. And I remember when we came back, he wasn't quite sure, I mean after I had married him and we'd lived in Copenhagen and come back to this country, he wasn't quite sure whether he wanted to live in Boston or to live in New York, so we went up to Boston. And we met a lot of cold roast Boston, if you know what I mean? And one of them said to me, "Why don't you come? A lot of foreigners like it here." I said, "Foreigners? In my state, we thought we made the nation." So I'm very glad he decided on New York, which he did.

WT: So you met him ... 46

JA: He was at the embassy.

WT: You met him around 1919.

JA: Yes, but he was trying to marry then an English girl. She wouldn't have him. And then we came back to this country to go into business. Did go into business. And then when I married him again, he was running a Scandinavian branch for the U.S. Rubber Company. Denmark. [End of side one.]

WT: Your father bought his house on Long Island in 1923. It was before you were engaged, right? You were married in your father's house? You were married in October of 1923 and then went to Copenhagen. And you were there for ...

JA: About two years. I came home for the campaign, for my father's presidential campaign. Not for the whole thing but for the last two or three months of it. It convinced me of one thing, that I never ever wanted to go into politics.

WT: You mention in your book that your father pretty much said what was appropriate for you and other family members to do during the campaign.

JA: Yes, and he never took anybody around with him as they do now. None of that. But of course I got pounced on by smaller organizations to come do this and do that. I remember a dreadful night in Washington. I went to the home of this old lady who wanted to give a reception. I'd been told nothing about the size of it or anything. Just go to this reception, so I went. She seized me and whisked me through a door. I found myself on a stage in a ballroom. (It was a big house in Washington) in front of an audience of about a hundred people in little gold chairs. And she rushed from the platform and said (we were on the platform at the end of the ballroom where the orchestra sits if it's a ball) "Everybody stand up. This is the daughter of John W. Davis, who has come all the way across the sea to make you a little speech." It was one of the most horrible moments of my entire life until then. In the first place, I'd been told to make no speeches by my father. He didn't want me saying something that would badly affect what he was saying. So I thanked them for the applause, which I knew was not intended for me. If I had had a gun, I would have shot her dead, but I'd come unarmed. And sat down. So I lived through it. But I still remember it as one of the really ghastly moments.

WT: You came home with your husband from Copenhagen ...

JA: Well, he couldn't get leave except to come for the last two weeks. He still had quite a business responsibility there running the Scandinavian thing for United Rubber. 47

WT: And you moved back to the United States about 1926?

JA: We both came back in 1926 or 1927. The campaign was well behind.

WT: When you were over there in Copenhagen, you were collecting materials for your first book?

JA: Well I did collect material for the first book, and the way I collected it was to go down and ... we went down to visit a friend of his. He'd been there for two years before I'd married and went there, so he had a great many Danish friends. And he'd been in the American embassy in London which gave him a little bit of an entrance, you know, and she was the daughter of some friends in Copenhagen. And she had done the pictures for this book. The first written Danish history was what it was. (I suggested you describe it a little differently in your list.) My husband spoke up and said, "Why don't you have Julia do it? She likes to write." So I brought it back, and I went around with this big portfolio of big pictures. (I can show you one of them. I've only got one left.) And I didn't know that wasn't how you sold a book. Well I went around with these pictures from door to door of the publishers. And sometimes I'd have to walk twice around the block before I could kick myself in to say here I am and here's this possibility. And I saw Dutton, the head of their junior department. And she thought it could be made into stories for what they then called young adults, which was teenagers. I mean, it wasn't a children's story, but it wasn't ... So I tried to put it into that. But it did stay in print for forty years, in fact it's only just gone out of print.

WT: Were these tales translated, or did you translate them and then work them into ...

JA: Well, I translated them in the beginning from the old Danish, which I found easier than the new Danish because it was more like English. But I was already speaking the new Danish, so that wasn't too much of a problem. I also changed the wording, naturally. I mean I told them rather than simply writing them down. But first I translated them so I knew what they were saying. And one of them was about the Danish Hamlet. He wasn't in the least like Shakespeare's Hamlet. He lived at Elsinor and his uncle did poison his father and his uncle did marry his mother. But his thought, being a Viking, was how to get even. And he pretended to be mad and he sat in the ashes of the big fire at the end of the great hall sharpening hooks. And they said "Poor Hamlet, he's gone. He's not with it any more." So all the Danes, including his uncle came back and got very drunk, which was a cherished custom of the Danes. (You don't know what drink is until you try to drink with a Dane. They can put any American under the table.) Well anyway, they all got drunk and fell on the floor drunk, which was normal. And he pulled down the nets he had made and hung up on the wall and fastened them with his hooks, set the hall on fire, and came out laughing. He was delighted. He'd done what he wanted to do. He had gotten rid of all of those people. No "To be or not to be" or any inner conflict. He did feign madness, yes, but he felt he had it to do. 48 And another one was about the mother of King Knute. She was Queen of Sweden and she was approached by the King of Denmark and the King of Norway and the King of this and the King of that and she would have their ships come together. Old Viking ships, you know, with the rowers, and a board put across. And if it was somebody she didn't want to see, she'd have the board knocked down while they were crossing the board to get into her ship. They didn't press their suit after that. The Danes were very outright people, I mean the Vikings....

WT: Do you recall the name of the woman at Dutton whom you dealt with?

JA: I've gotten it written down. It's in my back attic. She has died since, but she published it and then I had a contract for six more books for young adults which I worked off.

WT: How did you get into that?

JA: That's what Mr. McRea, the head of Dutton asked me to sign. And I was so thrilled that somebody was going to publish a book that I had written (I took the stories but I did write the presentation). I was so thrilled I would have signed anything. And I realized afterwards, after I got to know the publishing business at little better, that I had signed a ridiculous contract. But I signed it and I had six books to write before I could get out of it.

WT: So, Dutton in that contract was what launched you into a career as a writer of children's books.

JA: Definitely. Then I realized that I had to get out of children's books because I would go to writers' parties, and they would say "What do you write," and I'd say "I write books for young adults" and they'd say "How interesting ... Oh, Hello Josie."

WT: What would you have written when you were 28 or 29 if you had not been committed ...

JA: I was younger than that. I was ... it was published in `26. I was about 25. And green as grass.

WT: What would you have written at that time if you had not been committed to doing that?

JA: Well, I was interested in writing novels and so forth, but I don't know what I'd have written. I've always been a person who had to keep up running as fast as I could to keep up with what was happening to me. I've never been able to look far ahead and say "I am miserable here but I want to get out of it by doing this." I did know that I wanted to write, yes I knew that. And I did know I 49 wanted to bring up children, and of course it never occurred to me that I wouldn't have a large family of my own but I didn't. But I overcame both of those difficulties.

WT: Your next two novels also deal with non-American subject matter.

JA: Well, my next one I did was a Finnish story. And then he asked me to do William Tell so I did that and he asked me to do Stonewall Jackson and I did that and out of that got back to America and realized that my real interest was American history and so I knew about that. And I think that in your list if you put all of those books together. And I have suggested, I don't know how you feel about this, that you put the articles and the other publications in one list and the books in another so that anybody can follow the development of the books if they want to.

WT: I was going to ask you about subject matter because there did seem to be a break as soon as you started working with Stonewall Jackson. From then on ...

JA: Then I knew where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in American history and particularly in the history of this area. Jackson, of course, was Clarksburg and went through here a good many times, but I became very interested in that.

WT: Did your publisher suggest the topics for Remember and Forget?

JA: No, that was material that I had left over from having written Stonewall Jackson, and I made it into another. And then the Peter Hale book was things that I researched myself. And that was the last one I wrote for that contract. And then I wrote one other book for that publisher, which was a novel based on my taking of the Spanish children. And then about that time I had an invitation from Stephen Benet, which I could show you because I've kept the letter, asking me to do The Shenandoah for the Rivers of America series. Which of course I wanted to do very much. It was right down the direction in which I felt I was going, where I felt I was happy and that was what I really wanted to do. And so I signed that and then I had to leave Dutton because the contract was with another publisher who was publishing the Rivers of America series. And then the juvenile version of The Shenandoah was because of the publishers who were that time Rinehart, and there'd been a big publishing divorce. It had been Rinehart and ... Well anyway, my friend was the other one and they severed and I had to stay with Rinehart because that's where I had signed and they were also publishing The Rivers of America and I wanted to be in that. And then they asked Carl Karmer to do the Hudson. He's done the Hudson and he did the young people's Hudson and then they asked me to do the Shenandoah. And I did the Shenandoah. So that's how that came about. And then I wrote three novels for them. And they should be together and I've marked them as to which they are. They should come along as they did come along. And then I wrote a book of memoirs, which was Legacy of Love and Rinehart didn't want it. And my agent, who had faith in me had a hard time selling it. But she 50 finally sold it to Harcourt, Brace. And that's how I finally dealt with them. Because I never again signed an option on another book because I'd had had that. And I would just explain to any other publisher, "No I don't sign options." I have done that.

WT: You were divorced in 1932 from your first husband.

JA: Yes.

WT: Can you tell me anything about that?

JA: We were both very young and both very silly.

WT: You went to work shortly after that for the ...

JA: While I was still married to Bill I was still working for the Associated Press and that went fine. I loved it. But I had resigned to get this book out. The first book had to be out by the fall. And of course I was thrilled that somebody would take my book. And so I gave up the newspaper job, although I had enjoyed it. When I took the newspaper job with the Associated Press, I was the second woman they'd ever hired. And they were frank with me. They said "We're paying you less ... They were paying me by the word. I was doing special features. Not regular reporting. That was considered too tough a job for a woman. Going around watching fires in the middle of the night and, who knows what? So I was doing special features, and they would pay me a quarter of a cent a word, which they told me quite frankly was the lowest they'd ever offered anybody. So I was glad to get the job and I was glad to do the job, and I thoroughly enjoyed the job. It was very interesting. I was glad I had that experience. And I had a very nice editor to work with. And he told me in the beginning, he said, "You're writing for a newspaper. Take the first chapter of Genesis as your model. Put the whole story in the first sentence. Then develop the story. "In the beginning the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them lives." That's the story. Well then, you go ahead and fill in the details. And he was a very good instructor.

WT: What's his name?

JA: He was the editor of the Associated Press, one of the editors, the editor of the feature department. And the office was the whole floor in a building on Madison Avenue. The editors had little tiny cubicles, just big enough for a desk at the end. There were three of them. There was a head editor and then there was a feature editor, which was the one I worked with, and another editor. The printing ... you sat down and everybody had a typewriter and a desk and there were about thirty of us. And you sat down and did your story on your typewriter. You put it in a little thing. You put it up in the machine. The machine carried to 51 whichever editor it was directed toward. So overhead all the machines were click clacking all the time. And all the typewriters were going. And then the press was over in the corner and that was thumping away, thumping away. So it was a very ... If you couldn't concentrate, better get out.

WT: Can you tell me some of the topics you wrote features on?

JA: Well, I did a lot of interviews. I wrote a story on a man who had been a great runner and was now an old man in bed. I wrote a story on what jewelry you could buy in New York, what extraordinary jewels were for sale. I wrote a story on the history of Columbia. I don't know. It was just all kinds of topics.

WT: And from the Associated Press they could be appearing just about anywhere?

JA: Oh yes, they went all over.

WT: I'm trying to find some way to locate those. Or at least some of those.

JA: Well I don't know. They weren't preservable. I think they were very ... they went with the newspaper and went out with the newspaper. Usually it was in the Sunday edition, but I couldn't identify a newspaper for any of them. I never saw them in print.

WT: OK, but papers like the Times and the Herald would be the kinds of papers that would have carried your ...

JA: Well, I didn't have a byline either in those days, so they just appeared and went. I remember once I had interviewed the daughter of President Butler of Columbia and I was coming back with my story and I started to cross the street on Madison Avenue. There were streetcars then. And I passed a streetcar and a taxi came on the other side and knocked me down. And I remember seeing the taxi fenders coming over me. And I thought, "Well this is it." And I gave a small scream and I thought "That's a hell of a last word." Not very good. He stopped. So I crawled out from under the cab and said "You didn't hurt me," and I went on in because I was late getting the story in and I had to get it in by a certain time as newspaper work goes. And so I went up and I sat down at my typewriter to write the story. And my hands were shaking so that I couldn't hit the keys. I remember that very well. I was just shaking from head to foot. It was a very close bush with being really run over because the one wheel stopped here and one wheel stopped there.

WT: But you weren't injured. You were shaken up. 52

JA: I wasn't injured. I had on a heavy coat and I fell on the coat and got upstairs, but when I sat down to my typewriter I couldn't hit any key. But I finally did and got the story and went home.

WT: Can you tell me about some of your work at the State Charities Aid Association?

JA: I didn't get to that until considerably later because by then I ... Well I stopped to get out the first book. I don't know whether you have encountered that in any of my reminiscences but I went down to Clarksburg to finish putting it together. My aunt was living there in the old house. My grandparents had died. And Melville Davisson Post, who was a good friend of the family was there. And he took me on and taught me more in six weeks than I had learned in all the English courses that I had taken at all the colleges. Because he really knew what he was doing. He had the, you know, you need a little more dialog here, you've got to build this up, you've got to build that up. Your dialog was always either to advance the story or to enlighten people about the characters. It must always have a purpose. It must always move the story. I really learned how much cloth it takes to make a pair of pants with him in those six weeks.

WT: So you think that's where, as far as your dialog in your novels, some of that skill comes from?

JA: Oh it all comes from that. I mean I really learned a lot of things I didn't know. I learned what kind of descriptions to have. How much description to have. I just learned the whole technique.

WT: You must have bad a pretty good ear for dialog anyway.

JA: Well, I was capable of learning.

WT: The dialog on your books seems to me to be pretty realistic.

JA: It was meant to be.

WT: The black dialog in your books seems to be pretty realistic.

JA: I listened to people and you try to reproduce the way they talk.

WT: Some people can do that and some people can't. You're somebody who can. Can you tell me what you were doing at the State Charities Aid Association? 53

JA: Well that again ... this sounds like a digression but it isn't. I once saw a fortune teller when I was young and she told me that friends would be the most important thing in my life. And they were. The first job I got through a friend who had worked there, a college friend. And they'd thought they'd overworked her, but they hadn't at all. She sort of went to pieces and left, and it was because she decided not to marry a man she was in love with. Six weeks later she did marry him. And she's still married to him and still alive, so that was her story. And then she recommended me and I went down and they said "Well, all right" you know, "We'll give her a couple to do at a price that won't hurt us. If she can do it, that's good." Then I had the chance to publish the book so I quit, but I liked newspaper work. I could have gone on in that very happily. But I liked better staying home writing books, so that's what I did. And my divorce came in then and I came back and I went to work at the adoption agency because again another friend had worked there and recommended me. And so I started there at the gorgeous salary of $35 a week. And they gave me to begin with the most difficult child they had. Because, you know, "She's going to be no good, let her break her teeth, get out, and it won't bother us too much." And that same girl is coming down here on the 11th of February to pay me a visit. And she was difficult. She decided (now she tells me, she didn't tell me then) that she wasn't going to be adopted. She was the oldest child of a big upstate family. And her father died and her mother had to be taken to an asylum. And it was a family of six and she was the oldest child at nine. Who's going to adopt a family of six? And they didn't have much child care in upper New York State at that time. And so they were sent down here, and of course they were broken up because, who's going to adopt a child of six? And she fought her way out of every adoption home. And I mean fought her way out. I'd be called in the middle of the night. "Come get Mary. She's terrible." I'd get Mary. I'd say "What did you do this time, Mary?" Here we are, she'd tell me. Here we are, she calls me "Ma." She sends me orchids. She's made it. She's found every one of her brothers and sisters and she's made a very good thing of her life. And I went on then. Then they gave me others. And at the end I had most of the disturbed adolescents. And I also had then, they gave me a negro family. And that they gave with some foreboding because I was from the south. What would happen? And I got along with them. Then I had all the negro families. Now we're half negro. The same agency. So are the workers. So are the supervisors. Half and half because New York is full of them. But then it wasn't recognized and it was very hard to find adoptive homes for negro children and there was quite a lot of difficulty.

WT: That wasn't a job you fell into. You deliberately sought out.

JA: I applied for it. I applied for the press too. I wanted a job and was told "Why don't you take the job I had." And this was another friend who had gone there and she's broken down because of tuberculosis. I mean she had it. And she said "Try for it. You like working with children," so I did and got it and that was that.

WT: And you were with that ... 54

JA: About five years. I started sort of part time and you know "See if she can do it." And in the end I was working full time at this big salary of $35 a week. And during that period I got my divorce, which if either one of us had had a bit of sense we wouldn't have done it. But we didn't so we did. And then I married Paul West. And he was back from Panama, where he had been running something ...

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