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JIM WISE: This is Jim Wise for the Durham Public Library, and we’re talking with Pepper FLUKE this morning. It’s May 12, 2012. We’re at her home on Sevier Street in the Duke Forest neighborhood, and we’re going to be talking about her work with the Carolina Theatre, with Durham (Saddle Yards?), Carolina Designer Craftsmen, historic St. Joseph’s, and whatever else comes up in conversation. So, good morning, and where would you like to begin? PEPPER FLUKE: Good morning, Jim. JW: I was just thinking about how long I’ve known you and how many contexts I have known you in, and you… you get a lot… you’re well-known and I see you get a lot of credit for your work in saving the Carolina Theatre, but you’ve been involved in a lot of other things as well for a long time now. PF: It’s… I feel very fortunate that things worked each time something came up… First of all, I graduated from Cornell in 1951, and Cornell was one of the nine universities that established the Brookhaven National Laboratory out on Long Island, and it was placed there on the old Camp Upton, to be equally inconvenient to all nine universities.

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JW: [laughs] PF: There was no direct route. And while… And… And so I was in the… interviewed and was asked to come and help set up the pathology department because I was a histology major at Cornell. And within about three weeks I met Connie and Monty Moses, and therein began the 60 years of… of love affair, I guess you want to call it that. Connie was such an incredible person that I just can’t even imagine her talents in one person. So, I mean, she did all the costumes for shows that we put on. She did… Her mother was a milliner. She could make a hat out of anything, and… and she was musical. She sang in shows on Long Island at... I can’t remember the name. The Save the Little Music Workshop. That was it. And so, then we got… started a theater group in the old army Camp Upton Theater where we did our… all, everything. And here were all these young PhD’s, doctors and research scientists and then this group of very willing and able young technicians who came out there. And it was… it was a joyous place, and this was in… before all the rules and regulations of OSHA and all these things were there. So if we wanted to change a light bulb because it burned out, we changed it. About three years later, you couldn’t do that anymore. Anyway, this is where this love affair between the Moses’s and the FLUKE started, and we shared just in so many ways our… Well, as a matter of fact, after Arsenic and Old Lace, which was the show Monty was directing, Connie was making crepe suzettes for the whole cast at four o’clock in the morning at her house in Bellport, and Don and I were there. And we worked through the show and everything, and that’s when we decided we were going to get married. So you see how far back we go. [laughs] And… and everything just kind of evolved from that. Then we went out to Berkeley. Don got asked to come out there and do some research, and that’s actually where I started doing artwork because I was with a group of friends and they had some evening classes at, not in Berkeley but in a recreation center. And I guess I started doing jewelry out there at Berkeley, and then Don got invited to come to Duke. And I kept saying, “I’m not going there. I don’t want to go to the South. I don’t like how those people think.” And… And… But you go where the job is. So we came here in 1958, and we came with the determination that we’re going to make a change. We wanted to do something about the segregated schools, and… and so that’s really where a lot of our interest in the things that we’ve done in the community started. And… We… But then … as happens with professors, Don got a chance to go to Tallahassee Florida in 1963. ‘64 we went. I was a Cub Scout den mother at that time, and there were… We had twelve Cub Scouts, two den mothers. And so, we decided to get balls of clay for the boys to do something for their mothers for Christmas. And we worked through the Erwin Auditorium, which at that time was still operational. And that’s where we got the clay, and they agreed to fire this for us. 1963. Well, we had these twelve boys sitting around a table, and one of them was obviously, by today’s standards, autistic. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t do anything right. He was always… He was… every game he got in… till the ball of clay. [clears throat] Excuse me. [coughs] And he sat… and he just sat there. He didn’t say a word. He turned that ball of clay into a bud vase, just worked quietly and did all the stuff, and the eleven cub scouts sat around. “Hey, Al, that’s great. I wish… Show me how to do that. My mom would love that.” And I saw this miracle happening, and I couldn’t believe that this kid who suddenly was... was so… He didn’t like himself, but suddenly he was the center of attention. And that’s all it took to change his attitude. From that day forward you ask him to do it, he did it. No problems. Well, all the way to Tallahassee, Florida, I had two little kids. I was thinking to myself, “Well, if it can do that for a Cub Scout, what can it do for me?” I got into a recreation department, and there was a wonderful German lady who was teaching pottery and also cloth- sold… sold leather clothing. I’d never seen that before. And so that’s what I did for a year, and every day after that, there was wet clay on top of my refrigerator being… It was all hand-construction. It was all commercial glazes, but that was okay. I was learning how to work with clay, and that was my first experience. It’s gone on ever since. JW: Yes. [laughs] PF: So that’s why this, which is now everywhere… and… And it’s been a… It… I have gotten as much out of this as that Cub Scout got out of it, and it was very important. So… Because at that time, Don was teaching and I had two kids. And it was a time when I needed to have something else that I could do, and this is what I did. And then in 1978 we came back from Tallahassee, and we actually were living in the house on Dwire Place that Edith London moved into later, and while we were there... Oh gosh, what was… I just blanked on his name. Anyway, the chairman of the biochemistry department came to us and said that he wanted to recruit Connie and Monty Moses to come to Duke. He was at the Rockefeller -

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JW: Wow. PF: - in New York City, and he said, “Can you help us? Do you think they would come?” And I said, “Well, Phil[ip] Handler, the only thing you have to do is let me take Connie out and hunt for a house. If we find the house, they’ll come.” And that’s exactly what happened. We went into that Wiggery house on the corner of Pinecrest and… and 751. Connie was absolutely in love with this, and she said, “The only thing that’s wrong with this house is it’s never seen anybody who cared about it. It’s always been maids.” Which was exactly the answer. And so, it was like, I don’t know, I think it was in spring when they came down, and Connie had stopped at the delicatessens in New York. And I think it was the first time lox and bagels ever came to Durham. Oh, we had a great weekend, and they agreed to come. And that summer, they… Connie had gotten everything packed up and sent the van down with a long list of everything. We were going to be going to a family reunion, but I said, “I’ll see that everything gets placed in the house when… when the van gets here, and then we’ll stop when we get back from Ohio.” Well, that’s exactly what we did. And it was interesting because the moving people had never seen an organized load like this one, including the marble top of a… of a sink. And… and I heard one of them say, “What in the world are they going to use this for?” And I said, “Believe me, everything on that van has a use.” It’s what she used outside her pool. JW: Ah. PF: That was the… where they kept the ice and the drinks. Anyway, so when we came back from Ohio, we stopped at the Moses house, which was probably one of the places we stopped on a regular basis. There was Connie up on a ladder painting blue in this kitchen. And she looked down at me, and she said, “You know, nobody has ever done this right.” And there she was. So that’s how Connie operated. And then… She and Monty stood outside and watched the implosion of the Washington Duke Hotel, and Connie in her very, very loud voice said, “That is not going to happen to the Carolina Theatre, not while I’m living.” And that’s where the love affair with the Carolina Theatre began.

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JW: Well, the Carolina Theatre at that time was still leased out to a commercial operator. PF: It was… It was what was left of… It was all but a porn house. That’s how close it was. And Connie saw how… She had a vision. She could just see what was going to happen in that building if she could just get her hands on it. So Connie… Monty worked to organize the Carolina Cinema Corporation. And that started about 19-… Let’s see… 78, 76, 77… 1975, and Mark Handler was involved in that. And they were putting together a group of people who could give a minimal amount of money. Unfortunately, we at that right time didn’t have a… a penny that we would offer, but we could offer anything else. But they… they got, finally, something put together well enough, and Monty had enough connections with theater people all over because his father as you may, in reading his obituary know, his father was a drama critic in New York City and… Montrose J. Moses. And so, he had inherited a lot of this theater business, and there wasn’t anybody who could do all that… the tinkering, the things that had to be done. As a matter of fact, one of the joys of having Monty involved with the theater was on Christmas Eve he got a phone call. “Monty, we can’t… we can’t turn the furnace on. It won’t go on! We’re all freezing! Can you come?” Well, he had been given the… the information from the man who had been doing this in the theater for…What was his name? The guy who was running the Carolina Theatre at the time. Again, I didn’t think that… He died of a heart attack before he ever came to see our office. Well, anyway. It… Monty had the tool. He went down. He got the furnace going, and, you know, all was saved. That happened more times than anybody really knew. And on Christmas Eve, he dropped everything, and down he went. So then Connie… Once they got the lease from the city for, I think it was the 31^(st) of May. Then they could go ahead and start getting people to come in and help clean up and… and get the building so that it could be used. And so everybody dropped everything. Connie said, “Bring all your water-based paints, beiges, and light colors.” And she had a 50-gallon drum down in the lobby, and everybody poured their paint in. She stirred it up, and then buckets of paint went everywhere. And it… The thing that struck me the most, and I have this absolute memory of it: standing on a ladder painting a ceiling with Ledbetter. What was his first name? He was a musician that Connie had gotten acquainted with. Anyway, every… It was an integrated group of people in 1978 working to save that theater and… and do the painting and do the everything that needed to be done. Everything… Nothing was bought. Everything was donated. Linda… Linda Wilson got rolls of fabric that we were able to hang on the walls and… and the last thing we did just before the night before we were opening in 1978 with Charlie Chaplin was, Connie said, “Well, we can’t afford to change the carpet. So, get the red paint out, and we’ll paint it out, back out the door.” And that’s what we did. And it was a red carpet when people came for the opening. [both laugh] (15;11) So, Charlie Chaplin Film Festival was very successful. People were lined up to come. And then finally… They got… Maggie Dent to come be the film… to run the theater. And that was a stroke of magic because Maggie came with her own credentials for running a film house. Con- Monty was a film buff. Monty wanted the Carolina Theatre to be a true film house, where you could see the films that you couldn’t see anyplace else. And the… the people, the personnel, the kids that came to work there, were wonderful. They got, after Bill Cash, had not quite paid the bills, then Dorothy Palats(sp?) came in to… because Maggie Dent left. And Jim Steel was there for a while. Then he went to the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill. And I can’t believe I’m remembering these things. And then Dorothy Palats got cancer, and during the time that… that she had the cancer, everything kind of fell apart. Dorothy was an incredible film person. She knew films forever, and Monty knew about her. And so, that was kind of… Everything kind of sank. The bills weren’t getting paid. And then they hired Steven Barefoot in 1984 to come on as the manager. And for some reason, we had gotten acquainted, and so I wanted to help every way I could with anything that Steven needed. So I spent a lot of time down in the theater just doing any job that needed doing. Running errands or… or… And then the… the vendors that they needed, popcorn, cups, the kinds of things – oil – the things you need to run a theater, they wouldn’t pay… They wouldn’t give him anything. They say, “No, your bill is this long. We’re not giving you anything today.” And Steven sat there in that wonderful Steven Barefoot way and convinced them that he would pay them for everything that he’s delivering to me right now and I will pay you… and I can’t remember what the amount was, but it was 10% or $10 or what-have-you on the bills that you have. And somehow he convinced them. And he followed through on that, and then he started doing extra programming, getting more kinds of entertainers and using parts of the building that hadn’t been used before. And, of course, Connie was up there working on that ballroom. And the other thing that was so magical is that the young people who worked there, they weren’t making money. I mean, they were getting a little bit of money maybe just to subside or… subsistence, but they loved being there. They loved being part of this because it was something new, and it was energetic. And everybody did everything. Con- Monty, no, Steven cleaned toilets. Steven scrubbed floors. Steven cleaned up all the messes that occurred here and there and everywhere. And then, but, because everybody did it, there was no hierarchy; you were all equal. And so those kids loved being in that building. They loved being part of this atmosphere. That was generated by Steven, and by.. their… the building, and also because of Connie and Monty, their attitude of “everybody is equal.” We don’t have any majordomos here. And Connie was upstairs determined to turn that ballroom into a… what she called “everybody’s living room in downtown Durham.” And that’s what she did. And, this… this piece of furniture was one of the things that was donated to Connie for the ballroom after she got it operational. Well, a lot of the things when we had to finally shut down the theatre in 1988, we gave back to a lot of people the things that were theirs because of… Like Margaret Haywood had wonderful antiques in there, and we gave those back. We had borrowed things from Southern Season to try to set up a gift shop there. Well, lots of things didn’t work that we wanted to do. But this was going to be thrown out by the present. And Cora told me, “Pepper, you know that desk that” - Connie called it a writing desk - “that was in the ballroom? They’re going to get rid of it.” I said, “I’m coming to get it. If they want money for it, I’ll give it to them.” So I took it and got it refinished. Well, it was in this drawer the day we were closing down the ballroom in 1988 that I found Connie’s diaries. JW: Oh. PF: A photo diary and all of the information day-by-day that she did in the ballroom and photographs of everybody that came up to help and little anecdotes that she wrote about this whole episode. There are three diaries, and if I hadn’t gotten them out of there, they would have been thrown out. So they’re in the basement. Now all the… Well, I’m jumping ahead. Anyway, Connie’s goal was to… to sing her concert. In 1983 she called me and said, “Pepper, the other shoe just fell.” She had gotten the diagnosis that the cancer was back. Well, I fell apart. I went right over to her, and we sat and bawled for two hours. And then she said, “I’m going to finish the ballroom. That’s my goal, and I will do it.” And she did it. And she sang her concert there the 31^(st) of… of… What month was it? Sept? No, March. 31^(st) of March. And left, went home, and was gone in 25 days. And it was… terrible. Mary Beach and I spent the last 25 days, ‘cause Mary Beach lived just down the street. She was also very close to Connie. And we did all the cooking to keep the family fed up to the point that Connie couldn’t stand the smell of food. And then we would prepare it at home and take it there. And, so she did… She accomplished everything she set out to do, but she couldn’t beat the cancer. But, anyway. Now I’ve gone off track. Where do I go from here? [laughs]

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JW: You mentioned the young people that… that were working in the Carolina Theatre. Who were they? Were these like - PF: They were just students, mostly students, some of them high school kids, and we have photograph of all of them. They’re all in the archive. I have lists of all the people that worked in the theater. That’s all part of the archive. And because Connie was a… a paper clipper, there were four boxes of clippings that Connie had clipped out that ended up here in our basement, and we have a little cottage over at Cora(?) Lake, and I used to take one box at a time and go through them. Because everything that happened in Durham during the time they were working on the Carolina Theatre, as far as Connie was concerned, was historic to what was going on at the Carolina Theatre. Now a lot of that had to be… I mean, there is just so much paper you can save. But I went through and tried to catalog everything by dates, so that everything that was 1930, or 1940, 1950, whatever, was put together. And… and then I could spot certain things that I realized were historic, like fires in downtown Durham, which I thought was very historic. And so, that’s… and I had done a much better job in the early days than I was able to do at the end. Part of the problem was that I had everything sorted out downstairs in boxes and labeled, and then it got to the point that I needed the tables down there because I was going to CCC and I needed more space. And so, things just got shoved. Put them in the boxes. Get it off the tables so I had space to work. And… And that means that a lot of the boxes that went to the library were not as well organized as… as the initial boxes. Everything that went to the library... Like, it says here, “Carolina Archive, Box 1,” and it lists everything that was in that box. Eventually when the Arts Council went… Anyway, when the secretary of the Arts Council who lives right down the street here, and I just went blank… She gave me all of the information that they had collected that had to do with the Carolina Theatre. A lot of it duplicated what we already had, but all of that is included in every box that went. And everything was itemized. Here’s the list of all the special events that Steven Bare[foot] put in 1985-86 to ’87, and then here’s additional events to Box 8. Steven Barefoot was the most incredible, innovative… He is why the bills got paid and why when… There was a bill, outstanding bill, for the Herald Sun, and Monty kept saying, “No, we don’t owe it.” “Yes, we do, Monty. I know we do.” Because at that point, I had gotten all the information and was going through and tabulating things. And we had a sit-down with the Herald Sun, and we agreed that there were certain things that they should not expect us to pay. But, we ended up paying that off, and the… the Carolina Cinema Corporation ended up with $5000 in the bank – JW: Wow. PF: - which was a small miracle when you stop to think of all the up’s and down’s. And that ended up being held at first by the… the Historic Preservation Society, and then it went over to the Carolina Cardinal State Bank. And it was part of that that was the initial money that paid for the Dorocie Palat(?) chandelier. Because we also had some donations that came from Dorocie Palat, so whereas the city claims that they own all the fixtures in the Carolina Theatre, they do not own that one. That is owned by the people who donated the money for it, and there was a plac[ard] on the wall to that effect. For some reason, the present owner, the present management, have not put any of those plac[ard]s back. And… and they didn’t put Connie Floyd’s (triptage?) back in the cinemas, and that was done on grant money. So, although for a year now, I have not gone near the Theatre, partly because I didn’t feel welcome and partly because I was too critical. But, last Thursday night Don and I went to the Madeleine Albright presentation, which was unbelievably remarkable that they had been, that the city has gotten the equipment there so high-tech now that they can receive information sent from… from the 82^(nd) St Y down to the Carolina Theatre to Cinema 1. And the presentation was remarkable. So, and I have to say that for the first time since they’ve taken over the Theatre… I said I was coming, and I asked them to reserve a… a parking space because I said I can’t really walk too well yet. And so they did. Cora was there and saying, “Well, that’s one’s already taken. You can’t go there.” Handicapped spot. And they were gracious, and they were wonderful. And they welcomed me back. And it was a very satisfying experience because there were a lot of things that went on that… that I felt were wrong, but at the same time, I have to forget that I’m eighty-eight or eight-two, whatever this age is, and accept the changes that they are making because from their eyes, these are good changes. Some of the things I’ve seen in all the years that Don and I traveled with the League of Historic American Theaters, on our own dollars… We went for ten years to their major events all over this country, going to historic theaters that were being restored and learning everything that we could learn to bring back to Durham, and nobody in Durham wanted to hear what we had to say. It’s hard to say. That’s true. I mean, I would come back with all the literature and all the information and notes that I had taken. The reason the chairs in the Carolina Theatre are what they are is because I told Jack Brooklin(?) that I was going to Michigan, that I would not accept what the architect had brought in. Those are im- impossible. You cannot sit in that fabric. It will itch your bottom, and so I said, “I’m going. I don’t care whether you pay me or not. I’m going on my own dollar.” So he did a complete turn-around, and he said, “Well, I’ll send you and Don Anderson up.” And I said, “Okay, we’ll go.” And it was, there was another event going on in Milwaukee at that time, which was also League of Historic American Theaters, having to do with fireproofing, which we were very involved in at that time at the Carolina. So, we went up there, and, you know, sometimes miracles happen. The day that we arrived up there in Michigan, a new theater chair had just come online. What you see in our cinemas are those new theater chairs.

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JW: Oh. PF: Exactly the same price that Dan Coffee was saying it was going to cost. He was going to make a lot of money on those cheap chairs he wanted to put in our theater. And, he and I never got along very well. And so, for that reason, it was sort of like, that’s… that’s what my role was: fight, fight, fight. They’d see me coming, and they’d say, “Oh, Lord, what have I done wrong now?” But it was… it was… The people who were doing it, Jack Rufflin(?) and… From the county… Now I’m blanking on his name. But, they… they really didn’t know what they were into, and unfortunately Dan Coffee had sold us a bill of goods. And we found out after the fact, that the things he said he had done… He said he had been the architect at Radio City Music Hall. He didn’t bother to say the only thing he’d done was bathrooms. And then there was The Chicago Theatre, and that he would… big displays at The Chicago Theatre. Well, excuse me, when we got up there we found out it was the building next door, not The Chicago Theater. So, we were gullible. But, that we ended up… And all… When every time I walk out of the ballroom and have to go down that slant to go into the new ballroom, that should not have happened. That’s a new building that was built. You raise it up six inches so you don’t have slants all over the floor. We lived with what we got. Anyway, I don’t know. Where did I get off on this track? JW: What… While the theater renovations were going on, you were also very involved with the Savoyards. PF: Oh, yeah. Don and I started singing with them in 1980.

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JW: Ah. PF: And there again, it was partly because of Ben Keaton and Randy Umburger. We fell in love with them and everything that they were doing. And it was a time when Don had a little free time so he could, wasn’t quite as, you know, involved. He was still teaching full-time but… And we were both musical. I mean, I had sung all through high school, was one of the soloists and that kind of stuff. JW: You mentioned that when you first got out to Brookhaven, that you all were putting shows on. PF: Yup.

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JW: Were you involved in theater in college and in high school? PF: I was in high school, not in college. Back then, I had to spend a lot of time keeping my head going in college. But, yeah, we did a lot of shows. We did Arsenic & Old Lace. I was the lead in Joan of Lorraine, Basil Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, and that was an extraordinary experience. And, again, we were all of these people. Don was aria da capo, was Don. And… And there was an emergency call for Dan Tousserson(?). And he was dressed like a fairy underneath a table and he had to get a sheet thrown over him so he could go see his patient at the hospital. [laughs] I mean, that’s just the way life went. And I was doing… The man I was working for came from Emery, and he was the pathologist. And we were working on I-131 uptake in chicken thyroids. I got very good at taking chicken thyroids out, which are about the size of a pinhead. And so, whenever we’d decide, a group of us, that it was time to go to West Hampton beach to have a beach party, we’d say, “Okay, let’s go. Have you got any control chickens, Pepper?” As I always had a few controls that I could latch onto. And we’d go to the beach about two o’clock, have a typical beach party, and then go back to work at seven o’clock and work until three in the morning. So they got their full eight, or nine, ten hours, but we kind of used our hours. Well, that all stopped, you know, after… after a while. JW: Yeah. PF: The rules and regulations finally laid down on top of us. But we did several plays at Brookhaven. That was how the- we got connected up as thoroughly as we did with Connie and Monty. And then Connie and Monty had a sailboat called The Montague(sp?), and Don had a sailboat that was, he always called it a bastard lightwind because it didn’t… it had to have a boomkin to make the full wind. Ours… Ours was on a pier or on a dock that was going up the Duck Muck because this was where the… all these ducks were whereas Connie and Monty’s was on a pier in Bellport. And so, we would all come in together, and they would go off that way, waving to us, knowing that we were going to go get our boat moored, climbing through the duck muck to get in there. And… So, being at Brookhaven, our kids used to say, “Gee, I wish I’d had a Brookhaven in my life someday.” Because all the stories, when we would sit around the table and start telling stories, it was always full of laughter and full of joy and full of satisfaction for what we were accomplishing both in our jobs but also in the friendships we made. And those people are still our friends. We still send Christmas cards to all of those people –

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JW: Oh, that’s great. PF: - that are still alive. There’s… We’ve lost tremendous numbers, but… but we were close. And we shared… When… When you’re out in the wilderness like that, you sort of have to be close to people. JW: Yeah. PF: And… But, anyway. Let’s see now. What have I left out?

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JW: Well, you were starting to talk the Savoyards. PF: Being part of the Savoyards has been… Again, because of the friendships made, when you work that hard to put together a show in a small amount of time that you have, like January to March, you become very close to that group of people. And Mollie Moses O’Dell is very involved with Savoyards, and she sang this time at the show, Iolanthe, and it was the first time that she had a female role. JW: Oh, really? PF: Because they’ve always considered her voice was more low voice, low voice. Well, the night that we had the… the party at the Carolina Theatre, the 29^(th) of December after Monty had passed away, the theater offered to put on a party for the family and for the close friends. And they did everything, and… and Molly was in charge of the guest list and inviting people. But basically, the theater did it, and it was done very nicely. And Connie had sung in… What was it? Outrageous… The play that Lee Wing put on or wrote about Isabella Stewart Gardner. I have all of it upstairs. Anyway, Connie sang the lead and… Outrageous Mrs. Gardner? Or something like that. And it was a…a wonderful show. But Molly found one of the pieces that Connie had sung, and she worked it up with Scott Wing. And he and his brother were there as the combo that Connie had always sung with, and they… and Molly sang this piece from Mrs. Jack, that was it. And it… I mean, I could hardly believe it because she was her mother’s daughter. She was singing the same way that Connie sang it. And nobody had ever heard that in Molly before. This was the most remarkable thing, and so I think it was that as much as anything else that got everybody saying, “Hey, Molly can sing!” And it made a big difference for her to be part of that and still is, to be part of that group. And she has sing in every Savoyards show since she was old enough to walk. So, that’s… that’s a binding thing for all of us. And then to have lost Randy Umberger was unfair and unkind because he was just an extraordinary teacher at NCCU. So, you know, there are so many things, Jim, that have gone on in this community that are really remarkable. All the integration businesses that, the coming together of the… the folks who were bitter enemies, and then they came together and realized that this is ridiculousness, there’s no reason to be like this. My… The… In 1999 when I was on the board of the NCCU Art Museum and I generated that show for nineteen African American potters from all over, not… I think there was only one from Durham, but they were from Alabama, from Atlanta, various places. They had never been seen together before, and they put on a show at the NCCU Art Museum that was indescribable. Blue-Green Bird stated that it was one of the best ceramic shows she had ever seen in this area. And… high praise.

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JW: Very! PF: And so… And out of that show, $40,000 worth of pots were sold. JW: Wow. PF: And those artists gave 40% back to the museum. Which…

00:41:41.600 - 00:41:44.110

JW: That’s very generous. PF: - blew my mind. And… And of that group, at least half of them have been teaching up at Penland School. JW: Ah. PF: There’s… You know, there are some things that you do that you know are the right things to do, and that to me was one of the best things I ever put together. And I didn’t get much cooperation from the museum man, but that’s alright. We did it. And then from Durham, it went out to Columbus, to the museum that’s out there attached to the arts… I don’t know if they call it. The Crafts Museum or Arts and Crafts Museum, or something like that. And they got to be out there. But the friendships that were made, by me, in that, I mean, still, Illiana who’s in Atlanta, the most marvelous jeweler. He used to jewel on the streets in Durham when he first started out. And he’s now in CDC –

00:41:44.110 - 00:43:10.640

JW: Wow. PF: - and he’s been going to CDC for years. So Charles Smith got those three pots over there. Were… I discovered him in Spoleto in 19- in South Carolina, and he was in our show. And you can’t see, Gary Allen, over there, behind there, but these were outstanding potters, really incredibly talented people. And we got them here in Durham. So, and then Helen has now benefited from that, too. JW: Did you have a lot, if not everything , to do with getting Carolina Designer Craftsmen started? PF: Yup, we did.

00:43:10.640 - 00:45:20.180

JW: And getting crafts accepted as a, as a part of fine arts? PF: I don’t think we realized what was going on. In… It was retrospect after… I agonized for all those days putting that craft chapter together which got cut from 104 pages to… to 11. But anyway, we didn’t realize it was the arts and crafts movement coming into Durham. It had come from Europe, from England, to Boston, to Cleveland, to Chicago, to the hospital in… outside of Berk-… of… of San Francisco where they… the… the hospital for… TB patients. And they were sitting there doing nothing, just wasting away, and then… and then suddenly they said, “Wait a minute! There’s some things you folks can do.” And they started teaching them ceramics. And there’s… It’s called the Eloquip(?) of Pottery. There were books written about this. And this was, this was the salvation because what patients need is not just to sit and die, but they need to be energized. And pottery’s the greatest way to do it because it’s simple. It doesn’t require a lot of tools, but it does require a little bit of organization to get the things they need to make it work. So, when it came to Durham, we six… seven women started The Craft House of Durham, and we worked to open our shop on May 1^(st), 1970. At the same time, Flo McKinny(sp?), who is never given credit for what she did, I’m going to give it to her because she deserves every minute of it. That plac[ard] up there at the top, with the… the enamel plac[ard] there and the one over the Silvia Heyden there – JW: Ah. PF: - are plac[ard]s that Flo McKinny did. They’re…

00:45:20.180 - 00:52:02.060

JW: Oh. PF: I mean, she was an enamalist, but she did experiment with other things. Anyway, she started a little… a little shop called Florentina’s and… because there was no place for anybody for who was doing anything with handwork to sell anything in this community. So, okay, Flo did… started Florentina’s, and then we decided, “Well, we need something more. We need a guild that’s in our area.” Piedmont was going in… in Winston Salem, and we had all tried to get into Piedmont. But we weren’t good enough for them. So, I can’t remember… I never can remember the name of the woman. Flo wrote a letter to her and got a very nasty letter saying, “Well, we are the guild. We’ve been going, and we don’t need you.” And Flo said, “Well, okay. That’s why we’re starting our own because you’ve turned us down over and over again. We’re going to start our own guild.” Well, she was as nasty and obdurate as she could be. Flo went ahead and did it. So, the seven of us got together with Paul Manus, Chuck Chamberlain from ECU, and two or three others. The professors at ECU back in those days were very, very helpful, and it was part of their know-how and their willingness to join us or help us that this guild got started. And we met. We had meetings. We drew up by-laws, and we drew up rules and regulations that, minimal, that let this guild come to be. And we put on… The first CDC show was in April 1970, and that was over at the fairgrounds. And I’m trying to remember which building we… Oh! We were in the old education building. The… The ceiling leaked everywhere. We kept moving things around but… to have the show. We weren’t going to be daunted, though. We set it up. We had it, and it was very successful. And that was the first one. A month later, The Craft House of Durham opened on Chapel Hill Road in what was then the little shop that the jeweler who was downtown, Dooer. Mr. Dooer had moved up here to Chapel Hill Road. And then he closed, and we started. And I have photographs of the families, all the kids. And everybody was cleaning and painting and doing everything. And by that time, Dorothy Davis’s daughter, Cynthia, had had an automobile accident in college in the west and ended up with a broken neck. Never walked again. She had a wheelchair. So every shop that we put together had to have wheelchair access so Cynthia could get in and out of our shop. She was a very, very interested and wonderful person, and she is still going. Her daugh- Her sister, Debbie, she lives up in Allentown. And we’ve lost Dorothy. Morris is still alive in Chapel Hill, but … Craft House was a really fabulous institution because it was before women were allowed to run a business. And when Bob and Black – Bob Black and Norman Sanderson offered to build, to include a building for us in their building, that was 1974, then we hired… who was the wife of the man who ran the bookstore? She was a realtor and a businesswoman. We… We hired her to look at our business, read all our books, and tell us where, whether we could make it in the high-rent district on Chapel Hill Boulevard. And so she looked at it, and she said, “Well, you can do one of two things. You can either go to the bank and borrow money, or you can close your business down, whichever you want to do. But you gotta stop being a consignment business. You gotta buy what you want to sell.” So, Jan Gregg and Dorothy, I think, Dorothy Davis, were the two we selected to go to the bank. All our… All our mortgages were in Wachovia. And they went in and said what we wanted was $2000, and we’ve now been in business for… this was… We’d been in business for four years, have no… nothing against us at all. You know, we’ve paid our bills. And so the bank, the bank, “Oh, well, that sounds like a very good thing. Take this home, and have your husband sign it.” Oh, no, no, no. This is not our husband’s business. This is our business. We’d already listed all of the equipment that we personally owned: glazes, chemicals, clay, and machinery, I mean, potters’ wheels, and a whole long list of everything that we owned. And we said, “Well, in that case, if you can’t lend us money, then we will pull our mortgages and go to a different bank.” Two seconds! Two seconds! We had two thousand dollars. That’s all it took. We had to threaten! But it was women. Women don’t borrow money in business. Well, we did. So, I don’t know whether we were the first, but we were very near the first. And we went… We were in business sixteen years, and when we went out of business… And I can tell you to this day, my credit is so good that I could do whatever I want. And it was partly because each of us individually benefited from the credit we developed in that business. And we also introduced… We had North Carolina Glass 80 that we brought here from Western Carolina. They had that beautiful show, and we negotiated with them. I had to drive over there in my Volvo and then had $5,000, no, $50,000 worth of glass box in my Volvo. I wouldn’t even stop to go to the bathroom because I was afraid somebody was going to break it. [both laugh] Got it back here, unpacked it, set it up, and it was a gorgeous show. North Carolina Glass 80 was at Craft House. We had - JW: Where were you driving the glassware from? PF: From Western Carolina.

00:52:02.060 - 00:52:12.220

JW: Oh, wow. PF: Yeah, I mean, it was, what? Five hours? JW: Yes, at least! PF: Exactly. [laughs] Don and I had gone to see the opening of a show there. We stopped at Biltmore, and then we went over there because I… I really needed to have a little idea of what I’m into. And then… But that’s okay. And then Flo McKenny and I used to make trips up to the mountains, driving around to visit potters and to visit people whose work we might want to sell at Craft House. And… And I started going to Penland in 1972.

00:52:12.220 - 00:56:44.660

JW: Wow. PF: That was my first year. And this was because Vivian Guy, who was our teacher at Allied Arts in 1965… She was a potter, a weaver, and an enamalist. And she did it all in her home. Bingham Guy was a psychoanalyst. And Vivian really taught us so much about what we needed to know to… about, why do you do these things? What’s so important? That hanging over there with a bell in it are… is a Vivian Guy. And… And the one above that is a Tina Gyle(sp?). So, you know, I’m surrounded by all these people whose work I’ve… people I’ve learned and loved. Anyway. So, Vivian was the reason that we all got established because she had good ethics and good beliefs, and she had studied in good places. Cranbrook Academy and Haywor- Hay- no… in Maine… What is it? Hayworth. Nope. Highwater, maybe. No. Anyway. Haystack! Maine. And so, she would bring these things back to us, and then she kept saying to all of us, “You’ve got to go to Penland. Penland is the place where you really can establish a repoire for the art that you want to work on. Because all of it is there. It’s not just pottery and not just enameling. It’s something of everything.” And a bunch of the, you know… We had another little group called Clay Works. It started, and then it’s still going: Claymakers now. But anyway, Clay Works was about six of us who used to get to get together and taking classes with Vivian at Allied Arts. And we had to do everything. And so she said, “Now you’ve all got to go to Penland because you’ve got to get good skills.” And one summer, Mary Lucy Cobb and… the banker’s wife… What was her name? They went up, and that was in 1971. And they came back. Oh! They couldn’t say enough. They… It was just so glorious. It was the best experience they ever had. So the next year I went. And… And it was the best time in the world because Penland wasn’t what it is today. Penland was not at the time able to give college credit to people. It was a place where there was barely a trickle of water that came out of a faucet to wash your hair when you went in all covered with mud. But the food was superb because it was always homegrown and made by the students who were working there. That was the whole thing. It was all a community that shared and worked together. And after spending that first session at Penland… I just, I mean, to me, that was heaven on earth. It was the most beautiful place. The people were wonderful, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. So I went back the next year, and then I went back in 1975. Then I went back… I think I’ve taken eight, nine classes there. You’ll see they’re all listed there. But the most important thing you get out of Penland is the sense of community, the sharing of everything, ideas. There are no prima donnas. Nobody is sitting… like… to make you feel less important than anybody else. It’s… It’s the most healthy place, and I grew up in going to summer camps ‘cause my father was a… a poor school teacher. And he didn’t get paid a salary for three months in the summer – JW: Right. PF: - so in order to survive, my parents would close the house. And they would go and run a rich people’s camp. [Jim laughs] So my brother and I got to horseback ride and play tennis and swim and do all these things in arts and crafts with the rich kids. And my… my mother ran the kitchen, and my father ran the men’s camp. And that-

00:56:44.660 - 00:57:50.320

JW: Where was this? Where did you grow up? PF: I grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey. My father was a teacher at Patterson East Side High School. Lean on Me [movie]. But he didn’t… He didn’t have any problems. My father was six foot five, and he early realized that the important thing in this migrant kind of community that Patterson was, was all silk mills, you’ve got to keep these kids busy, off the streets, give them something to do. So he came with the idea that they needed a marching band. I don’t know what they had before my father. And then they also needed drum majorettes. JW: Ah! PF: So he got together and put together a marching band, and he started… You see, my father… Those are… Those are my Indian clubs over there on the floor. Do you know what Indian clubs are? Probably don’t. Well, I’ll get them.

00:58:05.340 - 00:58:18.020

JW: Oh, they’re for… for exercise. PF: Oh, yes they are! This is why I have not had to have surgery for a rotator cuff. JW: Ah, ha. PF: I got complete because of these. My father taught me to do this when I was twelve years old. First he taught me to baton twirl.

00:58:18.020 - 00:58:47.540

JW: Oh. Hmm. PF: And he took his marching band and his 250 baton twirlers. No, 250 band and… and marchers to the 1939 World’s Fair. Was it ’39? Yeah, it was ’39. And they won all the prizes. And I came home with a gold trophy – JW: Wow. PF: - for the juvenile champion. Who cares? Anyway, I still have it. So then when I got to be twelve years old, my father started teaching me baton- Indian club swinging. And… he… he was… he won… In 1912 he was… he was at NYU, and he was… He wanted to be a gymnast. He also was a rower, did all kinds of things. So he… But they said, “No, you’ve got to strengthen your upper body strength and your wrists, and, you know, if you’re going to be a...” He wanted to be a vault, a long… a long horse or long vault or something like that. And so they said, “You gotta get in the gym, work out your arms.” So the men were swinging five pound clubs. Each club was five pounds, and so that’s what he had to do. And then he went into the first competition, the AA competition, swinging Indian clubs because they thought he was ready. And he came home with a gold medal. “Forget all that other stuff you want to do. You just go get the gold medal every time. That’s what we need. Helps the team.” So my father won eighteen gold medals, and he also was a fencer. And he was in the 1920 Olympics in At-

00:58:47.540 - 01:01:17.960

JW: Oh! PF: - in Antwerp, Belgium, fencing epee. Women fence epee now. Back in those days they didn’t. So with all these skills he went to this high school, and… and he taught science in the high school and got this marching band going. And… and they never had any problems in that school when they had this band and the majorettes. And they were bringing home all these beautiful things for the school. So… But. So that’s how I grew up. For very… My mother has the distinction of having ridden down the Grand Canyon on a burro. The only problem was that the burro they put her on should have been last, not first. And it reared, got… and my mother fortunately was a horse woman. She knew to hang on to that pummel and don’t let it go. And they got to her. But she finished the trip, down and back again. JW: Wow. [laughs] PF: Gutsy lady.

01:01:17.960 - 01:01:32.100

JW: Indeed. [laughs] PF: She was. So, you know, I’ve… I’ve had an interesting early history. JW: Certainly sounds like… Sounds like a fun childhood in a lot of ways. PF: Well, it was, you know. We were in poverty, but we didn’t know we were poor. That’s the amazing thing about it. We… We were very busy. We had… I took… My brother and I both took lessons. As a matter of fact, my aunt didn’t … They didn’t have children, but my aunt bought that piano for me as a lure, so that I would stop walking ‘cause I… We didn’t have a car. I had to walk home from high school. And I would stop and play the piano for her.

01:01:32.100 - 01:02:17.340

JW: Ah! PF: Just amazing. [laughs] The things that, you know, happen along the way. [laughs] Well, among the other things is that Don built the harpsichord - JW: Oh! PF: - that sits right there. And it… He built it in… I think it was 1960. It was a Zuckermann hit, and we had to go down to the old railroad station, that beautiful, wonderful railroad station that nobody cared enough to save. And... Because the… what he ordered was the kit, and the kit was a box like so big of metal parts. And then it was a big flat box about that thick of the sound board.

01:02:17.340 - 01:03:02.820

JW: Oh. PF: That was the kit. And at the time, it seemed like a little bit of stuff for what we paid in 1960 for that. But… And then Don took the plans and built the harpsichord. JW: Wow. PF: And when we went to Tallahassee, Florida, it didn’t have the teak covering on the outside, but it was all playable. And we heard the… the man who was… It was a duplex. The man who was renting this duplex to us, and he said to somebody looking at the one next door, “Well, he’s got something in there, some kind of harp thing in there.” He didn’t have any idea what it was. But a harpsichord is lovely in a… in an apartment because it’s quiet. It doesn’t make big loud noises. So… And that’s going to go down to Charlotte to our daughter, who is very musical and… and wants… She has worked with… with her father, and they… She has the ear to know how to tune it. And so eventually John and Don will take it down to… to Charlotte.

01:03:02.820 - 01:04:04.440

JW: Ah. PF: She’s… She’s Celtic concertina and singer and harpsichord - I mean, not harpsichord - guitar. JW: Oh! PF: But she’s a veterinarian, along with everything else that she does. [both laugh]

01:04:08.140 - 01:04:45.480

JW: She takes… must take after you. PF: And our son, John, who just… just retired from IBM after thirty-six years… He… He worked… He had his first job at IBM between his junior and senior year at Duke. He was a… a double major computer science and physics, and so he worked out at IBM for that first summer. And the man he worked for said, “Now, you don’t have to look for a job when you graduate. You’ve got one waiting for you right here.” JW: Wow. PF: So, his first job took him up to… to Gaithersburg, Maryland, and he worked for IBM then for five years up there. And then he said, “Well, I think I’m ready for North Carolina again.” So, they said… He was working on satellite communications up there in Gaithersburg. And so they said, “Well, we’d really like you to stay here.” And he said, “Well, in that case, I’ll go find another company.”

01:04:45.480 - 01:05:25.440

JW: Oh. PF: They immediately moved him to the Triangle. Well, actually, they moved him to Raleigh, and then he ended up in the Triangle. So he worked for them for thirty-six years, and he just retired. And now he’s a contractor. JW: Oh. PF: He was… I think he was… Within two months they hired him back. [Jim laughs] And he’s…

01:05:25.440 - 01:07:07.240

JW: So they appreciated him. PF: Well, he has… When he… This is a kid who was born with dyslexia. Couldn’t read, couldn’t write. And… And we lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for one year because Don went up there to work for I- for the Atomic Energy Commission. That’s just my life. Don’t ask me how many times we’ve moved. I’ve lost track. I don’t even know. But, anyway. Each time there’s… Even though it’s a hardship, it was a benefit because up there in Gaithersburg was the first time he wasn’t in a school that was all Duke professors’ kids. And so this… And he said, “I need reading help.” And the… And the teachers said, “Well, how do you need reading help when you’re getting all these high reports on all your, all your grades are so good?” And he said, “Test me.” And they found out that he was reading so little by the… by the scale that they… So they gave him extra reading help. And John couldn’t learn to… to type, but he never had any trouble with a keyboard for a computer because he was in a… in a program up there run by some of the IBM-ers that… they didn’t talk about how to use the keyboard. They talked about what ‘made this machine work.’ Take it apart. Figure out what all this stuff is back there. And that’s how his mind thought. JW: Wow. PF: So it was right up his alley. And he had his first paper route up there, what was an experience also. So, you know, every time we’ve moved, there’s been a benefit, even though it’s been a bit of a hardship for the mother. But anyway… [both laugh]

01:07:20.880 - 01:08:38.560

JW: So how long were you in Tallahassee? PF: [whispers:] One year. [normal voice:] And the neighbor closest to us, who was a professor at FSU, his wife came over, and she said, “I just want to forewarn you, don’t talk when you go to the laundromat.” And I said, “What?” She said, “You’ll notice that in… peach Earl Warren sign on the way to the laundromat? Don’t talk.” We got this little duplex because Mary was four and John was… Let’s see, John was eight. Or seven. He was seven when we were in Tallahassee. And they… So we thought, “Oh, this is fine. It’s just across the field, and the kids can… We can walk across over to the swimming pool.” On July 4, a little black boy walked towards the fence. Not in, towards the fence. Every swimming pool in Tallahassee was closed for the summer. [whispers:] Was a nightmare. [normal voice:] Terrible place. I think of that every time FSU sends a team up there. [both laugh] JW: Well, that’s the sort of thing that could stick with you. PF: Isn’t that awful? [laughs] But anyway, so that… Oh, and then Mary was going… We had a black family that came to our church, and he had gotten his pastorate in France. Very intelligent family. I actually think they actually ended up over at Duke. And they had a little five year-old boy named Glen. And so we… We had them over for dinner, and we got acquainted with them. And Mary and Glen just hit it right off, and then we were driving to pick her up at day school at… down in Florida. And Mary said, “They can’t go to my school.” And I said, “Wait a minute, what are you talking about?” And she said, “Those boys, we don’t mention.” So, I… I went right to the school, and I said, “Now, I don’t know where this is coming from, but it’s gonna stop here. My daughter is not coming back to this school. This is not how we think. This is not how we teach our children. And as far as we’re concerned, if that’s what she’s learning here, then she’s not coming back.” “Oh, no, no, no. That is only teach… [sounds to imitate them talking].” You know. But it stopped. [laughs] So, that was another learning experience, to be in that environment where you… were afraid of what you’re going to say or do. Anyway, okay, have I run the gamut of more things than you ever wanted to know about?

01:10:14.680 - 01:10:24.720

JW: No, no. This is fascinating. I don’t want to tire you out. PF: Oh, I’m fine. I’m having a great time. JW: Okay. PF: I can’t remember names. I’m terrible… And I also have to tell you about this house.

01:10:24.720 - 01:13:02.960

JW: Okay. PF: We were the third house built in this part of the Duke Forest. This was brand new. There was one house down there, one house around over there, and then we were here. And the… the man who we had hoped would build the house said, “Well, I’ll just give you one piece of advice. If you can get a corner, by all means, that’s the more optimum place to build, on a corner.” So then this became available, and it’s almost an acre on this corner. And Don had drawn plans for a house that would sit and then go down the hill this way. And Tom Wilkinson, who was a wonderful builder – he actually built, I think, at least three houses in this neighborhood – before he would even consider thinking about building, he said, “I want to go dig to find out where the sewer is because down below the sewer is fifteen feet deep whereas up here at the top of the hill, it’s only, it’s no… six feet below the curb, which means that you can’t have gravity flow when you’re on a curve going down like this.” That’s what we are. So, he… he… We redesigned this, and I spent the next… We were living in a little rented place over on Pickett Road. And Mary was actually sleeping – she was a baby then –sleeping in the hall because it was two-bedroom. Anyway, we redesigned this split-level so that the… This would ordinarily be a second bedroom and a bath down here. Well, not in this house because Don would be having lots of students in for seminars and lectures and things. So we enlarged the living room. That was to be the children’s playroom. That was a joke. It didn’t last two days. It became Don’s study, and now as you can see it’s a catch-all. So the next bedroom was up on the next level adjacent to the kitchen, and that was to be a grandmother, in case. And then there are two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. So just as Tom was ready to put the final foundation… whatever you do… he said, “You know, I’m going to raise this house six more inches. I want to be sure you get gravity flow out.” So that planter that runs out the front of our house? JW: Yes. PF: That’s our sewer line.

01:13:03.160 - 01:13:11.840

JW: Oh, really. [laughs] PF: Yes, it is. [both laugh] And we’ve never had a problem. JW: Oh, good. PF: But… And so, it’s an unusual house because of that, and… and also, I worked in the house the whole time it was being built. It was started on November 23, and we finished on April 1^(st). It’s because the lady was there. I painted every single thing that went… every piece of wood that went on this house, both sides. And Don would come home from the campus and the scaffolding was around, and he would paint up on the redwood around the house. That… We have a lot of brick, and we had that. So by the time we got through, by doing the painting ourselves, we had saved enough money - I think it was $1500 to paint this house. But anyway, that doesn’t sound like much now - so that we were able to buy the Cyprus for the living room.

01:13:11.840 - 01:14:15.120

JW: Oh. PF: We couldn’t afford it, but that’s over. We built this house for $23,000. JW: Well, you did very well. PF: And it was do-it-yourself.

01:14:15.120 - 01:15:12.100

JW: mm-hmm PF: And… And then we had half a basement. This… There’s crawlspace under here. And afterwards, we thought, “Oh, that was a mistake. We should have dug out this.” But okay, we’ve managed. So then we added on the greenhouse, and then we added on the solarium, which is off the dining room. And what… because the solarium is a solar room, it has very thick… under the brick, it is… I don’t know what they call this special insulation, so it made a ceiling. And so Don… I was working at Craft House, and he had… we had all this leftover lumber from adding on things that we added on. And he built me a studio - JW: Ah. PF: - off the basement that goes… looks out into the trees. And that was just… You know, to have to sit and look at walls of books, which is down where I was working. Now I could look out at the trees. That was a whole different atmosphere to make pots. So I still have the… As a matter of fact, fast forward to the hospital, I had just finished trimming nine pots, and they were ready to be carved because I do carving on all my pots. And they’re sitting down there covered in plastic to keep them damp enough so I can still do it. And the kiln… There’s a big kiln in blue wrapping out there. I went to a kiln-building workshop at Saw Tooth Center in 1983. It was done by Richard Butts, Dick Butts, from Portland, Maine. And he is… He is a kiln innovator.

01:15:12.100 - 01:16:49.300

JW: Ah. PF: He wanted… He calls this a… an “echo-friendly kiln.” Now this is 1983. I… Who knows what “echo-friendly” means in 1983. Well, his design is, and he described this, and Don went to listen to the lecture because the idea of building a kiln in the backyard was kind of [makes a nervous sound]. It does not belch flame out the chimney. It does not belch smoke. And it doesn’t sound like a freight train coming down the driveway when you’re in reduction. And all of that proved true. JW: Wow. PF: It’s a very short stack, and… And actually, my problem was that at that time I was involved in Savoyards, in Craft House, in the Carolina Theatre, and I’m still trying to be a full-time potter. Now, not… It didn’t all work. So when I built a 36-cubic foot kiln, it was too much space for one person, for this person too involved in other things to fill it with pots. So I didn’t do as many firings in it as I wanted to, but my son is… is… He’s a blacksmith -

01:16:49.300 - 01:17:59.060

JW: Oh! PF: - along with other attributes. He… He works with the… at the state fair. He’s there for ten days every time in the blacksmith shop. And he loves to fire, so he would come and help me. And then finally we got to the point that I would invite other potters to help me fill the kiln. Well, a few days… a few months ago, my son said, “You know, mom, you’re going to have to put that kiln out for sale because nobody’s going to want to buy this house with that kiln in the backyard [both laugh] unless it’s a potter.” Who knows. JW: Who knows. PF: But anyway. But I have… In about, let’s see, 1970. No, ’85. When did I buy that? Yeah, I think it was ’85. Dorothy Davis has a contact or had a contact up in Allentown, close to Allentown, that’s selling L&L kilns, computerized kilns.

01:17:59.060 - 01:20:12.640

JW: Oh. PF: And her… She and her daughter and her husband were very close, sort of a friend/family thing, so they gave her a very good price on this kiln for her. And so then I said, “Well, Dorothy, I need to have the information so I can… Cause I really would like to get a computerized kiln.” It’s so much simpler. You just plug it in. Lay out what, you know… It’s all on a box, and you punch your buttons. And then you go to bed. And you wake up in the morning, and the kiln is doing its thing. And it’s just… Oh, it’s… it’s so much easier. It can… You make mistakes, you know, and I tended… had a few times when I made mistake... But, anyway. So, by this token, I had a brand new, almost brand-new L&L kiln, computerized. I have my old paragon, which goes back to the ‘70s. But I’ve never over-fired in it, so the bricks are still solid. And then I have that monster out there. [both laugh] And I bought a slab roller because I gave up my kickwheel. I loved having a kickwheel. I just really prefer a kickwheel, and it was one of the old wheels that I bought from Allied Arts when they closed down. But I decided that I needed a slab roller because I’m losing… I’ve lost the cartilage in my thumbs, and the day was going to come when I couldn’t throw. But I still love to throw. I’m… I’m sorry. So I throw, even if it hurts, and then I do something else. But… What haven’t I…? JW: You mentioned Allied Arts. Were you involved in Allied Arts in…? PF: When we first came to Durham, that’s what was here. And the… The very first thing I did at Allied Arts, they were having a fundraiser at the old Durham High School, and I offered to swing my Indian clubs because, I had, you know, I was a champion. I’m the… I’m the only woman champion left because in 1949 when they had the Olympic try-outs, they canceled women’s Indian club swinging because I had won for five times and the other “professional” gymnasts had had enough.

01:20:12.640 - 01:21:12.600

JW: Oh! PF: So, they simply changed what Indian club swinging is. It’s not what it was. But, anyway. So they... I… They said, “Oh, that’s great.” And I had lighted clubs. So, they dressed me up as Pocahontas - JW: Oh. PF: - because of “Indian clubs.” [Jim laughs] They didn’t know what they were. That was fine with me. I was helping to raise money for Allied Arts, and also at that time, since we had just come from California and I had started doing jewelry work, Marian Fitz Simmons from Chapel Hill was teaching silversmithing at Allied Arts. And she would bring her own tools and equipment and everything. And… And that’s where I started making silverwork.

01:21:12.600 - 01:22:36.340

JW: Ah. PF: And I made several pieces and still have all my equipment. Because I’m… I’m an… I love having equipment. I love it! [laughs]So I could… I even have a table that I… an old table that we made so I could saw my silver. And I keep thinking, “Well, maybe someday I’ll go back to making silver.” I better hurry up if I’m going to do it. [laughs] But… And then I was with Brightleaf Music Workshop when Steven Barefoot was involved with that. And the… the… The Hills… Bob… What’s her name? She’s doing the children’s choir now. I can’t… I’m awful about names. JW: Sky? PF: Yes! Sky Hill. And she was involved with Brightleaf Music Workshop, and they used to do some rehearsals at the Carolina Theatre. And so I was on the board of Brightleaf Music Workshop, and we raised money by having auctions and things like that. I bought that piece right over there from New York. And I should know her name, and I can’t remember her name either. But she has a whole bunch of things down at Wilmington, in Thalian Hall down there where Steven has been programming Thalian Hall, and I just talked to him on the phone. He’s heading to Kenya -

01:22:36.340 - 01:23:30.780

JW: Oh, really? PF: - for three weeks, retracing his steps in the Peace Corps forty years ago. JW: Wow. PF: And he is so…

01:23:30.780 - 01:25:53.980

JW: Now what is he going to do? PF: He is so excited because… And he got in touch with Trish and John Bartlett because of their connections for HIV. And they… they’ve got him a… a guide, someone who can drive a… drive the Landrover. And… and Steven is just like a kid in clover. He is so excited to think he’s going back. Scottie Elliot’s going to go with him. And this is all people that I knew when we were at Brightleaf Music Workshop. So I think this is going to be a wonderful adventure. I think it’s next week that he goes. Something you might want to follow up because he… Owen… Michael Barefoot, when I… When we went down to the Carolina Theatre last week and they had this reception first before the Madeline Albright, they had a reception and lots of people who are donors, giving money. Well, we’ve given every year, and we’ve given at least $1000 every year that I haven’t been involved because I still believe that it’s something I have to continue. And it’s like Penland. I’m… I’m called a Lucy Morgan leader at Penland because once they got me, [Jim laughs] I can’t not send them something. I mean, I just believe in what they’re doing so much. It’s… The gravy train will end up passing out of the scene, but maybe… But… So, I think that… that Steven’s trip… Well, Michael Barefoot was at the reception at Carolina Theatre, and I hadn’t seen him in quite a while. And right now, they’re… they… the theatre is… Because they want to do the next phase of their education, you know, their historic thing… Well, unfortunately, the only one that’s got all that is me, and it’s… I don’t know how much of that is still alive up here, but I was there during the whole time that it was being… the volunteers and… and the struggles and all of that. I was there. I was there in that building for fifteen years. JW: Wow. PF: Not paid a penny. Very often I was the last one out at… after midnight out the back door. And… And people would say, “Aren’t you afraid of the shady streetwalkers?” And I said, “No. Nobody has ever bothered me.” And there was one famous one down there, who used to ask for money. I don’t remember what they called, what his name was now. Charles. That’s what it was. And so one morning I was going out, and he said to me, “I would like… Could you give me money for breakfast?” No - “Can you give me money for something?” And I said, “No, but I’ll go buy you breakfast.” “Ugh.” And he walked away. And Charles was the one that used to haunt people at night down there. He never came back to see me ‘cause he knew he wasn’t going to get anything but breakfast. So…

01:26:51.460 - 01:28:24.960

JW: What… What were you doing in the theatre all those years and those nights? PF: Well, I was… I was working as the… the… I was the Volunteer Coordinator for a lot of that time. And so, I was there watching, being there sort of… if somebody didn’t show up or if there was a problem… just because they needed people. They needed people around to help people, and it was… I mean, it was watching how the operation was going and being aware of it. And then there were always things that would come up that you didn’t really expect and to know who to call or what happens if the fire alarm goes off. And now everything is so automated… And even their telephone system is a nightmare as far as I’m concerned. You can’t talk to a person. You just push buttons, and if you hit the wrong button, too bad. But, there were just… There were just so many things that had to be done. There was… We… We had an office at DC May, gave us space there to store everything. And we had all the volunteers move everything out. The Savoyards were the backbone of the volunteers for the theatre. They’re the ones that unscrewed everything that could be unscrewed off the walls. JW: Oh. PF: They’re the ones that saved all of the… the light fixtures that our architects said we couldn’t use. We got Woody Crenshaw whose father had a shop in Raleigh who’s now in… He was in Floyd, Virginia. He came down after I had them all hanging at DC May so that they could see what they were. And he looked at them, and he said, “These are fabulous!” And I said, “Well, our architect says they couldn’t be brought up to code.” He said, “Forget that. They can all be brought up to code. These are magnificent. They’re old, solid brass.” He said the same thing about those wonderful chandeliers at Hayti Heritage Center. I got him to come down because they were going to throw those out. And I said, “Woody, would you come down? I’ll pay your transportation.” He came, and he looked them. And he said, “These are irreplaceable. These are gasaliers. They… Just at the turn –“ Let’s see, this was 1871, no, 1891. Gas was the accepted lighting, but the electric had just come in. But nobody trusted it ’cause they didn’t think it would continue. So these are gasaliers. They’re both gas and electric. And they were there. All the fixtures were there. And they were irrreplac- Just absolutely gorgeous. So he came down, and Don and I agreed that we would raise the money to restore these fixtures. They were not going to be thrown out. And he took them up to Floyd, Virginia. And then it took us nine months because the fixtures have these little glass globes, and there was enough of the same to do the big one in the middle, but the two on the either ends we couldn’t find enough. And we searched for nine months at every possible lighting place they knew about until we finally were able to come to a compromise. We went up there to agree with them that this is the compromise. It’s not exactly the same but almost. And it… The price was $53,500. And Don and I said, “We’ll raise the money.” And this was… This was truly a mom-and-pop operation where, you know, we wrote to 500 people that we knew. I… We hand-addressed every envelope, and we personalized on every letter that went out so that they knew it wasn’t just a machine sending it out. These were human beings that had cared enough to do this. And we got up to $47,500, and then since that… they were reinstalled, we have continued to donate every year, so… I dunno. I mean. They’ve gone way beyond now. But that’s where… We always say, “This is towards the lighting fixtures.” And if you go in there… I mean, I just sit there and look at those and am just amazed. And the ceiling in that is so beautifully done. Just beautifully. That… That’s a gem. That is a jewel. And I’m glad that it’s now being used by other groups of… in other ways. But I miss Diane. But I hope they survive, money-wise. But that’s why they have those fixtures, because I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t let them throw them out. [laughs]

01:29:07.360 - 01:29:33.240

JW: Well, how did you and Don get in… involved with the Hayti Heritage Center? PF: Well, I think in part because I got to know Diane working on other things. It sort of crossed over with the Car-… with the… the Durham Arts Council. And it was - JW: Was this Diane Pledger? PF: Diane Pledger. But I think it had to do with some… There was a civic something… Barkus… Barker French was involved. The city was trying to put together some new… Gosh, what was it? And they were having a lot of these meetings to… to draw in different groups from the city. It must have had something to do with money, I’m sure, because they were trying to spread the funds. And… and it was… I can’t remember who organized it or what it was organized… But I… We crossed over on a lot of things. And then I think also because I had done that NCCU Art Museum and put on that pottery show over there. I think that… Who knows why you get tied into these different things. But Diane and I were very close. And… Maybe I volunteered. That’s possible. I don’t know. But once I knew that that… those… that building was going to be restored, I got very involved. And… And I have a complete… I have a complete… I’m… I’m big on notebooks. It’s about that big, and it’s full of every single article that came about that… from the time that… DiPasco, Frank DiPasco was involved in that. And of course he was involved with the Carolina Theatre, so there was lots… All these things cross over. You can’t… You can’t separate it out from one place or another, and you always have to be ready to say, “Sure, I’ll help. Sure, I’ll… I’ll be glad to.” And I was just absolutely convinced that… about those light fixtures because I got so… That was a big fight, about the Carolina Theatre light fixtures. And… And for that architect to say, “They can’t be fixed,” it’s just… That’s irrational. But he… he didn’t like me at all because I stood… An aside, when we hired Hannovan (sp?) to come down from Toronto to find out what the real colors were in the Carolina Theatre, there was not a picture. Look back to the newspaper articles. We have all of them. There was not a description. Nothing to tell us, to give us a clue as to what was there. So, Hannovan came down from Toronto, and this was partly because his association up there with Janice, who we hired to come down to consult on the Carolina Theatre. She did the winter garden up there. And they… There was no lighting in the building. There was no water in the building. And there was… There was… There was no way to get in the light, so Jack Ruffalin said to me, “Well, go get some hard hats, and go get some line cords. And get whatever you need.” And… And so I did. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I went and got ‘em. I found out what I needed and the… the right kind of thickness of line cords and things. And then I carried five-gallon cans of gas in my car to keep the generator running so we could have light in what’s now Fletcher Hall for David Hannovan. And he has… He… His… It was wonderful. I mean, I really learned so much because you go to a flat surface and with a very… I guess it was like a razor blade or something, you start working the layers down till you get down to the original plaster. And then you can go back and look at those layers and decide where the original color was.

01:29:33.240 - 01:29:43.200

JW: Ah. PF: And that’s what he did throughout the entire Fletcher Hall and… and then out into the lobby. And there were all kinds of clues that he could find, like where the… Because there had been major changes made in that building, and he could tell where that frame there has to go on from someplace else. And then we would try to figure out if we could match what… where that came from. And by going through this… and a lot of this is in my… my… my notebooks [laughs]. That helped to determine, and then I would sit by the hour as they would be working, trying to figure out, “Well, was that… is that really the way that was?” And then, at the last minute in February… They were having a snow storm in Toronto. I called David. I said, “David, I’m going to be sending you a piece of molding because I believe that we’ve missed one thing, that the molding on the walls had a border of the blue on the very edge all the way around.” And it’s there now. JW: Ah. PF: And I sent the wood up to him. And he said, “Yes, you’re right, Pepper. It’s there, and it was there originally. Do you want me to come down and just go through those last few things to make sure that we’ve got them?” And I said, “Well, David, I’ll pay your way… you just… I mean, if you’re willing to do that.” His wife was within two days of having a baby. I mean, that’s the kind of people that worked on that theater. And he came down, and… and he and I agreed that what we were trying to determine finally was the proscenium arch, the decorat- how that was done originally. And what this architect’s person was going to do was totally off the wall. It wasn’t anything that was there originally. So what we have in that proscenium are the original colors, the way they were done in 1926. And… And so, I guess, every step along the way was a fight. And it took a pig-headed redhead to stand up and say, “No, that’s wrong! Those seats, you won’t sit in them. They’re going to rub your bottom.” It was just… And… And how we ended up with Dan Coffee, I’ll never know. One day… One thing that had happened while David was in there working and running the generator… The generator was outside, but he was running.

01:29:43.200 - 01:30:09.260

JW: David…? PF: David Hanovan. JW: Ah. PF: And there’s a wonderful report in the library that he put together. He was painting everything. And, this man came up to the outside, and he said, “Do you work here?” And I said, “Well, I don’t get paid. I’m just here helping.” And he said, “I just want you to know that we hope you won’t let that man do to your theater what he did to our theater.” And I said, “Excuse me, what theater are you talking about?” And he said, “I’m from Greensboro.” And I said, “Oh, I understand.” Same company did the Greensboro theater, and if you’ve ever been over there in the summertime, try to walk in those saddlebags of stairs on either side. Every time our committee went over to Greensboro to try to talk to the people who had been on the committee, not the architect, we never were able to speak to them without one of Dan Coffee’s people there. Every time we would… we would make an arrangement to go over, and somehow they would get the information and one of those Coffee people was there. So we never got the chance to really find out how the people in Greensboro felt. “Don’t let him do to your theater what he did to ours.” And after that, about two years later, there was a young man that came through, and he said, “I used to work for Dan Coffee.” And I said, “Oh? And where are you working now?” He said, “Well, I went with a different firm.” But he said, “I was part of the design of the stairs going up to the cinemas, and I would like to know how they worked out.” And I said, “Well, you’re free to go look. No problem.” And then he said, “Well, I’m sorry.” That’s all he said by apology. I didn’t ask for any explanations or anything else. So there was… I mean, that to me was enough testimony to say that every bit of agony and fighting and… and foot stamping had a reason. But, yesterday… No, it was… What day was I…? It was Thursday, last Thursday. We were walking from the Connie Moses Ballroom down to go into the new building. And I was walking with David Bartlett, the… the clown, you know, from the Arts Council?

01:30:09.260 - 01:31:18.520

JW: With the rainbow. PF: Yes. And… and I said, “You know, every time I walk down this incline, I feel ill because it never should have happened when you’re building on a new building.” He said, “I trip every time I come down here.” So… So that’s what I was doing in that building all that time; I was fighting. [both laugh] And then, Lucy Stokes was the… on-the-site engineer, I guess you’d call them. And we got to be really good friends. And we did all kinds of interesting things. For Halloween - and there are pictures - we decided to make a huge banner out of butcher paper and… and wrap the theater for the guys, to keep them energized because this is a hard job. And so, it all said, “We’re so glad you’re on our team. Keep up the good work. Happy Halloween!” And it literally did go completely around the wire fence. So that in order to get into their job that day they would have to break this paper banner. Well, they didn’t break it. They went over and under. And then we had cider and donuts for them in the… in the Crowmean(?) lobby, which by this time had been… another story. In the original design, that architect was going to put a covered vault off of the Connie Moses Ballroom. You know, there’s a hallway that goes around, and then there’s a… a closet, an office, and a storage unit. And then there was the floor that Connie had devised for her prep room for the ballroom. And his idea was to spend se… $175,000? Seventy-five… I dunno. An enormous amount of money to build this covered vault. So, you look down. What are you going to look at? The back side of the concession stand. This doesn’t make sense. It took me eight months of moving boards and… and… I could only get… You can’t get more than three people from the city council and the county commissioners together because then it’s a meeting. JW: Right. PF: So I’d have to plan these things to get these folks up there to look at what I was seeing. And… and I would lay things out down there, and then I would sort of try not to be too obvious. That, this is the back side of the concession stand. Okay, go upstairs now, and let’s look down and see what you’re going to look, what you’re paying $175,000 for. They couldn’t believe this. Why am I looking in the backside of the concession stand? What am I supposed to be doing? I said, “You’re wasting money. Let’s put it to better use, find something else we can do with it.” It took eight months. I got it stopped. So that’s what I was doing. I was being a big pain in the butt. But, I wanted it right. And I guess I was willing to give up a lot of time to get it right.

01:32:03.920 - 01:32:50.380

JW: You certainly did. PF: And during this time, I put together thirty-six 3-inch notebooks from 1978 to 1997 when I left the board of the Carolina Theatre. And in those notebooks are all the meeting, board meetings, all of the building committee meetings, newspaper information, photographs. They’re… They’re a compilation of everything that was going on in that particular timeframe. And it was… because I wanted everybody to know, I wanted there to be a record of what was going on, of where we should have changed our thinking, where was… Finally, Don and I were going to the League of American Theaters. We went on these trips because they were very, very important. Theaters all over the country. And finally, at one point, Jack Rupman(sp?) and… Who was the one that was on the county, from the county? His wife is a dentist. Why can’t I think of his name? He’s been working at Duke and… Anyway, Jack Rupman represented the city, and he represented the county. And they went to a League of Historic American Theaters meeting because I guess they decided that if the FLUKE were going, they’d better go and find out what was going on. And it was very interesting because they couldn’t blend. They… They didn’t really understand what they were seeing, what was going on, that these were people who had either restored a theater, were going to restore a theater, ran into problems. This was the place for problem-solving. This is why you go to these meetings. It’s not just a vacation. You’re spending money to see the problems that someone else has had or how you can avoid this problem or where can you get this information. It was all available. And I came back. I mean, I had notebooks on that, too. But it was like, they… Everybody else realized that we were up against a real problem, and I think it became very visible to them when these folks were there. So… JW: So is that why the rest… remodeling the theater took so long? As I recall, it wasn’t expected when you moved out in ’88 that it was going to be ’93 or ’94 before… PF: They couldn’t come to decisions. And… and… You know, in ’90, ’88 when we closed that theater down and Steven had that wonderful thing in the… It was a donation. It was to raise money for the homeless, I think, or the food kitchen or something. And… And then afterwards, everybody came out singing “Auld Lang Syne.” And everybody was blubbering. And they had written all these messages on the sidewalk in front, under the canopy, and Steven had tables and chairs out there. And… And I have pictures of some of those, “Thanks for the memories” and things like that that were written there. The rapport of the people was just… You… You knew that there was love, that they just couldn’t believe that this was going to shut down. And it was in large part because the Arts Council was spending every bit of time to finish their Arts Council building. And they… I was sitting on both councils at the time. And at one point, Lue Myers stood up, and he said, “Well, since you folks down at the theater aren’t doing anything about getting that project underway, we’re going to take it over.” And I stood up, right in the middle of the meeting, and I said, “You will not take it over. We are working with what we can, and we are continuing to work at it. It is not your project. It is our project. And we’re going to get it done.” Everybody disliked me. [Jim laughs] But… there was just no… Then Michael Mars at (?) says, after he walks, leaves, “With a big debt for the arts council.” The Savoyards had an office down there, and… and he made an announcement that there was to be nothing old brought into this building. So we had some old filing cabinets. I got white paint and painted them white. He couldn’t say a thing about it. It had to do with… I emptied out the… the ceramic department for the Arts Council, saved all of the expensive chemicals for making glazes, for color colorants, had them all packaged up and labeled and everything. The wheels, and I saw it all over to DC May where we were storing things. It was thrown out. Nothing wanted. Nobody wants anything old in that building. I mean… I’m sorry, but those are facts. I bought one of the wheels, and I bought a couple of the tables and paid them for them. And they’re downstairs, and I’m using them and have been using them since that closed down in ’88. No, when was it when the Arts Council shut down… There’s…?

01:32:50.380 - 01:33:10.240

JW: ’86? PF: ’86. That’s right. We were ’88. But… And then, you know, because I was opposed to the joining of the Carolina Cinema Corporation with the… I guess it was Allied Arts, or was it Durham Arts Council then? I don’t know. But whatever it was. Pat Kenan was very, very much for it. He thought this was the way to go because the Arts Council was a real enterprise, and it was going. And I opposed it because I could see us losing autonomy. They would take it over, and it would be… And then there were so many missed cues on the plans, of what… how you could do what we needed to have done. So we ended up… I mean, people had never been up those stairs into those dressing rooms. They didn’t know how bad those dressing rooms were. They couldn’t take… They couldn’t get up there. The dressing rooms were in what’s now, or what was then, that room that became the… What did they call that downstairs room in the Arts Council? That’s where the dressing rooms were for the Carolina Theatre. Went through two doors, through the back. The doors are still there. That’s how you go backstage around behind the screen. But, it was just… They didn’t really think it through, and there were too many people, like Frank DiPasco had his ideas about how it should be done. And then it seemed like we really had to get people from outside that knew something about theater. Those of us who’d been involved with the Cinema Corp- I mean, with the League of Historic American Theaters, we knew that these things are possible. They were going on all over the country. And… And it was sort of like talking to deaf ears. So… That we got what we got, that the building is as good as it is, is quite amazing to me. And that it’s continued to run with so much support from the community. And it took me… I mean, I’ve only gone to two things in DPAC. And we were sitting at a table last Thursday at the theater with a woman who is now living in Wilson but still comes to the Carolina Theatre. JW: Oh! PF: And she said, “I went to a couple of shows in the DPAC. But,” she said, “I’m not going… I’m not going to pay their money. I’m not going back there.” And I said, “Well, the seating in this building is more comfortable.” And it’s true. The seats in DPAC are narrow, and you don’t have much knee room. We have a very comfortable Fletcher Hall. Very comfortable. And that’s ‘cause I browbeat the… the seating man, because I made him promise that he will build our chairs that three-quarter inch thickness that they are, which is what the original chairs were. And many of them are still there, but then they had to build some more. And then we had to make a compromise for the standards. We saw the chairs just like we have in our theater down in Charleston. We tried to get the mayor of Charleston to sell them to us because they were going to take them… they weren’t going to use them. I have photographs of the Charleston Theater. But as soon as we wanted them and as soon as he saw what they looked like painted correctly… And the reason ours are painted correctly is because Harriet Delias found one of the chair standards faced against the wall on the very top of the theater. Why it was up there I don’t know. She brought it down. And we… I took it to a paint store and got them to color match the paint because it was as close to original as we could possibly have gotten. And then they made samples for me of those, and I painted one of those chairs. And we shipped it up to Michigan. And when the League of Historic American Theaters was there for that particular event, they were painting the chairs for the Carolina Theatre. And they… And everybody was, “She’s coming! We better do it right.” [both laugh] And it was… I mean, that’s why it got done. And it is. It was exactly the color those chairs were supposed to be. And I think we still have that original somewhere. Saved, I hope. But… It was that kind of thing that… that mattered to me, that if we’re going to do this as a historic theater, we have to do it right. Keep it historic. What have I forgotten?

01:33:41.920 - 01:33:43.110

JW: I was going to ask… What have you not talked about that you need? PF: I don’t know, Jim. You’ve got more verbal diarrhea than I thought you’d have. [Jim laughs] But I don’t regret a minute of it. I think it was… I got as much out of it as the City of Durham got out of it. It was to me… It was sort of saying to me that I’m doing this for Connie and Monty. I’m doing this for all the people that have loved this theater for all these years. I’m doing it for all the young people that worked because they loved being there, because this was their family. And because I think Durham needs to take pride in what that theater is. It’s… It’s not the way it was conceived originally but then everything has to kind of move on. But I think it’s being used for very good purpose, and… And it is the heart and soul of our downtown. So… And I think it… it always will be. Unless some [whispers] idiot comes along. [both laugh] [resumes normal level] Connie would… And I still have to ask them a question: Why are the four corners in the ballroom white pillars? They make no sense! There’s no continuity. There’s… It’s not contiguous. I don’t understand it. I haven’t asked that question yet. I had to first get invited back. [Jim laughs] But I don’t understand it. And then someone said, “Well, it’s because the Yellow Tail now runs the ballroom.” I said, “What? What are you talking about?” That’s what they said to me, that the… and… I don’t know. I guess the hotel is using the ballroom? I don’t know. But… Oh… And I… I have one other thing I thought I’d... I gave you that… JW: Yes. PF: I’ve written some… I continue to cause trouble. Let’s see, which one is this? Oh, this is when I was negotiating with Bob Nosick(?) about putting the archive in the library. I was trying to find something else. Oh, here’s the one. I wrote this to the city council after Monty died because I felt that the… the ballroom should not be called the Connie and Monty Moses ballroom. It’s not the way it was. It was her ballroom, and it was nothing else. But, the… Monty’s the film buff. Monty is the one that wanted this to be a film theater. That’s why he got… the…the… He wanted it to be a place where people could really appreciate film, and that’s what it was all about. We knew it had to have more than one screen. Two screens would do it. So I sent this to the city council. And then I got a call saying, “Well…” I can’t remember if it was Bill Bell. No, he didn’t call me. I think we just saw each other somewhere, and I said… He said, “Well, do you have an opinion?” And I said, “Well, I think the family needs to be consulted. I know Molly is absolutely… And she knew her father very well, and she feels that the cinema should be called the Montrose J. Moses Cinemas.” Because that’s what his love was. He was a film buff. He wanted the theater for film. So, anyway. And then… I don’t know if this means anything to you, but this is… these are all the books that I bought on the League of Historic American Theater trips that I thought would have value to the people in the theater. And so I gave those books to them.

01:33:43.110 - 01:34:10.160

JW: Oh. PF: I hope somebody’s looking at them. I hope they weren’t trashed or… If they didn’t want them, I hope they gave them to the library. And towards the end, when I started running out of time and… I have one scribble sheet here, which is terrible. Maybe I didn’t put it in here. No, I don’t think I did. I think I didn’t. Because I wasn’t able to… I just didn’t have the time to go back through all these archive boxes, and so the last… from eighteen on, some of them were… I definitely knew what was in them, but others, it was… And when I was sitting on the floor with Kitty and Molly, and we were trying to go through a paper pile this high in Monty’s room… JW: Oh. Oh… PF: …in Monty’s house that he couldn’t even face. He wouldn’t have known what was there anyway. So what happened was, Kitty was trying to put family things out. Molly was… had another designation. And then anything that looked like it was Carolina Theatre got sent my way in a box. [both laugh] And so, there are at least three boxes of stuff that we collected -

01:34:10.160 - 01:34:10.170

JW: mm-hmm. PF: - in his… So sad. In his end. I remember for his 90^(th) birthday, Molly and I had found these reels of old movies that Monty had done. JW: Oh! PF: Unfortunately… Well, they were still in cans, so that was good because they were in the… the basement, which was completely moldy. And I took them to CSI, and there was one of the very first circus, the backyard circus, which was Kitty and Molly’s birthday. And then there was… We did it again because everybody said, “Oh, this is such fun! Let’s do it again.” And it will be for, to raise money for Allied Arts. So we did it a second time. And… And then we… I… That was for his 90^(th) birthday. They… We showed those films. But then, I had also… We had also found a box of the Mrs. Jack photos or slides that Mark Handler had taken. And did we show those, or did we not? It was too hard, I think, for Kitty to… to watch that. No, we did show that. With the circus we had a background cassette of a circus, and we played that. And Monty was sitting there watching these, and at one point, - his clown was Birdy, that was his name - and he said, “There’s Birdy! I didn’t think I’d ever see Birdy again!” It was the most wonderful moment, just wonderful. And here in the audience were all these kids that were little kids in that movie, I mean, in the… in the circus. Now they’re all grown up teenagers or past teenagers. So, it… That… That 90^(th) birthday was remarkable. Then I had taken… Let me see, three other cassettes over to CSI to get made up into presentable… One was sailing the Montalk at Bellport, and that was to be for his 91^(st) birthday. The next one was the… There’s a circus that came to (?) that we all went to. And he loved to go to circuses because he was a part of the circus. What was the third? There were three more. But by the 91^(st) we couldn’t do it.

01:34:10.170 - 01:35:08.920

JW: Yeah. PF: So… But they have them. There’s just… You know, to have friends for sixty years is quite phenomenal. JW: Yes, it is. PF: And to have as many memories as we have with them… Oh! We did… Monty had a tatay guitar, and we… I ordered a tatay from the same guitar maker for Don. And for the Durham Theater Guild annual meeting, Connie and Monty and Don and I took “The Lowland Sea,” and they reduced it down for four people, two guitars and… and two female voices. And we did that for the Durham Theater Guild in… What was the hotel out there on the highway? God, I can’t remember. Don could tell you in a minute. It was closed in. It was a place we all had… could go. Anyway. And so that was the entertainment. And then Connie had her breast cancer, and we decided about four years later to redo “The Lowland Sea” for four people. And we did it up there, and then our dear closest friends were all down here. That was sort of the thinking of this crazy house. Oh, and by the way, those balusters were from Harwood Hall.

01:35:08.920 - 01:35:15.640

JW: Oh! PF: I got there ahead of Gerard Tempest. It was snowing, and I was there at six o’clock. And so I asked the man, I don’t know, big hulking guy, who was tearing the house down, that I would like to buy the balusters from the second floor, “Is that possible?” And he said, “Well, yeah. How many do you want, lady?” And I said, “I dunno. How many will I… I only needed it for this.” We were going to… I said, “24.” And he said, “Well, what… what are you going to, what will you pay me?” “25 cents?” “You can have them for 50 cents each.” I said, “Okay.” So I came home with twenty-four balusters from Harwood Hall. And then I panicked because I said, “Oh, my gosh.” See, we were going to have two tiers, up and down. What if something happens and those contractors make a mistake and ruin those? ‘Cause these are all hand-carved in-place by Italian carvers brought to this… to Durham for that building. So I got in the car, and by the time I got there Gerard Tempest was there in his Tyrollian hat, and his camelhair coat, and his little poodle. And I said, I went back to the man I had talked to first. And I said, “Is it alright if I buy another twelve balusters ‘cause I’m afraid some may get broken.” He said, “Well, lady, I already sold it all to him for $5000, so you’ll have to talk to him.” JW: Oh. PF: $5000. And he was incensed with me. He said, “You’ve already ruined this building for me by taking the organ out, and now you want the stairway. Go ahead, you can have twenty… twelve more or whatever it is.” Well, at Christmas time when we knew the building was being torn down, I had paid Allied Arts for the… How much did I pay? $35? For Don and John, five-year old John, to go over there at Christmas time and take out the organ –

01:35:15.640 - 01:35:37.000

JW: Oh! PF: - because it turns out it was a Hook-and-Hastings organ, but the playing part of the organ had been already cut out. They had cut the players off and had been carried away somewhere. Nobody else had heard of this. We didn’t know about this. We knew it had a... a… a soundboard in the basement that pumped the air up to the organ, but… So the organ had been destroyed, and so John and Don were in there. The little five-year old could get his hands in to unscrew things that Don couldn’t. So the cover to Don’s desk in here was the cover to the keyboard. JW: Ah! PF: And the table out here was the organ bench that you sat on to play the organ. And then the two lamps were on either side. And so we carried all of those parts, every blessed piece of that organ, to this place over on Pickett Road that we were living on where there was nothing but a crawlspace underneath, and it was all stored under there. This was while we were building this house, and then eventually it got brought over here. And I had already, in my head, thought about how we could use these pieces, and then it was Mayor Markham’s… nephew? Who wanted to rebuild that organ, and came over here asking if he could have, you know, rebuild the organ. And Don said to him, “Well, if you can… Take the parts back if you want, but you can’t have the bench and the console cover until you have the organ playing.” So he came back in about, I don’t know, six months or something. And he said, “Well, I got it put together.” And Don said, “Is it playing?” And he said, “Well, no.” “Well, that was our bargain.” We never heard from him again. So, one more little tale. Anyway.

01:35:53.360 - 01:35:57.680

JW: Well, thank you so much for your time. PF: Oh! JW: This has been great fun. PF: Well, I feel like I’ve forgotten so many people’s names, and… and things go out of context and get mixed up. And… I don’t know how you can write anything from this, but I’m very glad for the Durham News.

01:35:57.680 - 01:36:27.480

JW: Well, thank you. PF: I really read that every day, every time it comes in and from cover to cover because I think it is the most important thing. And I was interested to read that Bob Ashley is going to be editor of the Herald again. JW: How about that. PF: What’s that… the Historic Preservation Society going to do?

01:36:27.480 - 01:36:53.440

JW: I have no idea. [laughs] I hadn’t talked with anyone about that. I was very surprised that he wanted to get back into the business. PF: Well, I was very surprised, too. So, I don’t know what that means, but... JW: Right. Yeah, the editor at the Herald is leaving, Nancy Michael. PF: Well, that’s what it said. Well, when you go through this, if you can stand to listen to it again… [laughs]

01:36:53.440 - 01:37:25.560

JW: [unintelligible] PF: If you… If questions come up… I know there are people’s names that I’ve forgotten. And there’s so much I’m out-of-context with, and I ramble from one thing to another. That’s a sign of old age, too. JW: Well, I think we all do that. PF: But, I’ve… I think this is an interesting thing that the library’s doing. And if I missed things that come up and you want more information, just don’t hesitate to call –

01:37:25.560 - 01:37:49.600

JW: Okay. PF: - ‘cause nobody should have to go… plow through all those boxes. I hope the archive person doesn’t get too discouraged because I know that there’s good information in there. Good… I mean, all about the British American Festival that took place. There’s a whole bunch of folders on that, and I did try to kind of put some things like that together. And then there is down in the basement all the boxes. There were four boxes that were Connie Moses Ballroom. And I just simply couldn’t part with them because I wasn’t really sure how all of this was going to play out. But eventually, yes, I’ve got to spend some time reorganizing that because it does list… there’s lists of all the volunteers who helped paint the backstage, which most people didn’t even know. All the things that volunteers did to help get that theater done, and that’s… some things I pulled out because I didn’t want them to be overlooked. One thing I just discovered: the… the Purell(?) portraits that are in the cinema lobby are… were given to Steven Barefoot from Duke. JW: Really. PF: And they came because they’re a special silver print. They came and hung them.

01:37:49.600 - 01:38:16.340

JW: Wow. PF: Then when we closed the theater down in 1988, we had them come over and take them down and return them. And I just… Then I was told that they were sending them out to be framed. Well, I have the contract still here, and I know… Well, I think they’re… [unfolds paper] The original may have gone back. Where is it? I looked at it this morning. See here was the… announcing the publication of Portfolio Twoo. For borrower Stephen Barefoot. April 4, 1986, from Jessie Pedcoff. Pedcoff is not there anymore. But these were left, and then they were taken. And they said they were being framed, and they don’t own them. And I had completely forgotten this. So I’m going to… JW: It’s amazing what you’re going to find or that someone is going to find when they go through them. PF: It’s just… They’re all… It’s just… Anyway. And this was something that Connie had done for the… the ballroom door. Dog…

01:38:16.340 - 01:38:38.540

JW: Oedipus Rex, the ballroom dog. [laughs] PF: Yes, well, they… The… The brass plate that he still had on his neck was stolen. JW: Oh. PF: One of the first times that there was a… an… I don’t know… army or some group came in to the theater and took it.

01:38:38.540 - 01:38:38.550

JW: Oh. PF: And so then the… the theater people didn’t realize this dog had a significance. Well, it sat right here in our living room all the time the theater was under restoration. And then I took it back. JW: Ah. PF: And then it lost its identity. [laughs]

01:38:38.550 - 01:38:45.320

JW: Oh, no. [both laugh] [then Part II starts over from the beginning… The other parts are a repeat of the same interview as on Part I and II. There’s no official ending like with the other two interviews I’ve transcribed. Is there something missing?]