Richard F. "Dick" Celeste part 1

CW: Today is August 1st 2018. I'm Cameron Wood here at the Ohio History Center with former Governor Richard Celeste. Richard can you please say spell your name for me?

RC: My name is Richard Celeste. R I C H A R D C E L E S T E.

CW: You prefer to be called Dick though.

RC: I do prefer to be called Dick, being called that in many contexts. You might imagine.

CW: So where and when were you born?

RC: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 11th 1937 and grew up in and around Cleveland until I went away to college.

CW: Specifically you were in Lakeside (Lakewood)?

RC: I was in that children's I don't know what called Baby's and Children's Hospital at University Hospital now the same place where my youngest son was 00:01:00born. So we've kept the record going there.

CW: Kind of going full circle.

RC: Going full circle, yep.

CW: Back to the start. So what was it like when you were younger growing up near Cleveland?

RC: Well I. I loved my childhood. In fact when I got to college I was a little disconcerted to find so many of my college friends complained about you know their where they grew up or their families their parents. I didn't have any complaints. I mean I grew up I, first few years I lived on Elmwood Avenue in Lakewood. My parents I think rented the bottom of a double house and the first pictures of me were playing in a sandbox in the backyard with our black Cocker Spaniel named Lady Ann Thizizimp, or Cindy. But we moved to Arthur Avenue in 00:02:00Lakewood in 1940, late 1940 just before my sister was born and came home and. So grew up in the same house really from that time until I graduated from high school and my best friends my playmates were on Arthur Avenue I could walk to Grant Elementary School, I could walk to Harding Junior High School, I could walk to Lakewood High School I could walk to my first job at the Lakewood Public Library, and played baseball in Andrews Field down the street, played tennis on the tennis courts there and I mean it was it was fabulous. My my grandmother lived about five blocks away on Summit Avenue and I would ride my bicycle from our house to her house and climb her apple trees and pick apples for her and 00:03:00then while I stayed there in the kitchen with her she would make applesauce or she would make applesauce cookies. I mean you know it was a great place to grow up.

CW: It's a small town, right?

RC: It was a small town. And at that time well Lakewood was was a big suburb of Cleveland and the street car still ran along Detroit Street. So if we went downtown the adventure was to climb on the street car with mom or dad and to go downtown. My father practiced law but he really he was a lawyer who was more involved in real estate than in the practice of law. By the time I was in my early teens and I remember he gave me a summer job probably when I was 12 or 13 to manage the rental payments on a apartment project in Euclid. He and his law 00:04:00partner had helped to develop and they had a management contract it was called Cle Track. I think something like that anyway and I was there posting monthly rents and learning from the ground up what real estate was. My mom was a non-practicing social worker. I put it that way she had a master's degree in social work but when I came along she basically stopped working professionally and became a eventually a full time volunteer. She did extraordinary amount of volunteer work for the YWCA for a variety of organizations. Every Christmas she was Mrs. Santa Claus for the Cleveland Press. They had a program where people 00:05:00would write in and ask for clothes or blankets or food or whatever. Tell their story. My mother would sit in our living room and read these letters with tears streaming down her cheeks and decide yes to this one and no to that one it was some of the hardest work she did. But I think it was because she had to keep practicing that that social work effort. We had foster kids in the house. And so when I was quite young there was a young woman older than I was probably in her mid teens who lived with us for a couple of years and she stay in touch with Mom and Dad throughout their lives, I mean. She grew up and married and had kids. My parents were sort of the second family for her. We had a displaced family from 00:06:00Latvia come stay with us in the late 40s I suppose and they lived for a year year and a half in our basement. Basically, mom, dad, two kids and it was it was an exposure to the wider world that happened even though I lived in this lovely bubble in Lakewood, Ohio and life for me was playing with my friends, going to school which I took seriously and got encouraged to take seriously, and activities around the church. I grew up in the kind of Methodist tradition Lakewood Methodist Church is my home church and I went to Sunday school there and I sang in the choir there and later I would go back and teach Sunday school 00:07:00there for a year or two when we were living in Cleveland. So I felt like I had you know I had a Hollywood type. It couldn't get better than this childhood. When I hear I hear my my roommates or my classmates at Yale start complaining about or blaming something that happened. Oh, my mother is this, my mother is the reason for this. My father's the reason for that I couldn't understand what they were talking about.

CW: What kind of shenanigans did you get up to when you were young?

RC: Well there were there were there were one or two memorable the most memorable shenanigan occurred when we were probably 13 or 14 something like that. There was a funeral home that was next door to the public library right 00:08:00around the corner from our house and it shut down and the funeral home had a magnificent crystal chandelier in the lobby and it was it was kind of boarded up and one day three or four of my friends and I decided we were gonna go explore this house when it was you might have imagined it to be a haunted house although there were no rumors of ghosts but we thought this would be fun and we got inside and this there was this chandelier and for some reason there was a pile of telephone books that were sitting on the floor. So we decided we could wing those telephone books at the chandelier and cause some just wonderful noise and damage. And you know everybody started flinging phonebooks at the chandelier glass was crashing. I decided to explore the rest of the funeral home and so I 00:09:00went upstairs and when I got to the top of the stairs I saw a police car pull up in front. I went down the fire escape and into my favorite public library and my pals got a lecturing from the Lakewood Police. I missed the lecture but I got it from my friends after the incident was over.

CW: One of the many reasons why public libraries are so popular.

RC: I think public are you know people their place on hot days or you can come and cool off. You can read the newspaper for free. I mean I love the library. Every summer I was in the competition for how many books could you read during the summer and move a little flag along a map or whatever the drill was to to track your progress. And it was always a competition between me and my younger sister who also was an enthusiastic reader. The other thing about that period in 00:10:00in kind of growing up as you know my my two grandmothers were really influential in my life. My mother's mother Bessie Louis was the one who lived close to us on Summit Avenue and she traveled. She had traveled everywhere. She was born in eighteen seventy five and in 1893 when she was 18. She went by herself from Cleveland, Ohio to Portland, Oregon by train to see her older brother who was on his way to Alaska to look for gold. And so she had a collection of postcards from Uncle Hank who was up in Seward, Alaska outside of Seward looking for gold. Then she went to visit him several times so she by the time I was born she'd 00:11:00been to Alaska a couple of times. She had flown across the Gulf of Mexico on a dirigible. She had visited every national park in the United States up until she turned about 70 then she couldn't get around as easily. So I had I had kind of a National Geographic view of the world from Bessie Louis plus apple pie and applesauce and applesauce cookies. My father's mother was you know a village woman from southern Italy. She was born and raised in Calabria in a little town called Cerisano. She was 19 when she brought my father who was nine or 10 months old to the US. I've seen the manifest of the ship that arrived at Ellis Island 00:12:00with them. She never learned to read or write English but she never learned to read or write Italian. She signed her name with an X until she died and she was you know she was up. My father was an only child which was very unusual. She had been part of a very big family and his dad was part of a very big family. But he was the only the only child. His name was changed when he arrived at Ellis Island from Francesco to Frank. His father's name was changed from Serafino to Sam and my grandmother's name Carolina was acceptable. That was that was OK. So we would drive two Monessen, Pennsylvania where she lived once or twice a year to see her. And when he was alive my grandfather. And that was always an 00:13:00adventure. There were no interstate highways then. We would stop for Isaly's, down in south eastern Ohio. We would go through that we call them the tubes and tunnels in Pittsburgh that got us down along the Monongahela River and we would arrive in this town where it never got dark because the steel mills these were open hearth mills and you know it was it was dramatically different from that kind of suburban a quiet easy suburban life of Lakewood to this rough industrial valley where the sounds and the smell and the vivid fires of steel being cast in 00:14:00the iron rod and so on was going on and so both of those grandparents had a lot of influence on me and Bessie Louis from my junior high school graduation as a present put me on a Greyhound bus with her and we went to Washington D.C.. She wanted me to see our nation's capital and it was an introduction you know sort of firsthand introduction to American government through my grandmother's eyes. By the way she was a schoolteacher although she only taught for a couple of years she taught in one school in Barrio. So we walked it had to be the hottest June in the record book at the time it seemed. But we walked everywhere she was 00:15:00this would have been in 1952 and so I figured out she was 70 something right. 75, 70, 45, she was 75-76 years old and walking around Washington D.C. with me every so often a police officer would say ma'am can we help you. Oh and she'd say No I'm just gonna sit and rest for a while but I remember we go to the Smithsonian the old Smithsonian main building. And she said Dick now this is the attic of the United States. Everything that you would imagine in the attic of the United States it's here. It's all of the papers in the collection and walk through congressional buildings didn't take a White House tour, but I looked at 00:16:00it from Pennsylvania Avenue visited Ford Theater. It was her. And her message throughout that time was there is no higher calling than public service. That was her theme her favorite biblical passage was too whom much is given much is expected. And she reminded me of that frequently. Carolina my Nana as we call her. My father's mother was tough you know she was always a little resentful of the fact my father had left the Catholic Church. My father had married this WASPy woman when my dad mom were getting married. They married in my grandmother's house on Summit Avenue because my Italian grandmother would not enter a Methodist church. So they did it. They got the pastor to come to my 00:17:00grandmother's home and they did a small wedding ceremony there. But, my Italian grandmother and grandfather came a couple of days early and they were invited to stay with Bessie and Ted Louis on Summit Avenue and Nana thought well as matter of reciprocity she should fix a meal and so she started looking for the makings of a meal and she came to my father and said You can't marry this woman and my dad said why. She said because they don't have any olive oil and they don't have any garlic in this house. She couldn't imagine a place that didn't have olive oil and garlic. So she was she was she was she was old country literally. And she, my father and mother were going to have a Halloween party. They had friends 00:18:00and they played cards together every month and they think that was the same group of people as were in their Sunday school class. But they got together often. We're going to have a Halloween party in this particular years probably 1949 or 1950. They were going to give prizes for the best costumes and the prizes were a suckling pig and a goose. And we had these two live animals down in our basement. Well Nana was with us at that time and every couple of days she'd do some laundry and she'd hang it out back so she was taking laundry out to hang on a clothesline and the suckling pig got loose. My friend Gary Strong and I watched Nana this four foot eleven kind of heavyset Italian woman and always in her black dress chased this suckling pig up Arthur Avenue. The pig 00:19:00made the mistake of stopping Nana got the pig and Nana brought the pig back and Nana I was shaking this pig as hard as she could. And as she did and cursing at an Italian of course the pig would squeal louder and louder and the harder she shaked the louder the pig would squeal. Finally she broke its neck and Gary strong and I watched that and I don't think either of us ever got in the way of my grandmother again and

CW: Did you have pig that evening?

RC: No, they saved the pig for a prize. I mean it just wasn't live pig any longer put it in the refrigerator. The party was the next night so I guess they figured it wouldn't spoil. But you know it was interesting because later when I went off to college I came back I remember I was it was the summer after my sophomore year I was going to be a junior in college and Nana was visiting us. 00:20:00And we were having dinner and often my father and I would have disagreements. Sometimes it was about an issue a public issue. But sometimes it's just about a family matter. And this was. I think I thought he was being unfair to my sister which would happen from time to time. And he would whatever it was he would not concede the point to me. And I was pretty confident at this point. You know I'm on. I'm gonna be a junior at Yale. I'm proud of myself right. And I got angry. I got stubborn. He was always stubborn. And finally I just left the dining room table in anger and went out on the front porch. And after a moment or two I realized somebody was with me I turned around and it was Nana. And she grabbed my arm with one of those hands that had broken the neck of the pig. She grabbed 00:21:00my arm and stuck her finger in my chest and said Dicky there's only one kind of smart and that is when you respect your father. And I was, I mean talk about a lesson right from an illiterate immigrant as we would say these days. It was really important. And when I started raising what came to be six and then seven kids I often wished that I had a grandmother who could grab one of the kids and say Eric, Christopher, Gabriella. There is only one kind of smart and that is when you respect your father. She was something. Many years later I learned that she had saved a kid's life on a street where she lived in Monessen and that she had healing hands. That she was invited by neighbors when they had migraines or 00:22:00they had arthritic pain to come and take the pain away with her hands. So but she was long gone at that point I heard this from a guy when I was doing a political speech in Pennsylvania 10 years after she died and I said to myself you know I thought I knew her but I really didn't. Right? And. So it's a long story about a childhood growing up but I mean I had a tremendous time. I enjoyed it. I had teachers who meant a lot to me. And that was I think that was another thing that stayed with me because for some time I thought about teaching as a profession. My favorite teacher was a man named Wally Smith in high school I got involved in the drama club. We called it barn stormers and he was the adviser. 00:23:00And so as senior year was about to begin at Lakewood High I decided to take the semester long speech course that he taught because I figured it would be a break from all of the classes that had tests and stuff like that. And after all I knew Mr. Smith couldn't be bad and we met every day in what was called the old auditorium the school built a big new civic auditorium in the old auditorium had been it was turned out to be really pretty small anyhow. That's where we met it became a classroom. So the drill was that we would get topics assigned. So the first one was a speech to introduce yourself. And each day three or four students would give their speeches. Mr. Smith would sit in the back of the auditorium and take notes and then 10 minutes before the end of the class he'd 00:24:00come up to the front and he would give notes to each of the people who spoke. So the third or fourth day of class I did my speech to introduce myself in probably two sentences into the speech. A voice came out of the deep back of the auditorium. Eye contact. And I carried on a few minutes later maybe a paragraph later the voice came out. Where's the logic of that. And instead of notes I got a punctuated annotation critique of my speech as I went along and you know it was funny because afterwards we gathered for the notes. All my classmates just said what did you do, right? And he gave notes to the other students and then he 00:25:00turned to me and said Celeste you can do better than that and for the rest of the semester. Every time I would give a speech Wally Smith would sit at the back of that auditorium and belt out criticism as I went along. And I know Mike and I worked harder and harder on my speeches because I wanted to shut him up. That was my goal. I didn't care what grade I got. I just want to shut the man up and I couldn't. And afterwards toward the end of that year I was trying to make a choice about where to go to college and I had to make a tough choice between Wooster and which had accepted me and offered a scholarship and Yale which hadn't accepted me and hadn't offer a scholarship and when I wanted advice. I went to Wally Smith. He was the one that stood out as a person I could count on 00:26:00you to tell me the way it was right but on graduation night. I was one of the class speakers and as I got up to speak I saw Wally Smith in the front row with the teachers. I thought uh-oh I hope he doesn't interrupt me. I went through the whole speech waiting for his voice to come at me many many years later when I was governor and I used to try to make a point about the importance of teachers. I would tell a Wally Smith story and I think during my second term we arranged to bring him back. He had moved to Chicago. He was teaching at New Trier High School and we brought him back just. I said I wanted to have a conversation with him but it was at any N.A.O.T.A. conference annual conference and I talked about the importance of your having a teacher who really demanded a lot. And then I 00:27:00told the story about Wally Smith. They had him in the back room listening to it and then we brought him out. I thanked him so I had a chance to kind of close the circle. How can it get better than that. You know I mean, I really if I had any disadvantages growing up it was that there weren't really many rough spots to have to deal with.

CW: Did you have a favorite holiday growing up?

RC: Did I have a favorite holiday? Well Christmas is always really an important celebration for us. We would decorate the tree and my parents would try to hide the gifts from us until Christmas morning but we kind of knew which closets to 00:28:00look in and we'd try to scope out what we were getting. But we liked Christmas as that kind of special day. We treated birthdays you know cake and ice cream not fancy parties or things like that. Thanksgiving was a big Thanksgiving was a big day for us because my grandmother Bessie Louis had been widowed. I think my grandfather died in probably 1943 so she was she was on her own and she would come and she and my mom would cook a huge meal and for a number of years they invited young sailors from the from some academy one great of one of these great 00:29:00lakes academies so we would have these really good looking sailors young youngsters and my sister was always goggle eyed at them. And they loved the home cooking. So that was just another example of how our house was kind of a place where people gathered.

CW: What was your relationship with your siblings like?

RC: You know my sister and I got along pretty well. She was three years younger than me which meant there was enough space that we weren't competing for attention either at home or in school and she was very bright and she always, I think she kind of enjoyed my friends and looked up to us. My brother was eight 00:30:00years younger than me and so he was always a little bit of a pain. You know he's like the puppy dog that followed you around and you know. And so Ted and I we only became close as adults and we started working together first in my dad's office in the real estate business and then in political campaigns. I mean he was a he was a cut up. He could mimic. He could sing. He could play the ukulele or you know. And so he was fun to be around him. But you know I didn't want some kid who was eight years younger than me you know if you're 16 having an eight year old tag along is gets in the way of whatever it is you're doing. So.

CW: So what would you have considered yourself in high school? At that time, 00:31:00would you have thought of yourself as a bookworm or a jock?

RC: No, I was clearly I was clearly a nerd. You know I was proud of the fact that I never missed a day of school. I was totally engaged in a variety of activities. So it could be Spanish club, or choir, or the yearbook I coedited the yearbook my senior year in high school I worked on the junior high newspaper at Harding Junior High School in fact got called into the vice principal's office at Lakewood High to say Dick you've gotta cut out some of your extracurriculars because your other kids need these opportunities too, right? The man was named Mr. Meeks. He was a kind of carryover he had been the assistant principal when my mother went to high school so he was an old timer. We didn't take him as seriously as we should have. And I was also very involved 00:32:00in church things. So we had, we had a ecumenical group of us probably 20 kids who would get together Monday mornings at a church right close to Lakewood High School and we just did our own service. I don't know quite how it even got started. There was no adult leadership or whatever we just we did it and we took different roles in that service. I went to what I was active in the Y and I went to YMCA Youth in Government. I was active in high school politics but not as a candidate. I was one of the, I became sort of a campaign strategist. I don't know how this happened but my, would have been my sophomore year in high school but it was at that time high school was three years so my first year in high 00:33:00school I got asked by a guy who is running for treasurer to help on his campaign and I did and that was pretty good. You know what it was making signs or thinking about a strategy for where you put the signs for the campaign. And so the next year I did a slogan. I ran I was the campaign manager for Ed Allen and the campaign was built around step ahead with Ed and we had I recruited a team and we had won high school student council president and the next semester I did that campaign for Jack Christie and I was back Jack. So I was really good at helping people in their campaigns but I didn't run for anything myself until 00:34:00class president and I ran for class president and lost and the fella who beat me. Jim Asbeck had been active as a football player and you know sort of in that element of my high school class. The kids who were more worldly than I was let's put it that they were more sophisticated than they. And his dad was a big Republican and when I first ran for State Rep. Jim Asbeck managed my campaign for State Rep. much to his father's dismay. So but yeah High School, High School was a busy time for me. I did a lot and I enjoyed it. I never, I never, I don't recall stress the way that I see in young people today. It was an easier time.

CW: When did your? Talking about politics. When does your father first run for mayor?

RC: My dad's first campaign was in 1955 was the year that I graduated and so I was around for the beginning of that campaign but then I went off to college and I wasn't around for his election and I was away other than summers I was away for most of, most of this, of his service as mayor of Lakewood. I was first in New Haven and I was there for five years and then I went off to Oxford for two years. So when I came back he was just finishing up his eight years as mayor.

CW: Did you talk politics in your house a lot?

RC: I would say we talked some politics but not at all with the intensity that later politics were discussed around our kitchen table. Mom and Dad you know they talked. It was mostly about people and the tradition then was less to engage your kids in the adult conversations. And I think that's one of things I resented and when I got into that argument with my father I mean. I, for example when they would have friends over the kid I was dutifully trotted out my sister my brother we would say hello you know to Hello Mr. and Mrs. Sicerelli or really Hello Mr. and Mrs. whomever seldom were we invited to stay around while they did 00:37:00their thing. If they think about it I remember one totally random event. My parents were away. My grandmother Bessie was babysitting us. I must have been 14 or 15 and she had her sister my Aunt Gussie and her brother in law Uncle Charlie and they were playing pinochle and they asked me to sit in. They needed somebody a kind of a dummy hand in pinochle which I didn't know how to play. They were trying to teach me the reason why this was vivid is A) I got to sit with adults 00:38:00for an extended period of time and B) Uncle Charlie gave me a puff on his cigar which he smoked all the time and it. I mean, I almost had to leave the room because I couldn't handle it anyway but it was a big deal. So it was more social work kinds of things community matters would get discussed but not in a political context and in fact I was kind of surprised when my father decided to run for office. I mean I didn't really. Later I found out he had run for mayor before but I don't think it ever was part of our family lore. He ran in the 20s late 20s I guess. No maybe the early 30s. 55, 24, 31 would have been when he ran and he ran against a guy named Amos Kauffman got thoroughly beaten and Amos 00:39:00Kauffman served for 24 years. And then when he retired in 1955. That's when my father ran again. So he must have had a political hankering. I mean he clearly did but he never talked about it. It was to me it came out of the blue. Later I discovered it. Oh, there was precedent.

CW: What do you think he was. What was his purpose for getting into politics?

RC: Well he thought he I think he had this vision. I mean I've read a little bit of his campaign literature from 1931. You know he felt that the incumbents weren't doing a proper job for this community and there needed to be an investment in maintaining the streets improving the street lights the infrastructure. He felt that the garbage collection could be done better. And I 00:40:00think he you know he just somehow or another he he intuited that he could do a better job of running this place. Right. And and I don't know how that happened. The man is barely out of law school. Go figure. He never confided. Part of it is they say that if the Calabrians are called testa dura rather they're stubborn they're hard headed but they're also secretive. And when I would play cards with my Italian grandmother she was always said breast a your cards breast a your cards keep your cards close to your chest right. And my father would say that way. I mean when he had problems with business or real estate he'd never tell anyone.

CW: I read somewhere you mentioned that it was a bit feast or famine in your 00:41:00household when you were growing up.

RC: Well he. And we always had food on the table and the rest. But his exploits I mean I don't know what and don't know what his adventures were he. He was someone who kind of walked away from his Italian heritage when he married my mom and lived in Lakewood. He was cut off from the Italian community in Cleveland and only later in life. Did he sort of reconnect with it and well at least that was my impression on the other hand when he was a young attorney. Apparently some of his business came from Italian business guys in Cleveland. So Frank 00:42:00Sicarelli was an Italian business guy in Cleveland. My father did legal work for and there was an Italian family who owned Morgan Linen Company that did all of the linen for restaurants and bars and things like that. And my dad did I think worker's comp. kind of cases for them. But you know he and we didn't know a lot about what was going on. So he worked very hard in fact so hard that when he was in high school he worked 15 hours a week on the weekends in the steel mills. And when I went back and looked through his papers recently I realized he didn't properly graduate from high school but he had enough credits. That Wooster College, the College of Wooster admitted him. And while he's at Worcester he 00:43:00held down two or three jobs and it looked to me like he only graduated from Worcester when he took courses, summer course at University of Wisconsin. And when they gave him credit for some of his law school courses and when he was in law school he and my mom got married in a second year of law school. He held down three jobs. He his schedule was at night at 6:00 in the morning. He would get up and he would deliver baked goods for the Huff Bakery, nine o'clock he would go to class at Case Western at three o'clock the classes were over. He would go to the Cleveland Trust Bank and he counted change for the bank. And then from 6:00 at night to 6:00 in the morning he worked at a city service gas station and that and that was it. Sometimes he couldn't get to class my mother would go and take notes for him and when his name was called she'd say in a deep voice "Yes." But the interesting thing is the Cleveland Trust Bank job 00:44:00introduced him to George Gund who was probably the most distinguished banker in Cleveland and a leader in the in the high high toned WASPy union club Republican Cleveland. And he took a shine to my father. So my father was able to go to the bank and negotiate mortgage loans for real estate projects which he did for. Not his own account but for groups of these wealthy families from the east side of 00:45:00Cleveland. And every so often those deals would go south. The the guys who'd invested would walk away. My father would always honor his signature on a piece of paper which is the answer to your question. So every so often like the year I'm heading off to Yale my father's filing for bankruptcy. That didn't mean we had nothing but it meant you know we were living on the edge and I think there were at least two times when my mother opened the door to someone who is serving papers to foreclose on some project that Dad was involved in because something had happened.

CW: I do believe your exact quote was It was Key West or Michigan for vacation.

RC: Yeah well it was Canada. Canada was where my uncle, my mom's brother had a place in Canada so we would go up there. We'd go to Michigan occasionally but 00:46:00Key West was my father's favorite place and there was a Clevelander. My dad, my dad he can move pretty smoothly among folks so he had his best friend in many respects is the guy he worked with at the city service gas station. Who is. I would say African-American fellow now named Alonzo Wright who became the wealthiest black Clevelander in a period. Later he bought the property on which that city services was locate saved his money bought it and developed real estate. My dad had friends in the Jewish community and one of his friends was named Max Mermelstein and Max owned the Casa Marina Hotel in Key West. And so he would invite Frank to take his family down there. I have vivid memories in junior high school with my mother driving us to Key West. His dad was busy. He 00:47:00flew down she had three kids in a car driving down to Florida. None of us were old enough to drive. I don't know how she did it. Unbelievable.

CW: Conveniently busy.

RC: Yeah. He was conveniently busy. Always but in a way you know... I can't remember something called hardship right. I mean I broke a bone in my ankle when I was playing basketball once and caught pneumonia. That was not fun.

CW: That's a good childhood.

RC: It was, it was remarkable and it made it very hard for me. I mean the next stage of life for me was. What are you going to do about college? And in the end I had the opportunity to go to Wooster which was where my mom and dad met and 00:48:00where my later my brother and sister would go. My brother and sister-in-law or Yale. And it happened. I mean it was strange we did a college trip before my senior year in high school and we went to look at Yale and Williams and Yale looked like a jail to me and when it is all these it was rainy in New Haven it happened to be spring break. So there were no students around and it looked monolithic and so Williamstown on the other hand was gorgeous. It was the ideal little New England setting. So I was fascinated by Williams now I wasn't going apply to Yale. And in about 48 hours before the deadline for applications I got a call from the executive from the Illuminating Company in Cleveland who is a Yale alumnus. And he said Dick I'm calling to see whether you are going to apply 00:49:00to Yale because I noticed that you came to college night for Yale and you visited Yale, but you haven't applied is there is there do you have any questions. I mean could I help. And he was very very thoughtful in his in his approach and I talked to him about it and I said that you know I find it kind of forbidding and they had a chance to talk to students. And he told me what Yale had meant to him and he said look you're going this is a choice for you to make. But I think I think you should apply just so you have some choices to make because I'm only focusing on one place. It probably doesn't do justice to your capabilities. And so I found them very compelling and I submitted an application 00:50:00at the last minute but then I faced this this decision I had been at Youth in Government. My mom sent a Western Union wire to me telling me that I had been admitted to Wooster and offered one of two scholarships. They gave full tuition scholarships to one entering male and one entering female. I had been awarded that scholarship but I had to give them an answer by Friday of that week. And so that's I agonized I consulted with Wally Smith and then I know and it was interesting his question to me it wasn't advice although I think it was meant as advice. His question to me was Dick which place is going to challenge you the most. And I said I'm pretty certain that'd be Yale. So I guess my inclination 00:51:00would be to go to the place that's going to challenge me the most. And that was the decision I made with probably the hardest decision of my life up to that point because I knew that it would disappoint my parents in some respects. And when I announced it to them my dad was a little crestfallen but I think he got around to the idea that you know if I got into Yale and I got a scholarship that would be pretty good and so I called the people at Wooster and I said well I'm going to have to turn down the scholarship because I'm waiting to hear from Yale and the admissions guy was very thoughtful and he said you know what. I understand that you're still admitted to Wooster and we try to help you if we can. But I appreciate it because we're going to award this scholarship to 00:52:00someone else. Fortunately I got into Yale I got a scholarship.

CW: So your parents wanted you to go to Wooster?

RC: Well they never said we'd like you to go to Wooster but you know we would they'd take us down the family down to their reunions every so often and we would go to football games and watch the bagpipes lead the band over the hill from the beginning of the game and it was you know it was familiar and it was appealing and it's a good school. I mean we I don't think I would have made a mistake if I'd gone there but I'm sure my life would have been different.

CW: Did they want? Was there a part of them wanted to keep you close to home?

RC: I think that probably was part of it. I mean we you know again we you know we couldn't afford a lot. I went by Greyhound bus almost always. They drove me 00:53:00the first time to drop things off. And my father would come once a year to see me the next time my mom was in New Haven was for my graduation and I almost always did a Greyhound home which was always an adventure. But my ties back to Ohio were my girlfriend from high school who was at Miami of Ohio and my family in Cleveland. So once a year there were a couple other Yalies I met who had girlfriends in Oxford, Ohio and so we do a crazy thing you know right after classes on Friday we'd all jump into a car and share driving in Saturday morning we pull into Oxford and we'd spent Saturday and Sunday there and Sunday night we'd jumped in the car and drive back in time to get to class on Monday morning. 00:54:00It was crazy.

CW: How do you think you adapted to that? I mean it's obviously a change from the Midwest to Yale.

RC: It was difficult. I you know. I had done very well. I think I finished in the top four of my class of 300 or whatever it was who graduated from Lakewood High School. I thought you know I'd had pretty much straight A's. I thought I was smart and I got to Yale and it was a totally different world because there was this the first place it was all male. It was predominantly prep school. These were young men who had been very well prepared for Ivy League schools by 00:55:00their training at Andover or Exeter or Deerfield or any one of a number of the prep schools. And so you know there was this gap between their classical training and intellectual discipline and what I'd been used to. And it had been pretty easy for me in high school and other than Wally Smith I hadn't had teachers who really demanded more of me than other students because I could have done more if they'd pushed me. So my scholarship consisted of grant, loan, and a bursary job. So from the beginning I had to work in a dining hall. Every morning 00:56:00I worked breakfast at a residential college called Branford and lived in a freshman dorm. That was a little more challenging than the kids who most of whom could afford to be there at that time probably I would imagine 80 percent of the class were students whose families paid full ride. My first exam was in European history and the midterm exam. This is a big midterm exam the midterm exam was probably a two hour exam and it consisted of one long essay question and a couple of short essays you know a paragraph or two paragraphs around a concept or a term. I wrote my examination blue book turned it in and found out the 00:57:00following week that I had gotten a D on that exam like a 68 or something like that maybe you know something. Anyway so I went to see the Professor. Professor is a man named Emerson and his nickname was Wild Bill. He was a tough guy. And so I went to see Mr. Emerson and it was all Mr. Emerson and Mr. Celeste. Why are you here Mr. Celeste. Well I'm concerned Mr. Emerson. I mean that exam result. I've never had such a bad examination result and I wanted your advice. I said then what. What I did wrong in what I can do better because I have to. I mean I would have lost my scholarship at the end of that semester if I continue that way. And he looked at me said Well let me let me ask you this Mr. Celeste did you outline your response to that long question before you started writing it. 00:58:00And I said no. And he said Well that would be a very good place to begin. He said I would suggest that when we give you that kind of time for an exam your semester exam will be three hours long with a half hour optional I'd suggest that use half an hour to outline your answers before you start writing. They'd make more sense that way. So So I took his, I took his advice to heart and I actually started smoking cigars at that point in time and I used the cigar as a prop for my exam ritual at Yale and my exam ritual consisted of doing all my preparation. Up until six o'clock the night before I had that exam and then I would stop and I would go after dinner in the dining hall I'd go to a movie and 00:59:00I'd just relax and get up early the next morning I'd take a shower I'd change and I'd dress up. We had to wear coats and ties for the dining hall we didn't typically wear a coat and tie to class but I dressed up for exams and I took a cigar with me. And when the exam papers were passed out all the other kids would start you know figuring out and writing. I'd take out a Dutch Masters panatela light it up get it going nicely read the questions. Think about it for the first five or six puffs on my Dutch Master panatela and then I put the cigar down and outline my responses. I take the full half hour enjoying my cigar. Then I'd set to work writing my exam papers and it got me through Yale. Academically at least reasonably well thanks to Wild Bill and Dutch Masters.

CW: Do you think your Midwestern upbringing gave you any benefits that other students didn't have?

RC: Well I don't know to talk about a benefit. I mean I think to some degree always feeling a little bit of an outsider at Yale was a plus. I mean I miss some things. I know that I could have done better but I also you know I never fell into a kind of an elitist attitude because it was interesting the next history course I took I was gonna be an English major. But my experience of European history. And then I took a course from a man named Morgan who taught a course in American history and I read The Uprooted Oscar Handlin book and it was 01:01:00the first time I appreciated the context in which my Italian grandparents lived in Monessen that they were part of this Italian migration that had come and the way they'd been treated and then the things that they had to deal with and all of a sudden the smell and the look and the difficulty and the challenges that place made sense to me in a larger context. And I identified with that. I didn't identify with Andover or Exeter or Deerfield where my roommate went. I mean I had a roommate from Deerfield whose father was treasurer of general electric. He was a nice young man. He was very smart. He was very well prepared for Yale and he probably got a gentlemen's B right. I worked my tail off and I graduated magna cum laude because I worked my tail off. But then you know I didn't do 01:02:00plays I didn't do newspapers that I discovered fencing and so that was my exercise which was good. It helped me get through my bursary job shifted and I worked for a professor in the English department and that was good. I was I became active in church things you know. I joined the Wesley Foundation which was a Methodist campus organization and became active in that. And within a year was president of the national of the New England Methodist Student Movement and I continued to be active in that. And I did a lot of writing for Methodist magazines. I became much more political through the social activism of the Methodist Church and through. A study of history and kind of looking at our 01:03:00country through the eyes of a historian. But by junior year I appreciated Yale I was having an interesting time there the end of my junior year. There were, Yale I had secret societies right. The best known of which is Skull and Bones. But there were also were a group of societies that were called underground societies. They weren't they didn't have big houses. They sort of came and went. But I was approached by some students who were a year older than me to take an 01:04:00interest in one of them it was called spade and Grave. And so I met two or three members of Spade and Grave one of whom was actually active in the Methodist and the Wesley Foundation as I'd known him. One of whom had just been elected to a Rhodes Scholarship. One of whom was a New Yorker, just a wonderful guy who I quickly kind of became close to and I said Okay you know I'll join, you know. And so on a particular Thursday night in May it's called tap night they go around and tap people well Spade and Grave didn't tap people they already got your commitment right. But there was a knock on our door and a guy came flying in his black suit said Celeste and I nodded and he came over and he hit me on 01:05:00the shoulder and said. Skull and Bones do you accept? And I said no. And he looked at me like what. He went to the window opened the window and shouted. No. Down below so that someone could run off to somebody else and tap them. The next day I get a call from my father. What did you do last night Dick? What do you mean? I got a call today from someone who said you threw your life away last night. I said come on. He said no, no I got a call serious call saying your son your son threw his life away last night. My father would never tell me who called him with that message but you know senior society they had a long reach. And even so that was part of my Spade and Grave became part of my senior year and I competed for Rhodes that year with the encouragement of Phil Ritterbush 01:06:00the man who had won one and wasn't selected, but Yale awarded me a graduate of special graduate program they had entered into an arrangement with the Carnegie Foundation it was called the Carnegie Teaching Fellowship. The point of this. They took 10 Yale seniors who were planning to do something else I'd applied the law school and was planning to go to law school. And the idea was defer whatever you're going to do for a year law school, med school, whatever, and get some experience at being a college teacher because we'd like to persuade you to teach. And so I took courses I took some half time courses in the history department at the graduate level and then I was a teaching assistant for the 01:07:00Howard Lamar that taught American history in the introductory American history course and I lectured occasionally in the African history course because my senior work was all around African history, American history and African history. So I had a ready made year after Yale and also that spring of senior year I got involved in something called challenge and this was this is my first real college organization, political organization al thing. We, I was at a concert at the Yale orchestra and it was a beautiful spring day in April of 1958 01:08:00and we were sitting on a blanket drinking Coca Cola and yakking away it was Sam Bowles who I had met through his mother when I testified against the draft for the Methodist student movement. I had done that the year before. The fall before I actually it was the fall 58 or the fall of the fall of 57 because this is the spring of 58. Fall of 57 I testified against the draft and Steb Bowles came up to me afterwards and said I was surprised to see someone from Yale coming here to testify against the draft. I said Well here I am and I'm from Yale but I'm really here on behalf of the Methodist student movement and she said well you should meet my husband because he's a congressman. And that was Chet Bowles who 01:09:00later became my mentor and you should meet my son Sam because he's there and I'm sure you'd like to meet you. So I went back and looked up Sam and we became friends and he had a pal named Ralph Bryant who was a Quaker and was a peacenik and so the three of us kind of hit it off politically and we so we're sitting there on this blank enjoying the concert and Sam Bowles. I remember vividly, Sam turned to us and said I went home to Essex this past weekend and I saw a one of those billboards that scared the daylights out of me. I said What did it say? The billboard said: "Sleep well your National Guard is awake." He said that scared the daylight, what is my National Guard know how to keep me safe. Right? 01:10:00And so we started talking about that. This is 1958, we're part of the Silent Generation on college campuses. And we went from the concert over to a burger joint that's no longer in New Haven it's called George and Harry's. And we sat there talking about how do you, how do we get our classmates to take what's going on in this world? The nuclear threats that we were experiencing the early just the beginnings the hints of the civil rights movement that was going on. How do we how do we wake up this student body? So we sat there and literally on the placemat started doodling what we would do well let's bring distinguished speakers, somebody. Let's devote a semester to a subject. Let's what we devote a 01:11:00semester subject and we have speakers or seminars. Why don't we have a a big kind of colloquium weekend and bring not just people from the Yale campus bring you know we could bring girls from some of the girls schools here? We have a have a colloquium and bring in some really distinguished speakers and maybe some music. So we started planning something in which we came to call Challenge and it was funny because we had no resources right. We're three guys. There was a fourth guy who actually was Students for a Democratic Society guy lanky guy who became an opera singer. I forget his name the four of us. And we would get together and we go up to Sam's place and we'd sit and chew on this. We recruited some graduate students who are women to help us started writing people. Ralph Bryant was a, played the cello and he thought we should get Pablo Casals to come 01:12:00because Pablo Casals was a well-known peacenik. And so he saidI'll write Pablo Casals. And we struggle with how are you going to finance this and finally they. Ralph took me aside one day a couple of weeks into this project and they said we figured out how we can do this. There's a prize that Yale gives called the Hatch Prize to someone who is devoted to building a more peaceful world. It's a thousand dollars and we're going to promote you for this price and if you get it you use it to start Challenge. I say wait a minute. If I get that prize the first thing I've had to do is pay off my bills at the bookstore. Well you can do that but then put the rest of the money into Challenge. So sure enough they lobbied and lo and behold I was awarded the Hatch Prize. And that the eight 01:13:00hundred and fifty dollars that was left over after I paid off my books or bills was the beginning of our budget for Challenge. And then the Treasurer of Yale got interested and he helped us raise some additional money. We eventually put together a full year that was basically the year after I graduated. So this is the fall of 58, spring of 59 we were organized and then it was this fall of fifty nine in spring of sixty. That Challenge got started it was my Carnegie teaching year and the first semester was the Challenge of the nuclear age in the first week of school when everybody was back on campus we had a debate between Norman Thomas the Socialist candidate for president and Bill Buckley on the challenge of the nuclear age. And then we brought a whole raft of people there we never got Pablo Casals. We got a letter from him but we had Carlos Romulo who 01:14:00was from the Philippines and had been president of the United Nations General Assembly. I guess I'm with some senior position there. Hubert Humphrey and a number of people who spoke on the challenge of the nuclear age. And we had.

CW: Who'd you get for music?

RC: Music was Peter Paul and Mary I think were the music that first semester and then in the second semester we called it the challenge of American democracy. And it initially was going to be mostly about economic issues. And we had Michael Harrington who wrote the book The Other America there. But we also the 01:15:00civil rights movement was picking up steam and we had Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and Thurgood Marshall all spoke at this event and Pete Seeger and Odetta sang and that was phenomenal. And afterwards Seeger came over to the law school lounge and we brought people over there and we passed the hat to raise bail money for the students who'd been arrested at sit ins at the various Woolworth's in the South during that period of time. Bill Coffin was our chaplain. He had gotten heavily involved in Challenge and so that you know that was that was real political activism and it was fun. I had gotten to know Odetta because she sang at a national conference that the Methodist Student Movement 01:16:00did. We'd had phenomenal dramatic program put together with the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Mary Tyler, Mary Taylor Dancers and the Southern Methodist Choir and Odetta was phenomenal. And I think that inspired my notion of how music and content could go together in a way that was important. So that was it. And you know kind of on a lark that spring I decided to reapply for the Rhodes and I got selected. So off I went to England.

CW: You've done a lot of work with the Methodist Church. Did you consider yourself a religious young man or was it more of a?

RC: Yes. No like I as I was I looked back on my correspondence then and on the things I wrote. I was religious. I was not conventionally religious. I mean in a 01:17:00sense that I wasn't. I mean to me the most important aspect of religion is the Holy Spirit. Bill Coffin had an expression. He said the most important emotion is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the spirit in us. And you know he was another big influence on me. I mean he used to one of his favorite expressions was life is a risk exercise. Everything is a risk. You know everything you do is a risk, things. People worry about risk. Don't worry about risk cause everything is a risk. So I think I was more in touch with a sense of spirit than in doctrine. If 01:18:00that makes sense and the element of there's a strong from its beginnings there was a strong element of social justice and social activism built into Methodism. And that certainly was something that I embraced enthusiastically. And if I look at my writing for the Methodist magazines back then it's all on social topics. I would read the Congressional Record and you know find something obscure that I could write about you know or rant about I mean sometimes I was more than a little off the charts. But that was an important part of my life. It diminished 01:19:00as I was getting ready to leave for England. I just had less time for it I was concluding work on campus and starting to think about what you know what's next in my life and in deferring law school for another year.

CW: Did that Carnegie Fellowship do what it was supposed to do?

RC: Well it gave me an appreciation for academe. I sat in ice for example I sat in on some faculty the history faculty and discussions which many many years later when I became a college president you know I understood what a faculty conversation could be like because I had been like a fly on the wall in that history department which is a powerful department at Yale. It didn't that 01:20:00dissuade me from teaching. But it did not win me over. I think that probably Challenge was more influential that year than my teaching experience and so I was more inclined to political activism than I was to to teaching.

CW: Did you realize that about yourself at the time?

RC: No, I was still, I was still on a journey and I wasn't sure what the destination was. I mean I knew my I knew this next stop on that journey was Oxford. And you know but in the meantime I had met the summer I was getting ready to leave for Oxford. I had met a young woman totally out of the blue. A friend of mine who'd been active he's a year younger at Yale name was Peter 01:21:00Bergman. He was from Shaker Heights and he had gotten active and in Challenge. It's just how I got to know him even though we were both Clevelanders. He called me in the summer of 60 early summer and said he needed my help and I asked him why and he said well I've been trying to date this girl from Sarah Lawrence for years. And she said no but you know she lives in Akron and I've invited her up here for up to go to a theater. And she said she'd go but her college roommate is there and she needs somebody who can go with their college roommate. So only if I can find somebody to go with their college roommate will she say yes. Would you do me the favor of sort of escorting this girl? I said okay yeah yeah fine. And he said Don't worry I'm going to pick you up I'm taking care of the whole 01:22:00evening. You don't have to spend anything. You know it's just. So he came over with his date and this young woman her name was Andrea Cousins and almost immediately I fell in love with her. It was crazy. She was attractive. She was vivacious. She was very sophisticated. Her father was Norman Cousins who was the editor and publisher of Saturday Review and to me and my peacenik mode. He was like one of the pantheon of heroes for those of us who were trying to do something about the nuclear age. Here I was with Andrea Cousins right and we just had a fabulous evening. And so I started writing letters and I had a motor scooter at the time and I decided at the end of the summer I was going to take 01:23:00the motor scooter back sell it in New Haven. Spend some time with Andrea and then Meet my parents in New York to head off to England. So I met Andrea, she was already back at Sarah Lawrence and it was the night of the first Kennedy Nixon debate. And that's another thing I'd become involved in over the summer was the Kennedy campaign. I've been a volunteer sort of working in youth for Kennedy. So here I was with this. New flame sitting in a lounge at Sarah Lawrence watching the first debate between Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy. There wasn't anybody in the room who was a Nixon supporter, I don't think. And then I went to New York and got on a boat. I think it was the Queen Elizabeth and sailed off to South Hampton and take a bus to Oxford

CW:How did your friend's half of the date go?

RC:How did the?

CW:How did your friend's half of the date go?

RC:I don't think anything happened for them. He ended up Peter ended up in L.A. he became Peter Berg. He helped, he had a radio program called the Wizard of Id and he ended up as a member of the Firesign Theater which if you followed kind of bizarre comedic. This is you know this is before the Seinfeld, this is radio stuff. They did really weird things. And that was Peter Bergman who passed away a few years back. Yeah

CW: Never know the connections you're going to make.

RC: Yeah. And it was I mean it was an example of what Wally Smith said you know you're gonna be challenged and ironically Challenge became the name of the political activity that we undertook at Yale in that last year but Yale stretched me and in many ways that were terrific. I didn't love the place. I feel better about it today as a coed.. coeducational Ivy and as a place that's much more diverse. And I've taken more of an interest in it I suppose. After my fortieth reunion or somewhere around there than I did before two of my kids have gone there and they had their own distinctive experiences there. So but you know it launched me into a different world.

CW: So you get the Rhodes Scholarship have you ever traveled internationally?

RC: Other than Canada. Canada was you know Canada was it. I don't think I needed a passport for Canada. But now I needed a passport to go to to go to England. And that was that was pretty. That was pretty exciting.

CW: How did you choose to study African history?

RC: Well I was I think it grew out of my curiosity about the world. We had a professor at Yale who was an African historian was pretty unusual and he worked hard to get people interested in the subject. I, my senior year I had an 01:27:00opportunity. They created a program called scholar of the house and they selected I think a dozen rising seniors. And they invited us to. Focus on what our particular area of interest was in an in-depth way. No classes but a year devoted to a project that would be demanding and substantive. And so I was working area of American diplomatic history Africa all of the stuff that was happening with African independence was just bubbling up at that time. And I had 01:28:00participated in something called a citizen, the citizenship seminar which the Methodist Church sponsors my junior year probably spring of my junior year in college and all of this I mean taking Harry Rudin's course being interested in American diplomatic history and then we at the citizenship seminar we spent three days in New York and our goal was to learn about the U.N. and then we spent three days in Washington to learn about American government and I was just thinking to kind of think as knowledgeable American citizens and knowledgeable world citizens. So the first night in New York we were kind of welcomed by the 01:29:00organizers and then introduced to a man who was working at the U.N.. His name was Eduardo Mondlane, M O N D L A N E. And Eduardo was from Mozambique and he was we were told that he had was born in a village rural village village in Mozambique had been schooled by American Methodist missionaries there. Was a promising student and had with their encouragement been had been, had become a Portuguese citizen which was possible if you could speak Portuguese had become a Christian and had graduated from high school and Eduardo had done all three of 01:30:00those. So he became a very black Portuguese citizen and these missionaries encouraged him to go to college and so he went to Witwatersrand University in South Africa where very quickly he showed promise and was elected to the student body which to the apartheid government of South Africa was treasonous. And so he was. Arrested and put in jail and the Methodist missionaries went to the government of Portugal and said how can you let a Portuguese citizen be held in jail. And so an embarrassed Portuguese government went to their friends who I mean they were close to the to the government of South Africa at the time and said look this is embarrassing. He's actually a Portuguese citizen and the South Africans said we will release him but he can't stay in the country. So Eduardo 01:31:00was offered a place at the university in Lisbon he went there in two years he graduated. He came to Oberlin and in two years he graduated. And by 1954 he was at Harvard working on a Ph.D. which he wrote on point four of the Truman Doctrine. And when he graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. the Portuguese government made every every government has a quota of staff at the U.N.. And so the Portuguese government proudly put Eduardo on display as a member of the U.N. staff on a Portuguese quota. So here he was from Mozambique trained in these various places actually married an Oberlin girl. But here he was talking about the U.N. and how it was organized at the end of this. One of the students in the front row said Mr. Mondlane. No way that you grew up in a village in Africa. 01:32:00Come on. Because Eduardo was totally fluent in English totally fluent in government at the U.N. I know it was probably twenty seven years old at this time maybe 28. He said hand me hymnal and he took the hymnal and he started drumming on it with his thumbs. And then he began to sing the lullabies his mother sang to him in this village in Mozambique. And it was it was transformational. I mean he took us all from a basement in Riverside and Church to a village in Mozambique with his voice. And he and I became pals. And so you know you got Harry reading you've got American diplomatic history you've got Eduardo Mondlane. I mean I couldn't resist and scholars my thesis for scholar of the house program was on Pan-Africanism and its prospects for Africa. And that 01:33:00was how I got interested.

CW: So how was that and then before you were offered the Carnegie fellowship you were thinking about going to law school.

RC: I know I had applied to law school the year before that yeah so I had applied to, when I graduated from Yale. I took at the LSATs. Sam and Ralph and I took the LSATs together because we were organizing Challenge so you might as well take the LSATs together and you know I think we were all actually a little hung over I can't remember but my recollection is that we took them kind of on a lark. We know OK let's do this right. Although I was thinking about law school and I passed. I did pretty well on them and I was admitted to Case Western which 01:34:00was and I don't think it was even Case Western at that time it was Western Reserve law school. And then I deferred that for a year for Challenge and then I got the Rhodes. So I deferred it for another two years and I came back to do had decided when I finished my Rhodes that I wanted to be. I was thinking really seriously about teaching in an urban school setting. So I came back to Yale to do a Master's in Teaching. By this time I'm married to a Dagmar and I did a semester of DMAT but you know I realized that wasn't really what I wanted to be doing and so I got an offer from Sally Bowles to go work at the Peace Corps in December. So in January of 1963 we moved to Washington D.C. pregnant and waiting 01:35:00for a kid. And I started working at the Peace Corps. I did that for six months and my plan was to go back to Oxford actually finish I had started work on a thesis and I thought I might go back to Oxford and finish the thesis So I can continue to defer my law school and then in March of that year Chester Bowles said hey come be my personal assistant when I go back to India.

CW: So you can't turn down a Rhodes.

RC: No, the Rhodes was good and it was you know I think people say. Is there anything you'd like to do differently in your life? I misspent my time in Oxford. I really did. I got totally swept up in the anti nuclear movement 01:36:00campaign for nuclear disarmament there. I there was another woman. I mean Andrea was wonderful and we corresponded a lot but she said she had a boyfriend at Harvard and so she was a little. You know it was one of those on and off things. So there was a young woman at Oxford. Her name was Lydia Howard. Her mother was Marghanita Laski. Her uncle was Harold Laski a famous socialist an influential political voice in Britain. So I moved into a whole another world of political activism and got arrested for sitting in Trafalgar Square to protest Russian 01:37:00nuclear tests. And I got involved in the theater. So I started doing plays, which I had done in high school but hadn't done in college. And so I did not I mean I probably was as bad a student as you could be and still somehow stay in reasonable standing in the college. When I started I was doing a degree program called philosophy politics and economics PPE. But by the end of the first it's not, they're not semesters. By the end of first term I realized this wasn't for me. And I started looking around for what I could do I went to you could attend 01:38:00any lectures you wanted. So I went to various lectures in history and the rest and I finally decided that what I really had to do is the equivalent of a master's thesis and so I sought permission to change and I got approval to do a master thesis an M.Phil not a D.Phil but an M.Phil in history. And the topic I chose was American participation in the Berlin Conference of 1883-84 when when the European powers divided up Africa. And I had done a little bit of work on that as an undergraduate at Yale and so I had a background and it turned out that there was a professor at Oxford very very famous historian named A. J. P. 01:39:00Taylor Who's best known for his work on European history before World War I and between the wars but whose original thesis was on the Berlin Conference. And so I sought him out to become my advisor for that paper and he agreed and sadly that was the only time I sat with him. I had correspondence with him after that. I didn't. I didn't research for that. I have a box of papers still in my garage with my notes for that thesis but I never got around to writing it. I was busy in demonstrations. I was busy With my girlfriends. I was busy with the theater 01:40:00and then I met Dagmar and we made a very very, you might say in the end rash decision. We were young and we were going to get married. Her father didn't like the idea. My father didn't like the idea. They did everything they could to discourage us but that only made us more determined to go ahead. And so we got married in August of 1963 and I didn't have a single member of my family at the wedding, which for somebody who was as close to family as I was. I look back on it with almost complete disbelief. You talk about kind of out of character and 01:41:00out of character. Big decision right. There it was. So.

CW: What do you think it was that drew you together?

RC: You know, it was a kind of. Dagmar is one of the smartest people I know. And she is an extraordinarily spiritual person . And I think even though she didn't speak English well and I spoke no German I think there was a kind of connection 01:42:00that we made that was so different for the two of us from anything that we'd experienced before. We thought wow this is this is it. I mean this is meant to be and we didn't test it. We just went pell mell ahead. And you know one could argue that that was not a good thing. But we have six phenomenal children. We had a tremendous time together not always easy. But I wouldn't trade it and I don't think she would either and we're good friends now. So. You know it wasn't the kind of marriage that she had imagined it would be nor was it the kind of 01:43:00marriage that I had imagined it would be but it was in its own way it was a it was a good marriage. And we we did very good things together so.

CW: You mentioned also theater back there. Where were you doing theater at?

RC: Well there was an Oxford. There was an Oxford dramatics society and then there were sort of off the books opportunities. And it happened that there was a young man. His name was Michael Rudman. He was an American from Dallas. He had gone to Oberlin. And Michael kind of came to Oxford on his own and he was deeply passionate about the theater. And so he decided he was going to put on a 01:44:00production of a play called it was called Cowboy or something like that. Don't call The Connection it was about the drug culture. And the main character was called cowboy and he needed somebody to play that main character. So I became Cowboy the drug dealer in The Connection and Rudman went on then to be invited by the Oxford dramatic society to mount a production. And he did a cast of A Month in the Country and he cast me in a role in that. And it was a fascinating experience. I mean one of my cast mates was Terry Jones of Monty Python fame 01:45:00another cast mate is a man named David Aukin A U K I N who went on to become the producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, of Trainspotting of you know just a number of really well known movies. He did a lot of independent production for not BBC but others. Annabel Levinson was in the movie and Annabel went on to do theatre in London and sing with girls singing group and she still acts from time to time. And so that was always more serious theatre and we every year the Oxford the main Oxford theatre the city's theatre invites one student production 01:46:00back for a week during the summer. And so that our production which was on stage for the Oxford dramatics society probably in May of 1965 or in 1962. Yeah, May of 1962 I was invited back that summer and I think that's one of the reasons why Dagmar and I decided to get married when we did because all of a sudden instead of going back to the United States that summer I was gonna be hanging around Oxford waiting for the production of this play. And so we had we had talked 01:47:00about getting married the following year. But she said well why don't we just get married this summer. And it seemed pretty easy. Hey I'm in Europe anyhow. Let's just go get married. Well when I announced that my brother reported to me later that my father would leave the room when my name was spoken. He was so upset that I was going off to get married, but he never he wrote me one letter saying he didn't think it was a good idea. Basically it was a long letter but basically saying that and then that was all. And once it was clear that we were going to get married he sent me a letter that he had addressed to the mayor of the place where we were getting married because you do a civil marriage which the mayor presides. And then a church wedding. And so he wrote a letter to the mayor of that town asking the mayor to do the honors for his son and this woman 01:48:00he'd never met. And it was kind of the whole thing was it mixed the drama that the drama continued past the actual dramatics society production.

CW: It's got to be a little bit crazy. Weddings are already kind of intense.

RC: Well this was this was totally weird because you know there were probably a dozen people at the wedding maybe 20 friends of her family. I had Michael Rudman came. He was gonna be my best man. But he was totally out of it. He'd, on his way he'd gone through Spain he'd driven from England to Spain and then from Spain to Austria and he picked up some fine marijuana in Spain and so he was 01:49:00totally zonked. He had his girlfriend with him and she got so upset with him she gave him a black eye, poked him in the nose. My Australian roommate was there Michael Smyth and Lydia Howard's brother who I'd invited her and her brother but she didn't come but her brother showed up on a motorbike just before the wedding. Those are the three people four people who are there for me. One of them stoned, his girlfriend stewing having given him a black eye, my Australian roommate, And Jonathan. And then family and the service was in two languages I didn't understand Latin and German right. I just get poked when I had to say ja and now is it. And then we did this Durnstein which is a beautiful beautiful town. On the Danube probably 60 kilometers from Vienna and it's where Richard 01:50:00the lion hearted was held captive. So there was a lot of joking about you know another Richard being taken captive. We spent the night at this little inn where we had the wedding party afterwards. When it was over everybody had gone back to Vienna. So the two of us hitchhiked back there. We hitchhiked back to Vienna after our wedding. She's carrying a wedding bouquet from with her as we try to flag down a car. Get back to Vienna.

CW: The wedding dress may be a little easier (hitchhiking).

RC: No, She this was the next morning so she had changed the wedding dress was packed away.

CW: So was the service a Catholic service?

RC: It was a very Catholic service.

CW: Again, another circle back around. RC: Yeah, it may have been one of the reasons my father was disconcerted was you know he had made the decision to 01:51:00leave the church and now here I was gonna be forcing my kids forcing this religion on my kids. Right. But he never, he never really talked to me about it. I think he just felt and I think he was right about this. So he felt that it would be more it would be wiser to wait and see you know let it, just see how we felt after passage of some time. I could go back in another summer family would go with me we'd kind of do it right. Right. But we were impulsive it was you know I'm sure in his mind I had eloped. Now for Carolina, for my grandmother, my Italian grandmother oh my gosh Dagmar's second language was Italian because 01:52:00after World War 2 she was malnourished and the Italian Red Cross had set up a program to bring youngsters from Austria who needed to be nursed back to health to Italy. So Dagmar went to Trieste and lived with a woman doctor there for a year and a half to get healthy. And so not only had I brought a nice Catholic girl back as my wife my Catholic girl could speak Italian. So Carolina, Carolina loved Dagmar in a way that I don't think my father could get himself to. He, she grew on him but.

CW: Did your father speak Italian?

RC: No. I mean what they spoke. I mean he did in home when he was a kid. He 01:53:00learned English in school. But the Italian they spoke when Dagmar heard it she said that's really not Italian. I mean that's a dialect. They spoke a kind of Calabrian dialect that was and he did not you know it was never spoken around our house. Except when Nana was cursing at the pig or.

CW: Yelling at your dad?

RC: Yelling, he understood her and she would she would go at him in Italian.

CW: How long were you back in Oxford after you got married? Were you?

RC: Oh yeah, we got no, once we packed everything up in Oxford left. That was August came back to the United States went to Cleveland. We were in Cleveland 01:54:00for about two or two weeks. My folks had a little reception for us there with friends and then we went to New Haven and we moved into a tenement building really I mean it was it was a building near the Yale hospital, New Haven Hospital probably five or six blocks from campus but everything around it had been torn down. The very first urban renewal in the country was going on in New Haven at that time. And the mayor a guy named Dick Lee had everything torn down. So.

CW: Was this Dagmar's first trip to the United States?

RC: Oh yeah. She.

CW: This was part of the plan, but how did she take to the States?

RC: She you know look she was, she was determined to make it work and we had one 01:55:00friend I had a there was a French woman I got to know named Miette who'd married a retired journalist from New Haven or from Hartford. And his name was Irv Alpert and they the two of them lived in New Haven. And so Dagmar and Miette became real pals because they were both new to the United States both newly married. Both trying to figure out their way. And, but it was it was a challenge. I mean I came home I remember we'd been in New Have for two or three weeks Dagmar was working at the Yale Library. I was going to school and I was also in a part time job teaching in a junior high school in New Haven program 01:56:00called Higher Horizons. Anyway I came home to find Dagmar washing our clothes in the bathtub. And I said well what are you doing washing our clothes in the bathtub? Well, washing we don't have a washing machine. I said there are automats. What's an automat? I said there places where you can go to put your wash in an automatic washer and then into an automatic dryer. She said Really? And so I said yes. And so the next load of laundry we take her to the laundromat. That's probably two blocks away in the neighborhood that was all black. I mean it was you know it was unbelievable. The school I was teaching in was in this neighborhood. I was helping in a class and there was in this social 01:57:00studies class a group of seniors it was one white kid and they referred to him as the pizza eater. He wasn't actually Italian. I don't know why they think he's the pizza eater. And in any event, so this laundromat was not very busy let's say. And when it was busy was often kids, young guys who were hanging around you know just yakking and Dagmar you know got to be friends with them. I mean they her accent everything else they found very interesting. We got to know the neighborhood gangs such as it was as a result but. She was coming she was she was very innocent we moved within six months we'd moved to Washington right. And we're living in a little basement apartment it was just like a basement studio apartment in a newly renovated house on Capitol Hill. It was one of the very few 01:58:00houses that had been renovated. And our landlord was Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post. Although I never met him. But every time I would travel because the neighborhood wasn't great Dagmar would go stay with the Bowles family. I was working for Sally Bowles and Sally lived in a guesthouse right behind her parents house in Georgetown. So as an example of Dagmar's innocence about the United States. They'd take her to the Bowles family as they were going someplace they'd take her along if I wasn't around. I came back from a Peace Corps trip that I'd taken. I was doing training programs around the US. I came back and said what's what? You know, anything interesting happen? She said Oh yeah we had a very interesting dinner. I said where was it. She said it was at the home of 01:59:00somebody. He's a newspaper columnist he writes. He's got a funny name Drew. I said Drew Pearson? She said yeah Drew Pearson and he and his dinner at his home and Chet and Steb took me along and I was sitting next to a really very interesting man and we got into quite a discussion. I said who was it? Well I don't remember he was like judge something or other. I mean I can't really recall. But we you know we had some very interesting conversation. So what did he look like? Well he had a head of white hair. And I said OK. Judge something or other. Yeah. I can't remember what it is. So So I asked Chet who had been the dinner guest. He said Oh that was Chief Justice Warren. My wife has no idea who 02:00:00he is right. They have this apparently very vigorous conversation and she's opinionated in her broken English way to express herself. So I said hey Chet. Oh my God I hope she didn't embarrass you. Oh he said no I got a call the next day from the Chief Justice saying Chet anytime you want to invite that young woman to dinner with me I would love it. We had the most engaging conversation. And she did not treat me like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. So you know being innocent of the ways can also have some advantages. And that was Dagmar.

CW: So, how did you find teaching when you were in New Haven?

RC: I did very little I was sort of more like a teacher's aide but it was interesting the woman who taught this class was a dedicated teacher who is 02:01:00totally uncomfortable with the kids that she was teaching. In her classroom when I walked in and I noticed that there were pictures of each class that she had taught up until a certain date. So this is this is now 1962 the fall of 1962 the last picture was probably 1958 or 59. And all the kids in the class were white. And what had happened when the urban renewal came in and they tore down everything in that slum that was kind of inner city right around the hospital those families had been pushed into this now neighborhood around the school and the neighborhood changed very rapidly from virtually all probably working class white families to virtually all working class or poor black families. And so 02:02:00part of you know part of my challenge is to try to help or think about You know topics for class and the rest in this social studies class. And then one day early on I was going through you know what do you have in this. What's in the classroom right. There's a closet I look in the closet and there's a. A big old tape recorder kind of reel to reel tape recorder microphone and like a real proper outfit for recording. And I suggested to her that we see what happened if we created kind of a radio station for the class. And every day we would ask one of the students to become the broadcaster and they would do three or four minute 02:03:00report on the news and they could get whatever they thought was news their way and they'd do it and we'd record it. And then we'd play it back and let the students talk about whether it was a good newscast or not. There's a little kind of Wally Smith kind of trick I suppose at the back of my mind. And she was a little skeptical but about the fourth day we did this. It was a school started late because there had been a fire on the main street in the neighborhood. And in a shoe store and its next door store had burned not completely the fire had been put out but apparently what happened is the fire was put out. Nobody had boarded up the shoe store. And so this young girl is doing the newscast right. 02:04:00And she. Her whole newscast is about the fire on Morgan Avenue. Fire destroys hardware store and partially damaged this shoe store. Students on their way to forgot what it was middle school junior high school pick out pairs of shoes and bring them to school. Police have just arrived at the school to search school lockers and at that point pandemonium breaks out in the class. All these kids need to go to their lockers right. She had a real news flash. And it became a big deal this these newscasts. And they started listening to real radio to kind of figure out or some of the picked up newspapers to check out what the news was. So that was my contribution to the class and that was the only class that I 02:05:00was involved in. Occasionally I would pitch in and help lead in discussion or whatever but I only did that for a semester and then we were off to Washington. I was a short timer.

CW: Decided it wasn't for you?

RC: Well it wasn't it wasn't thrilling me. But there was another influence. We discovered that Dagmar was pregnant and we had no health insurance. So when Sally Bowles asked me an interview for this job at the Peace Corps I discovered that the health insurance policy at the Peace Corps did not have a waiting period for the pregnancy benefit which many policies at that time did have. So all of a sudden a major challenge for us had an answer. And so I had an 02:06:00incentive. I had several incentives to move. I wasn't fully engaged in the MAT program and I was I needed help and the insurance at the Peace Corps was a big help. The Bowles family was wonderfully open to young people. Chet had always made it a practice of having young people around him in the work that he did. And he had been extremely successful in business. He founded the advertising firm of Benton and Bowles had made quite a bit of money had built this beautiful 02:07:00house at the mouth of the Connecticut River in Essex and the house was big enough that it could accommodate not just their kids but their kids friends and so on. So after I met Sam I we would with some frequency I imagine once every couple of months we would go to Essex. Often we'd take a couple of guitars and we'd have a hootenanny we'd sit around and sing songs and you know organizing songs for labor or civil rights songs. There it was there was music was a part of it. And Sally Bowles was my year at Smith. So she had graduated from Smith the same year I graduated from Yale. She went down to Washington to work with Sara Shriver in the Kennedy administration from the get go. And so I had known 02:08:00Sally I mean there was a another daughter by that marriage Cynthia who was older. I did not really get to know Cynthia. But you know at the Bowles family the refrigerator was yours. They always had a lovely table they'd get meals that everybody could have and so I knew them I didn't know them really well but I knew them enough that I felt really comfortable asking them to provide hospitality for Dagmar when I was off doing my travels. And I was totally surprised however when I got a call from the from Chester Bowles office at this 02:09:00time he was he had been sort of demoted by the President from Undersecretary of State to they created a position called Special Ambassador for Asia, Africa and Latin America. I mean go figure. It was actually a cockamamie thing but it was. He loved that because he he was curious about the whole world. He traveled it. He'd written about it. So it was right up his alley. In any event. So I got an invitation to have lunch with him at the State Department and that was a big deal. I mean you know this is the spring of 1963. I'm twenty five years old. I'm 02:10:00going to the seventh floor of the State Department and to the office of the Special Ambassador. I get there, there's a table set up with a white tablecloth white napkins a waiter. This is a big deal. And it was interesting and we began in I have to call him Chet. I mean I probably wasn't calling him Chet at that time but he wanted to be called Chet and he became Chet for me. Chet said How are things going with Sally. I mean is she treating you all right. You know what about the Peace Corps and what about your job. We talked about that house Dagmar feeling and you know when's the baby do you know all kinds of small talk. And I wasn't quite sure where this was going and then he said he said Dick President 02:11:00Kennedy is asking me to return to India as Ambassador. Bowles had served as ambassador for two years under Truman after he lost his re-election for governor of Connecticut. And he said I'm giving it serious consideration but I have some conditions. I wrote the President a response to laying out those conditions. He said are you interested in the letter. He's asking a historian if he's interested in a piece of history which he can hand me right. And I said yes sir I would be interested in the letter. He said well here and he hands me a copy of the letter to read. I'm reading a letter. From Chester Bowles to Jack Kennedy right laying out the conditions for why he would, under what conditions he would accept this generous offer to come back to return to India as ambassador. And 02:12:00Bowles never does things briefly. He does things sort of to some you know he want to spell it out so he spells out not only what his conditions would be. For example I needed direct communication to you not through the Secretary of State if I need it. And then it spells out what he thinks that the relationship with India should be. So it's a two page letter. And I hand it back to him. Wow. This is something else. And but I still don't know where it's going. That's pretty impressive. He said well what do you think about this. And I said well I think you'd be a terrific ambassador. He said No, no do you think it's something that I should do. And I said I don't think I can advise you on whether you should do that. I mean I think it may be hard to say no to the President but I don't know. 02:13:00He said well if I do this and I think I probably will I'd like you to be my personal assistant you know and come to India with me. Whoa. I mean this was so far out of left field: A) that he'd want me to work for him B) India. You know I'm waiting to go back to Oxford and finish up my degree after this kid is born. Right? He said Well now I don't want you I don't want you to give me any kind of quick answer. He said but you know Phil Merrill was the guy who was doing it for him at the time. Phil is going to stay here even though he hasn't, he's not interested in going to India. He can brief you on what the job involves and you can come on after your baby is born and join us in India. But I'd love to have 02:14:00you come and spend a couple of years with me as my personal assistant. I know Steb would like to talk to Dagmar about this and there's a lot the way. But you know we had young kids when we were in India in the 50s and that was a good place for them. So you know though he started selling me right away. I'm thinking to myself. Yeah. What do you do with an offer like this. I didn't quite know. On the one hand I was thrilled and I wanted that kind of just say you know I can't believe that you're asking me to do this. I tried to be as mature and buttoned up and deliberate as possible and it probably seemed to him like I was very hesitant about the job. I just didn't know what to tell him how overwhelmed I was. So we finished lunch and I go back to the office. And I think Sally knew 02:15:00this was coming. And she said how to go I said it went very well. Well you know what happened. She said he wants you to go to India with him and I said Yeah. She said well you're going to do it. I said I don't know is he going to go. And she said well I think he'll go. And I said Well I have to talk to Dagmar. So I got home that night. Dagmar said well how did the lunch go. I said Oh it's really it's very interesting. The President has asked him to go to India's as ambassador. I think he's going to go. And he wants me to be his personal assistant. He wants us to go to India with him. And she said OK. And I said What do you mean OK? This is a big decision. She said Dick when I married you I left Vienna and we moved to New Haven. And that was a big deal. In December we moved 02:16:00from New Haven to Washington. That's a you know that's the second move in less than a year. India. I mean I've already moved twice. One more move isn't gonna make any difference. You know. So I said well let's get out the atlas and look at where India is. I mean I had a pretty good idea of where it was but I wanted to make sure. And so I called Bowles the next day and I. And he immediately said look I want you to take your time on this. I said no no. We we'll go. He was astonished that we could make up our minds so quickly. And so then you know it was kind of a blur because I had two months or so to. We were doing. Lamaze classes for the baby. We had to think about OK now we're going to move to India. What's part of what do we have to move. And I had to think about what this new 02:17:00job is going to be like and you know get briefed on that. Then he was going to leave. He and Steb were going out probably the beginning of June. And our kid wasn't due until the latter part of June. So I went to the swearing in at the State Department when he was sworn in as ambassador and it was interesting because all of the Connecticut press was there and one of the reporters for The Hartford Courant came up to me and said did you know Irv died. And I didn't know what he was talking about. And I said Irv? He said Irv Alpert didn't you know 02:18:00Irv? And I said Yeah I did. I knew his wife particularly. And so in that period of time from the time that we had come to New Haven in September late August or early September until May there were 9 months. I was The. That's how long Miette's marriage to Irv Alpert lasted. She was a widow at that at that point. Sadly we couldn't help her when we called her and talked to her. But it was kind of a somber note on my way out to India that you know who knows what happens. He was in his 50s. He had a massive heart attack and was gone. Bowles said to me 02:19:00his last his last task for me was an interesting one and a very personal one. It was I want you to go to our house and clean out my dresser in my closet because I have packed the things I'm taking to India and I think whatever else is there either we should give it to Goodwill or we should throw it away. But I'd like you to check it out clean up for me and if there's any anything that you think needs to be it's a question you can contact me through the State Department. So I went to their house and I've never been upstairs this beautiful house in Georgetown they had and I went upstairs and found their bedroom and started going through the dresser in the closet. And what I discovered is something I hadn't really realized and all the times I'd seen Chet. He always wore the same 02:20:00thing. He had gray flannel trousers and he had four or five pairs of gray flannel trousers. He wore blue blazers and he had four or five blue blazers all Brooks Brothers. He had blue button down shirts and everything was blue button down shirts. He wore red and blue wrap striped ties he wore the same dark blue socks he wore the same slip on you know kind of burgundy colored loafers. And so when I went through his stuff I'm seeing the same thing over and over again ties with soup stains in them, shirts that had frayed or had spots on them, a jacket that had lost its buttons. I'm looking at this and I say holy mackerel and finally when I got to India I used it to Chet said you know you asked me to go 02:21:00through your things. I didn't realize that it was all the same. He said Dick when I got into business I made a decision I was going to wear one thing all the time and that way I would never have to decide what I'm gonna wear that day. And it I just got in the habit and never changed it. So once a year I get two new blazers, I get two new pairs of slacks, like a dozen new shirts and you know it's it's easy. So yeah the family. And I you know it's interesting, when I went off to Oxford as a Rhodes Ralph Bryant went off to Oxford as a Rhodes he also won a Rhodes that year and Sam Bowles won a Fulbright and he did a year of teaching. He got married. And he and his wife then went to teach in Maiduguri in 02:22:00northern Nigeria. And so Sam came to visit us with his wife in I guess. Where did he see us? He saw us in New Haven before they left for Nigeria. And I didn't see Sam again until he came out to visit his dad. He and Sally and Cynthia all came through India through New Delhi while I was there in the mid 60s. But yeah it was something else.

CW: Do you still stay in touch with Sam today?

RC: I stay in touch with him a bit. Not that as much as I should. He is an academic. He is still on the faculty at UMass Amherst in the economics department but he teaches Summers in Italy I think in Turin. And then he's also is at the Santa Fe Institute. So he's. He's spread out and his wife teaches at Columbia. And so he spends a fair amount of time in Essex driving from Essex to UMass Amherst and Sally has passed away. Sadly she is no longer with us.

CW: What were you doing? I know you were the liaison to Latin America?

RC: Yeah that was (unintelligible).

CW: What was that?

RC: What kind of work was that? Well the peace you know that you stood up the Peace Corps but you didn't have any precedent for it. Right? And so you're gonna send people out to serve in programs that are new that are that are fresh that haven't been. Haven't been done before. And in its early stages the Peace Corps training took place first in the U.S. And so there were training centers for example for people going to the Philippines or Thailand. They trained in at East-West Center in Honolulu or someplace in Hawaii. For people who are going to Latin America. They trained in Tucson or Santa Fe and Sargent Shriver was just 02:25:00relentless in going after colleges and universities that give part of their campus to the Peace Corps to do training. And so I was working in what was called volunteer liaison. My job was to go out. To meet the volunteers before they went overseas and then to be the person they could contact in Washington if they needed something. So they always felt like there was a lifeline back to the headquarters in Washington. That was the theory of how it would work. Well nobody had gone overseas yet. So I'm out there trying to talk to them about what their experience is gonna be like when none of us knew what the experience was going to be like and kind of making it up as we went. And it was fascinating 02:26:00because the programs that there were programs in Africa. The first program started in Africa. Ghana one and I think Kenya one maybe there were a couple of Peace Corps programs that got started a little before the others. And so we had the experience of those volunteers and letters they'd written stories they told and those become became the lore that I share with volunteers who were going overseas to Colombia or Peru or Ecuador or Guatemala or Honduras or places where we were beginning to establish Peace Corps programs. But, you know, there wasn't a there wasn't a program for me to go visit overseas and so I worked with you 02:27:00know the preparation for sending them overseas. It was fascinating. I mean you know that the place was electric everybody was you know we're making it up on the fly and important things were being done and we had the president's brother in law upstairs on the eighth floor. And you know it's pretty exciting.

CW: It must have been a youthful place at the time.

RC: It was very I mean you know I was twenty five. Sally was twenty six she was a little bit older than I was. Jay Rockefeller was also in that division working and the guy in charge was I've forgotten what his title was he was maybe an 02:28:00associate director for volunteer support or whatever. His name was Padraic Kennedy. Pat Kennedy. And he was maybe off 30 right. But it was I mean everything, Kennedy was in his 40s for crying out loud. It was a young that was the time right. It was the moment.

CW: Did you have any a little bit of regret for leaving the Peace Corps?

RC: When I went out to India. No I mean I would have probably if I don't know whether I would have gone back to England. I might have stayed at the Peace Corps. But I mean how exciting is it to you know to head out to the other side of the planet right. And to be with somebody who you respected really 02:29:00enormously. So. I mean that was I left Eric. Eric was born on the 20th of the 22nd of June. And by the fifth or sixth of July I was in India. So I brought Dagmar and Eric from Washington to Cleveland. And left them with my parents and I flew to India. She spent six weeks with my parents and then flew to Vienna and spent another six weeks with her parents. And so she got to India in late September beginning of October or something like that.

CW: What did you? How did your parents feel about you moving to India?

RC: Well I think they had very mixed feelings I mean you know it's a long way from home. We were going to have home-leave the idea was that we were going for two years. They said they'd come and visit which they did. You know home-leave turned out to be home-leave. So that we can go back to India for two more years. And that was a long time. There were two more kids by that time and they were very anxious to meet their new granddaughter. They had I think Christopher was born by the time they finally came to India. Gabriella was the new one for them. So.