Oral History Interview with William P. Daley, 2004 August 7-December 2
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Oral history interview with William P. Daley, 2004 August 7-December 2 Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with William P. Daley on August 7 and December 2, 2004. The interview took place in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and was conducted by Helen W. Drutt English for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. William Daley and Helen Drutt English have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview HELEN W. DRUTT ENGLISH: This is Helen Drutt English interviewing William P. Daley at 307 Ashbourne Road, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. We are sitting in his studio, and it is the 7th of August 2004, and I am interviewing him for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and this is disc number one in this part of the Laitman Project. William Daley, when and where were you born? WILLIAM DALEY: I was born in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on March 7 in 1925. I was born in the section of the town called Uniontown. I was born at home – it was on a third floor walkup in this village. DRUTT-ENGLISH: I know that you have always had a strong passion for your legacy and your heritage. Could you speak to me about your parents? DALEY: Well, my mother and father are from Irish descent. Both their families have been in the country a good long while; they were not immigrants. My mother lived in Yonkers, New York in a town below Hastings-on- Hudson, and my father was born in Hastings-on-Hudson. So I really felt in some sense that I really belong to the town, or I lived in the town. It was a great feeling. And my father worked in the mill. He had become an apprentice to a house painter as a boy and became a house painter and went in the Navy, and when he came out he started a house-painting business. And my mother worked in the Moquette, which is an Armstrong rug company. She was a bobbin girl. My dad left school at ninth grade and my mother left school at fourth grade to work. My grandmother on my father’s side, or my grandfather, died of consumption, and my father had to go to work. I still have a letter from the principal of my father’s school – the Frasier Free School in Hastings – that he was a magnificent student, and the principal was begging my grandmother to let him stay in school. And my father was a twin, and they had already taken his brother Edward out of school two years before. And my mother went – she then became a nanny and took care of wealthy people and children in Yonkers, New York. And she was married to her first husband, then he died of consumption, and then married my father. So I have a half brother whose name is O’Mara and I have a sister, Alice, and that constitutes the clan – the immediate clan. My father had a really bardic memory and also loved poetry and he loved to talk. And he knew all of [Robert] Frost and all of Carl Sandburg and he would just go on and on and on. I used to sort of be willing to go out on the back porch in the rain to just escape hearing him. His favorite poet was [A. E.] Housman, and he would say to me, “Now hear this, Billy,” and he would recite. DRUTT-ENGLISH: The commitment that you have to house painting seems to be something that is very central and very much part of your heritage. DALEY: Well, I taught Tom how to be a house painter, and I painted with my father. Back then, the town – he would moonlight all the time in the factory, paint people’s houses to earn extra money, and when he would do that – when we would be walking to church, my father would take a diversion and show me what he was painting because he really liked it so much. So I worked with him as a house painter and then when I went out to Iowa to teach. And I only taught nine months and didn’t get any pay in the summer, so I signed on as a union house painter. So you are right. Painting houses – I still paint one side of my house every year. On my 80th birthday, my wife, Catherine, gave me a 40-foot ladder. DRUTT-ENGLISH: On your 80th birthday? DALEY: No, no, what am I saying? I haven’t had – my 70th birthday because I have not yet had my 80th birthday. But, anyway, I put the ladder up on the side of the house and climbed up to the top and had a fantastic conversation with my father. And I literally almost – when I would paint and I was teaching Tom how to paint on the back of our house – when I was 13, my father put me out on the ladder on the plank with him and I would be in the middle of a yellow pine plank that was 20 feet long between the ladder brackets and it swayed up and down – it was very scary. And he used to say to me, “Billy, think into the wall, don’t think back of yourself and you will be just fine.” And my mother would call – called out and said, “Now Bill, what are you doing, having that child out on that side of that house painting? He will do that soon enough.” And – [laughs] – my father said, “Ally, he has to learn how to do it sometime.” So that is how I started painting. And I got so I loved climbing trees and being up high in the air. I still love going up. So it was a real treat to go up on that present I got, that 40-foot ladder. When I was teaching Tom, which is where I began, I really could hear my father around the side of the house, telling me what I should be telling Tom. And of course I told him the same things that my father told me. DRUTT-ENGLISH: So it’s pretty special. DALEY: Yes. DRUTT-ENGLISH: Also, language has been such an important part of your life, and the use of language and the way you invent words and use words and extol your thoughts through language. DALEY: Well, I think he really loved it himself. He would tell me that the greatest word in the English language, the most euphonious word, was cellar door. DRUTT-ENGLISH: Oh, yes. [Laughs.] Right. DALEY: Have you heard that at all? DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes, from Cinderella. She says, cellar door. DALEY: Oh, okay. DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes. [Laughs.] DALEY: Well, anyway, he had all these kinds of things about – he would repeat the Shrops – things from A Shropshire Lad [A. E. Housman, London: K. Paul, Tranch, Treubner, 1896], and he would say, “See how marvelous it sounds, Billy.” DRUTT-ENGLISH: Do you think that is a part of your Irish heritage – DALEY: Maybe, maybe. DRUTT-ENGLISH: – where language is such an important part of expression? DALEY: I never thought of it – but it – I’m sure it comes from his celebration of it, although he liked – he thought artists were magnificent. He was in the Navy with a man who was an illustrator during World War I. And of course he never got on any ships because since he was a painter, they had him painting admirals’ houses and things like that at Newport and then up in Rhode Island – I can’t remember the naval base there [Naval Station Newport]. But he had, as one of his fellow painters, a man who was an illustrator, and my father would talk about the pictures that he painted and describe them to Alice and I – my sister – and she ended up going to art school and being an artist, also. But he really – and he talked about [Jasper Francis] Cropsey, the Hudson River painter who lived in Hastings in the preceding generation, and also that he was Irish and that he was a great painter. And my father’s favorite painting was Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair [1853-55] in the Metropolitan [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York], and I don’t know if you have ever seen it, but it is a huge painting. It must be 20 feet by 8 feet high of people at a horse fair, and he would go on and on about what a fantastic painting it was. DRUTT-ENGLISH: So there was this great interest – DALEY: That’s right. DRUTT-ENGLISH: – in art in the house – DALEY: That’s right. DRUTT-ENGLISH: – and in language and in poetry, and – DALEY: Yes, through him. DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes, through your father, and do you think that it was these sensibilities that motivated you toward wanting to be an artist? DALEY: Well, in the neighborhood that I grew up in, there wasn’t much of a precedent for being interested in culture in that way and I think it really was that he thought it was a very special calling, and he was always buying us art supplies and in fact, I got a set of oil paints when I was maybe – a small box of oil paints for Christmas – maybe I was 10 or 11.