The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History University of Arkansas 1 East Central Street Fayetteville, AR 72701 (479) 575-6829 Arkansas Memories Project J. Frank Broyles Interviewed by Scott Lunsford December 17, 2007 Fayetteville, Arkansas Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas. All rights reserved. Objective Oral history is a collection of an individual's memories and opinions. As such, it is subject to the innate fallibility of memory and is susceptible to inaccuracy. All researchers using these interviews should be aware of this reality and are encouraged to seek corroborating documentation when using any oral history interview. The Pryor Center's objective is to collect audio and video recordings of interviews along with scanned images of family photographs and documents. 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Some of these elements are omitted after the first twenty minutes to improve readability. The Pryor Center transcripts are prepared utilizing the University of Arkansas Style Manual for proper names, titles, and terms specific to the university. For all other style elements, we refer to the Pryor Center Style Manual, which is based primarily on The Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition. We employ the following guidelines for consistency and readability: • Em dashes separate repeated/false starts and incomplete/ redirected sentences. • Ellipses indicate the interruption of one speaker by another. • Italics identify foreign words or terms and words emphasized by the speaker. • Question marks enclose proper nouns for which we cannot verify the spelling and words that we cannot understand with certainty. The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas ii Arkansas Memories Project, J. Frank Broyles Interview, December 17, 2007 http://pryorcenter.uark.edu • Brackets enclose o italicized annotations of nonverbal sounds, such as laughter, and audible sounds, such as a doorbell ringing; o annotations for clarification and identification; and o standard English spelling of informal words. • Commas are used in a conventional manner where possible to aid in readability. Citation Information See the Citation Guide at http://pryorcenter.uark.edu/about.asp#citations. The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas iii Arkansas Memories Project, J. Frank Broyles Interview, December 17, 2007 http://pryorcenter.uark.edu Scott Lunsford interviewed J. Frank Broyles on December 17, 2007, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The second part of the interview with Frank Broyles was recorded the following day. [00:00:00] Scott Lunsford: Okay, Coach, I've got to take care of some business here on the front end. I've got to say that we're at the—uh—at your old residence—it's now [daughter] Betsy's and [son-in-law] David's residence . Frank Broyles: They're living here now. Yes. SL: . uh—up here on Lovers Lane in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Today's date is December 17. Is that right? Joy Endicott: Yes. SL: I think it is. FB: Yeah, it's getting close to Christmas. SL: It's getting—getting close to Christmas. FB: Yeah. SL: Um—and we're going to be—uh . FB: I guess. SL: . talking with J. Frank Broyles. [FB laughs] Coach. I'll ca—call you "Coach" all the way through this. FB: I don't know any other name. SL: I've never known you . The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas 1 Arkansas Memories Project, J. Frank Broyles Interview, December 17, 2007 http://pryorcenter.uark.edu FB: Please don't call me "mister." [Laughter] [00:00:35] SL: I've never known you any other way, Coach. Um— and—um—we're gonna be videotaping and audiotaping. This is gonna—this document is gonna—r—uh—reside in the Special Collections Department at the University of Arkansas, Mullins Library. FB: Wonderful. SL: And, Coach, I've got to ask you on tape if that's okay with you that we're videotaping. FB: I approve of that wholeheartedly, and I'm proud to have it there. SL: Well, thank you. Um—Coach, I—I want to—uh—start with your earliest memories. I want to talk a lot about—I want you to talk a lot about your parents and as much about your grandparents— as you can remember—and your brothers and sisters and what life was like. First of all, I've got to know when and where you were born. FB: I was born in the Piedmont Hospital—uh—in Atlanta, Georgia, on December the twenty-sixth, 1924. Mother [Louise Solms Broyles] said she ate too much turkey—nearly got me to be a Christmas baby, but I was born early in the morning on the twenty-sixth. [00:01:40] SL: Well now, I was reading the Hog Wild [: The The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas 2 Arkansas Memories Project, J. Frank Broyles Interview, December 17, 2007 http://pryorcenter.uark.edu Autobiography of Frank Broyles] book and—and your mom— um—when she first got here, she couldn't speak English. FB: That's correct. She—well, what happened—her mother and father [FB edit: Mary Louise Solms and Ozzie Taliafero Broyles] were Germans—came over as eighteen-year-olds and met and got married, and—uh—so they spoke German in their school— in—in their home, excuse me. And—uh—so she went to the first grade even though she had tried to learn some English, and they said, "No, you don't know enough English. You got to go back and study English for a year and come back." So she was a year late starting. [00:02:13] SL: And her maiden name was . FB: Solms. S-O-L-M-S. They were German. Um—her mother and father came over when they were teenagers and met in America and were married, and—um—he was a—um—architect and— and—and building buildings—uh—with beautiful designs— concrete designs around the buildings in Atlanta. And he died when my mother was nine years old. SL: Mmm. FB: And my grandmother took over after that—Grandma Solms—and she was tough. And she—he had left a lot of property and all, and I remember the last part of her life. She ran a—a—uh— The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas 3 Arkansas Memories Project, J. Frank Broyles Interview, December 17, 2007 http://pryorcenter.uark.edu apartment house with four stories in downtown Atlanta. Even though she had fallen and broken her leg, she was tough as she could be. And—um—then she moved—after they finally got—sell that—she moved to within a block of me. She wouldn't move in the house with us. She rented a place one block from us where she could be alone—wouldn't be a burden to anybody. But that was the way they were in those days. [00:03:12] SL: Well, that's amazing. Now—um—so your grandfather was an architect? FB: He was a architect that built—uh—the—he built some of the big buildings in Atlanta—the—the domes and so forth. He would put the stone and the design around the buildings that were built, including the state capitol. SL: Wow . FB: Yeah. SL: . that's pretty prestigious. FB: Yes. He had a—he had a big company. SL: Mh-hmm. And—um—so did he go to school here in . FB: He went to school in the United States, yes. SL: Uh-huh. FB: They moved over—he and his—and my grandmother moved over when they were—uh—teenagers—uh—from Germany. The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas 4 Arkansas Memories Project, J. Frank Broyles Interview, December 17, 2007 http://pryorcenter.uark.edu SL: Uh-huh. FB: And there's a little town in Germany called Solms—S-O-L-M-S. And I've been there, and the Solms family had a—they had a— a—um—castle there, so they put it and made it into a tourist attraction. The town's about five hundred people, and it's in Germany. I went through there on my trip to Europe one time. [00:04:12] SL: Well, that must've been great to see that. FB: It was. It—it was a—one—one—one of the—uh—castles where you had the—the s—warriors were up top to protect the castle against the . SL: Uh-huh. The turret. FB: . the—uh—robbers and so forth. And then they had the museum down on the first floor. And it was about—uh—oh, the equivalent of three stories high.