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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project YVONNE THAYER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 3, 2007 Copyright 2020 ADST INTERVIEW (Begins in middle of statement by Ms. Thayer) THAYER: My father was the eldest son of six kids. Q: So you have a lot of uncles, then. THAYER: And a lot of aunts. My father was the second of six; my mother the tenth of 11. Q: Good heavens. So what was your grandfather doing? THAYER: My paternal grandfather Percival Ernest Thayer, known as Percy or PE, was a banker in St. Paul. His father, my great grandfather came to the Midwest from Connecticut. According to family lore, he was a purveyor of fine teas and coffees. Our line of Thayers descended from brothers Richard and Thomas Thayer, who came to America in the 1630s from Thornbury, England. They helped found Braintree, Massachusetts in 1640. There are lots of interesting Thayers, like Sylvanus Thayer, the founder of West Point. Some years ago at a family reunion we asked my then 82-year-old father what life event or experience made the biggest impression on him. He immediately said the Great Depression. My father was born in 1918. His banker father did all right but he as a schoolboy saw many of his neighbors and classmates going through terrible times, desperate, losing everything. He was always thrifty and responsible about money. He was never in debt, never lived beyond his means. He instilled that in us kids. Q: And your father, what did he do? THAYER: My father went to a Catholic military academy for high school, then college and law school. When America entered the Second World War, he volunteered for the army but was turned down because his eyesight was too poor; he was nearly blind in one 1 eye. He wanted to serve so he joined the FBI, which took lawyers and accountants at the time. He ended up staying through a full career. Q: So he was with the FBI the whole time? THAYER: He joined the FBI in 1942 and went from St Paul to Boston to Norfolk and finally Baltimore where he met my mother. She was 21 years old, from Little Rock, the tenth of 11 kids. After a year at Marymount College in San Antonio, with the war on, she was sent to Baltimore to help an older sister whose husband had joined the navy and who was expecting her first child. Q: Let’s go on your mother’s side then. What do you know about them? THAYER: My father’s side is English-Irish, descending from English Thayers on the paternal side and Irish Catholics--Ryan, Egan, Fitzgibbon--on the maternal side. My mother’s father was a Swiss immigrant, Anthony Metrailer. He immigrated to the United States in 1898 from Sion in the Swiss Valais when he was a teenager, joining his sister and a cousin who had come earlier to Conway, Arkansas. Papa, as we called him, was a shoemaker. He became quite prominent in Arkansas. He was written up in a book for making custom shoes for people with deformed feet and for declining payment from people who couldn’t afford shoes or shoe repair. I have one of his lasts among my souvenirs, and a shoemaker’s bench. Papa was soft-spoken and industrious, very Swiss. He built a Victorian-style farmhouse in what was then rural Little Rock for his large family, surrounded by cows, chickens, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees. It was near the zoo. When we went to visit as children, we would hear the lions and elephants bellow at night from where we slept on the upstairs sleeping porch. We heard many a tale of escaped big cats. Papa bought land and helped build homes for several of his daughters to raise their families nearby. My grandmother Henrietta Ruff, of German descent, was progressive for her time. Before having eleven children into her 40s, she was a telephone operator, one of relatively few women to work outside the home. Both my grandparents lived into their nineties, in the family home, playing pinochle and tending to dozens of grandchildren. My mom was the only daughter who ended up leaving the South. She lived in Baltimore and then came to Minnesota with my dad. Q: Now on education, on your father’s side, where did he go before he went for a law degree? HARTY: My father went to St. Thomas Military Academy in St. Paul for high school and later got his bachelors’ and law degrees at the University of Minnesota. Q: And your mother? THAYER: My mother had one year of college—this was always a big issue for her. Of the eleven kids, three of her four brothers went to Notre Dame and became prosperous engineers and land developers. My mother was the only one of the seven sisters who 2 begged Papa to send her to college. She went one year to Marymount College in San Antonio, Texas. Her younger sister, my aunt Rose, told us later that their father opposed educating his daughters, thinking they would not be content staying at home as mothers and wives if they got an education. My mother lamented that girls had limited opportunities compared to their brothers. In her world, girls got married and had large families. Thus my many cousins. Q: Well then, your mother and father, how about, speaking of large families, how many children did they have? THAYER: I’m the second of seven, five girls and two boys. My youngest sister Jill, a deputy attorney general in San Francisco, is 18 years younger than I am. Q: Well now, did you grow up in Baltimore? THAYER: We left Baltimore when I was nearly two. My Dad’s youngest sister got polio and he was helping her and his mother so he asked for a transfer back to Minneapolis. We moved into a small house in suburban Richfield and attended parochial schools. As the family grew to five then seven kids, my parents built a larger home in Edina, a nearby suburb known for the quality of its public schools. Q: And he was with the FBI then? THAYER: My father stayed with the FBI until retirement. He and I would say we retired at the same time. I was leaving my job at Newsweek magazine in 1973 to marry a Foreign Service officer when my dad retired from the FBI after 30 years. His last case was at Wounded Knee, the standoff between the Lakota Indian tribe and federal law enforcement on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He found the ordeal stressful and demoralizing. My father was thoughtful and well-read. He closely followed current events and told interesting if discreet stories about law enforcement and the FBI. He was fairly taciturn, formal in that 1950s way, and had a wry sense of humor. His friends called him “The Judge” in respect for his views and careful way of thinking and speaking. After the FBI, he joined a family practice law firm in a small town west of Minneapolis. Some years later he and my mother retired to Bella Vista, Arkansas to be closer to her family. Q: Well now, let’s talk about your, basically your first memories of growing up. What was it like? THAYER: In Richfield we lived in a small house with a breezeway, crabapple trees, a sandbox and swing set in the backyard. Our mom stayed at home, cooking, cleaning, raising kids, sewing doll clothes. Dad went to work, mowed the lawn, washed the car, and cleaned the garage on weekends, occasionally nipping down to Al’s for a beer. My older sister Ellen and I shared the attic bedroom. We were always very close. She was my anchor as I went on to live and travel abroad. She lived in Paris for four years but for the 3 most part she lived in Minneapolis. She taught special ed, then computer learning, got a masters’ degree in leadership. Ellen reads and travels widely, speaks beautiful French, keeps up with world affairs, and is an exemplary aunt to lots of nieces and nephews. As often happens with the first born, she took on a lot of responsibility for the younger siblings, freeing me up to go off and do other things. We’ve always been best friends. Q: Well then, how did the family work? You know, I think it's sort of almost like Cheaper By the Dozen or something. How did this- what were the dynamics of the family? THAYER: It was pretty much the classic 1950s life. My father went to the office in the morning and came home at 6 or so at night, read the paper until dinner was served. My mother stayed home with the kids. We all had chores, helped with dinner, minded younger siblings. We lived in the suburbs and went to public schools, joined the Brownies, walked to the library. We biked and swam in the community pool in the summer, ice skated on the pond in winter, played Parcheesi on the screened back porch. I recall we were the last family in our neighborhood to get a tv. I wrote for the school newspaper and was active in Spanish Club, directed a school play, joined the National Honor Society. There weren’t competitive sports for girls in those days, but I played on the school girls’ tennis team and in summer tennis tournaments. I volunteered as a Candy Striper in a local hospital.

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