Lloyd Neighbors
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project LLOYD NEIGHBORS Interviewed by: David Reuther Initial interview date: February 6th, 2013 Copyright 2014 ADST Q: Today is the 6th of February, 2013. This is an interview for the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Trainings Oral History Program. We’re talking to Lloyd Neighbors this morning. I’m David Reuther. Lloyd, let’s start with where you were born and what was your family background? NEIGHBORS: I was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1945, November, in the tiny gap between the greatest generation and the baby-boom generation, which started in ’46. Marshall is a small town in East Texas, not far from the Louisiana line. It’s the home of Bill Moyers, or as he is known there, Billy Don Moyers, and the home of James Farmer, the founder of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). The folksinger Lead Belly was from around there, as was the former heavyweight champion of the world, George Foreman. My aunt Sue used to see him at the local Piggly Wiggly (grocery store). Although I was born in Marshall, my father was in the military, in the Air Force. I spent a lot of time traveling around. I lived in 14 different states, plus the District of Columbia, and from kindergarten through 12th grade attended 12 different schools. Moving around as an Air Force brat got me used to the idea that after three or four years in one place, I needed a change of scenery, a new slant on reality. Q: If your father was in the Air Force, were most of his tours in the continental U.S.? NEIGHBORS: Most of them in the U.S., although I did spend 1954 through 1956 in Okinawa. My dad was stationed at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. I don’t know if that’s what got me interested in the Far East. We lived mostly on an American base and did not, unfortunately, have lots of contact with Okinawans. But the experience probably did stimulate my interest in the Far East, which is where I spent most of my Foreign Service career. Q: Growing up on a military base, what was the educational system like? NEIGHBORS: I attended Department of Defense schools. The first year in Okinawa we lived off base because military housing wasn’t available. We lived at the top of a hill in a place called Awase Meadows. A drastically steep gravel road led up to the house, and we were exposed directly exposed to the elements – meaning typhoons. Typhoon Grace, with gusts up to 145 mph passed directly over the island in August 1954, and during the height of the storm we were without electricity with an inch of water in our living room. At 1 night with the windows shuttered, we were safe, but the house was pitch black and the wind was howling. I foolishly feared the darkness more than the wind. I took the school bus everyday to Sukiran Army Base. The second year in Okinawa, 1955, we moved to Kadena Air Base, and I went to school there. It was like going to school in the U.S. The teachers were all American elementary school teachers. I went to fourth and fifth grade there. Q: Now, in the States where was your father stationed – what bases? NEIGHBORS: He was at Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was just a baby then. And then we were twice in Montgomery, Alabama, once when I was a baby and the other when I was in third grade. We were in Clarksville, Tennessee, Dayton, Ohio at Wright Patterson AFB, and then in Washington, D.C. My dad was at the Pentagon for four years. And then he was at NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) at Colorado Springs, which is where I graduated from high school. Q: What was your father’s MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)? NEIGHBORS: My father was not a pilot. He joined the army during World War II and was in the Signal Corps. He spent most of the war at radar sites in Panama. There was a fear that the Canal might be attacked, so we had bases there. He told me about going up river in a canoe to deliver pay to GIs manning radar sites back in the jungle. After the war my father got out of the military briefly, and then rejoined. But this time he went into the Air Force and attended Officers Candidate School. Unfortunately, he was six months too old to qualify for pilot training. So his specialty was what they called special weapons, that is, nuclear weapons – the care and feeding of them (laughs). He supervised teams that traveled around the U.S. inspecting bases to make sure the weapons were being handled correctly. Q: What your father’s background? NEIGHBORS: The Neighbors family originally came from Normandy, France. They were Huguenots who fled persecution as heretics in the late 17th century. They went first to Ireland and then moved on to the New World and Pennsylvania. On the way they changed their surname. Their original name was Voisin, a not-rare surname in parts of France, I’m told. Once in America they translated the name to Neighbors. Around 1750 Abraham Neighbors shows up on a land deed in Loudon Country, Virginia. Then around 1800, the Neighbors pick up stakes and move through the Cumberland Gap and settle in a place now called Mountain City, Tennessee, not far from the North Carolina border. One of my great-great-great-great grandfathers, Ebenezer Fairchild, helped found the Dutchman Creek Baptist Church in nearby Davie Country, North Carolina. As clerk of the church, he registered the baptisms of George, Jonathan, and Edward Boone – three of Daniel Boone’s brothers. 2 The infamous Tom Dula (or as he is known in song, Tom Dooley) was also from around that region. He murdered his lover, Laura Foster, was arrested and hanged for the crime. Another of my distant relatives – according to legend – visited Tom Dula while he was in jail and heard him singing a ballad about his awful crime. She remembered the song and taught it to her family, including to her son – and my fourth cousin – Frank Proffitt. Years later when the Library of Congress was recording folk music all over the U.S., Frank sang “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley,” for them. The Kingston Trio heard the recording, did its own version, which became a smash hit in the 1960s. After some courtroom antics, the Kingston Trio acknowledged Frank’s right to the song and paid him and his family a good amount of money over the years. Around 1910, after almost 100 years in eastern Tennessee, the Neighbors family pulled up roots and moved to western Oklahoma, and that’s where my father comes in. My father, Lloyd Neighbors, Sr., grew up on a farm in Western Oklahoma where Woody Guthrie says you can see further and see less than any place in the world, where the wind is a way of life. The closest town was Granite, Oklahoma, with a population of a thousand people. Now my wife Mary is from Hong Kong. We met when I was an exchange student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1970. We married in Hong Kong in 1973 and shortly thereafter came to the U.S., going almost directly to a family reunion in Granite. Mary spoke excellent English, but Okie was a foreign tongue. She had no idea what these strange people – my relatives -- were saying (laughs). And remember, Granite was a town of a thousand people. Mary’s apartment building where she lived in Hong Kong had a larger population. We both liked to walk a lot. It’s about two miles from my uncle’s farm into town. One time Mary and I were walking back from town, and every farmer on the road stopped to offer us a lift. They figured something was wrong. They’d never seen anybody walking before. Nobody’s crazy enough in Oklahoma to walk in the summer when it’s 104 degrees, but we were doing it. Mary even chopped cotton that summer, while six-months pregnant. Q: Oh goodness. Now this is Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl Oklahoma (Burns is an American director and producer of documentary films, one of which was “Dust Bowl,” 2012). NEIGHBORS: Well, yes, it was. My father grew up in the ‘1930s in Oklahoma. Had nine brothers and sisters and amazingly enough, out of those nine, six graduated from college. And at that time, you know, they had about a nickel a week from their parents to live on (laughs). It was difficult, but they managed to do it. Surprisingly, the richest sibling in the Neighbors family was the brother who didn’t go to college. He was registered to attend, but World War II came along and he joined the Coast Guard. After the war he came back to Granite, Oklahoma, and returned to farming. He started out with almost nothing, but wound up very wealthy. He was a shrewd businessman. In 1942 a lead story from the Granite newspaper said, “Tom Burr Neighbors used to have four strong boys to help with plowing and boll pulling. But that was before the shooting started.” The article went on to tell how the four Neighbors boys – including my father -- 3 had joined the military, two in the Navy, one in the Army, and the other in the Coast Guard. Q: And what’s your mother’s background? NEIGHBORS: Well, my mother, Bobbie Merrill, grew up in a small town in East Texas - - Marshall, Texas.