Library of Congress Interview with The Honorable Charles O. Cecil , 2011 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR CHARLES O. CECIL Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: September 7, 2006 Copyright 2010 ADST Q: Today is the 7th of September 2006. This is an interview with Charles O. Cecil. What does the “O” stand for? CECIL: Oliver. Q: And you go by Chuck. CECIL: Right. Q: This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Chuck, let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? CECIL: I was born in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1940. Q: Can you tell me something about your family? Let's start with your father's side, the Cecil side. What do you know about them? CECIL: My father was a railroad man who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad as did his father and several of his uncles, his father's brothers. They were a Kentucky family. Interview with The Honorable Charles O. Cecil , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001692 Library of Congress They had been there since the late 1700's. I know that my—if I get the number of greats correct—great, great, great, great grandfather migrated from Maryland, from St. Mary's County, Maryland, to Kentucky in 1785. They were part of a group of 65 Catholic families that had settled in Maryland. My family came in the late 1600's, early 1700's, something like that. They were English Catholics, and they were looking for religious freedom, so they came to Maryland. After three or four generations there, they migrated to Kentucky in 1785, and that's where the family stayed, and that's where I was born. Q: Where you came from in Kentucky, was this one of those Kentucky places with the mountaineers and all that? Was this part of that, or was it a different area of Kentucky? CECIL: Owensboro is one of the larger cities of Kentucky, probably about third, I suppose, in size. Louisville's obviously the largest. Owensboro's on the Ohio River. I lived there until I was about eight years old, and although I've made a few visits back since then, I have no family there now, so I'm no longer really current. My father and his part of the family were from a little bit farther east, south of Louisville. All those Maryland Catholic families settled in an area roughly 50 miles or maybe 75 miles southeast of Louisville, Kentucky. It's not mountain country. They're not hill people. They were farmers until the mid-1800's, and then they went into education. Four of my ancestors, four brothers, one of whom would be my great-great-great grandfather, established a boys school—a Catholic boys school—in a little town called Cecilia, Kentucky, which is a few miles from Elizabethtown. Q: Was Cecilia named after Cecil? CECIL: Yes, I think so, and the college was called Cecilian College, but it was only a secondary school, not a real college. One of those brothers went to Georgetown University, one went to Washington University of St. Louis, and I forget where the other two got their degrees. But back in the mid-1800's, I guess that was quite an achievement, and so that generation, at least those brothers, were into education and running the boys school, and I'm not sure what else they achieved because I'm not a genealogist. Interview with The Honorable Charles O. Cecil , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001692 Library of Congress Q: Where did the family come on your father's side during the Civil War? Kentucky was badly split, of course. CECIL: Yes. My family never talked much about that, and I haven't done any real research to look into it, so I'm not sure where their sympathies lay back at that time. I suppose if I studied it a bit, there might be circumstantial evidence. Q: Were there family stories about “Uncle Rupert was in the South Kentucky volunteers on the Union side?” CECIL: No. There are no stories like that, so I suppose they weren't very involved in the war. I do know from the Maryland time, there was a time when I did a little research on the family, and I have seen a will from one of my ancestors willing, among other things, a slave. At least in Maryland they owned slaves. I've never heard the family talk about owning slaves in Kentucky, so I suspect, if anything, they were probably sympathetic toward the Union. Q: What about on your mother's side? Where do they come from? CECIL: My mother's name was Price, and her mother's name was May. That would be my grandmother. She often talked about a Judge George Washington Triplett who was her grandfather, I think. All of those names—Triplett, May, and Price—are English names. Although I don't know much about the history of that side, I just know that they trace their origins back to England, but I don't know even what century they came to this country. Q: Were they a Kentucky family? CECIL: Yes. Q: Did you get any feel for being a Catholic family in what essentially is a pretty Baptist area? Rather fundamentalist area. Interview with The Honorable Charles O. Cecil , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001692 Library of Congress CECIL: It's the Cecils who were the Catholics. My mother's side—the Prices—were Methodists, so I was baptized a Catholic and raised Methodist. Later in college, I explored, tried out different churches just to see what appealed to me, and went to quite a variety of mostly Protestant churches. Eventually—we'll get to that when I get to my first Foreign Service assignment—I met my prospective wife who came from a very strong and solid German Catholic family, and that served to motivate me to turn back to the Catholic church. All of those Cecils were very active in the Catholic church. In our family, as far as I am aware, it was not a source of conflict between my mother and my father although my parents were divorced about the time I was seven. My father went off to World War II. I think he left in 1942, if I recall. He came back in '45, and around about '46 or '47, my parents were divorced. I was pretty young, as you can see, five, six, seven in that time frame there, and I never really questioned them as to why they split up, but in '48 my mother's parents, James R. Price and Lizzie Rea May, migrated to California and settled in the San Francisco Bay area, and my mother and I soon followed, so I continued to be raised in the Methodist church at that time. Q: Did you mother or father go to college? CECIL: No. My father, when he graduated from high school, I'm pretty sure that was in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I recall him telling me later when I was a teenager, that his father gave him a choice on graduation: He could go to college, or he could have a car. You know, when we look at that, putting that kind of a choice in front of a 17 year old boy, it maybe wasn't a very smart thing to do, and my dad chose the car. Because all of his family was closely associated with the Illinois Central Railroad, he just gravitated to that kind of work. He was doing it before he went away to war, and when he returned he went back to that. In the war he was with the North African invasion, and he ran trains across North Africa carrying supplies and troops from Algiers over to Tunis. Then he followed the forces up through Sicily and Italy into Europe. He was always a railroad man. I had a lot of railroad lore and tradition around me as I was growing up. Even after my parents Interview with The Honorable Charles O. Cecil , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001692 Library of Congress separated, I would often go back to Cecilia, Kentucky, to visit my grandmother on that side, and my great-uncles who lived there. My mother remarried, around 1949 I would guess. My step-father was in the Air Force, and that took me into a military frame of mind and existence, and we fell into the habit of being transferred every three years, and I think that's part of why I joined the Foreign Service. Eventually, I got used to a military pattern of life where you live somewhere for three years and then move on to a new place and do the same thing again. Q: Did you have brothers and sisters? CECIL: I didn't have any while I was growing up essentially, but when I was 14, my mother and my step-father did have a daughter. So I have a half-sister who's 14 years younger than I am. Q: Do you recall much about life in Kentucky? CECIL: In bits and pieces. I certainly remember those summers when I visited my grandmother in Cecilia. That was a very, almost a rural kind of life. Cecilia was a little town. I think it was founded primarily because that's where the road, the highway, crossed the railroad, and that's probably why those four brothers chose that site to establish Cecilian College because there were two ways, then, students could get there: by train and by road.