Interview with Dean Rust

Library of Congress Interview with Dean Rust Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project DEAN RUST Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 6, 2006 Copyright 2007 ADST Q: Today is 6 December 2006. This is an interview with Dean Rust. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. I take it you go by Dean is that correct? RUST: That is correct. Q: Dean let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? RUST: I was born in 1943 in Ohio, near Toledo. Actually I guess it was in Toledo, Ohio. Q: OK, I want to talk a bit about your family, the Rust side of the family. Do you know where they came from and about when? RUST: Yeah, Germany in about 1870, 1880, something like that. My grandparents were the first generation born in this country, born in the late 1880's. Q: What were they doing in Germany? Interview with Dean Rust http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001504 Library of Congress RUST: I don't know too much about the German segment of the Rust family. I know the ones that came over were farmers. My Grandfather was a farmer and his dad was a farmer and my dad was a farmer. Q: Well did they have a farm in... RUST: Northwestern Ohio actually about 15 miles from Toledo. My grandfather never moved more than about three miles away from where he was born and where he ultimately farmed, during his entire 81 years. Q: What sort of farming did they do? RUST: Mainly grain farming, corn and beans and hay, and some dairy, some beef, some hogs, chickens. Small farms, not huge farms like you find out in Iowa and Kansas. These were to 150 to 200 acre farms. Q: And your father was also a farmer? RUST: Yes, he was born in 1918. He wanted to farm, but we didn't have a lot of land in the family, and grandpa was still farming at the time, so he ended up with just a small farm and worked full time for a small farm implement dealer that sold International Harvester equipment. He worked 45 years for a small dealership about 15 miles form Toledo in northwestern Ohio, mainly selling parts for farm equipment. Somebody would break a part of a combine and they would come into the shop and my dad would provide a new part for them. Q: I remember reading an account of the support system for farmers which is really remarkable. You know if you have a harvester, you have got to use it the next day, and the ability to have the parts ready and installed and all was one of the miracles of our farming system. Interview with Dean Rust http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001504 Library of Congress RUST: Yes. When the weather is right, you have to be in the field getting your crops off, and if you have a breakdown, you can't afford to be broken down very long. You have to get your part right away. So anyway dad was not able to farm full time. He didn't have enough land to support a family. There were three of us kids. He never really encouraged my brother and I one way or another as far as farming. He made clear that if we wanted to go off to college and do something other than farm that was OK with him. Q: How about on your mother's side of the family? RUST: I don't know as much about them or when they came over from Europe. I just knew that my mother was also born and raised in Northwestern Ohio. She met my dad when they went to school together. They were high school sweethearts. They were married in their early 20's. Q: Did either your mother or father go to college? RUST: No. Q: You had what two brothers? RUST: One brother, one sister. Q: Were you the younger or the older. RUST: I was the oldest. Q: Let's talk about, did you live in a town while growing up? RUST: I was born in Toledo, which is where my parents lived when they were young. But once my dad got about 25 or 30 he inherited a small farm from his great uncle that was near where his dad farmed also. So they moved out to a small town about twelve miles outside of Toledo in a rural area of Northwestern Ohio, and that is where he farmed. We Interview with Dean Rust http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001504 Library of Congress moved there in 1949 I guess when I was about five or six years old. He lived there the rest of his life. Q: So you basically grew up on a farm. RUST: Yes, until I was four or five we were in I would say a suburb of Toledo, but then he helped my grandfather farm all the time. But when I was about four or five we moved out to the farm and that is where I grew up. Q: My father lived in Toledo at the time I was born, worked at Hicks and Peterson Lumber Company. Let's talk about growing up on the farm. How was that as a small kid? RUST: Well I would say my brother and I never took to farm chores very well. I liked the out of doors. We had a big yard and we played sports all the time in the yard. The neighborhood kids would come over. Since we had the biggest yard, we always played football and softball there. But when my dad wanted us to help with chores it was hard. We were more involved in school activities and mainly sports. He had a hard time. As we got a little older, I should say as we were teenagers, we tried to help him out a little bit more, but he was always a little disappointed I think, that we didn't want to help more than we did. Sometimes he had to hire kids from the town to come out and help because he couldn't get his own kids to help him enough. Q: Were you much of a reader? RUST: No I don't recall reading much at all. Q: More sports. RUST: Sports and math and science. When I was younger I gravitated towards mathematics and the physical sciences, and that is what I was good in. Even in my Interview with Dean Rust http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001504 Library of Congress undergraduate college years I was not much into English and literature and writing was never my thing through my education. Q: What was your elementary school like? RUST: Well it was a building built I think in the mid 19th century. It was an old schoolhouse. There were 30 or 40 kids in a class and all six grades were in one schoolhouse. I would say there weren't more than 80 or 90 kids per grade. It has changed a lot now, but in the 50's when I went to elementary school there was just one three level schoolhouse with probably no more than three or four hundred kids total and maybe 10, 12, 13 classrooms. They all played on the same playground. It was an idyllic childhood in many ways. We didn't have a lot of money, but my parents saw to everything we needed. I did whatever I wanted to do. Q: Did you have a town to go to or was it separate? RUST: I lived about a mile from Genoa, Ohio with about 1,500 people. It was in the limestone quarry region of northwestern Ohio, and one of the old quarries had filled up with water and was used as a swimming hole. The town turned that into a municipal park, so we spent quite a bit of time at the municipal park swimming or hanging out at the local hamburger place. They also had some ball fields nearby, so I played a lot of ball games in Genoa. Then we would also go into Toledo which was about 12 miles away to cruise around as you can imagine. Q: Yeah, I know. What about with your family, where did they fall politically or did they? RUST: Pretty apolitical. I learned as I got older my father was pretty moderate politically. He would vote for whoever he wanted to vote for. No party affiliation whatsoever. If anything he probably leaned toward the Democratic blue collar working man philosophy. Dad was a part-time farmer so he was an independent businessman in that sense, but he was also a blue collar worker. He didn't belong to a union. But he worked for a place for 40 Interview with Dean Rust http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001504 Library of Congress years, never had any retirement other than social security. He tended to side with the little guy, the working man. But there was very little political discussion in the house. Q: What about religion? Where did your family fall on the religious side? RUST: Well my father was a Lutheran. Mother was Church of the Brethren, which was a very pacifist oriented Protestant sect and is to this day. Until I went to school, my parents attended both the Lutheran and Brethren Churches. That wasn't working any longer.

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