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Fabyan, Riverbank, and the Biliteral Cipher Elizebeth Smith Friedman Interviews the Marshall Research Library Lexington, Virginia June 6, 1974

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Fabyan, Riverbank, and the Biliteral Cipher Elizebeth Smith Friedman Interviews the Marshall Research Library Lexington, Virginia June 6, 1974 GEORGE C. MARSHALL FOUNDATION TAPE #5: FABYAN, RIVERBANK, AND THE BILITERAL CIPHER ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN INTERVIEWS THE MARSHALL RESEARCH LIBRARY LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA JUNE 6, 1974 THIS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT MAY BE USED FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE QUOTED FROM, CITED OR PUBLISHED EXCEPT BY PERMISSION OF THE GEORGE C. MARSHALL FOUNDATION. This is a recorded interview with Mrs. Elizebeth Smith Friedman at the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia on June 6, 1974 in which Mrs. Friedman discusses Colonel Fabyan, the Riverbank Laboratories, and the biliteral cipher with Marshall Research Library staff members. ESF: They were few and far between in those days, and I was staying on the south side with friends and I learned that the Newberry Reference Library, which is a private library on the north side of Chicago, had a Shakespeare first folio, an original, and I had never seen one of course, and so I highed myself to that library to see the Shakespeare folio and afterwards I was talking to the librarian there who was a graduate of, is it Earlam College at Richmond, Indiana? And Indiana is my home state and my ancestors, a lot of them, lived in Richmond and had a lot to do with the development of that part of the state and so I said to her, “I am looking for a job and did she have anything to offer” and she said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I do.” She said, “There is a man who has asked me to find some young person who is versed in English literature and knowledgeable about Shakespeare and so on to do research work for him on his estate outside of Chicago,” and that was all that she told me about him, and she said, “I’ll call him up and ask for an appointment for you.” And she called him up and he apparently replied, “Well, I will be right out” and that’s all he’d say. Well, he arrived at this library and he came in, in a Prince Albert suit, striped and, you know, the tails and the striped trousers, and a stock in place of a collar, and had a message and he strolled with a very authoritative bearing and he came in and Miss Whatever-Her-Name-Was introduced me and did he say “pleased to meet you” or anything like that? Oh no, he said, “will you _____ and spend the night with me?” Why, you can imagine at my age and inexperience how that struck me! And I kind of stammered and said that I didn’t have anything with me; I wasn’t prepared to go right then or prepared to go anywhere to spend the night. And he said “Well, we’ll furnish all that. Forget about that. Come on!” and I went along with him and we went outside and there was his Chicago limousine with a chauffeur. He kept one in Chicago with a chauffeur, and a couple of them, and several chauffeurs out at Riverbank, and so I don’t remember what he chattered about but we had to hurry to make that train, the one that he customarily took back to Geneva, Illinois where his estate was. And so we got on the train and he took me forward in a coach and put me on a seat that was down front, you know the very last one, that way, and set me down there, and then he disappeared, apparently looking up to some of the train officials for some reason or other, or I don’t know what, but when he came back, he came back, he sat down and beside me, I was here by the window and he sat down beside me and he looked over at me like this. He said, “Well, what in hell do you know? And I was nonplussed for a moment, but kind of a stubborn streak arose in me and I looked at him out of my right eye and said, “That remains, sir, for you to find out.” Well, he laughed! He roared! You could hear it all through the train, not only the car, that single car, so then I turned my head back and looking out the window and he settled in beside me and started talking. Elizebeth Smith Friedman – June 6, 1974 – Page 2 of 11 Well, the hour went very quickly, the trip out to Geneva and I don’t remember what all we talked about. He probably did all the talking because he was the one who usually dominated every situation that any other people shared in, and we arrived, and another limousine and another chauffer met us at the train there, and I was taken to this estate which is only about a mile away from the station. It was about between three and four hundred acres and it was split into three strips. There was land over on the farthest off, was the land along the eastern side of the Fox River. Then there was the Fox River and then comes another strip of land which was retained for his personal and private property and their house called the Villa was there and Mrs. Fabyan’s pet zoo; she had a lot of zoo animals, in a small, large cage on the grounds and she was interested in…I as shown everything, and then on the west side of the highway, the Lincoln Highway. The Fox River and the Lincoln Highway were the two parallel breaks in the land that belonged to the Riverbank Estate. And on that side of the Lincoln Highway, as you go away from Geneva, Illinois, there were two frame houses, one was called the lodge and one was called Ingledew Cottage down the road a piece, and that’s where he kept all his workers and he developed these different laboratories. He had an engineering laboratory which has gone down in history because, for two reasons. They perfected Sabinite which is the material that you used to put on auditorium walls to make it soundproof. There was no such thing as soundproof materials in those days at all so this Sabinite was something that could be used as sort of an extra layer of wall and it contained this Sabinite. And then the engineering department also had perfected something that to me looked exactly like a tuning fork, like a giant tuning fork, and it had some very important something or other to do with the war, that was secret, I don’t particularly know what was, so he really did, you know, do some things that were for the benefit of humanity and not just George Fabyan alone, and so I was housed in the lodge which was the nearest to the villa; I mean on that side of the road it was the nearest to the villa down here, and he had a great big, this isn’t important to the story but it just shows the character of the man, he had a tremendous fire cave, I guess you’d call it. It was, it had a brick wall around it, the wall about the height of the seat there and that was all built of brick and it took about five or six foot logs to burn and every night he would have a big fire in that fireplace and over here, that direction not very far from the fireplace, no farther than Lynn is from that wall there, he would swing back and forth in this tremendous chair. This is the portrait that’s in here, he’s swinging back and forth in that big chair and whenever he wanted to ball anybody out, which he did frequently, he would have them brought there. He would stand them up over here say and over there was George Fabyan and he’d swing back and forth on those gigantic chains that seemed to me they were about fifty feet high, fifty feet long, and give that person hell, so it was called “the hell chair.” Everybody, all of us, were always calling it, oh here, yes, that’s it. And that was his dress. At Riverbank, he never wore anything else. Always puttees and knee bloomers and the rest of the…but anyway there he is, looking quite like Teddy Roosevelt, by the expression and the mustache and the hat, and the expression and so on. Elizebeth Smith Friedman – June 6, 1974 – Page 3 of 11 Well he had, you see, he had run away from home when he was a boy in his teens, from his blue blood family in Boston. They, his father was the head of the Bliss Fabyan Cotton Goods textile corporation. It was the largest textile corporation in the world at that time, and he had offices in Chicago, I mean there were branch offices in Chicago and in Saint Louis. And of course the main office in Boston, and so after George Fabyan had run away from home and gone off somewhere, he worked with lumber for a while. I’ve never been very clear about whether he did it in Chicago in the selling and loading of lumber or whether he did it in, up in Wisconsin or Minnesota where the lumber was found, and cut, and shipped from there; but at any rate, when he was, I think he was fifteen when he ran away from home, and when he was nineteen he went down to Chicago, or down to Saint Lois, saw the manager of the Saint Louis office and asked for a job as a salesman and he made the Saint Lois manager promise not to let the senior Fabyan know that he was there, that he George was there, and he made the Saint Louis manager promise to send all his sales records in to the parent company, parent office, under the name of Mr.
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