Oral history interview with Richard Haas, 2009 Jan. 13 and Mar. 16 Funding for this interview was provided by the U.S. General Services Administration, Design Excellence and the Arts. Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Richard Haas on January 13, January25, March 5, and March 16, 2009. The interview took place at the studio of Richard Haas in NY, and was conducted by Avis Berman for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the U.S. General Services Administration, Design Excellence and the Arts project. Richard Haas and Avis Berman have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview AVIS BERMAN: This is Avis Berman interviewing Richard Haas for the GSA [General Services Administration], Archives of American Art Oral History Project, on January 13, 2009, in his studio on West 36th Street. Would you please state your full name and date of birth? RICHARD HAAS: Richard John Haas. Born August 29, 1936, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. AVIS BERMAN: Allright. Spring Green, Wisconsin, of course, is very famous because of Frank Lloyd Wright. And I know that Frank Lloyd Wright was hugely important to you and your family. And I wondered if you'd like to begin talking about that. RICHARD HAAS: Well, since I was born in Spring Green and my father and great-uncle were partners in Haas & Haas Meat Market, they served everyone in the community, including the Taliesin Fellowship [Taliesin, The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture] from day one and even before. And so both my father and great-uncle were quite familiar with Mr. Wright and he with them. Then in 1942 when they closed the butcher shop, my father moved the family to Milwaukee [WI]. My great-uncle went across the river at Frank Lloyd Wright's request and became his chief stonemason, master stonemason, and stayed there 'til he died in '62, two years after or three years after Wright. And I was invited to go there. Well, I had a long conversation with my great-uncle about my interest in architecture when I was a senior in high school and a freshman in college. And even planned, hopefully, to become an architect. But since there was not an architecture school in the state of Wisconsin, I couldn't get that free education start-up. And that's probably the only thing that prevented me from probably sitting here now in an architectural studio, to be honest. So I, through uncle George's arrangement, went out to Taliesin in 1955, in the summer, and spent the summer there ostensibly as his assistant; but with the allowance to kind of rein freely throughout the fellowship and even over to Taliesin itself. Kind of being a busybody and observing everything that was going on. And, of course, always starting out the day working with my uncle: cutting rock and laying stone. I did that again in 1956 for the summer; I continued that project. And that gave me, I think, a fairly good insight into what the fellowship was all about and certainly what Wright was about, and a pretty good sense of what the work was and what architecture was at the period. AVIS BERMAN: Gee! I wonder, back to the first, back to the butcher shop, did they pay their bills on time? He was notorious. RICHARD HAAS: [They laugh.] In a word, no. And, you know, I was too young to be aware of how serious that might have been. But my brother just recently—who's older than I am—said, "You know, we used to go over and get our Christmas trees at Taliesin." And my brother, being a priest [inaudible], said to—[Telephone rings.] Sorry. AVIS BERMAN: Let me pause that. Now when we were interrupted, you were talking about Christmas trees from Taliesin, and your brother who was a priest. RICHARD HAAS: My brother who was not a priest then but just a kid, we'd go with my father—and I remember vaguely doing it myself—to chop down our Christmas trees. And my brother being someone with honorable intentions, said, "Dad, are you sure we can just cut these trees down? I mean, because, aren't we supposed to pay for them?" And my dad said, "He owes me so much money, I could cut the whole forest down." [They laugh.] So that was what happened there. AVIS BERMAN: But your father, the Haases, continued to extend them credit. RICHARD HAAS: Apparently. Up until the end, yes. And I guess he did get paid. One of the stories that my father would tell is that he knew [Eugene] Gene Masselink very well, who was Wright's personal secretary. And whenever a check would come in, Gene would call my dad and say, "Get here early in the morning tomorrow. There's money here from Johnson & Johnson." Or Johnson's Wax. "And if you're the first ten in line, you'll get paid." So that's kind of how I think my father managed to get some of the money back. AVIS BERMAN: Right. Well, when you said you knew what the fellowship was about, would you elaborate on that? RICHARD HAAS: That would be a book in itself, and there is a book now that I just read called The Fellowship [Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman; New York, Regan: 2006]. AVIS BERMAN: Okay. Well, I just thought when you said that you—I just wondered what your own idea might have been. RICHARD HAAS: Well, this book I would recommend. It tells a lot more about it than I could ever know or tell. But it did corroborate a lot of what I had hunches about, about a lot of these individuals and so on. AVIS BERMAN: Well, what, among the people of Spring Green, your circle, that were not the fellowship, how did the local folk regard Wright? RICHARD HAAS: I think for the most part they saw him as "Old Shaggy-Hair." That was one of the terms that was used around town; and they knew him mostly for his famous lack of paying bills and, grandstanding around, and braggadocio beyond belief, etc. But there was a kind of grudging admiration for the fact that he happened to be there in their town. AVIS BERMAN: So there was the knowledge that he was a great architect. RICHARD HAAS: There was among I'd say certainly the elite of Spring Green, if you could be as hilarious as to say there is such a thing, and beyond that I'm not so sure. And even when we moved to Milwaukee [WI], we would mention him to neighbors, and they'd say, who's that? What's that all about? So on and so forth. He really wasn't very well known back then in any sense compared to how he became known after his death. AVIS BERMAN: Right. Well, when you were there for the two summers, you must have met or had some encounters with him. RICHARD HAAS: I had several. All of them, I would say, in secondary ways. Because he would come around and see what we were doing. And he had a nose for following up on everything. My uncle had a different relationship with him than I think most of his people there, and there was a kind of a stand-offish reverence that went down in some odd way toward a craftsman like my uncle; and so he would never really be on his case, as it were. But when we were laying stone, he would sometimes tap his cane next to us where we were working, and say things like, "What are you doing here? And what's this all about?" And I would answer him in very simple terms. And he would call me "nephew" because he could never remember my name, after all. He would say, "What are you doing this morning, nephew?" Blah blah blah. That kind of thing. And then he would address us, when we were working sometimes, and go through one of his great Wright lectures, which he could do at the drop of a hat as he would go around, even with workers. And there was that one that I have related several times, including to Brendan Gill when he wrote his book [Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, Brendan Gill; New York, Putnam: 1987] though he didn't include it, about when he came by us as we were putting up rafters on top of a stone circular base that would ultimately become the restaurant for Taliesin, which is now the orientation center and restaurant. We were just starting to build this thing which they didn't really know quite what they were going to do with, but he was always doing a project. And was nailing up the rafters along with his sort of lead carpenter, and Wright tapped on our scaffold, and said, "What's this rickety mess here?" And the lead carpenter yells down to him, he said, "That's our scaffold, Mr.