Hartman, Arthur A. – 1999

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ARTHUR ADAIR HARTMAN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 20, 1999 Copyright 2015 ADST [Note: Ambassador Hartman did not complete editing this interview prior to his death. His editing stops after his departure from London in 1967.] Q: Tell me where you were born and something about your family. HARTMAN: I was born in New York City in a hospital that has since disappeared. It is now a garage under or next to the 69th Street Bridge. My parents and my brother were living on Long Island at the time, in Flushing, New York and that is where I grew up -- quite different from the place it is now. Today, Flushing’s Chinatown is one of the biggest outside of Asia, but I believe our house is still there as we left it. I lived in Flushing until the age of seventeen -- or from 1926 to 1943. At the time, it was not a Chinese-Indian-Korean community, but a different mix of Long Islanders, with some very old residents, people who went back to the original Quaker settlement (Flushing was one of the very first Dutch settlements). The oldest Quaker Meeting in America was right there on Northern Boulevard in Flushing. Q: Give me the background of both your parents please. HARTMAN: My parents were married six years before. They both came from fairly recent immigration, both from Europe. My father’s father died when my father was about twelve. He went right to work and attended night school to learn speed writing, maybe even shorthand, which he used quite a bit during his lifetime. I think he took night courses at Johns Hopkins at various times later in life but he had no formal education. One cousin said the family had moved from Alsace in Napoleon’s time because it was a rough time for Jews. They had grown grapes in Alsace and so they moved to the wine growing area in Hungary, near Tokaj, but they then acquired a flour mill on the main river to become flour merchants in the town called Miskolc, in the eastern part of Hungary. Apparently, a flood wiped out their mill along with their entire production around the end of the nineteenth century and, being the sixth child in the family, my grandfather Sigmund immigrated to the States around 1870. He then started a business in Baltimore, importing porcelain china from Hungary. He met my grandmother there. Her name was Jackson, but I’m sure it was Jacobson before that. They had come from New Orleans and her father was an iron merchant -- that is, he designed iron things. It may be mythology but he is said to have designed the main gate going into Arlington Cemetery. My grandfather Sigmund had been married before and had a daughter who, 1 after they were married, came to live with them. The great mystery in our family is what happened to that daughter. My grandmother, who in many ways was an old battle-axe, pushed her out of the house after my Grandfather died of a burst appendix. After my parents were married in the beginning of the twenties, my grandmother lived with us on Long Island most of the year, although her house was in Washington DC, where I used to visit her quite often. She would take me around on trolley cars. The station master at Union Station was married to one of her sisters, and used to play in the Sousa band. He was a character I was taken to visit when I was a child, usually when I visited at the Easter holidays. One of my memories of him was that he always pulled quarters out of my ears. Another was that his apartment overlooked an approach to a black cemetery and the marching bands would pass by. He knew many of the people in the bands, although Washington was a strictly segregated town in those days, including on the trolleys. We would go egg rolling on the White House lawn and I can remember my Grandmother’s stories about small town Washington society -- including how she and another sister dressed up in all their finery to attend a reception President Cleveland gave after his marriage. My mother’s side was Jewish as well. My grandfather Eddy was born in Odessa, and, according to family mythology, made his way across Europe by various means. He started out as a singer; he used to sing in churches. He had a boy-soprano voice but finally his voice broke when he was in school in Berlin. So he took up trumpet. He played in a band on the North German Lloyd Line and got himself to the United States in 1880. First he went out to what is now North Dakota; it was the Dakota territories at the time. I remember him telling stories about his days out there. There was a German baron who bought a lot of land out there to settle these Eastern European Jews on because he didn’t want them living in New York and undermining the good repute of the German Jews who considered themselves higher class. I remember visiting North Dakota at the 100th anniversary of its statehood in 1989, and there was a chapter in the commemorative books on the Jewish immigration in the Dakota territories. My grandfather Eddy stayed out there a few years. And there were stories of selling cigars to Indians and running a train through a barrier. As you can see there were no great tales of good farming. I’m afraid he and his friends were not very good farmers. So he drifted back to the east and got into the real estate business. He lived in New York most of his life. I think my grandmother came from what is now some part of Poland or maybe Russia. They settled in New York. My mother grew up in New York and met my father when he was in the navy in the First World War. He got influenza and went off to a sanitarium in upper New York State. I think he started to do some work while he was still in the navy involving psychological testing in Saranac, NY. They used people who had been evacuated for various jobs. Then he went into the paper business, first in Chicago and then back in New York. I became very ill coming out of the hospital after my birth with a blood disease called staphylococcus. This was before they had antibiotics. A young intern at the hospital decided to bleed me. He cut my shoulders open and put my father’s blood into my ankles, 2 changing my blood without knowing anything about blood typing (this was 1926). Thanks to him, I got through this staphylococcus infection; one of the only cases to have done so. My middle name, Adair, is that doctor’s name. He later became head of Sloan Kettering, a center that specializes in cancer. My parents decided that it would be safer for my brother to live with my mother’s sister for a year, while I recovered from my infection. Although this was a time of great economic distress, with the Great Depression in 1929, my family was spared many of the hardships many others endured. At home, I don’t remember being affected by the Depression too much. We were lucky enough to have my father, who was a man of many talents. The business he started with a friend, Barclay’s Tissue, was involved with tissue manufacturing; it made Kleenex and tissue towels, and the manufacturing was mostly centered in Brooklyn. Although my father often talked about the Depression, I did not feel it at home so much because his business got the family through a rough time. We even helped people work some, and at that time we had a couple household servants. There were some social activities to raise money for various things. My father’s business took up most of his life and I can remember sitting around the dining room table stapling samples of his product in very well designed folders that were then put in envelopes and sent out to potential customers. One of my father’s talents was design. He did all the design of the boxes for Barclay Tissue. I also remember the pictures he would draw and his wonderful handwriting. But seeing my father lead the life of a business man convinced me I absolutely did not want to become one. He was constantly yelling at people on the phone, and worried about his company. I had an absolute abhorrence of business. Watching my father and seeing the strains and stresses he went through to get this business going, to get and keep this business going, because it was a one man affair; I rejected the idea of it. He had no partners. He created and ran it. I didn’t want to go into business. My older brother was always the one that my parents expected to take on the company, but I don’t think he ever took much of a liking to the idea. I went to Bayside High School which, at that time, was a new high school built in the ‘30s in the north end of Flushing. I was always pretty academic, always involved in the educational side. I had some outstanding teachers. One was in government -- I think it was called civics at the time -- and he encouraged me to do all kinds of things.

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