Interview with Ms. Louise Taylor

Library of Congress Interview with Ms. Louise Taylor Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Information Series LOUISE TAYLOR Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 19, 2001 Copyright 2007 ADST (Note: This interview was not edited by Mrs. Taylor) Q: Today is January 19, 2001. This is an interview with Louise Taylor. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Let's start at the beginning. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? TAYLOR: Yes. I was born in Chicago, Illinois, December 29, 1946, just after the war. My father had returned from the U.S. Army Air Forces, where he had spent at least two and a half years in Western Europe. That had stimulated his interest in travel, Europe, art, and music. He and my mother, who had married in the early '40s and had gone to the University of Chicago as students together, decided to settle back in the neighborhood of the university in Hyde Park. So, I grew up in a very lively, urban environment at the university. My father was working for a newspaper at the time, the Sun Times of Chicago. He was also working for AP as a stringer. I spent most of my early years in Chicago, although my father's family also lived in a small town in Illinois called Freeport, in the northwest corner of the state. About the time I was in the later years of grade school, my Interview with Ms. Louise Taylor http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001651 Library of Congress family moved to Freeport because my father took over the old family business. I graduated from Freeport High. Q: What was your father's name? TAYLOR: My father's name was William Pfender. My mother was Better Pfender. Q: Tell me again about your father's family background. TAYLOR: My father's family, his grandparents had come to the Midwest like many German/Northern European immigrants in the late 1860s and had made their way across the United States and settled in that very Germanic farming area of northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin. There, they set up a hay, grain, and feed business which turned out to be quite profitable for them because the little town of Freeport was right on the Illinois Central Line. The train system on the way to the stockyards in Chicago came right through Freeport. Thus the rationale for setting up this kind of business. That business lasted well into the 20th century. Like most families in those days, it was a large family. There were five or six siblings of my father's grandparent's generation. So, there were a lot of people to work in this business. My father grew up as a young man in a family of older people. His mother had died when he was three in the great tuberculosis epidemic of the early '20s. He had a mentor in the person of an aunt who lived in Chicago and who was for a woman of that time extremely well educated and extremely well traveled. She had a doctorate. She took my father around as a young boy. His father was very supportive of this. His mother was dead. Everybody else in the family was older. So, my father grew up with kind of a world view even though he was an only child in this large family of mostly older people. They all read books at night and they all listened to music. It sounds like a very idyllic sort of place for him to grow up. All of this about my father may be significant because he did eventually end up in the Foreign Service. I, however, did not grow up as a Foreign Service “brat.” He joined the Foreign Service much later in life. We can get to that later. Interview with Ms. Louise Taylor http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001651 Library of Congress Q: What was your mother's background? TAYLOR: My grandmother was of French heritage. Her family had settled in the middle West, although it was in the Indiana-Ohio area. My grandfather, my mother's father, did not come to this country until he was 30. He was British. He was working for the British canard lines. Having spent 15 yearhe joined the sea services very early in lifgoing back and forth between the United Kingdom and the United States, he decided he wanted to be an American and he somehow made that possible. I'm not sure of the details. He ended up settling in Cleveland. He had the sea in his blood. He had to be near the water. He was also very musical. He became the choir director of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Cleveland. Being a Brit, he was a proper Episcopalian. My grandmother, whom he met at the church, happened to be the organist for the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Neither one of them was particularly religious or even particularly Episcopalian, but they both loved music. That was how they met. My grandmother, who I said was of a French background, was about 4'10”, a tiny little birdlike creature. My grandfather, although he was very slim, was at least 6'2”. So, these people had really very little in common except their music. They married. My mother was their only child. They lived just outside of Cleveland on Lake Erie. My grandfather had to be close to the water. My grandparents were older when my mother was born and she always told me how protective they were of her. When she decided to go away to college at the University of Chicago, it was a great blow to her parents, my grandparents, and I guess there was a big struggle for a while until she finally was given the permission to go off to Chicago. One other thing about my grandparents was, my grandmother, in addition to being a wonderful musician, was a beautiful seamstress. She did not do this for the money, but she made me the most gorgeous Easter dresses. Nobody wears dresses like that anymore. Of course, I was a little girl and there were lots of frills and bows and ruffles and sashes. I can remember every one of those dresses. Each year, I would get a different one. We lived in Chicago at the time, but we would travel to Cleveland to go Interview with Ms. Louise Taylor http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001651 Library of Congress to Easter services where my grandmother occasionally played the organ. My grandfather was no longer the director of the choir. That was not his profession. His profession was with the Ohio Electrical Company. He wasn't a technical person. I imagine he was an administrative person. Q: On your mother's side, what was their family name? TAYLOR: Watson, very proper British. I'm very much a product and the more I think about my past and my outlook on life, the more I read, the more I see, I really am very much a Midwesterner. I went to college in Boston. I've lived my whole life overseas. But just reading American writers, I am really a product of the Midwest. Every time I go back to Chicago, I say, “This is really the kind of city that says to me that this is the middle of America. This is where people open their hearts. They don't really care much about where you come from.” Chicago is a very energetic city. It's a very dynamic city. It's also very youthful. Q: What did your mother and father major in at the university? TAYLOR: My mother was a French literature major and my father was a political science major. Q: Did the war pick him up shortly after you left the university? TAYLOR: Yes. He actually left to join the Service before he graduated. I think he would have graduated in '41. He finished his degree in '45 or '46 when he returned from Europe. My mother was two years older than my father. She graduated in '39 or '40. She taught school all during the war. It's kind of an interesting story. The last year of the war, '45, she had been teaching school during the year, but she worked in the summers on Mackinaw Island, in between the upper north peninsula of Michigan. We now have a summer house there. But she was working at the Grand Hotel, this wonderful hotel on Mackinaw Island, during the summer that the war ended. She described this wonderful scene where all the Interview with Ms. Louise Taylor http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001651 Library of Congress ships and boats and tugboats and every craft imaginable went out into the harbor, into the Straits of Mackinaw, and blew their stacks and blew their horns and water was spraying everywhere to celebrate. Q: Oh, how wonderful. For how long did you yourself live in Chicago? TAYLOR: I think I was in fourth or fifth grade at the time we moved to Freeport. But we came back to Chicago almost every other weekend. My parents had very strong ties there. They were very much a part of the cultural scene. They wanted to make sure that I grew up knowing about theater and music. I had already started to study ballet, which was one of the major interests of my life. So, I was taken to ballet and to the symphony.

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