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THE HONORABLE DAVID B. SENTELLE First Interview July 7, 2003 This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is the Honorable David B. Sentelle, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is David Frederick. The interview took place on July 7, 2003. This is the first interview. MR. FREDERICK: This is David Frederick here to do the oral history of Judge David Sentelle. I’m with the Judge in Chambers. It is July 7, 2003, at about 10:20 in the morning. Good morning, Judge. JUDGE SENTELLE: Good morning, David. MR. FREDERICK: Thank you for doing your oral history for the D.C. Circuit Historical Society. Why don’t we begin by you telling us your full name and your date of birth? JUDGE SENTELLE: David Bryan Sentelle, February 12, 1943. MR. FREDERICK: Where were you born? JUDGE SENTELLE: Canton, North Carolina. MR. FREDERICK: Now I think I read that you were not born in hospital? JUDGE SENTELLE: That’s correct. I run into people occasionally who tell me I couldn’t have been born in Canton because there is no hospital there. I tell them that I was neither sick nor in need of an operation and, therefore, it’s not necessary that you get to a hospital. It’s only necessary that you be near your mother at the time and she didn’t go to the hospital so I didn’t either. MR. FREDERICK: Was it common for children of that era to be born at home? 1 JUDGE SENTELLE: It was transitional, really, in that part of the country. My brother, who is older than me, was actually born in a hospital. But during World War II, gas was hard to come by and they didn’t – it was easier for folks to let one doctor spend his increased allotment of gas than it was for a family to use that gas going to the hospital, so the doctors went where the mamas were and I was born in Canton and there is no hospital in Canton. I was born in Canton. MR. FREDERICK: How much older is your brother than you? JUDGE SENTELLE: Two-and-a-half years and there’s just the two of us. He was 63 on July 5th – last Saturday. MR. FREDERICK: Now tell me about your parents. JUDGE SENTELLE: My father was Horace Sentelle, Jr. He was known to most of his friends – to most everybody – as Dugan. Dugan was a character from a comic strip, Maggie and Jiggs Bringing Up Father. Dugan hung out in the pool hall all the time and apparently my father, in his younger days, had stayed in the pool hall all the time and picked up the nickname of Dugan. He rather liked it. He was sort of an eccentric who taught us to call him Dugan, so my brother and I always called him Dugan and said we were Dugan’s boys. He finished the eleventh grade, which was what was available to him in Clyde, North Carolina, at the time. Clyde is a little further west than Canton. Canton is west of Asheville. Clyde is west of Canton. He bummed around for a while and finally wound up working at a rayon – later nylon – mill outside of Asheville where he was the foreman and a 2 pretty well respected supervisor for someone who didn’t get any farther in school than he did. In fact, I think he and his brother had the two best jobs in the mill of anyone who hadn’t gone to the twelfth grade at least. My mother was Maude Ray. She didn’t have a middle name. She was born in Yancey County, North Carolina. My father is from Haywood, which was west of us, and Yancey is to the east. She grew up in Haywood County. She finished high school in Canton, North Carolina, went to business school in Greensboro for a year or so, was a legal secretary. She was working for Sam Robinson who was a lawyer in Canton who married my father’s sister. I think he was the only one of the brothers or brothers- in-law or sisters that had a college degree and he was a lawyer with a Wake Forest law degree. Mother was working for Sam and the story goes – and I think it’s probably not entirely accurate – but the story goes that my father’s younger brother was getting married in his sister’s home. Most people had house weddings instead of church weddings in the working class in those days. It was at Christmastime and my father was standing under the mistletoe and somebody said, “Dugan, you’d better get out from under there. You’re going to get kissed.” He said, “Nobody would want to kiss me.” Sam’s secretary went over and kissed him. That was my mother and that’s where the whole thing started according to the legend. My mother says they knew each other before that, but at least it became public that they were well-acquainted with one another. 3 MR. FREDERICK: How did the Sentelle family come to settle in North Carolina? JUDGE SENTELLE: We wondered about that, too, David. A theory had been – which proved to be wrong – that it was an Italian-Swiss family and that they had come in with some grape growers who had come in at New Bern in the early part of the pre-Colonial era. In fact we now have – by the tracings of my distant cousin, Sam Sentelle, who is Superintendent of schools of Putnam County, West Virginia – Sam traced it back to the early 18th Century Virginia Colony. The Sentelles were the Huguenots. The first couple. Sam also – Sam and Jane, which is my wife’s name – were Huguenots who were among the few Huguenots who came into the Virginia Colony. Most of the Huguenots came to Charleston. For some reason, my people were always mavericks, I guess. They came to Virginia, drifted west, and then came down the Appalachians over the course of three or four generations. Before the Civil War, the Sentelles were already in the Appalachian Mountains, having gone west in Virginia and then drifted South in the Appalachian Mountains. Did that answer your question? MR. FREDERICK: Yes, it did. Do you know what your family’s sympathies were during the Civil War? JUDGE SENTELLE: My great-great-grandfather, whose name was also Samuel Sentelle – that seems to turn up generation after generation – was a mountain Unionist. And he, like quite a few other mountaineers, left the South to fight for the North and he was a Union soldier. Family legend had always been that he was killed on the way back after the war. A local historian finally found 4 an accurate tracing. He was killed on the way back, but the war was not over. He was apparently AWOL at the time he was killed. He and another man by the name of Sentelle and a third companion were ambushed in what’s called the Pink Beds area of the Smokies on the way back. If you’ve ever read the novel Cold Mountain about the Confederate soldiers on their way back to Haywood County – cause he went AWOL near the end of the war and was murdered. It’s the same story except they were Union soldiers and were probably going to the Transylvania side of the county line rather than the Haywood County line, but it’s the same general area as that – very similar to the story told except that it’s Union soldiers instead of Confederates. MR. FREDERICK: Were there many Union sympathizers from this particular part of North Carolina? JUDGE SENTELLE: There were a lot of mountaineers who were Unionists. Now it was stronger in – Wataugua, Yancey, Avery, and Mitchell were the real hotbeds of Unionists. That’s a bit northeast of my part of the mountains. Madison County was called bloody Madison, but it was very evenly divided. They didn’t have to leave to fight one another there, there were so many on both sides. Now when you got over through Buncombe and Haywood/Transylvania, it was more Confederate, but there were pockets of Unionists there too and my great-great-grandfather was one of them. MR. FREDERICK: How did that political involvement affect your family through the generations after the Civil War? 5 JUDGE SENTELLE: Well the term Mountain Republican has a real meaning in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, Western Virginia, North Georgia. Even in the hill country of Mississippi and Alabama, you have Mountain Unionists who were the founders of the Republican Party in their respective states. My family were Mountain Unionists and my branch of the Sentelles remained loyal Republicans to this day. My brother is still living in Western North Carolina and since his retirement from Sears Roebuck, he’s a Republican precinct worker on the election sites down there. MR. FREDERICK: Was your father active in politics? JUDGE SENTELLE: He was very interested in politics and he would always, if he could, take election day off at the mill to go work at the polls for some candidate or other and he did some campaigning for people. He never ran for office. Now his father – my grandfather, Horace Sentelle, Sr., was very political. He was a printer and he operated one of those many weekly local newspapers that existed in those days, which were very partisan.

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