1 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project F. ALLEN (TEX) HARRIS Interviewed

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project F. ALLEN (TEX) HARRIS Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 10, 1999 Copyright 2020 ADST INTERVIEW Q: This is an interview with F. Allen Harris, known by all as Tex Harris, and the interview is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Tex, let’s start off with when and where were you born, and tell me something about your family. HARRIS: I was born in Glendale, California, on May 13, 1938. I am sixty-one years of age as we are recording this today and have retired from the Foreign Service eight weeks ago. I am pleased to note for the record that I was conceived in the great state of Texas, where my father was in the oil business in a place called Aransas Pass, which is just outside of Corpus Christi, and those were solid days. He was doing rather well, and he had a number of racehorses, and he took them to California for the racing season with my lovely, pregnant mother, Helen. My dad’s name was Murray. By the way, my first name is Franklyn with a “y,” not an “I” because that was the Democratic spelling and the “y” was a family name, more of a Republican spelling. I was born in California by an accident and did not spend any time [there]. I grew up most of my life in Dallas, Texas, where I went to public schools and became very much involved in basketball. I’m very tall. I’m about six feet, seven inches and was an all-state basketball player. Q: Okay, let’s go back again. Tell me about the background of your father. HARRIS: My father was born in Russia in 1902. He came to the United States in about 1904. He was Jewish. He came from a small village in what was called Russia Poland, and there was a lot of persecution of the people. The family fled to Germany, and from Germany they came to the United States. His given name was Shlimka Simselowitz, and when he applied as a young man for papers to work in the Merchant Marine, they asked him what his name was and the fellow was very puzzled, and so he used the name that my grandfather had been called, which was Herr S, and that became the family name. Q: H-E-R-R and then S-period. HARRIS: Yes, capital S, Herr S., Mr. S., because his last name was so long, and that then became anglicized as Harris. That’s how the name got here. 1 Q: What about your grandparents on your father’s side? What did they do? It’s very interesting the way they came in 1904 over to the States. HARRIS: My grandfather was a carpenter, but not really a carpenter; he was a cabinetmaker, and he and his brother, who was a weaver of wrought iron bars, would make banks’ and other enclosed areas’ screens similar to what you have today only they’re plexiglass and bulletproof. In those days they had a business in New York City in which, for banks and other places that wanted certain levels of security, they would put in high counters and then my uncle would put in these wire mesh screens to protect the cash or jewelry or other things that were behind the barriers. Q: I refer anyone who’s doing this to look at the movies of the 1930s, and they will see this type of construction very much involved in things involving bank robberies or movies around the financial business. HARRIS: And my grandmother, Cecilia, was a very talented seamstress and made clothes for ladies. Q: What was her background? HARRIS: She was a dressmaker. I don’t know. I know the uncles, but I really did not ever engage in conversations. They came from an artisan class of folks in the Jewish community, were very orthodox, prayed every day. My grandfather lived in Brooklyn, in an area of Brooklyn called Bensonhurst, and he would go to the synagogue each and every day and pray with great regularity, and this was a defining moment. He suffered very badly from asthma, which was aggravated because he built things not with nails but with glue, and so everything he built was done in the traditional cabinetmaker’s style. He glued everything together, which was not good for his fragile lungs. Q: How did your father get educated, and he moved into doing what? HARRIS: My father, I think, left school at an early age, I think in the eighth grade or something like that, but absolutely had an incredible mind, had the ability to do numeric calculations in his head, large numbers, had a great recall, great memory, would remember everything that was told to him, but was very reserved and very quiet and very focused on outcomes. He was in a series of businesses throughout his life in different parts of the United States and always was an entrepreneur looking for new ventures and moved forward. Some of them were very successful; others were very unsuccessful. He had a kind of a boom-and-bust life. Q: I was going to say, it sounds like an up-and-down type life. HARRIS: It was, very much. He had businesses that were extraordinarily successful and he’d have closets filled with tailored suits, and then he’d have other times when he was very poor and had to go around and ask friends for loans of a few thousand dollars to get him through the month. It was a tough time, but he enjoyed his friends and his associates 2 in New York and across the United States and loved to yarn, loved to talk and listen to storytellers. This was the kind of tradition of his friends, sitting around and talking. Some of them were wonderful Damon Runyon New York characters who had very rich lives and experience, and it was an interesting life. Q: How about your mother? HARRIS: My mother was born in Clifton, New Jersey. Her family immigrated to the United States in the early part of the century, sometime around 1904, ’5, ’6, something in that period. They came from Hungary and were Roman Catholics, devout Catholics, and lived near the Czech border. My maternal grandfather died very early, and he was a blacksmith and a metal worker, but my grandmother, whom I do not remember—I was in her arms, but I don’t remember her—she was a linguist. Actually all the relatives spoke a number of languages, but she spoke six or seven languages, just part of growing up in that area and having lived in different areas of Eastern Europe. She spoke some of them better than others, but she was a gifted linguist. Q: What about your mother’s education? HARRIS: My mother graduated from high school and then went on to business school and began work as a secretary working in the garment business, the rag trade, in New York City. She was a very attractive lady and very vivacious, and then that led to modeling—very commercial modeling, not the high-fashion runway modeling that one envisions but more of the modeling for trade shows and other things, ready-to-wear kinds of things. Then she traveled around the United States as a sales representative for the first static-free slip, so her great adventure in America was these long trips on the train, traveling around and demonstrating the static-free slip. Q: You might explain why static-free was considered quite an innovation. HARRIS: Well, the earlier slips were made of silk or something and they produced a lot of static, which means your dress would cling to you. These new inventions of some new synthetic material reduced that, and it was an innovation in its time. Q: Your father—I forgot to ask about his education. HARRIS: My father just graduated from primary school and that was it—period. As he said, he was educated in the school of life. Q: Well, now, with your parents, particularly your mother, being in the clothing trade, was your family at all involved, particularly your father coming out of the Jewish community, in the early ’30s and before that, in the socialist trade thing? HARRIS: No, my parents were generally very apolitical. I cannot recall many conversations about politics in the family. They were not involved in politics. My dad was very interested in sports. My mother was very interested in fashion and was 3 interested in show business, the theater, and things like that. They were very dedicated to me as being a precocious child. My mother would read to me, not bedtime stories but the New York Times, when I was growing up as a young kid. So I’d sit there and listen to her read the New York Times aloud to me for my edification and her edification. Q: Your father, with his mathematical ability and his taking chances, did he get into gambling? You mentioned horse racing. HARRIS: Yes, he liked to gamble, and he liked to win, but he was extremely mathematical in terms of selecting odds and would lay out the various odds and find bargains, as it were. It wasn’t as much, for him, gambling as it was looking at the various odds and things like that and laying those things out.

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