Eastham, Alan
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ALAN EASTHAM Interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview Date: July 28, 2010 Copyright 2014 ADST Q: Okay, today is the 28th of July 2010. This is on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. You go by Alan? EASTHAM: Yeah that’s fine, terrific, Alan or Al either way. Q: Okay. Alan let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? EASTHAM: October 16, 1951 in Dumas, Arkansas. Q: Where is Dumas? EASTHAM: It’s a small town in what nowadays is occasionally referred to as L.A., lower Arkansas. It’s in the Mississippi delta near the confluence of the Arkansas River and the Mississippi River, about 90 miles south and east of Little Rock. When I was growing up, about 3,500 people lived there. Q: Okay, we’ll come back to Dumas and that area but first tell me something on your father’s side; what do you know about that part of the family? EASTHAM: On my father’s side, in fact on both sides of the family, my people are part of the westward migration. The part of the country that I grew up in was pretty much unsettled swampland until around the 1870s or the 1880s, when the railroad was punched through from north to south. As was the case in many parts of the country, the railroad brought little towns and it brought a certain amount of commerce, economic activity, and settlement. My grandfather on my father’s side grew up in the hill country a little bit to the west of the flatlands where I grew up. He moved to Dumas, Arkansas, around the turn of the century between the 1800s and the 1900s, to work as a clerk in a general store. He subsequently bought a bit of farm land and was a land owner basically with quite a few tenant farmers who worked for him. He also made “furnish” loans to small landowners. My grandmother grew up in Hamburg, Arkansas, another town to the southwest. She went to the University of Arkansas and became a school teacher and came to Dumas around, I don’t know when, around 1910 probably. They married and my dad was born in 1923. 1 He, like most of the rest of his generation, wound up in the service, in the Army Air Corps in the Second World War. He came back after the war and set up a little electronics repair business, since he was trained as a radar technician. Q: Where did he serve? EASTHAM: He, I think, ended the war out in the Pacific. He was part of the surge that anticipated the planned invasion of Japan in late 1945. He didn’t join the army until around 1943, I guess; he went one year to college and that didn’t work out, and I think he joined the army around 1942 or 1943. At the end of the war he might have gone as far as Guam or Okinawa. Q: How about on your mother’s side? What do you know about her family? EASTHAM: On my mother’s side, my grandparents came from the eastern U.S. over several generations. I have the impression that they moved west each generation. My family lore has it that they were in Alabama and then came to Mississippi. In fact, all my great-grandparents on that side, with one exception, were born in Alabama. My grandfather was born in Mississippi. When he was a young man, before the family moved to Arkansas, he was in the Mississippi National Guard. He was part of a Mississippi National Guard unit that was sent to Europe as a road-building unit during the First World War, and he mentioned to me that he had been in Belgium, and in fact I have a unit history that confirms this. I believe he was already in Arkansas, about 17 or 18 years old, with his parents, when his unit was called up. He came back and settled in Arkansas after the First World War. He farmed around 160 acres or so during his prime and owned about 80 acres when he died. They lived east of a town called Winchester, about 7 or 8 miles south of Dumas. My mother went to nursing school and became a nurse and then came back to Dumas to work in the hospital. Q: I think it is typical of the times that neither of your grandparents well one grandmother went to college and became a school teacher but both grandfathers didn’t go to college. EASTHAM: That’s right. Q: When you say farming what do you mean by farming? EASTHAM: Hard work farming cotton, soybeans sometimes. My grandmother had about a half an acre garden that fed the house and she did a lot of canning. They tried cows, and I remember early morning milking and putting the milk can out by the road to be picked up. One of my earliest memories, though, is the day they put down their cows because of hoof and mouth disease. There was a big fire involved to dispose of the carcasses, and even though I was only about three years old, I remember that very clearly. 2 Q: Your father was in electronics and had an electronics store? EASTHAM: That’s right. Q: In Dumas? EASTHAM: That’s right. He sold radios and repaired radios when they had tubes in them, from a shop behind my grandfather’s finance office, where he handled his farming business. Q: Oh yeah this is when the radio was the means of reaching out. EASTHAM: Yeah, but he had the first television in the town too; television reception arrived when I was pretty small. They said they taught me to say, “Television is the coming thing” to customers. Q: Okay well let’s talk about Dumas; what was it like as you recall? EASTHAM: Well, when I was growing up, I remember it as a town with a lot of divisions. Obviously I don’t know it currently, because I’ve been away for about forty years or even longer than that actually, and I haven’t spent more than two nights consecutively there since I joined the foreign service. But when I said divisions, I meant in several ways. It has a railroad running down the middle of it and the highway used to run along the railroad until they built what was called the new highway, soon to be a four-lane highway, which moved everything about a mile out to the east. It had another division in that it was a thoroughly segregated community. Approximately, I think, half African-American and half white, with three or four Chinese families and a similar number of Jewish families. The social divide between black and white was pretty complete. But it is a town that has changed a great deal over my lifetime. When I was a child I remember the farmers all coming to town on Saturdays; Saturday was a huge day for the merchants in the downtown area with cars and mules and wagons parked all along the railroad tracks there. People would come into town in the morning and go back after dark. You could not walk down the sidewalk without bumping into people on Saturday evening. That doesn’t happen any more. In fact most of the downtown stores are either gone for good or closed on Saturday. Saturday trips to town faded away in the mid- 1960s. Q: Of course a lot of people did mule wagons. I know in the ‘40s my farther had a slow lumber concern in Meridian, Mississippi, and I’d stayed there a couple times watching the wagons with mules come in Black and white; for a lot of people that is how they got around. EASTHAM: Then you had in the ‘50s the increasing mechanization of farming, which caused a lot of the population to seek other work and, of course, the little town did a lot 3 of struggling to try to put in light manufacturing industries to accommodate people who were losing their employment on the farms. Now, you know, it’s very easy for some guy and his two sons to farm 5,000 acres or 10,000 acres or something like that with equipment and one or two help. They don’t need repeated applications of labor as they did before. And the result is that the population in the county has dropped by about half since 1960. My dad at one point actually farmed a piece of my grandfather’s land in the sense that he hired the workers, directed the work, and handled the financing and the sale of the crop. One of my memories of about five years of age is going out there for the cotton picking where we had lots of people with big sacks picking cotton and my dad sitting at a table at the end of the day with stacks of quarters in front of him to pay them for their day’s labor, based on how may pounds of cotton they had managed to pick out. Q: Okay as a kid in the first place were you the only child? EASTHAM: No, I have two younger brothers. Q: Where were you in rank order? EASTHAM: The oldest. Q: What was it like as a very small kid; what did you do? EASTHAM: Oh I don’t know.