Interview with Robert Mandeville # IST-A-L-2013-103 Interview # 1: December 6, 2013 Interviewer: Mike Czaplicki
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Interview with Robert Mandeville # IST-A-L-2013-103 Interview # 1: December 6, 2013 Interviewer: Mike Czaplicki COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Czaplicki: Today is Friday, December 6, 2013. My name is Mike Czaplicki. I'm the project historian for the Governor Thompson Oral History Project here at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I'm with Dr. Robert Mandeville, who was Governor Thompson's budget director for most of his tenure. He's been gracious enough to come in on a very cold day and sit down and chat with us. Thank you, Bob. Mandeville: You're welcome. Czaplicki: We always like to start at the beginning with these things and ask, when and where were you born? Mandeville: Nineteen thirty-one, April 29, in Jacksonville, Illinois. Czaplicki: What is this document we're looking at here? Is this a scrapbook of yours? An autobiography?1 Mandeville: Yes, written about three years ago. Czaplicki: Unpublished? Mandeville: Unpublished, yes. I wrote it for my kids and my grandkids. Czaplicki: Oh, excellent. I'd like to take a look at that at some point in some more detail. Any brothers and sisters? 1 Dr. Mandeville wrote an autobiography for his family members, which he brought with him to the interview sessions. Throughout these transcripts, when he makes asides to talk about pictures and newspaper articles, he is usually referring to this document. Some of this material is reproduced in the transcripts. Robert Mandeville Interview # IST-A-L-2013-103 Mandeville: Yes, there were eight in our family. I had three brothers and four sisters. Eight total. Czaplicki: How did your family happen to end up in Jacksonville? Mandeville: Actually, my dad and mom were both from Jacksonville. Dad grew up on a farm, south of Jacksonville, a place called Lynnville. In 1888, his father, my grandfather, homesteaded in western Nebraska. He received title to 160 acres if he stayed on it five years. You know how that works. Czaplicki: Under the Homestead Act? Mandeville: Yes. Unfortunately, there were many years of drought. He ended up losing the farm, moving back to Jacksonville, and buying a farm from a relative. So they were farmers most of their lives. My dad, there were nine children in his family, which was not uncommon in those days. Dad was from Jacksonville. My mom was from Alexander, which is just a few miles east of Jacksonville. They met in Jacksonville, and got married in 1921. Czaplicki: What did they grow? What was on the farm? Mandeville: On the farm in Lynnville, they grew crops like corn and soybeans, which is about all Illinois grows. But later on, in 1942, my dad bought a truck farm in St. Louis County and we moved down there. You have tomatoes, you have asparagus—we had an acre of asparagus. If you ever cut an acre of asparagus, you wouldn't want to do it again; (laughs) your back would be thrown out. We had tomatoes, we had grapes, we had plums, we had peaches, we had apples, and we had potatoes. We would grow them. We'd put them in the back of a '35 Ford and go down to Third Street in St. Louis and sell them to the merchants. They would come to the marketplace and pick up a crate of tomatoes or potatoes or grapes or whatever. Then dad went to work for what is now McDonnell Douglas. It was Curtiss- Wright at the time. He had been an auto mechanic. Ran his own shop in Jacksonville, on South Main, for twenty-five years. He’d just mainly work on the ignition systems of an automobile, coils, batteries, and so on. But his health got bad working inside all the time, so the doctor advised him to change jobs. So he took a job in a factory. We moved down to St. Louis County, and he worked in the factory, and he also worked on the farm. I went through the fifth grade at Our Saviour School in Jacksonville, run by the Dominican nuns. Then when I went to St. Louis County, the last three grades and high school were at St. Mary's. Grade school run by Franciscans, and the high school by the St. Joseph nuns. Got well-indoctrinated in nuns. (laughter) Czaplicki: Was it a big change to move over to St. Louis County, or were you still primarily rural? 2 Robert Mandeville Interview # IST-A-L-2013-103 Mandeville: It was a big change. We didn't have the farm in Jacksonville. My dad's family did. In Jacksonville, we lived in the city. We initially lived on West College Street, which was kind of—I would call it a pretty high-income level there. It was the house of one of my mom's relatives. During the Depression, in '33, we lost use of that house, and we moved in with my mom's aunt on East College from '33 to '42. That was different. I was only two years old when we moved, so I don't really remember much about it. But I do remember moving to St. Louis. That was a change, from a small city lot, right behind the Lutheran church on East College, to a forty-acre truck farm. That was a change. I'll show you a few pictures. (pages turning) This is me and my dog in 1946. Czaplicki: Your dog's name is Zed? Mandeville: Zed, yeah. This is the farmhouse we lived in. It was a two-bedroom house, with a kitchen and a living room downstairs. So all seven of us—one of my sisters died young—plus mom and dad, lived in two bedrooms. I can’t remember where some of us slept. (laughs) There wasn't room for all of us upstairs. Czaplicki: Did you move into an existing house, or did you put that up yourselves? Mandeville: It was an existing house, built in '21. A guy by the name of Mives. We bought the farm from Mr. Mives, and this was his house. So when we moved in, the house was there. There was one bathroom inside and an outhouse. And again, in '42, an outhouse was not uncommon on a farm. Large families were not either. Czaplicki: That was Mr. Marbus? M-a-r-b-u-s? Mandeville: M-i-v-e-s. He built it in '21. It was not a very nice house. The basement was always wet and leaking. But when you're young, you don't even realize you're in a bad house. You take it for granted. Czaplicki: Is it safe to say you grew up a Cardinals fan? Mandeville: Yeah. In fact, I went to a World Series in 1944. The Cardinals played the Browns. Intercity series. The only time that happened, because the Browns 3 Robert Mandeville Interview # IST-A-L-2013-103 were generally very bad. If it hadn't been war years, they wouldn't have been there. They had a center fielder, named Pete Gray, with one arm. Pete Gray would catch the ball, and quicker than most outfielders, he would put his glove underneath his stub and throw the ball. It was a good experience to see that. Czaplicki: So you would have been about thirteen when you went to that? Mandeville: Yeah, 1944. Nothing much happened when I was in the eighth grade, except I was working. A neighbor had a foundry where he made the aluminum castings for electric motors. When you do that and you break the mold, little bits of aluminum fall into the sand. My job was to shovel the sand into a sifter and get all the aluminum out of the sand so we could make the next mold. I did that until I went to high school. I went to high school three years at St. Mary's High School, a small Catholic high school in Bridgeton, Missouri, run by the St. Joseph nuns out at Carondelet in St. Louis. In '48, when I was seventeen, my teachers recommended I skip the senior year and go on to college. I thought that was neat, so I did. For the first two years, I went to St. Benedict's College in Atchison, Kansas. It's a rather small college, I think about a thousand students in 1948, run by the Benedictines. So I'm getting a good mixture of philosophy from the different orders. I was on the boxing team for two years. (pages turning) Czaplicki: Oh, look at that. Mandeville: Each year, we had what they called a smoker, where those on the boxing team would box people from other places. I boxed a guy from Kansas City, and I boxed a guy from Boys Town.2 I won both fights, but Frank Szminski got me with a right cross, and I literally heard bells ringing. But he didn't knock me out. Ended on a split decision. Czaplicki: That didn't make your parents nervous, you getting into the ring? Mandeville: They didn't know. Czaplicki: They didn't know? 2 Boys Town is a famous social service agency for boys, originally founded as an orphanage by Father Edward Flanagan in Omaha, Nebraska.