Interview with Wayne White

Library of Congress Interview with Wayne White The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project WAYNE WHITE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: April 21, 2005 Copyright 2006 ADST Q: Today is 21 April 2005. This is an interview with Wayne White. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. You go by Wayne? WHITE: Wayne. Q: All right. Well to start off with, when and where were you born? WHITE: I was born in Philadelphia January 30, 1950. Q: OK, let's start just to get a little feel for the family. Tell me about your father's side of the family. What do you know about it? WHITE: Oh, like so many people, I could go on forever, but I will try to avoid that. On my father's side, half German, half English, with just enough Irish from one ancestor to get me into St. Patrick's Day parties. They are both amusing in the sense that the German half of the family came here in the late 19th century and set up a liquor distributing business in Philadelphia, and were quite successful. Then their business collapsed in 1920, as you can imagine it might when Prohibition came. The other half were also fairly well- Interview with Wayne White http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001482 Library of Congress to-do by, say, 1900, breaking into the white collar upper middle class through the shoe industry, but starting at the bottom and attaining ownership of a shoe business in one generation. My great grandfather apprenticed as a leather-maker in Birmingham, England, immigrating first to Camden, N.J., briefly, and then, finally, Philadelphia, where he set up a small factory. Everything apparently was just going great until something called the Great Depression came along, and that left the family shoe business in ruins. They all had to go and find real jobs. They were left with a fleet of Buicks, several nice homes in Philadelphia, and a one large vacation home on the Jersey Shore. My mother's side of the family, is also German/English. The more interesting story was my grandfather on the German side; his father, from Stuttgart, came to the United States during the Civil War — 1863 to be exact. He was a cabin boy on ship bound for Philadelphia and then to Bombay. He jumped ship in Philadelphia, hoping to be a Union drummer boy, perhaps inspired by Franz Seigel's poorly-led, but largely German corps in the Union Army (another “political general”). But they apparently didn't need any more drummer boys (at least at that moment), so he ended up hanging around Philadelphia and eventually became a smith (in his case, a tad different from a regular blacksmith in that he only made wrought iron tools instead of also shoeing horses). My Grandfather in the early 20th century was apprenticed to a master stone mason and became one himself. Perhaps more lasting than what I did in government and I am now doing here in these sessions, working out of a firm in Philadelphia, between 1928 and 1940, he spent much of his time in Washington and Annapolis working on monumental architecture. He built the extension on the chapel in Annapolis, for example, which makes up most of the chapel we see today. Q: This was when? WHITE: Around 1939-1940. Q: Yeah it was. I went to the chapel in Annapolis as a kid when that was being put on. Interview with Wayne White http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001482 Library of Congress WHITE: He built both of the extensions to Bancroft Hall, the stone work that is. He was a stone mason, although that meant setting bronze windows and things like that too to keep the stone work going. In the district, he built the Scottish Right Temple on 16th Street. He did much of the interior stone work on the Supreme Court building, mainly the actual court room inside. It is very beautiful. He worked a little bit on the justice Department, but that job was temporary. He built the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Building (the structure next to the Holocaust Museum), which is the most interesting of his jobs because that is the only one he did absolutely from the bottom up, which meant going to the quarry, selecting the stone, arranging for them to be brought to the job site via railroad tracks that at that time extended right up to the site, and then setting or overseeing the setting of every stone in the building. We have some pictures from that era which are quite fascinating, including engineering photos of Bancroft Hall's wings. The most amusing story if this is not taking too much time, is when he and his boss, the company supervisor, were asked to go over and see whether they could finish the mason's monument in old town Alexandria (the obelisk across from the train station now contianing the George Washington Museum). They found the job simple enough, so his boss said, “Yeah, I think we can do it. Do you have any problem?” “No.” They then strolled into old town so his boss could get a shot of whiskey (being a hard-drinking Irishman) and found out that Virginia was still dry. That was the end of the project in Alexandria, with the job supervisor remarking: “If I can't get a drink within three blocks of the job, we are not doing it.” Q: Well how about let's take your mother and father. Did your father go to college or not? WHITE: One portion of that story is unfortunate. He was very good in sports. He lettered in high school at the time when high school was more important, and one of the best ones in Philadelphia, Simon Graz High School, lettering in basketball, soccer, and baseball. He also played minor league baseball in the days when there was something called D Ball, where you were paid per game. He was a first baseman. The University of Delaware Interview with Wayne White http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001482 Library of Congress offered him a sports scholarship. The family which was still struggling because of the failure of the shoe factory, which made him feel rather guilty about going off to college and not getting a job. This is something that I always thought was very wrong. A family should make sacrifices for their child, where this family didn't. They encouraged him to help out, and so he went to work instead of college. Soon after, he was drafted in the peace time draft in September 1941, went off to the war, and thought he was going to be thrown into the struggle at the deep end of the pool because he was trained by December, 1941, infantry. He was sent out on the convoy, not so famous but getting more historical attention now, into the Pacific at the time when Bataan was besieged (very early on—January 1942). Things were in horrendous shape. George Marshall and others wanted to use the troops on the convoy to secure islands on the route to Australia and in order to protect lines of communication to the southwest Pacific, whereas Macarthur was screaming that it should go right to the Philippines in a forlorn attempt to relieve US forces there. Anyway, Marshall won and my father, concerned that he was going to be thrown quickly into battle, flat-topped WWI helmet, WWI gear and all, was instead dropped on Bora Bora in the Tahiti island group as part of Operation Bobcat (securing strategic island groups), and spent much of the war on Bora Bora quite happily, switching over to quartermaster (Americal Division) and eventually moving on to New Caledonia where he played with the New Caledonia army baseball league. I understand generals bet on the league, and with some major leaguers on the island with the army, my father had a grand old time in the Pacific playing for them until returning to the States with sufficient overseas “points” in November 1944. Q: Then what did he do when he came out of the military. WHITE: Well just before he was drafted, he had gotten a job with Sears and Roebuck, so he eventually returned to that job in the fall of 1945 and spent his whole career with Sears on the mail order side of the business, the company's original cachet. He ended as a division head in Sears and Roebuck, Philadelphia. I at one point wondered when I was a Interview with Wayne White http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001482 Library of Congress division chief in INR (until 2002, when I was elevated to the deputy director's position), that I had never really gone any further than my father! Q: How about your mother? What was her background? WHITE: I told you about my grandfather, the master stone mason, who was her father. She basically did the usual thing in those days, and went no further than high school. She graduated from high school during WWII, went to Sears, and at age 19 was managing an entire department because all the men were off fighting the war. Then, when all the men came back, she was relegated to sort of clerking, and met my father there. After they were married in 1947, she did what most women did in that era, left work, and became a homemaker, but clearly was frustrated at the time, doing a lot of sketching, some of which survive.

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