The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project SYLVIA BAZALA Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: February 3, 2014 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is the February 3, 2014, with Sylvia Bazala. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Sylvia, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? BAZALA: I was born in Virginia, in Portsmouth. My father was in the U.S Navy at the time. Q: OK, let’s talk about your father’s side first. What do you know about the family? BAZALA: I know quite a bit because my father was very interested in his own genealogy, and I inherited most of his papers. He also wrote an autobiography. He was born in Georgetown County, South Carolina in 1911. He came from a family of rice planters that owned several plantations over the years. My father traced the family all the way back to Scotland before they migrated to South Carolina in the 18th century. The family became prominent in the 19th century when rice growing was at its peak in South Carolina. Dad grew up on a plantation called Belle Isle. When rice production declined after the Civil War, plantation owners turned to alternative ways of earning income. My grandfather, for example, hosted hunters who came from the north and paid to go duck hunting every year on the plantation, and he established a public garden for paying visitors known as Belle Isle Garden. During World War II President Roosevelt toured Belle Isle during a visit to South Carolina. Unfortunately, the decline in rice production in South Carolina, a destructive hurricane, the depression, and a fire that destroyed the family home in 1942 eventually forced the sale of most of the family’s property in the 1950s. When my father was just a teenager he joined the U.S. Navy as a reserve soldier/sailor. Then he went to Clemson and majored in agriculture so he could go back to the plantation and raise crops and help with the Garden. Dad went on to get a master’s degree from Louisiana State University and a PhD from Cornell in horticulture. That would have been in the 1930s. He had just started a job in Auburn, Alabama as a college teacher when World War II intervened. Because he was in the naval reserve, he was called up in 1941 and ordered to Virginia. I was born in 1941 right after Pearl Harbor. Q: What was the family name? BAZALA: Johnstone, with an E on the end. 1 Q: Well, let’s talk about the Civil War. BAZALA: OK. I’m not entirely sure, but I think there was one member of the family who was an aide to a general fighting on the southern side. But it was also important to grow crops for the cause, primarily rice. Belle Isle hosts a Civil War historical site. Battery White was established as a defense installation with cannons that overlooked Winyah Bay in Georgetown County. Its purpose was to defend against any union ships that attempted to enter the bay. Q: What did your father do during World War II? BAZALA: He was a naval officer. At first he was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia and assigned to the USS Delta, a new cargo ship. After trips to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, the ship was assigned to convoy duty to carry supplies and equipment to Iceland for the allied war effort. He made about five trips to Iceland in 1941-42, but it was very dangerous business because of the German submarines operating in the North Atlantic. He didn’t see me for the first couple of months of my life until he got back to Norfolk. In July 1942 he was transferred to the west coast and stationed initially in Washington state and later in California. He was a gunnery officer and executive officer on several ships that were transporting troops and airplanes to the battle areas in the Pacific. His ships participated in some major battles including Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Kwajalein, and Okinawa. He was all over the Pacific delivering men, equipment, and aircraft. He also set foot in the Philippines and Japan at the end. So he was right in the thick of it during the whole thing. Q: Oh, he certainly was. BAZALA: I have almost all the letters my mother and father wrote to each other during the war, and they are quite interesting, at least to me. I put them all together chronologically. Dad stayed in the naval reserve for several years after the war and retired as a captain. Q: What is the background of your mother and her family? BAZALA: My mother was from north Louisiana. Her father owned a printing plant and was a publisher of a weekly newspaper. She was the second of five children. She had a couple of years of college and was teaching school when she met my father. It was the depression era, and my father’s best chance of finding employment at that time was through his status as a naval reserve officer. His unit was assigned to work with the CCC. Q: Civilian Conservation Corps. BAZALA: Right. He was sent to a CCC camp in the north woods of Louisiana. Even though he was in the navy, he was sent to inland Louisiana to set up a camp to provide employment for young men. My parents met because my mother was working for her father on the newspaper during the summer months, and he sent her out to the camp to interview the camp leaders for a story about the camp, which was named after the family. It was Camp Colvin. 2 Q: Where did you grow up? BAZALA: The first five years of my life my mother and father were moving back and forth across the country and up and down the California coast. My mother tried to make her home wherever my father was stationed. When I was five years old, my father was finally discharged from the navy, and he resumed his job teaching horticulture at Auburn University, a position he had before the war started. So we returned there. That’s where my sister was born. Q: Did you grow up as a kid in Auburn? BAZALA: We didn’t stay there very long because my father went to work for a cottonseed oil company in Dallas, Texas. He didn’t like that, so he went back into academia and found a position at Ohio State University. From there he went on to become head of the Department of Horticulture at the University of Georgia. That’s really where I grew up - from about the age of nine. Q: How were the elementary schools that you went to? BAZALA: Switching around was difficult because there were different curricula in different places. I remember in Ohio I was having trouble reading, so I was put in the lowest reading group in third grade. I was so insulted by that I managed to be in the top group by the end of the year. I also remember being taught Ohio history, which didn’t mean much to me later. When I moved to Georgia I had not yet learned multiplication tables, which they were already teaching there. So I had to learn them quickly. There was no consistency in the curriculum. Each state was doing its own thing. Eventually I caught up with everything by the time I entered Athens High School in Athens, Georgia. Q: You were at Athens High School from when to when? BAZALA: There was no junior high, so I started in eighth grade. I graduated in 1959. Q: So it would have been a five-year high school? BAZALA: Yes. Q: Going back just a bit, were you much of a reader? BAZALA: Oh yes, a voracious reader. No TV. That came in in the 1950s and my parents were rather slow to adopt the technology. I joined the local public library, and that’s what I did all summer when I wasn’t at a camp. I read books. Q: Can you think of any books that you read on your own that really stirred you or were fun to read or stuck with you? 3 BAZALA: Probably the same things I still like to read, which are history and biography and some fiction. Q: What sort of history did you like? BAZALA: When I went to college I majored in European history and political science. Modern European history was my focus, and still is. I am still very interested in that subject. Q: Was high school segregated at the time? BAZALA: Yes. Q: Did you feel the change coming or not, or was it pretty well set? BAZALA: You could feel it, but I felt it more the first year of college. At that time in the deep south we grew up with certain assumed norms about things. I can clearly remember the separate water fountains at the public library. In addition to the unfairness of it all, I thought that it was very impractical having two separate fountains. Q: Yes. BAZALA: My first year of college I attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I was very much a minority up there as a southerner. I was something of a curiosity. Q: You have a strong southern accent? BAZALA: I did. People would come up to me and they would have the strangest ideas, like, “do you all have TV down there?” or “how do you like wearing shoes now?” There was all this teasing.