Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Wesley Egan The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR WESLEY EGAN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 28, 2003 Copyright 2006 ADST Q: Today is the 28th of October, 2003. This is an interview with Wesley Egan and its W- E-S-L-E-Y and E-G-A-N. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy and you go by Wes? EGAN: I go by Wes. Q: All right. Let's start at the beginning. Could you tell me when and where you were born? EGAN: I was born in Madison, Wisconsin in January of 1946. Q: Let's start, first let's do your father's side. How about, where did the Egans come from and how did they get to Madison? EGAN: The Egans are, it's a very common name in New York City and the metropolitan New York area. I come from a long line of New Yorkers on both my mother's and my father's side; all born either in the city or in Flushing in Queens. My father went back to the University of Wisconsin in Madison after the war to finish his undergraduate degree. He and my mother were living in a small apartment about a block off Lake Mendota when I was born. Interview with Ambassador Wesley Egan http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001347 Library of Congress Q: How about your father's family in New York? What sort of work were they in? EGAN: My grandfather was a businessman. There were small businessmen on both sides of my family. My grandfather was in the automobile business for many years. My grandfather on my mother's side worked for a large dairy company for most of his life. My parents were the first in their family to go to college. Q: Your mother was from where? EGAN: Also born and raised in Flushing. Q: Her family name? EGAN: Her maiden name was Skeuse. Q: How do you spell that? EGAN: It's an unusual name. S-K-E-U-S-E. Both my parents had German/Irish backgrounds. My mother and father went to Flushing High School and went to St. George's Episcopal Church in Flushing where they met working on the church newspaper. Flushing was a small village in those days. Q: That was before the, what was it, what about the world's fair? EGAN: Well, the world's fair was there twice, the first in the late 1930's. Q: It was '39, I remember. EGAN: It was there again in Flushing Meadows in 1964. In fact I worked at that fair in 1964 and 1965. My mother was born in 1918. My father was born in 1919. So, by 1939 they would have been in their early '20s and I'm sure went to that fair. Interview with Ambassador Wesley Egan http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001347 Library of Congress Q: Oh, yes. Well, now, did your father get involved in World War II? EGAN: Yes he did. He was a pilot. He was a bomber pilot in the Second World War. When the United States entered the war, he signed up and was trained as a pilot in El Paso and Tucson. In those days military spouses didn't count for much as far as the armed forces were concerned. There were no provisions made for housing or travel or anything else, so my mother got on a train in New York City and followed my dad to El Paso and rented a room in a boarding house on Montana Avenue with two other women that she'd never met whose husbands were also being trained. She did the same thing in Tucson. When my dad went overseas, she went back to New York to wait for him. When he came out of the service at the end of the war, they went back to Madison for him to finish his undergraduate degree. Q: Was he either in Italy or England? EGAN: He was in North Africa. Q: North Africa. EGAN: He was based in Rabat and then Benghazi and for a little with the British east of Cairo on the Suez Canal. For their 50th wedding anniversary, we brought them back to Cairo. My father had not been there in 45 years. We tried to find the old RAF base but couldn't. He flew mostly over Corsica and Sardinia. A lot of those men did not come back. He was to have been part of that famous raid on the oil fields. Q: It was Romania. EGAN: Romania, that's right, but he came down with sand fly fever two days before and was grounded. Otherwise he would have been on that raid, but he came back to the States in probably 1945 and went back to Madison with my mother. I was born in January of the next year. Interview with Ambassador Wesley Egan http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001347 Library of Congress Q: What fields were your parents studying at Madison? EGAN: My father did his undergraduate degree in dramatic arts. Madison was a real hub of young actors, set designers, and playwrights in those days. James Daley was part of that crowd and my father was very active in the theater community in Madison. Q: Did he continue this when he came back? EGAN: Well, his intention was to get his undergraduate degree in dramatic arts and then get his masters degree with Paul Green at the Playmakers Theater at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Paul Green went on to write several of those great outdoor epics, The Lost Colony and things that have played in North Carolina and elsewhere. He did all the course work, but he never wrote his thesis. Instead he went to Kent State University in Ohio to teach dramatic arts. He was teaching at Kent when the Korean War broke out. He was called back in to the air force at the time of Korea and never left. He retired in the 1974 after 37 years as an air force pilot. Q: How about your mother? EGAN: My mother went to Hunter College in New York City but only for two years. She didn't finish for financial reasons and went to work in New York for AT&T. She never went back to school. Q: Did you have brothers and sisters? EGAN: I have a younger brother born in Ohio in the early '50s, no sisters. I have a first cousin, the son of my father's brother who was killed in the Second World War and whose wife died in the early '50s, who lived with us as a brother. He's six years older and my younger brother is six years younger. Interview with Ambassador Wesley Egan http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001347 Library of Congress Q: You came out of New York, how Catholic was your family? How Catholic did you grow up? EGAN: Well, I didn't grow up Catholic at all. Because of the way my name is spelled, I should be a Catholic, but my grandfather, who was a Roman Catholic, married a Lutheran and was promptly disowned by his family. His sister did not speak to him for I think 50 years. He was ostracized and the compromise he and my grandmother made was to join the Episcopal Church. So I was raised as an Episcopalian. Q: When you sort of remember, when you grew up you were where at Kent State? EGAN: My oldest memories are of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I don't think I could have been more than about three when my father was doing his graduate work at the University. We went to Tripoli, Libya in 1952. My dad was assigned to Wheelus Field. His next assignment was Mitchell Field on Long Island. I then have very strong memories from elementary school through the ninth grade living on the North Shore of Long Island. In 1960 we moved to West Texas when my Dad made the transition from the Tactical Air Command to SAC [Strategic Air Command] at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene. It was a big base in those days. I think it's a B1 base now, but he was flying C141s. In the early '60s he was assigned to Bangkok for about a year and a half flying counter insurgency groups in northern Thailand. Bangkok became one of his favorite cities in the world. He came back from Thailand in 1964 and was assigned to the faculty of the Air War College at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama. He was later in charge of the airborne command post at the Pentagon. He arranged his last active duty assignment as the Air Force ROTC Commandant and the Director of the Curriculum of Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and retired in '74. Q: Going back, since you jumped all over the place, let's talk about, rather than, what do you recall, as a kid? How did you grow up? Was this a family that sat around the dinner table or talked about world events? Interview with Ambassador Wesley Egan http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001347 Library of Congress EGAN: It was probably a slightly odd mix of the theater crowd and a house full of books related to the theater, dramatic arts, set design, the classics and history.