Ruth Ashton Taylor: Interview #1

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but through different people passing away and my not being present at any of these occasions, the documents have gotten lost. And it doesn't matter to me. My kids think it's kind of interesting, and it's interesting because I can't be specific.

Biagi: That would be British roots?

Taylor: British roots for my mother's family, the Ashtons. The great-grandparents had accumulated wealth, and I suppose it was handed down before that. My mother, who would be in New York City, used to come and say, "There's where Granddad was born." He was born in a house at Fifty-fourth and Fifth Avenue, which was a pretty good address for the family to have real estate. This was the case, and the great-grandmother and great-grandfather decided to come west on the train in the nineteenth century. I don't know dates of that. But they dropped off kids along the way. Two of their sons dropped off in Shelton, Nebraska, and were given big parcels of land that somehow the family had. The great-grandmother and two daughters continued on to the west. As I understand it, he liked being back in the baggage or cargo cars with his horse, and as I understand it, he died back there. I just think he didn't want to face any more time with my great-grandmother, who was a real tyrant. She lived to be in her late nineties, and she ran the family quite a lot.

They settled in Pasadena for one place and had a place in Santa Monica. We had several places out here, and they bought property around. Anyway, one of the sons they had dropped off was my grandfather.

Biagi: What was his name?

Taylor: His name was Thaddeus Ashton. He was a gentleman farmer, had a terrible mouth. He had actually gone to college. I think it was Northwestern. Was that where they put their kids through? I guess it was. One of my uncles came out here and was an attorney. In fact, there was an Ashton Street in Beverly Hills, in West Los Angeles, named after him. He was Fred Ashton.

Anyway, Thad, my granddad with his filthy mouth, married this lovely lady who was not at all highly educated, but a terrific worker, and I think that's the way a lot of men were at that point. She was a farm girl. Mimmi, I called her. I don't remember my grandmother's name. But anyway, they had five children; my mother was the second oldest. They lived on the farm and worked.

Biagi: What was your mother's name?

Taylor: Flora Louise, which she hated. Everybody called her Sis, and that was what she was called all her life. Anyway, my mother hated the farm, even though my granddad had money, he never did show it in any ostentatious way. He had a couple of good cars. But my grandmother worked her head off. She farmed hard and they grew a lot of things and was always cooking wonderful things. I can remember eating fresh asparagus and cherries off a cherry tree, and there were always chickens, fresh chickens. I had an aunt who broke an ankle jumping over a fence after a chicken. But that was where my mom was born and raised and wanted to get away from. She hated the farm life because she had to do too much work. There was not much in the way of conveniences. There weren't many conveniences at that time. So the women of the farm worked hard, and Mother did. I guess they had help from time to time. I don't know.

I know that I spent quite a lot of time on the farm, but I don't remember a whole lot about it. I loved going out with my grandfather on the great big things that would go through the fields,

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Biagi: And a dancer.

Taylor: Excellent dancer, I guess. He was involved with the Spanish branch of the Bank of America, which I think at the time was the Bank of Italy. But at any rate, he had to dress every day, and I know my mother used to talk about how she would have to press these trousers every day. He was meticulous and proud and impossible, I gather.

Biagi: Where did they live?

Taylor: They lived in Long Beach. I can only remember one house, and that house was a little bungalow in Long Beach, where we lived when I was about four, which was about when the divorce occurred. Mother, at that time, became very ill. I don't know if I remember this or if people have simply told me, but a number of members of the family who had been from far-away places, Nebraska or someplace, came to visit my mother. Among them was one of the relatives who was a doctor. My mother had been going and going, but she hadn't been feeling well. This relative who was a doctor said, "Sis, you've got a temperature," and took her temperature and it was like 104 or something. Ultimately, my mother had double pneumonia and almost died, and she was at home. She'd had a lung collapse, and they didn't, of course, have antibiotics or any of those things. She said she saw me going down the hall, and said to herself, "I can't die because I can't leave her with that (whatever word she used)," who was my father. She had been an English woman and head-strong. For that kind of a woman to get teamed up with—as dominating as they are, generally—a Hispanic man was just a terrible idea. I mean, they danced divinely together, but that just doesn't do it forever.

So my mother did recover and decided she had to get a divorce. The boys wanted to go with her, because Mom had been a good mom to them, too.

Biagi: So the boys had moved in, the three sons?

Taylor: Mother couldn't handle taking them, so my mother did leave my father, though, and the divorce proceedings went ahead, and we went back to Nebraska to stay on the farm.

Biagi: You went with her?

Taylor: Yes. The boys didn't. I'm not sure exactly what happened to them immediately afterwards. They would come to see me from time to time. We went back there, and my great-grandmother, the tyrant, was just outraged by the fact that anybody in our family could get a divorce; this also was not accepted. She just didn't even allow her money or anything. She would help Sis out. Mother and I stayed with them sometimes, but not much.

Mother went back to the farm and proceeded to try to get well, and also she would bake things and try to sell them so she could try to make some money for herself.

Biagi: Where would she sell them?

Taylor: In town. She was an excellent cook. This ultimately became what she did. She baked cakes and pies and rolls and coffee cakes and all those things. I don't really remember what all she did bake; I just know that everybody always had a lot of good food around. And I couldn't eat much. That was one of the things about me; I was not a real healthy kid. I always had some stomach problems. In fact, they could hardly keep me alive the first year because nothing would agree with me. This is in that other oral history. They finally found Horlich's Malted Milk and I

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it when I got noticed for doing a good job. Again, I think part of it was a loneliness, though, and a striving, though the family always loved me a lot, it wasn't like having a close family and a home. I was a mobile kid and we were tracking around.

My mother finally, though, found a house and a restaurant together close by where one of my aunts lived, my aunt and the uncle who had the store. This person who owned this house and restaurant wanted to sell it. My mom somehow—I think she borrowed money from my granddad or something. I don't know all of her negotiations, but she said that was a way to have me with her and she could look after me. My mother went into this little restaurant when I was in about the third grade.

Biagi: The restaurant was where?

Taylor: In Signal Hill, right across the street from Long Beach. Signal Hill was this outstanding landmark in Southern California with all the oil derricks over it. When you go into Southern California, you can see all these oil derricks that went up. Signal Hill, as a town, wasn't much. They had a city hall and it was incorporated, but it was surrounded by Long Beach. We lived right across the street from Long Beach, but we lived in Signal Hill. I have often made the comment that I'm probably the only person that anybody ever heard of who grew up in Signal Hill and lived! In fact, my husband is even aghast. The other day he was talking about the density of oil. Anybody falling into an oil pool, that's not a good idea, and probably never will be seen again. But we used to sail rafts across the oil ponds, and we would walk on rotary mud and we'd climb on old oil derricks. My mom was always working, so she never did know all this stuff was going on. There were a couple of girls in the neighborhood, but mainly there were boys around, so we were pretty rough and tumble.

I also know about that time my mother started giving me dancing lessons at Marion Rankin Dance Studio in Long Beach. I was very good at it and became one of Marion's good pupils and loved it, and we did a lot of dance programs for hospitals and at theaters, and we opened all the public buildings in Long Beach whenever there would be a new building.

Biagi: What kind of dancing were you doing?

Taylor: I did everything. I did tap, acrobatic, ballet, toe. I hated toe because it just never felt good. But I was an excellent tap dancer, which has followed me through life, and I was a very good acrobat. I was extremely limber, so I could do a lot of double-jointed things. We'd do these tap-acrobatic routines, and I had a partner, a girl, and we were very good together. But when I started to dance, it seemed, for one thing, to help me physically a great deal, but all of a sudden, they say poison came out of my system. I got rashes and I got boils and I got eczema that started a lifelong pattern. I obviously had an allergy pattern there, and it all showed up as I became healthier, actually.

Biagi: Of course, at the time you didn't know you were getting healthier. You probably thought you were getting sicker. [Laughter.]

Taylor: I hated it! There were times when the eczema would be so bad on my hands that they'd have to be wrapped all the time and treated every day, then wrapped. I couldn't do my acrobatics because I couldn't stand on my hands because of all the bandages. That really plagued me for a year or so, but then I got better. Ever after, though, I had one little patch of eczema, particularly on the inside of a knee, and you could tell when I would be a nervous wreck, when things were getting too much for me, because that little patch of eczema would show up. I'm sure it's

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I didn't like that very much. I mean, I didn't like the job much, so I didn't try to make money that way too often. But that was the little house.

Biagi: She called the restaurant what?

Taylor: It was Sis's Cafe.

Biagi: Was it Sis's Cafe before she took it over, or had she renamed it?

Taylor: She renamed it. She was Sis, and she didn't like her Flora Louise name. She was Sis to everybody. My mother had a banter. She was great at wisecracks and she liked talking with everybody, and that was part of what the charm of her cafe was. The food was good and she had a couple of people. One was a remote aunt related to us many times away, but she was a good pie baker and cook. She worked with my mother. Then Mother would have a couple of waitresses. But Mother was mainly involved in everything that happened in that little restaurant.

Biagi: Kind of standard fare?

Taylor: Yes, very country cooking, where you would have your mashed potatoes and gravy and your vegetable and all different kinds of meat. She'd always have roasts, a ham, beef, and pork. Once in a while she would have Italian spaghetti that she made in a wonderful way that was from an Italian recipe that a navy chief had brought to her. Mother had a boyfriend who was a navy chief and a band master. He had brought this recipe to her. She made it, but it took her two days to make this particular sauce, but really everybody loved that, too. She always had great pies, lots of ice cream.

Biagi: Did you eat in the restaurant? Were all your meals essentially taken in the restaurant?

Taylor: No. I would eat my breakfast out there, lunch would be at school most of the time, and dinner, my mother would come in and bring dinner in. Mother didn't usually serve dinner. She served dinner early in her restaurant time and then she stopped serving dinner. So she would prepare things out there. She seldom used the stove. There was a stove in the house, but it seldom got used. People were always out there, so that I was in the house by myself, but I was right near people. I could always go out there. But it was not a real warm upbringing.

I had friends whose house I would go to a lot, one particular friend who still is my best friend. As these stories of age have gone around, you know, and people have arbitrarily chosen an age for me when they've written stories that I never did admit to, one nice reporter for the Times chose an age that was very nice, very flattering, and this girl, who is still my best girlfriend, whose family was very warm and they took me around with them a lot, a friend of hers said, "How could you have grown up with Ruth when you're so much older than she is?" [Laughter.] But that's where I found my companionship a lot, in this other family, the Lyons family.

Biagi: What was her name?

Taylor: Her name is Virginia Lyons. Her sister, Bernice, who was older, Bernice and Harold were twins. Harold was a great big, tall guy, probably 6'2" or 6'3". Bernice was a little tiny lady of about 5'2", and they were twins. But Bernice was a very witty person. She went to Scripps College and she was the one who took Virginia and me to Scripps to some dances, too, when we were in high school, in the hope that both Virginia and I would go to Scripps. Well, it ended up

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Taylor: The navy guy was fun and he taught me how to lead a band, you know, so I can still do four-four time and two-four time and three-four time. We'd go out on the ship and have dinner. But I didn't ever understand the relationship. It was the kind of relationship that was so private, and Mother was herself and kept so much to herself, and she was not able to communicate with me things that I needed to know growing up, to a large extent. A lot of things I had to find out the hard way that had to do with your own physical changes as a teenager. I never heard a discussion of sex in any fashion. I had no sex education and was naive all my life. My husbands—both of them—could hardly believe this woman! [Laughter.] And I agree, in retrospect. It's impossible for a kid to grow up beyond the third grade now and not know what I knew when I got married, I suppose.

But Mother never could talk about any of that. I found out when I began to have a menstrual period. The lady next door, whose child I used to take care of and babysit for, was my person to discuss all that with me. I would find other people. Of course, I reverted to being not healthy, because I was always terribly busy with dancing, which I kept up a lot, a long time. I worked hard at school. I did work at times with my mother. I took care of the house. When I was about ten or eleven, I read everything there was. Sometimes, because it was kind of lonely in the house, I'd go out and cozy up in the car and sit in the car and read. I would go to the library, but also Buffum's Department Store had a department that had a little library, and I read everything I could read.

But I was not busy enough, and in the summertime it was particularly a drag, so my mother got me a job answering phones for a lumber company about two blocks up from us.

Biagi: How old were you?

Taylor: I was not more than ten or eleven. So I'd answer phones in the summertime. I began to type their invoices, and because it was a lumber yard and the office was pretty dirty and certainly didn't meet my mother's standards or mine for cleanliness, I started washing the windows and doing the blinds and dusting everything and driving everybody crazy in this lumber yard. So the boss, though, finally added on a new office with walnut paneling and everything else, and they shaped that place up. I was working at that, and more and more I began to do their books. By the time I was twelve, I was doing their books. Then I was working after school, too.

Biagi: You worked after school and summers?

Taylor: Right.

Biagi: That lumber company was what?

Taylor: It was Ballantine Lumber Company. That started because my mother wanted me to have something to do, and it also began to help that I was making a little bit of money, too. That grew so that I did more and more at that lumber company. It also was the genesis of a close relationship that I had with a lot of the oil men and the people in the business. Very few women would have a chance to know what men really do in the afternoon. Maybe they do other things now, but in that particular era and in that particular place, the men would have their nice lunch and then they might, I suppose, go back to their offices for a while, but these guys who had their tool companies and their oil companies and their every kind of companies would gather in the afternoon and play cards at this lumber company. Or if they didn't play there, they'd play across the street at the Wonderly Construction Company. But there would be these guys playing cards with all of the language that goes along with the rough-and-tumble life of oil people.

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[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Taylor: She would go to Hawaii. As I say, my mom would take us for a week to Catalina. That was as far across the sea as I got. But when Virginia would come back, she and her sister Bernice would be all full of the hula and Hawaiian, too, so we also sang Hawaiian duets and did the hula. That was just kind of by osmosis that I got to travel to Hawaii and catch all these things. So we had our little acts and so on. But a lot of it had to do with the fact that she was a world traveler to Hawaii while I was working in the summertime most of the time—all the time, because I always worked in the summertime.

Biagi: When you went to high school, what high school was that?

Taylor: When I went to high school, I went to Long Beach Polytechnic High School. We both went there, too.

Biagi: You majored in math.

Taylor: I majored in math, but I also took Latin. We took heavy duty stuff—Latin, English. One of the courses I took in high school was very valuable. Though I had been a politician to a certain extent in junior high and had given speeches, and both Virginia and I were in what was called the Leadership Class, I wasn't still real outgoing. Of course, I loved to dance and I was in a lot of programs that way, but you could be very shy and be a dancer, just as long as you can smile. You don't have to say anything. Just smile. In fact, sometimes I've had the same feeling as I smiled on the air that I had when I used to dance, because after you smile so long, your cheeks start to wiggle and it becomes a real difficult thing. [Laughter.]

But I didn't become really comfortable in front of a lot of people until I took public speaking in high school as a course. But I had a very good teacher, Mr. McKay, and he had us join the Public Speaking Club. We would make our speeches out and around in the community for different kinds of occasions. I had a Mother's Day speech that everybody liked a lot, and I gave that Mother's Day speech every Mother's Day for the whole three years, I guess, everyplace, I mean a million places. I always sweat blood before I'd go out and give a speech, but I did it, and it was extremely valuable to me. As I say, I'd done a little bit of acting for some school plays and things like that, but that's not the same thing. There it's all memorizing and you can be an actor, I think, and act, or a dancer, and still be very shy. When you get out and speak, you have got to go out to the people and they've got to react.

Biagi: You had written this speech, obviously, and presented it.

Taylor: We didn't extemporize. That was a thing that you certainly learn. You should probably learn to extemporize as you're learning to speak in a prepared fashion, because if you make a mistake on your prepared speech, you could be thrown right out the window too fast. If you're able to get back on your feet, most of the time you could recover. But anyway, that was a thing that was extremely valuable.

I was still working after school, and I joined a lot of activities. I was in a lot of clubs.

Biagi: Such as?

Taylor: Hostess Club and the Welfare Club.

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my way through, and Mom came up with some of the dough. But it was a disgrace that my mother had divorced, and she was just wasn't part of the crowd, really, though she went up there and was the person who really helped my great-grandmother get around and all kinds of things from time to time. It's a part of the story you can hear if you want it, but it's really boring.

Anyway, the counselor decided I should send letters out, and I did, choosing where I wanted to go. I sent a letter to Stanford and I sent a letter to Scripps; I don't remember where else.

Biagi: Why Scripps?

Taylor: Scripps because that's where Virginia's sister had gone.

Biagi: Why Stanford?

Taylor: Because it was a prestigious place that I'd heard about. It wasn't like I'd been talked to a lot about it or like kids now know. I liked USC [University of Southern California] because I used to hear their football team. I liked Cotton Warburton and all those guys, and my mother and her friends in the shop would bet on the games on Saturday afternoon. But it wasn't a place that I thought of for going to college.

Scripps, I'd been there, I'd been to dances there. It was a hard institution at that point. It was extremely demanding. I often deplore how they have dropped their standards to such an extent. One reason, though, an entering class of ninety-five would be reduced to like twenty-five by the time they graduated.

But at any rate, I did send out these letters and I got scholarships to at least two institutions, and I chose to go to Scripps. I was also given opportunity to work, wait tables and things like that, and answer phones, which would help me with the money, because, as I recall, the tuition was $1,200 a year, which was a lot of money at that time.

Biagi: This would have been what year?

Taylor: 1939. For my mom and me, that was pretty heavy duty. But I had the scholarship, which was $500, as I remember, a year, and I worked, and Mother came up with some money. When I finished, they gave me a second scholarship so I wouldn't have to work so much, because I still was not a healthy person. They figured they wanted to protect their investment, I guess. [Laughter.] "Keep her alive 'til she can do something that we can be proud of!"

Biagi: What was your relationship with your father during this time?

Taylor: None. He had never contributed to my support, and my mother said so long as that was the case, he was not to see me. Considering how hard she had to work and his lack of taking any responsibility for me, even early, I guess he paid the bills while they lived together, but he certainly didn't provide any real help to accruing the kind of lifestyle anybody would want, to help his wife. It was not anything that my mother could accept. Anyway, she was so bitter by the way her life had been with him, and then when he didn't take any responsibility for me, though he was very supposedly proud of me and thought I was a neat little kid, he didn't do anything to back that up.

Biagi: Did you see him while you were growing up?

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It was not a big club type of thing, but where they'd just sit and talk for a long time and meet.

Mother's place was very successful for a little place. She didn't make any big bucks. She finally sold it out and came back and stayed with me in New York for a while after she sold out and got to do a couple of things she'd always wanted to do. We would entertain some of these people who would come back through New York, and we'd have cocktails on the terrace in the Waldorf. She loved the opera, and we'd go to the opera. We went to Broadway plays. Musicals she liked particularly.

Biagi: What was your life like when you went to college? What was your schedule? What did you study?

Taylor: Scripps had this wonderful curriculum of the humanities, mandatory for three years. Of course, this is the whole survey of Western civilization and everything changes now. But Western civilization, history, art, music, literature, all of the survey, science as it developed. You really saw a stream of civilization developing through history, and you had to take the humanities for three years. You had an offshoot of required biology, some kind of science that was very humanities oriented, still. It was not pure science. You weren't learning this through the scientific method. Things that I really would have liked to have kept on doing. Harvey Mudd was not there at the time or I would have been taking a lot of courses there. I used to think, "I'll finish it here and then I'll go back and go through Cal Tech," because I truly liked mathematics. But this was a very liberal arts offering, the science as they taught it and the humanities.

I majored in American history. It was heavy academics. I did not take any of the art courses. Of course, they had a wonderful art department. I took language at Pomona. I took Spanish at Pomona. I never did take anything but Spanish. I took three years of Spanish at Pomona. I took economics at Pomona.

Biagi: I think somebody on the East Coast might not understand the arrangement of the colleges there, so you should probably describe that a little bit.

Taylor: Scripps College is in this little town of Claremont that is about fifty miles east of Los Angeles. It is one of the Claremont Colleges which currently number six, I think it is. At that time they numbered three. There was Pomona College, Scripps College, and Claremont Graduate School. The idea of the cluster is on the Oxford Plan that you can take courses anyplace within the group while you still maintain the requirements of the principal college in which you're enrolled. That meant that I had to take all of the courses mandated by Scripps, the humanities and so on, and so much was required that you didn't have a lot of extra time. But I could hippity-hop down to Pomona and take my Spanish or anything else I wanted to. Ultimately, economics I took there, too, as I mentioned. Now had Harvey Mudd been there, I'm sure I'd have been over there to take physics or biology or something that was hard science.

Scripps was this very heavy duty school with a wonderful ratio. You'd sometimes only have five students in a class, and you would have your big humanities lectures and then you would be in the seminars of small groups. In your senior year, you had a tutorial system that was one on one with a professor every week, an hour or two a week, also, though, if you got to your senior year, because you had to pass a senior qualifying examination at Scripps at that time, which meant that you had to pass a six-hour exam at the end of your junior year based on the entire survey on Western civilization. If you did not pass it, you did not become a senior and out you went

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They all came from very wealthy families. Some of the girls were brought there in a private car, their private railroad car of their family's. Very wealthy crowd, except for Ruthie. Really, I probably had the least amount of money of any student there. I did like to dress well and I also became the representative for the little dress shop up on Foothill Boulevard, and I could get my clothes for a certain amount off. I got a certain commission. So when I needed to get some good clothes, I would just bring a bunch of their clothes over and have them in my room in the dorm and sell them, and then I could go buy some clothes. [Laughter.] So I had my little gizmos going. I got along pretty well. I was not at all treated like an underclass in an economic sense. It didn't seem to matter. I did a lot of work. But there were other girls who worked, too. Even some of the girls who had a lot of money worked.

Biagi: How did you get involved with the paper?

Taylor: I was circulation manager. I don't know how that started. Maybe somebody just asked me. I think at the time I did that, the girl who was the editor, we had four dorms and she was in the hall where I was. I think she probably asked everybody else and nobody wanted to do it, and she asked me and I said okay. It was not something that was a highly glamorous job, but anyway, I did that, and that meant that I was part of the staff, a small staff. We had a little room in one of the academic buildings. In fact, it was a little room that when I became editor, I insisted on changing and I wanted a really shiny spittoon, not because we spit, but because I thought a newspaper office should have one. So we got one.

Biagi: That's an important addition.

Taylor: Very. And it was a major subject of some of our cartoons and things, too. I was business editor, and I became editor in a political ploy, because they didn't want the person who wanted to be editor to be editor. Somehow the political groups—and I don't remember exactly the ramifications of that, but I know they put me up to try to jam somebody else, not because they thought I'd be good. It was my first experience with dirty politics, and I was it. I became the editor that way. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Were there any classes you had to take?

Taylor: We didn't have any journalism classes. We had a lot of literature classes. Almost everybody there wouldn't get there if they couldn't write. In high school you wrote. We had a lot of heavy emphasis on English, and what we did in the way of our examinations at Scripps were largely essay type examinations, too. We had excellent literature courses and literature professors. You got comments; you didn't get grades per se. It was interesting, because I was not the breath of poetry. I never did really well in poetry at all. I just don't know why, but it didn't come on to me. My form of writing was much plainer, much more direct.

In fact, this one little literature teacher who was known as brilliant and she did create some fine writers in her classes, she agreed that she and I just were never going to understand each other. [Laughter.] But she respected the kind of mind I had. I certainly respected the kind of mind she had. Here she was doing this. She wasn't complaining that I didn't fall into her patterns. She was accepting that I had a different kind of direction that I went in the way I wrote. That was great, because when I would write critiques, for instance, they were totally off the wall, as far as she was concerned, and didn't fit in even with what she had contemplated in the way of any reaction from a student. But then it would be kind of interesting to her that anybody could think that way. I don't remember examples, but I know I got a good comment from her and I absolutely flopped in her class in terms of going the way she would liked to have had us go.

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We had to have a car, of course, because we had to get the ads. We had a great big card—my mom was always fractured about it—that said "Press" that we put in the front window. [Laughter.] The only problem was that as I'd sit in Spanish class at Pomona, I'd hear it sing. [Taylor sings melody of car horn.] I knew she wasn't going after ads and she was going to wreck the whole scheme! But that was part of the paper.

Biagi: Do you want to stop?

Taylor: Yes.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Biagi: Let's continue now. We have you working on the newspaper, writing for the Scripture. So how long were you editor of the paper?

Taylor: I was editor of the paper the one year, and then I became editor emeritus or something the second year, I guess, because I kept on writing and I wrote a column and so forth.

Biagi: What was the column called?

Taylor: I don't know. It was whatever I wanted to write. I kept it up, though, and by now we're in the war pretty strongly. I kept up connecting to the outside world, because we were certainly very involved. The guys we went with and the whole thing was coming down around our heads at that point. That was 1942-43. It was a hard time for the campus. It was a hard time for everybody. Our little world, our little ivory tower, probably was able to proceed in terms of education much more without interruption than most coeducational institutions, because, of course, the guys were going by flocks at that point into different services. I was engaged to a Cal Tech student who was a mechanical engineer. He graduated two years before I did. He went off with the navy and helped build dirigible hangars for the navy down in Florida. A lot of my other friends went off. Of course, they were pretty well spared until they got out of school and then they went out. Most of them that I knew graduated and then went into the service, but they were going like mad. It was hard.

As I say, I was engaged to this guy who was a Hungarian. I didn't really like him much. [Laughter.] He was a very good-looking guy, tall, dark, and gloomy, like a Wagnerian type. He, though, just fascinated most women and he just stared at me so, and he just seemed to like me so that all the women were telling me to really go for him, so I believed that.

Biagi: Where did you meet him?

Taylor: He was a Cal Tech student. Because Pomona College was the only coeducational college close to us, the only college with men in it, there was a real demand for Pomona men. [Laughter.] But the Pomona women also were in that, so we spread out to Cal Tech and had nice parties and good times, because they had four halls over there and we had four halls. Fairly frequently we would have these exchange parties where one of the halls would be the guest of another hall in Cal Tech. Then the guys would move out of their hall, move in with their friends at other halls, and we would move into the Cal Tech guys' halls for that Saturday night. They'd have parties and dances and it was beautifully done. Everything at Cal Tech and everything at Scripps was always

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Biagi: So you felt connected to the war in that way.

Taylor: I was very connected to the war because of the young men that I know who went off, and there were other young guys that I went with who went, and I don't know what ever happened to them, but also my friends, all the girls, had men who were going away and men who didn't come back. It jumps the story a little, but when I was in New York and was working for CBS [Columbia Broadcasting System], some of us had a house together at 116th and Riverside Drive, a really nice apartment. There were five of us, I guess. One of the girls' husband was missing in a B-29 flight over in Japan. One of the girls' cousins had—I don't know how this was resolved, but somehow a German soldier had changed uniforms with him. I don't know whether they killed him, but it was a sad story. All of the girls had some kind of profound attachment to the war.

On D Day, I went to work on D Day, which was my graduation from Columbia, but I didn't make it. You have that in your story.

Biagi: Yes. We'll have to go through it again.

Taylor: Bob Trout was on the air and he was the one I was working with on D Day. He was on the air and he was going to be my family. Anyway, that day there was a lot of talk about the 28th Infantry taking it so hard. I thought that's where Gene, my friend, was. I don't know how the infantry regiments and so forth all broke down, but all day while I was working, I was afraid that that was the crowd that was pinned down and having such a terrible time. But that was it. Every day you were getting these different stories from the war, and nobody was listening to what was going on. Even if you have somebody in the Middle East now, you're not that worried. You don't have to listen with a full ear to every little thing that's happening. When a war is really under way, people are dying every day, and everybody's life is touched by it. That news and every detail is something that you're pinned to.

Biagi: You were in L.A. on Pearl Harbor Day [December 7, 1941].

Taylor: I was at Scripps on Pearl Harbor Day. It was Sunday and it the symphony was on. It was the middle of the day, like around noon. The symphony was interrupted for the bulletin that was read by John Daly, whom I subsequently knew very well. That was profound, of course, to everybody. Then [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt came on the day after. Here you have an institution that's pretty remote, maybe much more than your ordinary college, from the world, but it was really right with it. It bombed everybody awake, and the fact that we had taken such terrible losses, as that became so apparent about Pearl Harbor. My friend Bernice, sister of my close friend Virginia, Bernice had gone to Scripps ahead of me and she was married to a navy lieutenant who was on one of the ships at Pearl Harbor. He was not hurt, but he was certainly surrounded by people who were.

Biagi: Did the relocation of the Japanese affect you in any way at all in Los Angeles? Were you conscious of it?

Taylor: I was conscious. Of course, the people who were alive and here at that time have a much different memory than the legends have it. There was a very strong feeling. There were a great many Japanese gardeners and people along the coast who felt, rightly or wrongly, and I don't know how much this was ever proven, but it was a very strong conviction at the time that there was a good deal of surveillance going on by Japanese who were here. Of course, after the surprise attack, there were not that many Japanese that you associated with or that you saw. The Japanese you knew about were along the coast, and there was a feeling of tremendous pain to have been hit

Page 24

Gee, I went to the movies. My mom and I went every Sunday. I'd go to matinees on Saturday. That was the place, when I was growing up, to park the kids. You always were going to movies.

Of course, you didn't have television. You had radio. Let me talk about how outstandingly Bob Trout created television on radio. You didn't need a picture tube if you had somebody who could make pictures the way he could with words. Radio was a big form of entertainment. You stayed pinned to "Myrt and Marge." When my dog had puppies, two of her puppies were called Myrt and Marge by my husband and me. That used to be a nighttime soap opera, a nighttime drama that was played. You'd always listen to it. You had to be home by 8:00 or 8:15 because "Myrt and Marge" came on!

I remember hearing a drama that came on every Sunday night related to the royal families of England. It was a story of the kings and queens of England, and it was a dramatization. You were really learning a lot. I suppose it was distortion, but you at least knew the names of kings and queens of England through history. You had "One Man's Family" and Jack Benny and George Burns. You had to watch Radio Theater. When I did my first major documentary for CBS, which was on atomic science, [William] Paley had said, and [Edward R.] Murrow agreed, when we had this documentary unit of four people, and when the documentaries are ready, which is when the person doing them feels they're ready, we will preempt the best program on the air and put them there, so that you've got a good audience going in. Well, mine preempted "Lux Radio Theater." "Lux Radio Theater" was a regular event. Well, now, that was radio and that was the same time you had Hollywood.

So that was the kind of entertainment, though. It was not pervasive as it is now. Hollywood was a glamorous thought, and there were a lot of glamorous people, but living close to Hollywood meant nothing to me particularly. I knew what I knew about Hollywood from going to the movies every week.

Biagi: What about broadcasting, the earliest radio? How did radio fit into your life at that time?

Taylor: Radio was constant in my life. It's like I say, on Saturday when I would be cleaning the house, it took me all day to do it maybe because I was listening to the radio half the time. But what I was hearing on the radio was the opera. When I was a kid, eleven, twelve, thirteen, I was listening to the opera every Saturday and listening to the symphony on Sunday and hearing the special events, hearing the elections and the conventions. I remember the [Wendell Lewis] Willkie [nomination]. Of course, I was older at that point. It was 1940. But '36, I remember being in the house and hearing Bob Trout. So wowee! On my first job, I'm told, "You can work out in Los Angeles because we've got you a job where you say you want to work, but in the meantime we'd like to have you write for Bob Trout." Wow! Because I listened to the radio. It was something you could listen to all the time, but it wasn't a bunch of junk.

I was listening to the radio when the 1933 earthquake struck, in fact. It was about ten minutes of six. "Little Orphan Annie" came on, I think at 5:30, and I think it was Wheatena by 5:45. [Laughter.] One of those was on. I drank a lot of Ovaltine and ate a lot of cereal.

Biagi: Wheatena?

Taylor: Yes! As a result of the way radio impressed my life. But I didn't have to listen to it, although through my life that's what a soap opera was to me. It was Helen Trent and Just Plain Bill, some of those. Ma Perkins. Some of those. Now, they were nice stories. I was buying a VCR the other day and it was a quarter of twelve, in the middle of the day, and all of these

Page 26

came in named Ruth Ashton. [Laughter.] I don't remember how that was all worked out with my teachers, but it was accepted and I just became Ruth Ashton.

I tell you that because now I go to work for Douglas Aircraft when the war is on, and they're going to get a security clearance on me, and they're going to try to figure out who is this person who doesn't have a birth certificate or anything. My birth certificate doesn't say Ruth Ashton; it says Ruth Montoya. So when did it change and how did it get changed and all that kind of stuff? There's nothing legal about any of it! [Laughter.] The Homestead Act didn't apply, you know.

Biagi: But eventually they cleared you?

Taylor: Eventually I was cleared. I'm not sure why. I was sorry almost, because that was hard. It was a totally routine kind of job. It was in an office. I was working on some kind of invoice or with paperwork all day long, though, but it was a routine job. It would be like an assembly line, only with the paperwork. You get this one type of thing to do and you get this one type of thing to do. It's like Rosie the Riveter, but only now you're working with a typewriter. I know at the end of every day I would come home and my head would be pounding just from that tedium.

We happened to have at that time a couple of young ladies staying with us, who came out from Nebraska, who were nurses. One was a sister of an aunt by marriage, and her friend. They were nurses and they were staying with us, and it was a perfect time because they were great at rubbing my head. [Laughter.]

I hated the job. The things I remember about the job were the clock, the muffins, because always I would look forward to having a muffin at lunch. They had pretty good muffins in the cafeteria. One thing they did have, too, and I'm reminded of it because I like to listen to these OBG, oldies but goodies, radio programs, songs, music, at lunch they would usually have some entertainer people like the Mills Brothers, I remember, would be there and sing "Paper Doll" and things like that. I still hear those songs. It wasn't every day, but it was every so often, and that was nice. But you were so regulated. You got to punch in to a time clock, the only time clock I ever had. You had to punch in at the right time. You'd get your break for a certain length of time. You had your lunch for a certain length of time. You'd go home at a certain time. You'd punch in, punch out, punch, punch, punch. Look at the clock. You know. Slowest time. It was terrible.

Primarily before that I had worked with the oil people. At one point I worked for an oil crowd. I forget the name. I told them I needed to keep working because I needed more money, and they let me. They were plotting future oil production in the wells they owned, and I had a job, which was really interesting, of taking, say, ten or twenty oil wells and tracing their history. For Los Angeles, for instance, I'd have to go into books of Texaco or some of these other people, to track back the oil well we're now talking about that belongs to this other oil firm that I'm working for, and see what kind of production history it had, what kind of geological expectations, and so forth.

Biagi: Good work for a history major.

Taylor: Or for a math major, because I would project on future production for twenty years.

Biagi: That was a good idea.

Page 28

those few moments that you can remember vividly—"You know, it's kind of scary, but you could stay in Long Beach and be a secretary or bookkeeper for the rest of your life or you can get on that train and go back to New York, and you don't know what's going to happen." So I proceeded to where I had started to go.

Then I did that thing I told you about with going to the bank to borrow the money, because I didn't have any money. Mom didn't have that much money. The bank said, "What are you talking about? You don't have anything back of you." They were very understanding, because, as I say, this was the bank where all of these oil men traded. They subsequently came down. One of them said, "I don't like to go in on a note with anybody," and several of the guys went in on a $600 note. He said, "Just tell me what you want and I'll loan it to you." So he loaned me a certain amount just out of his pocket. All of it got paid back between Mom and me.

Biagi: The reservation you made on the train, was that for a subsequent trip?

Taylor: That was for the trip I was going to make. Somehow I determined—and I don't remember how I did that—when Columbia was going to start. I think maybe I made a phone call or something. So the first thing I did was make the reservation on the train to go back there to go to school. You didn't go back and check into any of these things. There wasn't the money; you had to go once. [Laughter.]

Biagi: So you applied then.

Taylor: I applied. They didn't give scholarships until the second semester. You had to prove by your work at the school that you were worthy of a scholarship. So I went back there and went to the journalism school. I got along very well. I stayed in the Teachers College back there and had good friends who were at the journalism school, but my best friends were at the dormitory, where I stayed at the Teachers College, and they weren't teacher candidates. One was a lawyer. I can't remember what the other girl was; she was Canadian. That's all I can remember. But they were real close friends of mine and we did things together.

Biagi: You had known them from Scripps?

Taylor: No, I didn't know a soul there. The Scripps family had an apartment in New York. They lived many places. It was the E.W. Scripps family. It was his sister who actually had started Scripps College, Ellen Browning Scripps. But the E.W. Scripps family was very involved with it, and two of the granddaughters of E.W. Scripps were going to Scripps when I was going there. One was Peggy Scripps and one was Nacky Scripps, who married the guy in New Hampshire who ran that very conservative newspaper, the Manchester [N.H.] Journal or whatever it is. It's been the powerhouse in New Hampshire and has been terribly important for all of the candidates who have ever gone into a presidential primary. I called Nacky, in fact, in 1988 and I never got a call back from her. I wanted to know something. I think she got pretty crabby. He was notably crabby. She was never my good friend. She was a year or so behind me. Her sister Peggy was in my class. I saw Peggy when I was in New York, but most of all I became very close friends with the girl who was married to Peggy's brother, Charles Scripps. Louann Scripps and I became buddies, so the only people I knew were the Scripps family at that time when I was going to school. The rest of the people I just got acquainted with as I went to the school of journalism, which was a close school. In a graduate school, you get to know people pretty well. They had teas.

Biagi: How many students are you talking about in that class?

Page 30

At the end of his little discussion with us—not discussion, but narrative about his adventures, we were then given our assignment, which was to write in twenty-five words what Charles Collingwood had said! [Laughter.] Which is what I got my A on. Also at the same time, we wrote an autobiography. This was our first assignment for Paul White. We wrote that story about Charles Collingwood and also wrote our autobiography. I wrote that, for one thing, I had a nickname, which was Henry, or Hank, named after an old car at Scripps. So I said, "My nickname is Hank for Henry," and then I went on and said, "I was born and raised in Southern California and I hope to live, work, and die there." [Laughter.]

Biagi: A very succinct autobiography!

Taylor: I continued on from there. That was the lead. [Laughter.] I remember it, because White took that "I hope to live, work, and die there," and when he offered me the job, it was to work at KNX out here. I think I have told you this previously, he asked me, "But I'd like to have you start back here." School was still in session. This was February. "I'd like to have you start working back here. You can start working part time writing for Bob Trout while you're still going to school." Whee! "Also I would hope that maybe you will go as the staff to the conventions this summer." [Laughter.] In Chicago, they were. You know.

So it was interesting because there was a guy who was a news director out here—I forget his name. He was legendary, but I forget his name. After a couple of years of these assignments that were fantastic, and subsequently Trout started another show that I inherited and became the producer of when I'd been there less than two years, which was giving assignments to all the correspondents, not giving assignments, but—

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Biagi: Continue with the tales.

Taylor: After a couple of years with the guy out here saying, "When is this person I hired going to come out here?" White sent back a telegram, "Never!" [Laughter.]

Biagi: Although he was wrong.

Taylor: He was wrong, but that was after his time.

Biagi: Let me ask you about the role of Paul White in your life. Not everybody would be familiar with the name.

Taylor: Paul White was the head of Radio News for CBS News. He had come into the organization in the thirties, and that's when the organization of news was being actually formed. I don't remember the details. The only way I know any of them is because I've read the Murrow books. But Murrow was in Europe building up—actually, it started up with [William L.] Shirer to start building correspondents over there. They didn't know they were going to build correspondents. They weren't really foreseeing the whole of World War II. But as different developments came along, they would hire new people to add to that staff.

Meantime, back in New York, I don't remember exactly how it was, but Paul White, who was a tremendous organizer and an old-time newspaper editor, I guess—I can't remember Paul's early history—but he was a crackerjack newsman and a cold-blooded S.O.B. in a lot of people's minds and he was an egomaniac, a lot of things, a big guy, heavy, pretty heavy, kind of the

Page 32

Biagi: So this would have been exactly which month and which date that you went to work for CBS?

Taylor: April 1944. I graduated in '44, and D Day was the day I was supposed to graduate.

Biagi: It wasn't the day that you graduated that you went to work.

Taylor: No. April I went to work.

Biagi: That seemed early to graduate.

Taylor: I didn't graduate then. I was still working while I went to school. It seemed apparent that I knew which direction I was going. I was put on a part-time program where the school, I suppose, gave me some credit for my graduation. I don't remember how that worked, but I know I was granted an absence from a lot of classes to work, which was actually learning, as well.

Biagi: Were there any other women working in radio news when you first went to work with CBS?

Taylor: There was one girl who was writing in the newsroom and a gal that Paul White later married, who he'd hired out of the school several years before, Peggy—Margaret. She and he became a number, and she was an excellent writer and a wonderful lady, and I think she still lives in San Diego.

Biagi: There was another girl there who was writing. That was going to be your job? That's what you were hired to do, was to write?

Taylor: To write for Bob Trout, though.

Biagi: Not just to write!

Taylor: Not just to write! And I did. Subsequently, after graduation, White hired another girl [Alice Weel] out of our class to write in the newsroom, and she was from a very good family in New York. They had a big apartment on Park Avenue. Everybody stuck together, particularly in those times. It was a good thing you stuck together, because things were breaking and you had to go right back to work. But we went to her house for lots of parties, and her family was very involved and delighted she was working for CBS News, but she was working on the overnight. They just thought that was not very fair after she'd been there for I don't know how long, maybe half a year or a year. Because they were such gracious hosts and hostesses and had this money and influence, they thought that Alice shouldn't work.

I was working with Trout. I didn't have to go to work 'til maybe nine or ten, and the show was at 3:15 in the afternoon. Then I was through! I might work on some things for the next day or something like that, although you didn't work on much the next day because the news was going so fast, you had to show them you had plenty of material coming in all the time. But they wanted White to take me out of Trout's office and let Alice go in there. I can work overnight. Just switching these students from the same year, you know, same thing. And Trout said, "No way!" [Laughter.] So I never worked the overnight and I never was forgiven by Alice's family.

Biagi: While you were going to school and working, were you still going to classes or did you get what would be the equivalent of internship credit?

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Taylor: Oh, by all means. By all means! He had a wonderful sense of humor, absolutely a pixie. He looked so dignified, always dressed in his oxford tailored clothes and carrying his big black umbrella, wore the black coat. He was an impressive figure and such a pixie sense of humor, it was really funny. He and I just struck it off really well. He liked my work, although God knows a lot of the writing had to be just really hard. I was pleased he would always read it, even when I knew some of those sentences were dillies. He would read it and make it sound good. The only thing he had an objection to was a report of the second front and the Russian place names. I'd slip them into the script without warning.

I remember one time somebody—I think it was Peggy White—standing outside the door, and I thought, "I wish she'd go away, because we are really pretty tight. We've got to rush for the deadline." She said, "I really don't want to bother you guys, but it's thirty seconds to air." [Laughter.] But that's how we did it. He wouldn't read these before we went on. He was just very good at reading a script on the air, but he'd hit some of these names and they were dillies. He was delightful.

I don't know if I told you in the previous session about his phone thing. He hated telephones. But there would be calls we should have. Our office was over on Madison Avenue. We were on the seventeenth floor; that's where the newsroom was. The newsroom was the other end of that floor, so people would get phone calls for us, mainly for Bob, or there might be something we'd need to know for a fact or something, and they'd have to run [and find Bob]. I'd have to go or maybe his wife, or it was something important for some reason, some business reason, and he'd have to go. So I thought we should have a phone. So we got a phone, but he hated the phone! So he would put it under the desk sometimes, and it would ring and you'd try to figure out where it was. I'd dive under the desk and answer it or I'd say, "Bob, it's for you," and he'd put it in the desk drawer and close the drawer and walk out, you know. [Laughter.] He just had this really great sense of humor.

He always liked a story with a punch line at the end of the show, even though it was very somber times. He had that humor and he wanted a good story. I don't remember specifically the stories, but he was able to take a story and make a punch line. He would tell lots of little silly jokes. It was just a delightful time working with him. He had this sort of other side that I don't think, unless you got to know him, you really saw. People in the newsroom all knew it.

But he was one of the hardest workers. He taught me—and it was a lesson I've used and never forgotten—going to a convention, for instance, you wouldn't see Bob. You'd see everybody else frolicking and be in the club car. They'd go by train, say, to Chicago. But you wouldn't see Bob. He would be in the stateroom or whatever he had, studying, getting briefed on all the information. Then he would not need to refer to it. He had this mind like a bear trap that would take this in and keep it. He could use that to talk on interminably.

Of course, one thing he did beautifully, and it's always a lesson to me when you're on a special event, you don't have to pontificate and be the great thinker and tell everybody what everything means. You can describe where you are and what its meaning is and how it relates to the story, and talk about some of the little things that give you a feeling for this place where you are. He did that. Of course, he did it for radio, where you needed that picture of where you were, what it looked like, what it was like.

There was that story about when he went someplace where President Roosevelt was coming in on his yacht one time. Of course, Bob was just preeminent master at ad lib and special events. I guess he was meeting the yacht coming into Bremerton or some place. The president

Page 36

Biagi: What was the newsroom atmosphere?

Taylor: The newsroom atmosphere was very busy.

Biagi: A lot of people?

Taylor: Yes. It was divided up so you had your editors. The copy was carefully read by tough editors, but your whole newsroom had the wire machines all the way around it. You had everything. That's where I got into Walter Cronkite, on the UP wire. But Reuters and UP and AP and Short Wave, and then inside back of one of the banks of wire machines, there was this big window that looked into Studio 22, I guess it was, a big studio with windows all around it. Then right beside the newsroom, there was a little office for the assistant news director. I can remember the night editor also being there sometimes, I guess after the news director went home. Then White's office, which was a great big office, had a couple of sofas in it and a big, big desk with a panel on it. At that point, we would bring in our correspondents by short wave and you would order from whatever short wave companies. Somehow you'd order them up for a particular time for a talk-up and then for the broadcast. It was all live. There was no such thing as recording ahead of time.

It was like when I was working "Feature Story" and I'd have to bring in the correspondents. Then you'd go and you'd talk them up to make sure everybody's there. Then you'd go on the air, and they get the cues and they go on and do their number. But before the shows, you used Paul's panel to talk to the guys, to be sure where they were, what they had, all this stuff. So his office was a very important center and where everybody slouched around and talked.

So you go down a corridor, out of the newsroom, and you've got some secretaries there, a studio to the left as you're walking down. Then there was a cubicle where William L. Shirer had an office. Then a cubicle where Quincy Howe had an office, another cubicle that I worked in, and different people worked in in different times. Then there was a big corner office for a guy who was a producer, who worked for a long time. Ultimately, the corner office became Ed Murrow's place when he was on the air, on radio. Then next to that was this little office where Trout and I worked. Out in front there were secretaries and folks around, and that was the seventeenth floor.

Biagi: Were there, would you say, thirty, forty people there?

Taylor: No, I wouldn't. The newsroom per se was rather small. Eight? Ten, maybe, in that room, at the most.

Biagi: When you say "the operation," who was in charge of setting up the news budget? How did the programming work?

Taylor: White would be, I'm sure. I didn't know much about that, but I'm sure it was White. White was autonomous in New York. I imagine whatever the correspondents wanted, they got.

Biagi: The programs were on the air how often?

Taylor: There weren't a lot. You had your morning news and your evening news.

Biagi: The morning news lasted how long?

Page 38

I didn't look at it the way other people looked at it. My mother looked at it as a way for me to marry a really impressive diplomat or somebody. In fact, when I married my first husband, who was an editor, she said, "After all this and you marry a two-bit editor?" Anyway, it was a terrible disappointment to her. She had ambitions; I didn't. [Laughter.]

Biagi: So at that moment you were just living for the day, do you think?

Taylor: I had a lot of opportunity every day. I had the opportunity to write, to work with people who were interesting and exciting, to be involved in news events that were of magnitudes that we don't see now, every day. It wasn't a question of, "Oh, shoot. What shall we lead with?" It was, "How can we get it all in?" It was an exciting time. There was always something new.

When Murrow came back and I was put into the documentary unit, here was a brand-new challenge, a whole new thing. Then they assigned me to do a story on atomic science, which I said I wanted to do. We all got to choose an area that we wanted to do our stories on. So I chose science. I had been so impressed. I did one of the first stories on the atomic bomb being dropped over Hiroshima, because as the day went on that day, it became so apparent how big this story was. But when somebody reads that a B-29 dropped an atomic bomb the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, you say, "Well, I know it's important, but I'm not sure just exactly what we're talking about," until stories started to come in on what the test at Alamagordo had done in terms of people who were blind hundreds of miles away seeing the flash.

Anyway, what I am saying is when I was going to do a documentary and go do it on this subject, I didn't have time or interest in projecting myself on into a goal someplace up there. I was doing something terribly important and exciting right now. And that happened to me a great deal. I was doing these things. Why would I project onto something else? The aggrandizement of myself was not my goal—ever. To be excited about what I was doing, to enjoy my life, by feeling it was worth it, was what was important to me.

I never did put my sights on being on the air. I was asked to be on the air. I hadn't even thought of it until somebody asked me to be on the air in 1951, when I went on the air and never got off, you know. I never shut up! [Laughter.]