University of North Carolina at Asheville
D. Hiden Ramsey Library
Special Collections/University Archives

Oral History Register
for

Anthony (Tony) Lord, 1900-1993

Anthony Lord
Bruce S. Greenawalt Oral History Collection
D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville, 28804

Title

Creator

Subject

Subject

Keyword: Architecture ; Depression ; World War II ; Buncombe County Public Library

Description

Publisher

D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville, NC, 28804

Contributor

Date

Electronic Record Issued: 2001-07-19

Type

Sound ; Text ; Image

Format

Identifier

Source

Dr. Bruce S. Greenawalt Oral History Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville 28804

Language

English

Relation

Coverage

Acquisition

Donor number: 23 ;  Date of acquisition: August, 1977

Processed By

Interview Date

Biography

Tape 1, Side 1:

Greenawalt:  This is an interview with Anthony Lord, retired Asheville architect, conducted on Thursday, August 2, 1979, in his home in Asheville, North Carolina.  Mr. Lord, I thought we might start by asking you about your family, and who your father was, and back up to his father and go back into that generation.

Lord:  Well, I don't know Asheville.  I don't have southern roots.  My parents both came from Hapsburg.  My mother came from  Nevada, Duchess County [?] and all her family had grown up there for generations.  Also around Fishkill and Newburg, and all that section.  They were low-country Dutch and Flemish people.  Hasbrooks...they had names like that...and Whites.  They came over...the original Anthony, I think, came over quicker than the Hasbrooks and the Peter Stuyvesant.

Greenawalt:  What was your mother's maiden name?  You've mentioned several.

Lord:  Her maiden name was Anthony.  And so there's no connection south.  My father came from Ithaca and Syracuse.  And his father came over from the Isle of Man when he was a little boy.  So there's not much American background.  His mother was Pennsylvania Dutch.  Came from somewhere, I think, in Pennsylvania...what's that area...Lancaster...yes, in that area.

Greenawalt:  What was her name?

Lord:  Fritcher.  I don't know as much as I should about these people.  So I have singular rootlessness in the south.  Most of my friends have long drifts where they find their roots all over the place, and you have to be very careful where you step [laughs] because so-and-so always turns out to be your cousin.  I do have three cousins living in Tarboro, the children of my mother's sister.  That's how she came south, was the sister had already come down.  She was teaching down there in Tarboro and my mother came down to visit her, and that started it.  Then my mother and father married in Hapsburg, New York and then came down here.  I think he saw some opportunity here.  He sort of gathered, although he never talked about it, but he had some...he negotiated some arrangement with a chap who was already here, RS Smith, to make some partnership or some business arrangement.  That apparently fell through.  If there was any situation, I'm not sure.  Anyway, he started for himself, and like all beginning architects, had a rough time.  That was about 1899.  He built this house.

Greenawalt:  In what year was this house built?

Lord: It was built in 1900, or 1899. It was finished in 1900, I think.  I was born in 1900.  There's a picture of me out behind here in a wheelbarrow.  Everyone was just laughing at this baby in a wheelbarrow.  And I was born just up on Flint Street.  But the funny thing is I have no connections around here.

Greenawalt:  People say that buildings can express the interests and personality of the architect or the person commissioning the architect.  Do you see anything in this house that speaks of your father?

Lord:  Oh yes.  This is a type of thing...it was a different kind of thing.  He started one trend that horrified all the old friends.  He put the kitchen on the front of the house.  This was a thing unknown, inconceivable to the local populous.  You didn't put the kitchen on the front of the house.  People built houses on Montford Avenue where there was a superb view in the back of the house, with porches that had the whole Pisgah range...the whole Cold Mountain, Pisgah, Spivey, Eagle's View panorama...in those days it was just clear as crystal all the time, that view.  In those days you could see it, but now all that stuff is just a crick in a particulate fog.  Anyway, they put a streetcar track on Montford Avenue, and there was a certain amount of traffic, and a certain amount of streetlights.  People had porches on the front of their houses, where they could see nothing but whatever went on on Montford Avenue.  This is entertaining, I think, because it illustrates the standards and mores of the period, and I guess of the people.  The interest in activity far outweighed the interest in natural scenery or the fantastic set of views.  The sun sets off this back porch, and its clouds troop across the garage...crocodiles followed by giraffes, incredible Chinese dragons would cross the sunset.  Well, you don't see them anymore.  It's a shame, because they were great pleasures.  And big thunderheads we would get over the Duck Mountains out there.  Tremendous cumulous clouds, and as it got darker they'd turn gray and keep lightning within the cloud...a flash of lightning would illuminate the whole into pink...it would warm up the whole into pink flesh, these gray clouds.  Incredibly beautiful.  

Greenawalt:  So, your father anticipated that view to the east and put the kitchen in the front of the house?

Lord:  Yea, and took advantage of the view in the back, sure.  There were not all these trees here, this was a pasture.  One tree and an old apple tree, and nothing else.  All this other stuff he planted, and has grown up since.  It just took it 80 years to do it.  My mother may have had influence in that too, I don't know.  

Greenawalt:  Let's pay one bit of attention to your grandfather before we leave that generation.  

Lord:  The one that came from the Isle of Man?

Greenawalt:  Yes.  When was that?

Lord:  About 1840.

Greenawalt:  And he settled in Ithaca?

Lord:  He settled...yes, around Ithaca.  They were mechanic type of folks.  I think they were...they came from Ramsey.  I went there in 1927 and found the old parish register for Ramsey. I asked the old parson who was in charge of the records, and had an ear trumpet.  The only real ear trumpet I ever saw...long and somewhat curved, which he put one end in his ear and pointed the big end at me and I yelled into the end of it [laughs].  I had an unfortunate time with the director, he was at tea or lunch or something...anyway he came out rather reluctantly and I inquired about the Lords, and he said, "yes, yes, the best of them left here about 100 years ago."  I finally pulled the old register, and I was supposed to be pouring over it for a long time, and had I had enough background knowledge I could have made some sense out of it.  I just found a name, is all.  And I did...I ran into a man in Ramsey who had the same name, William Henry Lord, like my father.  So that was some sort of connection.  But other than that I know very little about them.  I know about the background of those nice people...some of the people with Bernard Shaw who came, who painted their bodies blue, who thought that though they might lose their lives they would never lose their respectability, you remember?  Remember Cannis [?] was one of them in Julius Caesar?  But I don't know whether they were...what racially they were.  Of course the Mags [?] linguistically are kin to the Irish and Scotch, or so it seems that they share the same language.  

Greenawalt:  Your father and mother grew up a great distance from each other, one near Ithaca and one in Dutchess county.  Where did they meet? 

Lord:  They met in Plattsburgh, New York.  My father did sort of an apprenticeship, where you went to be an architect in those days, in one of the little schools of architecture in this country.  If you wanted to be an architect, you either went to Europe, and then I guess on to Paris, or went to the Ecole des beaux-arts, which...the Biltmore House was a product of this.  Or else you went into somebody's office the same way you read law, in a lawyer's office.  If you wanted to be a lawyer you didn't go to law school, you worked for a lawyer as a clerk and general flunkie, and gradually you learned something about law.  The same way with architecture.  And he had been down in Syracuse, and he got to a point where he...I don't know what the competition was, but anyway an officer named Merritt...Asa Merritt, came to New York, in Syracuse.  He got to a point where...he went to work for the quarter master corp of the army, and they built little army posts around different parts of the country, so he was in Plasttsburgh building a post.  There was always, forever I guess, a military post in Plattsburgh.  So he was working on that, and he built one in Minsford (Mullford?), Massachusetts [?], which is, I think now, east Boston.  He built one in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and he told me that he never saw a little one-company cavalry fort.  These were Indians...for protection against the Indians, if you please.  He went out there in the fall after the snow had fallen, and they supposedly must have been more or less standard drawings...anyway you know how they got things started, and the post was built and finished and the construction people left.  And they'd never seen the ground.  They dug holes in the snow, dug the holes for the foundation posts, put the frame buildings up and got out before spring.  Then they spent some time in Denver...

Greenawalt:  You say "they."  Is your father married at this time?

Lord:  He was married at that time, yes.

Greenawalt:  In what year did he get married?

Lord:  Well...

Greenawalt:  You said your mother went to Tarboro in the  1870's, and she was single then, so it must have been between 1870 and...

Lord:  Well this was in the...I think in the 90's...I guess I'm a little early...I can find out, though.

Greenawalt:  But they were traveling together?

Lord:  Yes.  And there was a tremendous Indian gathering of the western tribes, and great pow-wow's and treaty business about that time and he had...I had some books with snapshots that she took of these Indian teepees and all different things.  That stuff was of course before.  Then he came down here, I guess with my aunt and her husband, who was living here at the time.  He came down here at the urging of those folks.  And, as I said, I think he saw some oddly possible partnership.  So he was scrambling along as all small architects did.

Greenawalt:  So he arrived in 1899, began as a lone architect, and already buildings around were being constructed?

Lord:  The Parkway office buildings, that was the old Mission Hospital.  And he did that and he did a bit of remodeling on the old thing that preceded it...and the same thing with Biltmore Hospital.  He did that.  Then when the steel frame was invented...he did, if I'm not mistaken, he did a whole earlier remodeling.  I remember he did...a nice little building when I was no older than high school...which was a building started in 1916... and the tractor went bust, and it stood there unfinished, the skeleton of it, three or four years, and was finally finished in 1920.  I graduated from high school in 1918, and I went to high school in the old Burroughs House, which was for a while the YMCA, and stood where the Clyde Savings and Loan building on Broadway and Woodfin. [Asheville City Directory 1915:  Asheville High School - Oak at the Northeast corner of College]

Greenawalt:  What was the name of the school?

Lord:  It was Asheville High School.  Those were the quarters they were in, because they hadn't finished the David Millard, you see.  It was standing there near half done.  

Greenawalt:  You've mentioned several buildings that your father did.  Is that typical of his work?  Chiefly doing commercial and large buildings?

Lord:  I would say large ones, yes.  He did...what was the Williamson house out here on Pearson Drive, still standing...nice house...a beautiful house. He did the house for Canie Brown, who was the Swannanoa laundry Brown, on the corner of Montford and West Chestnut.  He did a house out here on...this is no futuristic architectural thing, or any architectural wonder...on Cumberland Circle for Captain John Perry.  The Captain rather fancied himself in the discussion...I think he knew something about it...anyway, they came up with a very livable house.  The Perry's were interesting people...you don't want me to bore you...

Greenawalt:  I'm trying to get in my mind which house it was, on the corner of Cumberland...

Lord:  Oh, that was the corner of Cumberland and West Chestnut, there's one house...

Greenawalt:  It's still there, then?

Lord:  It's still there, oh yes.  Standing, yes.  That [garble] was built for a man named Canie Brown, and he was the...his daughter married Whitman Smith.  And he ran the Swannanoa Laundry.  One of the boys, maybe both the boys, still run the Swannanoa Laundry.

Greenawalt:  I think you were about to tell us something about Perry?

Lord:  Oh, Captain [John] Perry, yes.  Well the Captain was the remaining head of the tribe of Perrys who fought the battle of Lake Erie, who were Admirals, and since then they have apparently opened up Japan to American Admirals. And this was the same tribe.  And when they celebrated at Lake Erie...they must have had a sixteenth century cannon or something, of course that was fifty years ago now...that battle would have been during the war of 1812, wouldn't it?  No...anyway they had some kind of big fandangle there, and the Perry tribe all went up and sat on the front row and made much of it, and had a grand time.  And the Captain had...I don't know, he disagreed with the authorities about something or other...the composition of sulfur or something at the Naval academy.  So he didn't make the grade in Annapolis.  Or entrance into the Naval Academy so he went into the Army.  And he was at some of the posts that my father had built in the west.  So they had a common interest.  And they also lived in the Philippines...they were stationed in the Philippines, and they'd come home with rolls of East Indian floor matting and left hand shears and screens and tropical...nice cool tropical stuff that Mrs. Perry very skillfully deployed in the house.  So it was a lovely house.

Greenawalt:  Well this gets us to the point where you were one the scene.  You arrived in 1900, which month was that?

Lord:  February.

Greenawalt:  February the...

Lord:  Seventeenth.  

Greenawalt:  Were you the only child?

Lord:  Yes.

Greenawalt:  And you went to elementary school where?

Lord:  Well, I and one or two other people got tutored when we were little kids, and then I went to Mrs. Ford's school, which again was in the old Burroughs house, so I went to school in that house twice.  Once when Mrs. Ford ran it as a school, and Verne Rhoades' mother, Dorothy Weaver she was...she was probably just a couple years older than I was, but we were there at the same time.  Boys and girls went to school there, mostly little kids.  And then I went to a school run by a man named Jacob Patton, which was down on Haywood street, very near its junction with Patton Avenue.  There I went for I guess a couple years, anyway.  Mr. Patton folded up at that point, which must have been...that point must have been about my first year of high school, or so, or my second year of high school, thereabouts.  And then Mr. J.B. Thrall, James Brainaird Thrall, who was the rector of the First Congregational Church, and had come down from Massachusetts, took me on together with a young woman whose name I remember was Mary Mitchell...but she and I were tutored in the polite subjects, including German.  The old chap had I guess some degree from a German University...

Greenawalt:  His name is spelled Thrall?

Lord:  Yes, T-h-r-a-l-l.  He had the post that Crooks has now.  He tried to build up the congregation, but always had a struggle.  My father was very much interested in that church.  He designed it, was the treasurer of it, was the principal business ramrod of the thing for many years.  He devoted a great deal of time to it.  Well, Mr. Thrall presided over my destiny for a year, and then the next year I guess I went to high school at the old Burroughs house again, which had then been somewhat altered...a little more conservative.  And there I went two years, and got my high school credentials there.

Greenawalt:  Before we leave the Burroughs house, that was quite a substantial building, I remember when the Y was in it.  Who were the Burroughs?

Lord: Burroughs?  The man was a doctor...that's about all I know about him.  He owned a big triangle of land that went down, well the expressway comes in about where the back line of it was.  And quite a lot of room on the east side.  Broadway was the boundary on the west side.  And I think Woodfin has encroached on the front.  But he had this area in the back fenced, and in the early days he had a number of deer, I guess a dozen deer in this enclosure in the back.  This was a local curiosity.  People would go by, look through the fence and see the deer.  And then I suppose he died, and the property was broken up.  But it was a big house.  It had...the Y had two front doors.  Of course the original house didn't have two front doors, it had one front door.  And when they added the other, in about 1925, I should think, they moved...they built the addition on the east side of it...and that work came alive. [Dr. James A. Burroughs]

Greenawalt:  Well, this brings you to your senior year in high school.  Had you made up your mind by this time what you were going to study when you went to school?

Lord:  I guess so...I always had this terrible urge to tinker with everything, I mean I always wanted to...I was capable with my hands.  I always enjoyed putting things together.  I built a blacksmith's forge out in the back here, and part of that required somehow anviling within a liter, or thereabouts...I learned, I taught myself a certain amount of stuff at that time.  My father's skills extended to a good many home tinkering things...he was good at that sort of thing.  And so I learned some carpentry and so on.  So I thought I wanted to be an engineer.  I was sure that was what I wanted to do.  And my family was very, extraordinarily good about this...they were marvelous, they didn't push me into anything.  But I did have a vent...I mean so many children don't have now, didn't have then.  But I had this strong urge to, I thought, be an engineer, so I went to Georgia Tech and got a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering.  Then I came back here and worked...oh, here and there, for two or three years.  Subsequent to Tech I went to New York and spent...I think my mother was concerned that I had learned something about engineering undoubtedly, but that the humanities offered at Georgia Tech were slightly lacking, so she was instrumental I guess in packing me off to New York.  And I went to Austin Teague [?] up there in '22, and took also a couple courses at Columbia. I took a course in contemporary history and a course in French.  But I remember I didn't hold out very well in these things, and I fell to the wayside.  But I drew in charcoal and got a lot out of that.  And of course any 22-year-old youngster would give an enormous amount to live in New York City...that was a good winter.  You don't want this stuff, do you?  

Greenawalt:  Well, we're getting into the development of Anthony Lord, the architect, and if it bears on that, go ahead.  I think it does. 

Lord:  The old gentleman in Moscow, what was his name, the old impresario...the wonderful revered old Russian who did the Moscow Art Theatre, well he was there that winter with the Moscow Art Theatre.  And I got mixed up in the theatre...it was a very good experience...

Greenawalt:  Chemical engineer, at that.

Lord:  Yes.  Oh, it was wonderful.  So then after having working for a couple of years in the engineering trade I decided that engineers were the children of gardeners, and they were not for me.  So I went to study architecture for two years, and got another bachelor's degree up there at Yale School of Fine Arts.  Well, then it was not a graduate school, it was an undergraduate section...

Greenawalt:  So you had maybe some credit for your years at Georgia Tech?

Lord:  Oh yes.  Well, as it happened, they will now...they would now do it I guess, if I sent them [Yale] ten dollars and my transcripts, they would technically give me a masters degree in architecture.  But I never bothered.  I didn't see the point.  

Greenawalt:  So this takes us to about 1924?

Lord:  No.  I was out for three years, so about 1927.  No, I was very lucky.  I went to Europe for about 7 months...I went to France and England and Italy and all that.  During this time I painted in watercolor, and first learned to love all the continentals very much, and to enjoy life for everything.

Greenawalt:  Were you still looking at architecture during this?

Lord:  Well, theory was to look at architecture, which I was.  I was also painting it.  Which is a good way of getting it in your head.

Greenawalt:  Well, in the 19th century, the grand tour, and in the 18th century, was part of ones education.  Was that still part of the architect's?

Lord:  No.  Except that most prizes, most architectural prizes for competitions or scholarships or whatever...most of them are fellowships to travel.  So, that's still the idea.

Greenawalt:  What led you back to Asheville?

Lord:  My father's office was here, and I was still begging for work here.

Greenawalt:  That was what, 1928?

Lord:  1927, 28...yes, 1928.  Then of course the great Depression fell upon us.  In the meantime he and I began the building which is now the interchange building.  I think it was originally the Mercy's home for the Mission Hospital.  This old telephone building.  Now I think it's offices, I'm not sure.

Greenawalt:  So that was your first big job?

Lord:  Yes.

Greenawalt:  Did your father talk much about the excitement of being in Asheville in the 1920's?  I'm sure it must have been exciting for an architect.

Lord:  Well, it was an exciting place, in the boom days.  The pleasures were very simple, though.  It was a very open, kindly, low pressure sort of place.  In the late 20's the...at least that was the way it was to me...it was, for example, there were band concerts on the square.  It was not this mad rush always.  At least I didn't feel it.  And it felt that way until the beginning of the second war.  At first it was a stock company that gave the lease to the Plaza Theatre.  And they would do a show every week, I guess or every two weeks, and they would rehearse with a chorus line with about 5...one of whom was Lenny's wife who was pregnant at the time, and could still kick as high as anyone else.  And of course this was all during prohibition days.  You went up there with a couple of friends, and you came out and had a cola or something...after probably Goode's Drug Store, a place where you were likely to encounter everybody you ever met.

Greenawalt:  Was that on Montford Avenue?

Lord:  No, it was on Patton Avenue.  Ran through...it was where the Wachovia Bank is now.  Ran through from Patton to College.  I remember Tom Wolfe holding forth on some trip he had made to France, his pleasure and amusement in the provincial French one night stands...and Charlie Parker, who was an architect here.  They could all be found standing out front at Goode's, from about 1:00 in the afternoon to about 6:00 in the afternoon.  He didn't stay in his office because people came in and bothered him.  Then he'd go back after supper, at night, and turn it out, and go to work early the next morning.  So this is the way we operated.  But he was good.  He's the man who did the Arcade building.

Greenawalt:  I was walking through the Arcade building the other day, and maybe you can answer this...it seems to me that with all the trouble that Grove went to level that hill and get rid of it, that when it was all over and done with he still had to build the Arcade building on a slant, with bumps and curves...a very uneven building.  Why didn't they just finish the job and make it flat?

Lord:  That was another lost cause.  We love mountains but we hate hills [laughs], I think I've said that before, but that's the way we are.  We destroyed the possible personality of our town by trying to make it flat.  Look what they did over there where David Millard High School was.  They made a terrible mess of that whole thing.

Greenawalt:  By leveling the hill?

Lord:  Well, yes, and when they ended up there was no pattern, no overall design to tie one thing to the other, no harmonious hold.  And this was most unfortunate.

Greenawalt:  That's not the first time it's happened, in town.

Lord:  Well, no, that's right.  It's so needless.  We could have dignity and... 

Tape 1, Side 2:

[tape has several minutes of dead air]

Greenawalt:  Now, when did your father retire, or die?

Lord:  My father died in '33.

Greenawalt:  Was he active up until then?

Lord:  Yes.  He lost his life in an automobile accident.  In '33.  Just about this time of year.  He was active, but there wasn't much that he could do.  I made mostly hardware for doors...door handles and hinges and fittings and that sort of thing.  It had to work with certain kinds of locks, manufactured locks...my father, he knew a great deal about this sort of hardware business....I used to go to New York, sell his stuff, design it in a man's office up there, get it approved, come back home, detail it, send it back and put it in the shop.  The shop was right here.

Greenawalt:  That forge you built as a child...

Lord:  It came back to life, yes.  So, we had three or four people working out there, a good part of the worst years of the Depression.  Early '30's.

Greenawalt:  Well, were these door handles going on doors at new construction, or was it that during the decade people were just doing little jobs?

Lord: [part of response lost due to poor tape quality]
...subsequently went to work for James Gambel Rogers in New York City.  And Rogers was the architect who was responsible for much of the changeover that we had at Yale from the old housing system to the college system.  They broke Yale College down into the twelve residential colleges, remember?  There was Branford and Saybrook, and...  the first one they built was called Parkins.  Two or three years later, when it was finished, they divided it into two colleges, Branford and Saybrook.  And then they built Jonathan Edwards.  Most of them are named after former presidents.  They ended up with, I think there were twelve, all together.  Rogers designed most of them.  And so it was very lucky, being part of that construction.

[telephone rings, Lord apologizes for the interruption...]

Greenawalt:  It's impressive, the extent to which the economic Depression of the 1930's hurt architects.  Henry Gaines...

Lord:  Yes indeed.  It really did.  It was one of the worst known methods of design.  There was no support in the architecture field.  Blacksmith work kept me busy.  It helped three or four little families around here get through.

Greenawalt:  Are there any examples of your work around town, or are they all in Connecticut?

Lord:  No, there's a pair of...there's some stuff out in the forest, a pair of gates and a pair of doors, I guess they're still there.  On a house on Eastwood Road.  There were some people who were afraid of kidnappers, and fixed up all this stuff as protection.  And they were good to look at at the same time.  None of this stuff was an earth-shaking design, but it was all very honest.  It was traditionally designed, and we made it in traditional ways, so it wasn't phony.  It looked like what it looked like.  

Greenawalt:  This was being made with hand tools?

Lord:  Oh yes.

Greenawalt:  You were personally out there hammering?

Lord:  Oh yes, I was a pretty good blacksmith.  

Greenawalt:  Well, you left blacksmithing by 1937, so I gather there must have been some return.

Lord:  Well, a couple of houses, as I said, came along, that I did in the forest.  That kept me going some.  I guess that was also interspersed with two or three big houses.  I did the house for Charlie Owens.  Did the house over for...[several sentences lost due to tape quality].  And then I did a lot of work for Biltmore Dairy, at one time.   

Greenawalt:  I gather that in 1937 you reopened an office?

Lord:  Yes.  Well, I had, the office was still there.  I just kept the office.  The rent on it was almost nothing, and it was a good place to work, and so on.  I was, I'll tell you where I was.  Do you know where Lamar Gudger's office is?

Greenawalt:  No.

Lord:  Do you know where Pauley Ford's office is?

Greenawalt:  Yes.

Lord:  Well, you go up those stairs and go past the front of the office, which is slanted through the corridor, and it's made with oak...that's my old office.  And the door with big square panels...that's my old office.  

Greenawalt:  So you take that stairway off Church Street?

Lord:  Yes.

Greenawalt:  What building is that?  That's the Federal?

Lord:  Now it's part of the Federal...it used to be a little second building which my father had done many years ago...a cute little building.  When they took it over the developer added sheet metal, and they built the whole thing together to look like one building, instead of two.  So, I was there until I did the work for Western Carolina University.  Western Carolina teacher scholars...

Greenawalt:  Are we talking now about the late '30's?

Lord:  Well, I don't...[response lost due to tape quality]

Greenawalt:  Let me ask you about the impact of WWII on your business.  I know there was more production, war gave priorities as to who could get what, and so forth.  Home construction almost stopped.

Lord:  That's right.  There were four of us, in the late '30's, who got together to do some low-rent housing.  This was the end of the Roosevelt urge to redistribute the wealth.  And we designed two housing projects, the four of us together.  Those four were Stewart Rogers, Henry Gaines, Charles Waddell, and myself. Then when the war came along, that office shut down, like that.

Greenawalt:  Which housing developments did you do?

Lord:  Well, it didn't happen.  The whole business went flat as a board. One of them, I think the site...one of them was on the hill there between Biltmore Avenue and the McDowell.

Greenawalt:  That's Livingston, isn't it?

Lord:  No, it's the other side of the triangle, that little short street that connects South Side and Biltmore Avenue, there.  I think we designed one for that site, and I don't remember where the other one was.  Anyway, they were all...they all went flat as a board.  So then two more people came, Erle Stillwell, Bill Dodge, and we said, "Well, we don't know about this." ...And Mr. Waddell, Mr. Chauncey Waddell, and they were still working in Hendersonville, and that was the original six associates.  So we incorporated ourselves and put ourselves together, and went after some hospital work in Nashville and in Thomasville, Georgia.  The first one we went after was this one out here at Oteen...the Moore General, now the General Evaluation Center.  That's the first one we did.  

Greenawalt:  Were you away from town?

Lord:  I was away from here.  I was over in Nashville.  I spent a year over there.

Greenawalt:  What hospital is that?

Lord:  What the dickens is the name of it...

Greenawalt:  Is it still there?

Lord:  I think they tore it down.  Built some kind of housing development.  It was out in the Belle Meade area.

Greenawalt:  So, is that the sort of work that kept you going through the war era?

Lord:  That's the sort of thing that kept us going through the war, yes.  Then we came back here.  Mr. Waddell was ill then, and died not long after.  And we started working on some textile work, and went after and got a...we did this Old Fort finishing plant, for the United Merchants and Manufacturer's Management Corporation, and I made a site survey for that.  We looked at four different sites, and that was a lot of fun.  I was run up on little river, and the one I picked out was out there in Swannanoa somewhere.

Greenawalt:  Now, this time we're talking about the post-war period?

Lord:  Yes, well this was just immediately after the war.

Greenawalt:  I thought that plant was perhaps more recent than that, but maybe it was just designed in such a way to look ageless.

Lord:  Well, of course it's been added to several times since then.

Greenawalt:  Is there anything characteristic about the work of the six associates and your own work in the post-war period?  The war, of course, was characterized by large government contracts, maybe the 1920's was characterized by large public buildings, and so forth.

Lord:  Well, I think most of it was pretty much...we pretty much stuck to houses.  But, you see, the pace was altogether different, the setup was altogether different.  In general, the six associates did not do individual houses.  But we did a lot of hospitals together.  One of the first things that pulled us together as a firm, in the 40's, was the beginnings of the Memorial Mission, which took over the old Norburn Industrial school site.  The Norburn's hospital was up on the hill there, and the first wing started from that.  

Greenawalt:  They should have put that hospital on a 1,000 acre site, so they would have room for...

Lord:  Well, everything in that kind of...it's always a compromise, you always have to whittle it down to another standpoint...

Greenawalt:  Let's turn from the way you earned your living in architecture to some other areas of interest.  I know you spent time on, at least I'm familiar with your service in the libraries.  Maybe we can start there.  When did you become a board member?

Lord:  In '47 or '48.  Somewhere along there.  The first time it was in preparation for the court [unintelligible].  At that time Annie Westall was the chairman of the board, and the court said the hour has struck, meaning that we were just as jammed up as we could possibly be, and we had to have a new building. Laughter.  That was in '48, I guess.  And it was a nice little analysis of  where the money went and all that stuff.  Of course nothing ever happened about  it.  But that's how long we've been agitating for a new building.  And that's pretty much what went on, I think.  We... of course we had our ups and downs with directors and librarians and so on.

Greenawalt:  What was your....what was one of the ups in a librarian?

Lord: Well, I suppose they've been up mostly anyway all the way around.  But we were obliged to, we had to let Miss Ligon [unintelligible].

Greenawalt:  Now, Ligon was the director of the library from when to when?

Lord:  Well, she was director I guess from about '45...somewhere in there, because she was director when I got on board, and I think we...Ligon was there till about '64.  But it was a much smaller and more modest operation.  Ligon was a protégé, in a way, of Weldon Weir's.  That, maybe, is not the way to put it, but Weldon understood Margaret and Margaret understood Weldon, and just the budget preparation was very simple for Margaret.  She even...she used to could go and talk to Weldon about how to put a budget together, and put it together.  And that was it.  That's what we got.  

Greenawalt:  Did the library enjoy good relations when Weldon Weir was around?

Lord:  Yea, well Weldon...they had then the habit then of reaching into our affairs without telling us, often, and pulling something out.  This crowd finally got them to say...well, we've got to cut your budget by $100,000, or whatever it is, it's up to you, of course, what you do about it, but you just haven't got the money that you want.  That's the way it should be.  But they used to say, well we haven't got the money, and then they'd fish around and pull things out on their own.  Which of course was insane, because they did things that were upsetting by pulling people or probing them...but they would do that sort of thing.  I hope, certainly this crowd we've got won't do that.  So...well one of the things we did, I remember working on quite hard was to...when I got there all they had was the original building...

Greenawalt:  With the turret on top?

Lord:  No, no, no.  This was...the building we were in until last Christmas was built in 1924.  And that was all we had.  But we didn't have any additional rented space.  We had that building, and then we had the Eagle, the Market Eagle branch, just around the corner, which was the colored branch, presided over by Mrs. Hendrick.  Mrs. Robert Hendrick.  He was a dentist...a black man, very much respected, very able, very good people.  We were just tucked up like this because the Sondley had been dumped on us during the war.  So I guess one of the first things we did...I think was up on the top floor.  One of the first things we did was to rent the old bank quarters in the Eagle building next door...cut a hole through the wall and spread into that area where the offices were.  That we did, I guess, in the fifties.  And we developed the basement for storage, and for governmental work space down there, some office space.  And then we were able to get the old ice cream stand on the other side...cut a hole through into that, and had a children's room in there, and that was pretty good.  Maybe an even earlier project, I guess was the exhibition room in the basement.  That was an old supply of old newspapers...years and years and years of old New York Times just sprawled around...tons of newspapers...you couldn't find a thing to save your soul.  And we cleared that out, raised a few pipes out of the headroom, and built those simple little exhibition boards on which you could tack up stuff, we fixed the lighting, and scrounged the money to get that air conditioning thing in there.  And we made very good use of that room for years.  The tendency of late was to emphasize what an awful place it was...terrible.  But when we first built it people were absolutely delighted with it.  They had movies down there they'd never been able to see before anywhere, they had pictures...the first show we had in that room was an exhibition of twelve early American portraits, which the national gallery in Washington loaned us for a month.  And they sent down here with that show two people...two guards.  And one of them spent the night with those pictures and the other one spent the day with those pictures.  You see, the national gallery had sent down here and stored in the Biltmore house during the war, some of the choicest stuff of their collection.  Were you aware of this?

Greenawalt:  No, I wasn't.

Lord:  Well, the room that Bill Cecil not so long ago fixed up, the old famous designer...it was the music room of the house...was never finished when the house was built, it was just a rough formation.  Well, Mr. Beadle and I cased the house as a place to store these pictures, bottom to top, and decided that was the best place to do it.  Mr. Beadle was the man who was in charge of the estate, in charge of the house, before the boys came back from wherever they were.  
This was during the war.  

Greenawalt:  How did you get that assignment?

Lord:  Well, as I said, I had done a great deal of work on the dairy out there.

Greenawalt:  I see.

Lord:  And of course I had known Mr. Beadle, always.  I mean, if I ever had to landscape...ever had any landscaping problems, I went and asked Mr. Beadle.  And if I ever wanted to go somewhere on the estate all I had to do was ask Mr. Beadle if it was alright to take off and go there, and it always was.  I mean, we had a very nice relationship.  So when this thing came along he just phoned me up and said, hey, let's go look at the place and see what we can find.  So we found this room and fixed...we made these wire frames, pipe frames and heavy chicken wire supports, with about three foot centers or four foot centers, and that room was full of these things.  And you could see the best 14th century art in the world from a distance of about three feet...you couldn't get any further. [laughter]  

Greenawalt:  No chance for perspective. 

Lord:  No.  You wandered around and saw these things, but you couldn't get any...there they were but they had guards there all day.  But anyway I think they felt that they owed Asheville some bit of gratitude, because it housed their collection for a while.  And so they made this very nice gesture...the director...Annie Westall angled it...she had some way in and sold us, I think.  And so we had these nice posters, and we did a lot of good publicity on this, and we had a lot of folks interested.  People enjoyed that.  They saw that we had good pictures, good exhibitions.  We used to get the IBM traveling show.  IBM had at that time three or four collections of maybe 40 or 50 pictures which they just kept on the circuit all the time.  And you could find those things ahead of time, you could get in line and get them...they didn't cost anything.  You had to unpack them and pack them, get the insurance, and you had to ship them to the next destination.  Otherwise, you didn't have to pay for the rent on them.  And then we had...we got other folks too.  The Association of American Artists, various groups.  Annie bought a whole collection from Randolph Macon, and that was good.  He had some good pictures.  So we had some good shows there.  And we did the movie thing.  John Bridges was not here then.  We had one or another young women who were sort of exhibition folks who did the formalities and booked things...I've got a whole file on the thing like this.  Annie and I ran it, virtually, for years.

Greenawalt:  How long was Annie Westall chairman of the board?

Lord: She was chairman...oh, I guess from about 1940, I would think, through about '59?  Yea, '59.  '40 to '41 to '59, I think.  Something like that.  

Greenawalt:  She was never employed by the library?

Lord:  No.  No, she and her sister were always much more interested in the Saunders stuff.  Mary Westall, her sister, is, or was...she's now dead...was a botanist who taught botany at Agnes Scott.  She had her doctorate in botany.  So she was a very good bibliographer of the Saunders material, very knowledgeable about what the old man had in the way of natural history, and so on.

Greenawalt:  I see.  One of the problems the library faced during this time was a problem that other institutions in the 1960's faced, and that was integration of races.  For a while the public library was, I suppose, closed completely to blacks, is that not the case?

Lord:  Well the real clincher, I think...I don't know what the situation was before Saunders was put in with the Pack, because I wasn't connected with the library at that time, but Mr. Saunder's will read that the Saunder library was to be used only by well-conducted, non-smoking white people.  [Laughter].  And we were afraid...we had no objection whatsoever to integrating the thing, except we were scared that the heirs would take the board over.  I never had any...I always wanted to integrate it, as soon as we could...but we were always sort of hung up on this thing of, well, if we do this, we'll stir up a great row with the Saunders heirs, and we could lose part of our collection.  And then we kicked that around for a long time.  Reuben Daily was then on the city council...Reuben Daily was a black man in city hall.  And we asked Reuben about it.  We said, Reuben, what would you do?  What do we do about this?  We stand a chance of losing this material, which is, if it's something that we can deal with, will be of as much value to black folks as white folks.  What do we do?  Do we take this chance now, or should we just wait a while?  Well, he said, I don't think you ought to take the chance.  So we stalled.  Then finally we got fed up, and we just said, oh hell.  If we can't let black folks in here, well, let's tell the Saunder heirs to come get their damn will.  So we just proceeded to open it up, and then a year later closed the Market Street branch.

Greenawalt:  Was anything ever said by any of the heirs?

Lord:  Well, I think there was some...one or two little peeps of indignation.

Greenawalt:  What year did that occur?

Lord:  Oh, now...

Greenawalt:  It was during the 1960's, was it not?  About the time the Civil Rights Act was passed?

Lord:  I should think this was probably...this was probably the early '60's.

Greenawalt:  Wasn't George McCoy on the board in the early '60's?

Lord:  I would think so.

Greenawalt:  And how did he stand on that question?  Was he...

Lord:  Well, I don't know, but I think he voted for integration.  The little I know of George, I'm sure it was.

Greenawalt:  Well maybe we could say a work about the Market Street branch.  That was established, when?  In the thirties?

Lord:  That, as far as I know always existed.  I mean, I don't know when it started.  It was moved around the corner in my day.  It was on Market Street down in the end of the YMI building.  And we took it out of there and put it on Eagle Street.

Greenawalt:  Did it get its books from the Pack Library?

Lord:  No, it got its books the way the other branches did.  Irene Hendricks...I couldn't think of her first name...but she was a temperer.  A power for moderation, and she had influence with the black folks, and she kept the lid on.

Greenawalt:  Were there many black folks agitating to integrate the library?

Lord:  I think that somebody then...whoever agitated things anyway agitated that along with it.  I went back to the office one day, I had a whole delegation of school kids who came and sat in a row in my office and they just said, we want to know when we can get in the library.  And I said, well, we're working on it.  We've got to work it out.  They were eager, all of them, to put as much pressure on us as they could.  And the library is well used by black folks, now, I'm pleased to say.

Greenawalt:  Well, how about other areas of interest?  I clearly knew about the library.  Is there some other area of interest that we can touch on?

 Lord:  That's a good word, touch on.  [Laughter]  Well, I think that as far as my impact on the local scene goes, the impact of the trips I've taken to foreign parts have impressed on me the values of certain city amenities which I don't think most people have ever thought about much.  And the desirability of introducing this kind of think into our local scene...this has given me...this is probably not where to start, because I've always had this bug about getting trees planted back in the tree-less desert of uptown, to counteract the acres of asphalt and concrete, and the terrible glare of the heat waves shimmering off the square in the noon day sun.  And I worked hard to get trees planted uptown.  And that's been interesting and fun.  I think people are gradually beginning to...I mean, this tree thing is catching on.  I believe that's one thing that will make a tremendous amount of difference in Asheville.

Greenawalt:  How is it that all the trees disappeared?  Was it a deliberate act, or just...

Lord:  Well, trees...I think that...I've got a Pen and Plate paper or two about this, if you'd like to look them over...I think that we're closer to the fire handlers up here.  People are perhaps two generations closer to fire handlers than people are in Winston-Salem, for example.  And the [unintelligible], quite reasonably, I guess, was brought up to believe that unless he cleared the land and cultivated it, he would be regarded as lazy and shiftless, and unable to get himself a family, unless he cleared his new ground and planted his crop.  And that was part of the whole ethic.  Consequently it was bred...the tree is your natural enemy.  Don't pay any attention...trees are...here's a whole forest full of them...don't worry about a tree.  And he brought it to town with him when he came in.  And the result is that the regard for trees is very low.  And the understanding of the value of trees in the urban scene is lacking.  People don't realize that a big tree is a ten-ton air-conditioning machine all by itself, or more.  But they don't realize what the thing does for them in the summer, just in practical terms, in their electric bill.  They don't understand these things, don't think about them.  They just say, well, the leaves fall and we have to rake them up, and it's a damn nuisance.  I hope people are gradually becoming a little more conscious of...they subconsciously gather in the shade, you see.  You don't see little groups of people standing out here in the summertime in the sun, talking about their neighbors, or whatever it is they talk about.  They go and get in the shade of one of those trees, of which they are more or less unconscious, but which adds to their comfort, materially, only they just don't know it.  Until that tree's gone, and then they fuss...then they complain...where's the shade?  I hope we've now got a tree commission in the town.  I think it's going to spread a little education...spread more.  And I hope we can get more publicity and more stories and more news and more talk and more enthusiasm about it.  There's a movement right now to get a couple more good trees planted in Pritchard Park, in those two corners over by the Wachovia Bank.  And this is a thing very close to my heart...I just pursue this all the time.

Greenawalt:  In some cities, water departments are the arch-enemies of trees.  They don't like roots to get into their lines...

Lord:  That's right.

Greenawalt:  Is that the case in this town?

Lord:  We're of course trying...we keep trying to explain to these people that...certain kinds of trees, certain maples and certain willows, their roots get inside and clog them up.  So to try to avoid planting trees like that...

[end of tape 1]

Tape 2, Side 1:

[Some of the conversation lost in the switching of tapes]

Greenawalt:  A few minutes ago you mentioned the Pen and Plate Club.  This has been an area of your interest also?

Lord:  Yea.  Pen and Plate has been a lot of fun.  I've enjoyed Pen and Plate.

Greenawalt:  What impact do you think the club has had on the town?

Lord:  [several seconds of silence]

Greenawalt:  In your own tree campaign, did you not deliver some papers to the Pen and Plate Club?

Lord:  Yes.

Greenawalt:  Did it stir up any interest?

Lord:  A little.  I was about to say that I thought the impact of the Pen and Plate Club on the town was zero.  On individuals, probably it broadened the view somewhat of a good many people, as far as knowledge and views, and they have in turn probably had an impact.  I think when people write papers for this club, generally people are very good.  So when a person takes on one, he feels he has to do the best he can.  So he researches it as well as he can, and writes it as well as he can, and tries to get a subject that will be of interest to the group.  And of course, the ones that have been the most successful are the ones that have been controversial, where you get two sides...two arguments, and you get some for and some against.  And that makes it more fun, but it's not very often the case.

Greenawalt:  Can you recall some of those?

Lord:  Well, let's see...it's not very often the case.  [several seconds of silence]  No, but I'll look them over and see what I can dig up...

Greenawalt:  Well, when I raise the question of other interests, I'm not merely asking about interests that may have had an impact on the town, but also interests that have been important in your own development.  Earlier you mentioned photography.

Lord:  Yea, well, most of the pictures I've taken in recent years...in my early days I started off with a 5 percent view camera...and learned something about how you did it.  In more recent times I've mostly stuck to 35mm.  And I've taken lots and lots of slides, when I traveled in Europe, and I brought back an immense amount of stuff that has been good propaganda for trees, or for town squares, or for certain kinds of pavement or certain kinds of shopping centers...lots and lots of pictures, and I've shown them to scads of people, these slides, and I think it rubs off a little.  Otto Fleishman, an interesting man with whom I traveled quite a bit...Otto and I, when Weldon was in charge...we thought if we could just take Weldon from one or two council meetings, and take him over to Europe and show him some of these things...I mean we assume...this is a tourist town...we assume that we know how to...we never seem to think that there are other people, or at least people in other parts of the world who might know how to do the tourist thing better than we do.  Americans, I think, are prone to think that whatever they do is the best way to do it, and why go ask somebody else?  Why, we know how to do whatever it is better than anybody else does.  But the Europeans have been doing the tourist thing since the crusades.  I mean, Switzerland has been in the hotel business since the year 900.  They know more about it than we'll ever find out.  And they know how to please the traveler.  And all of southern Bavaria knows how to do this.  Parts of France, even if they don't pay any attention to it, they know a lot of these things.  The Italians know a lot of these things.  Here's all this stuff, and we go over there, the things we look at and the things we enjoy...we come back home and we haven't got any of them.  And you try to encourage these people to do some of this stuff, and you just can't get through.

Greenawalt:  Well, in this regard I recall a very interesting talk you gave on European plazas and squares.  You were showing pictures, and you talked about the possibilities and potentials of Pack Square.  This was years ago.  And then, soon after...one of the things you said in your talk was the need to keep things scaled to a human size.  Well, soon after, they knocked down some buildings on the west side of Pack Square and put up the Northwestern Bank.

Lord:  [Laughs uproariously]

Greenawalt:  One of the points in the talk was also a space where you meet people face to face, and not bumper to bumper, and a decade later, the city got some money and used it to allow traffic to flow through Pack Square faster.  And I hate to bring this up, because it is such a discouraging reaction, but do you think there's any hope for Asheville?

Lord:  [Still laughing]  Well, I don't know.  I think there are certain people on this new acquisition commission who are sensitive and persuasive.  And one of them is Chan Gordon.  I don't know how well you know Chan, but he's generally come through with a good contribution at committee meetings.  Another one is Robin Daniels.  I don't know whether she's...I'm afraid she's the one who's more or less blind as a bat shit...[laughs].

Greenawalt:  Unknown Gaelic or poor French...

Lord:  [Laughs]  Too crazy...anyway bad Gaelic or bad French...it's really half cockney, I think.  But I guess something will come out of it.  I don't know...I hope so.  Of course I've just tried to get some more trees planted on Haywood Street, and now three of the four are just as dead as doornails.  Apparently all the leaves fell off.

Greenawalt:  You mentioned earlier that Asheville is not far removed, or Ashevillians are not far removed from the fire handlers.  Have you noticed any of that attitude changing in the last 20 years?  A more growing sense of urban sophistication?

Lord:  Yes.  Well, I think so.

Greenawalt:  While we're talking about the associations in the town, through this conversation you've mentioned several things about the quality of life in Asheville.  The increasing pollution...today you can't see as far west as you used to be able to see...you also mentioned other things about the quality of life changing.  The mad rush, I think you said, that began after WWII.  Can you compare the Asheville as it is today, and the quality of life, with, say, some point in the 1920's?  Has it gone downhill?

Lord:  Well I think it has.  It seems to me that our values are cheaper, are less...our values are not what they were.  The things we want are not as...the North Carolina Department of Control office knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Maybe not.  Maybe the real estate boom here...did you ever hear of the Penny brothers?  Twin auctioneers?  They would go around selling the lots in these little subdivisions, and they had this little band with a clarinet and a trumpet...a trombone probably, and maybe there were some strings somewhere...they'd play a little tune and then they'd auction off these lots.  They had some kind of platform and a truck to do all this.  So maybe the values were just as cock-eyed in that day as they are now, but somehow it was just simpler, sort of.  And certainly an attempt was made to put pressure...but it just didn't take.

Greenawalt:  Another thing you mentioned was that architects or builders have simply disregarded the natural surroundings...they've leveled hills and built things on a flat.  Do you think there's any change in that in architecture?

Lord:  I think that the architects are more sensitive to this than they used to be.  I think that architects in general have a much better notion of design now than they did then.  I think they have a better idea of real values now than they did then.  But the people who work for them...I'm not so sure about that.  But, I mean, the people are so apt to fight the site all the time.  Instead of going along with it...instead of building with the environment and with the natural inclination of things, they so often build against it.  They cut out and dig out here, and they spill the soil down the bank over here...god knows where...and kill all kinds of underbrush and all sorts of stuff.  And it takes years for that stuff to recover.  And they dig out a bench...they dig here and they fill there...bench this in and put their house on a flat place, instead of having the courage or the imagination or the gumption to just shoot something out from the side of the hill and put the house on it and let the wind blow underneath.  Or hang the house down from something and put the garage on top of it.  There are all kinds of things...wonderful things you can do with houses on hillsides, but nobody ever does it.

Greenawalt:  Well, the roundette seemed to be an answer to that, didn't it?

Lord:  Well, is it ever hung up on anything?

Greenawalt:  No, but it's stuck up on steel piers...

Lord:  Are they?

Greenawalt:  Usually, yes.

Lord:  I'm not...I think I must never have gotten into that whole nest of them up there.

Greenawalt:  It's nice that, the ones I've seen anyway, are built without any excavation whatsoever.  Steel piers are just driven into the ground, and the building is placed on top of that, with no damage to the environment.

Lord:  Well, good.  Of course, I think Walter Wickman's housing development out here, Klondike, out at the end of Montford...they're on stilts, but I don't know how they're faring.  So I think things are changing.  

Tape 2 Side 2

Greenawalt:  Well, we've spent a good deal of time at this.  There's just perhaps on last major question that I might ask you.  I know in your seventy-eight years in Asheville, you've met any number of people.  You've already told me a little bit about George Masa, the Japanese photographer.  Perhaps you could share some of these thoughts.

Lord:
Ah, he was a dear little man.  He came... as far as I know, he came over here as a... he made his way in America as a valet.  As an ironer and button-sewer and coat's presser at the Grove Park Inn.  This is what I've heard.  I don't know.  And how he got into the county... where he came from...  He spoke with a strong accent.  He wasn't born in America.  He must've grown up with a foreign language.  And then he became... then when I first knew him, he was a very popular member of the Carolina Mountain Club.  A great hiker.  And a man who had a... he had one of these little bicycle wheel trail-measuring devices.  And he pushed it all around through the mountains and measured the distances from here to there.  And he had a pack sack in which he carried his... he had a great big 8x10 (which I now own, as a matter of fact).  A great 8x10 camera that he carried in a canvas thing on his back.  And he took a lot of these Smoky Mountain pictures with that thing.  Of course he left a whole lot of negatives.  A man who bought all of Masa's equipment and stuff... came into it somehow.  Masa died ultimately.  Before he died... I think he was completely broke.  This was the end of the Depression.  And he died out at the County Home.  No one out there could contact his people.  I went out to see him a time or two.  He was not right in his head.  But he seemed to be comfortable and well looked after out there.  And when he died, George Stevens and myself and two or three other people saw to his funeral arrangements... and a coffin and so on... and buried him... he's buried over in Riverside Cemetery.  And we put him over there under, right at the foot of a big oak tree.   And I wish I could remember exactly where that was, but I don't.

Greenawalt:  Does the tombstone say "George Masa"?

Lord:  There's not a tombstone really.

Greenawalt:  Is there a marker of any kind?

Lord:  There may be a record over in the office there.  I don't know.

Greenawalt:  Who purchased his negatives?

Lord:  A man who came here from Alaska.  And who went somewhere.  Now, I don't know.  Do you know... did you ever know Buck Thorne?  Did you know Barbara Thorne?  She was a Barbara Ambler.  She was a great mountain climber.  And she might know more about George.  I don't know.

Greenawalt:  About his negatives?

Lord:  Where they got scattered to I don't know.  George Stevens might know something about that.

Greenawalt:  You've mentioned Weldon Weir. What was your impression of Weldon Weir?

Lord:  Well, of course, we all very much adored Weldon Weir.  But I don't...I think Weldon was the kind of chap that you'd like to have as a city manager.  He was a political operator, and he more or less managed the political machinery which councilmen elected, at least I always imagined he did.  And he sort of controlled, in a way, the council of which he worked, you see.  I liked him, and found him understanding and aware of the...of a good many thing's we've been talking about that made towns worth living in and worthwhile.  And, for instance, Weldon was around when we first got the first row of trees planted across Battery Park Avenue, there.  That was the first row we put in that were planned. 

So we got them planted, and designed all this stuff and so on...and then later on they got some kind of bug or something, and we said, "Weldon, those trees need spraying."

    "Oh," he said, "Here you are, you always want something.  Get them sprayed and send me the bill."

  I mean, you got instant action out of it.  On a matter like this, which, in this day, would be referred to somebody and somebody and somebody.  So he cut through all that.  And you could always see him.  

Greenawalt:  What did he stand for?  You've described him as someone who could make the machinery work well.

Lord:  Well, I don't know that he stood for anything more than to have a good working community...good fire protection, etc.  It may have...how good it was, I don't know.  But Weldon really gave his attention to detail, and if you wanted to find him, if you went early in the morning...I've been down at the city garage at 7:00 in the morning, and there would be Weldon Weir down there talking with waterworks people to see whether they were doing this, that or the other...what their schedule was and why they weren't doing something.  And so the technique was, "So-and-so, you do such-and-such.  If you can't do this, I can get somebody who can." And it happened.  Sort of a combination of pressure and still a feeling that the person was being looked after. "I'll protect you against the public.  You better get this job done or you'll hear from me."  I think he was effective in that way.  I don't know how many...oh, there were probably...I mean, old people who had some funny job, or old folks who were not eligible for pension, but who had a long allegiance to the city in some way...he'd take care of these somehow.  It was not that he was all bad...

Greenawalt:  What you seem to be describing is the classic description of the city boss. 

Lord:  Pretty much.

Greenawalt:  His office predated the welfare system, but he was able to take care of welfare in a personal way.

Lord:  I think pretty much.

Greenawalt:  You are a contemporary of Tom Wolfe.  Did your paths cross?

Lord:  Not much.  Very little.  I made one or two...at the time I was going north to peddle iron...I used to peddle it around the offices of New York.  I rode up once or twice on a train with Tom in a smoking car.  And he was worth listening to, but I never really knew him...The Black Mountain College thing...I'm sorry that I didn't stay closer to that.  

Greenawalt:  Do you mean as an educational enterprise, or as an architectural?

Lord:  Oh no...for the people...fantastic people.  Buckminster Fuller. All kinds of amazing folks that harbored or took refuge from the Depression down there.  Cunningham and some of his people spent at least the summers down there, with nothing but pocket money...a place to sleep, something to eat and pocket money, that's about all.  John Cage...lots of notables. We had several of these people at one time.  And I think one of the things about Black Mountain was not the effect it had on the students, about which somehow you don't really hear very much, it was mostly the effect these people had on each other.  The electrifying contacts between members of the faculty who sparked each other into all kinds of activity, and who...some of this group more than others...the whole of it was so much more than the sum of its parts.  

Greenawalt:  Well, it's easy to miss things while they're going on, and then in later years say that...

Lord:  Well, I got out some, but not...in the last years there was an oboist who wrote contemporary music, which was to me completely dissonant and meaningless.  

Greenawalt:  Well, we've been talking about people.  Maybe as the last question I might return to architecture.  Buildings, in a sense, can be friends.  You've left a number of friends around in the community.  You've mentioned some of them that you did with your father, but I don't think we've said much about your work, the buildings that you did in the post-war period.  Can you possibly...

Lord:   Well, I did quite a number of Cullowhee buildings total...did the science classroom building out there...I don't know what they've done to it since then...they haven't done anything to it.  I haven't been out there in quite a while.  But, it was quite a successful building in its day, I thought.  And I liked that.  It looked sensible and worked well, and that I thought was the criteria.  I don't give a hoot what it looks like; if it doesn't work, so what?  What of it?  And this was a way of thought...The Shool of Architecture at Yale...it doesn't work at all, but which is magnificent to look at.  And saying to some people, this...transports as a piece of sculpture.  But the thing has to work, anyway you like.  I guess the last time I was there I went up a couple of floors and there was water on the floor because it had been raining.  And I said, hey, what goes on?  Does it do this every time it rains?  And they said, oh, yes, it always does.  I think its a six or seven story building.  But I think there are actually some fifty odd floor levels, different floor levels.  Up and down and back up...its incredible.  But there you are.  I suppose a building like that is very well worth while, because of the discussion of the age about architectural philosophy.  This thing must have sparked hundreds and hundreds of hours of argument over what it's all about.  And stimulated a lot of thinking about what are we doing, anyway.  I wonder if Whitney Griswald, who was president before Brewster, who hired a lot of these architects, didn't have something like this in mind in the diversity of this building.  Of course he had Aaron Siren up there, and McGee and I looked at Aaron's stuff and decided that it was the best stuff on campus.  The warmest, nicest stuff on campus.  

Greenawalt:  You're modestly avoiding your own work.  Which of your own jobs around are you happiest with?

Lord:  Well, of course, the building that he and I did...the [D.H. Ramsey] library at the University over here, which I think works pretty well, doesn't it?

Greenawalt:  Yes.

Lord:  And I liked that.  Then I did...I did a little shopping center...a most inconsequential, inconspicuous, insignificant affair, at Montreat.  A little general store with a little building off to the side which contained a coin-operated laundry...that's right down a creek bottom.  The creek flows around and between these buildings, which are connected by bridges across the creek...

Greenawalt:  That's sort of Japaneese...

Lord:  ...on different levels, with wide overhangs...I don't know if you're familiar with this or not...

Greenawalt:  Yes.  I just said it has sort of an oriental...

Lord:  Oh, you like that?

Greenawalt:  I like that, yea.

Lord:  Well, I think that's just about the nicest thing I've built on my record.  I really do.  It's of course...it was lovelier ten years ago than it is now, because it hasn't been kept up.  But I think it has a delicacy, and still harks back to the mountain...and it pleases me still.

Greenawalt:  And it certainly co-exists with the environment.

Lord:  Yea, I think...oh, you always hear water running, and that's nice.

Greenawalt:  What buildings are you unhappiest with?

Lord:  I think the thing that made me maddest, and caused my back to hurt worse than anything was the Wachovia bank uptown.  That was programmed in a way that just didn't...we had it up off the ground so you walked under it, put chops around it, we had to set it back from Pritchard Park, we had an alleyway through the middle of it from Church Street to College, across from Patton, right through the shops on both sides of that.  You go through that and down some stairs to Lexington in the back...I mean College in the back...we even had it going across...we even had a bridge going across Lexington to the parking lot...across College to the parking lot on the other side.  Well, any kind of thing you could imagine would make it a people place, where folks would go and where they would loaf and where they would stop and where they would get in the shade and where they would exchange growls, and where they could get a Coke-a-cola on the side.  Hell, we tried everything.  Couldn't crack that fortress Wachovia mentality.  It just didn't fit anywhere.

Greenawalt:  They kept tearing town your schemes, didn't they?

Lord:  Yea.  

Greenawalt:  So they pretty much designed their own building.

Lord:  Oh, they designed it, yes.  That was a sad disappointment.  Because there was something...you see when it's done, Bruce, it's interrupted the sequence of show windows for shoppers.  Now, before, there were serious shops in that thing, and the shopper went right around from Patton Avenue and up to Haywood with continuously something to look at in the windows.  Now, from beyond Church Street up there to the corner of College Street, they haven't got anything to look at at all except that damn building.  That glaring building...nothing going on.  And yet, this was the pervasive, the prevailing philosophy that these people had when they did that building and two or three others...because I've seen others down State which have the same formidable...you know...you stay out sort of feel about it.

Greenawalt:  Did they have a vice president in the company somewhere who was an aspiring architect, or something?

Lord:  No, I don't know in what way they thought this would effect the...

Greenawalt:  Too many buildings like that could ruin a downtown.

Lord:  Oh god yes.  Then I did a couple of dormitories down at a women's college in Greensboro, that I enjoyed and thought were nice.  We propped them up in the air so that you could walk...a nice walk....landscaped, close clipped lawn on one side, and just woods on the other side.  Just raw woods, with underbrush.  And I liked that transition.  Totally different environment on two sides.  And nice space under the building.  I question whether kids use that space or not.  They use one thing one year and use something else the next year...I don't know.  Student fashions and what students like seem to change radically and rapidly.  

Greenawalt:  Well, I want to thank you very much, Mr. Lord, for sharing so much time.  We've spent at least two hours at this, and again, I want to thank you very much.

Lord:  Well, you're very welcome.

Greenawalt: 

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