Interview with Ron Stroud Part 1.2

A while back I posted the first part of my on-going interview with Ron Stroud, in honor of the Regular Year Members of 1959-60. Unfortunately, I left out part of it! So here is the last fascinating tidbit associated with the first part of our interview. It's short but definitely sweet. I asked Ron how he traveled to Greece and what it was like - plane, train, what? He answered:

"I traveled from New York to Athens in August 1959 on the Greek liner, Queen Frederiki.

The Queen Frederica in 1967. For an idea of what the experience would have been like, check out this awesome video.

Pierre MacKay and the other Fulbrighters came on the other Greek liner, the Olympia. Also on the Frederiki were fellow-students Bill Wyatt, and his wife Sandra, Jim Wiseman (his wife Lucy came later), Patrick Henry and possibly one or two others. Fellow passengers were the new Director of Athens College, Dr. Rice and his wife, and the Greek poet, Athanasios Maskelaris, from whom I had Modern Greek lessons on board. The trip took 14 days and we all got the false impression that the long journey was almost over as soon as we cleared Gibraltar, but then we stopped in Barcelona, Palermo (where WW II bombing was still very evident), Naples, and Messina and it seemed to take forever to get to Peiraieus.

I was in a cabin in the very bottom of the ship with five old Greek men who had recently retired and were returning to their villages to live off the proceeds of their US Social Security. I was the only non-Greek at our table for eight, which was provided for lunch and dinner with a large flagon of very bitter retsina. The menu for lunch and dinner was printed in Greek and English and I still have one as a souvenir.

Queen Frederica menu from the 1960s.

We had a Greek orchestra, Greek dances, and Greek movies every evening; I remember Melina Mercouri in "Stella." I relieved the boredom of the journey by a shipboard romance with a young American woman who was sailing to join her parents in Athens, where her father worked for the CIA, and she was going to join the US Economic Mission. The Truman plan was still very active in Greece and the US Mission had taken over the huge city block occupied by the Tameion Building, just off Syntagma, and containing the swish watering hole Zonars, where many Americans hung out. The US Embassy was at Vasilissis Sophias and Herodes Atticus, catty-corner from the Benaki Museum and across the street from the headquarters of the Evzones.

Greece was not in sight on the eve of our arrival but I was too excited to sleep and around 3.00 a.m. went down the hall outside our cabin to where a member of the crew was standing smoking next to a large open door. The sea was rushing by and on the horizon barely visible was the outline of a mountain. "Ellada[Greece]" he said laconically. It was Cape Malea and he seemed as excited to be here as I was.

We were met at the dock in Peiraieus by Colin Edmonson, the Secretary of the School. The Secretary normally met arriving members of the School in those days. We had little baggage, because you had to go down to Customs to clear your belongings the next day, so Colin bundled us all into the School Land Rover, a venerable gray vehicle, with a large spare tire on the hood, that had been donated by Dr. George Miles of the American Numismatic Society, father of Mimsy Miles and future father-in-law of the future Director, James McCredie. It so happened that McCredie himself was there with Edmonson because they had been out on a topographic excursion with Arthur Steinberg. The reason I mention these three is that as we drove into Athens and the Acropolis loomed into sight, we all in the back seats were stretching our necks and uttering excited exclamations, while Edmonson, McCredie, and Steinberg merely drove by without looking. Hardened veterans."

The Parthenon in 1959. This amazing picture from here.

Things I see a lot of

The view from the back of the bus. Somehow I've managed to hold on to the same seat I've had the entire year.

This picture is a double whammy. First there's the map stop, with all of us standing around a map of the area, compass properly positioned, learning the lay of the land. Then there is the passing-out-of-the-handouts. If there is a handout for every site we visit, then how many times this year have I watched the handouts go round?

The climbing of a hill/acropolis/mountain. Notice that everyone else is somehow ahead of me.

Usually when people post pictures of their trips, they upload the ones of beautiful landscapes, quirky images, or smiling people. Far too often, the most ubiquitous images are left out, especially the bus. The tour bus is one of the most common things to see in Greece, and for us, it is pretty much the structural core of our day. I would go as far as saying it is the center of our world.

Birthday Party to Loring Hall!

Today is February 11, 2009. Loring Hall has officially been open for 79 years. I say officially, but not in practice, because in the fall of 1929, after the Fall Trips had ended, people began slowing trickling in to the brand-new building, some in December and some in January of 1930. Lucy Shoe Merrit was one of those. I’ve already reported some of her thoughts on Loring Hall, but my favorite of her descriptions was the one about the ‘Grand Opening’ of Loring, which occurred on February 11, 1930, from 5-7pm. She’d apparently kept a diary while at the School, so her letter in 1981 contained a lot of wonderful details.

Apparently over 300 people came, and it wasn’t just members of the School community, but dignitaries, some of the leading families in Greece, archaeologists and foreign diplomats. There was a huge spread and the students were in charge of showing the guests around; the things that were most popular among the guests were the metal furniture, the bathrooms and the kitchen. The guests kept opening all the drawers and playing with the aluminum utensils in the kitchen (which annoyed the cook; he preferred his copper stuff and was unimpressed by the aluminum). It seems that the bathtubs were extremely popular as well; in Greece in 1930, being able to turn on a tap and get hot water at any time of the day or night was entirely miraculous. Funny that hot water is still an issue in Loring today. You can get wonderful scalding showers at certain times of the day, but if it’s a bit cold outside, prepare yourself for pain.

The day after the Grand Opening, because it was such a special occasion, Lucy Shoe and her compatriots ‘dressed’ for dinner. That is, they wore evening dresses and tuxes. To dinner in Loring Hall. Fancy. Shoe commented that back in the day you actually ‘dressed’ for special occasions. There’s some very revealing information about the School population in that statement: most School members were wealthy enough to own a tux, and to bring it to Greece with them. This can be contrasted with the situations of other people at the School whose letters I have read. For one man, in the early 1900s, the topic of money was a frequent one in letters home to his family. He would constantly refer to how much he spent on lunch, how much it cost to get his clothes cleaned, and when he was able to get a great deal on various meals.

Anyways, Happy 79th Birthday to Loring Hall. May there be many more to come.

Dudes: Stay Out! Loring Hall and the Hostel-For-Women in Lucy Shoe Merrit's Letters

On Thursday I spent another hour or so in the School’s archive, finally returning to my research-for-fun project on the School’s history. I haven’t been able to address the topic much (which, actually, was one of the main reasons for this blog’s existence), simply because we have been so busy here on the Regular Year Program. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I have been getting some good work done on my Etruscan sacrifice projects; when I’m in the research-zone, it’s pretty hard for me to break away and explore other subjects, like ASCSA history. So I’m not the best at multi-tasking. I admit it. But I’ve been slightly obsessed with the issue of Prince George’s Palace, where the School’s women lived in the 1920s before Loring Hall opened. While I was researching that, I got a little side-tracked by some letters written by Lucy Shoe Merritt, so I’ll deal with Prince George later.

Lucy Taxis Shoe came to the School in 1929. She was born in 1906 to Mary Dunning Shoe and W. Bonaparte Shoe, an engineer.

Lucy Taxis Shoe and her Aunt Lina on the porch. (Photo from the Dunning Family Photograph archive.)

Lucy Taxis Shoe at age 16, school pic from the Philadelphia High School for Girls. (Photo from the Dunning Family Photograph archive.)

Lucy eventually got together with Benjamin Merritt, a specialist in 5th c. BCE epigraphy; he'd been a professor at Michigan (1928–1932), then Princeton (1935-1969) and then UTexas, Austin. One of his better known works was The Athenian Tribute Lists. Benjamin and Lucy were married at Princeton in 1964.

Lucy marries Benjamin Merritt, 1964. (Photo from the Dunning Family Photograph archive.)

Lucy was an incredibly active member of the American School community. She was a big fan of mouldings, and her first publication, Profiles of Greek Mouldings, came out in 1936. She also worked on Italian examples; we can surely call her one of the early American Etruscologists because of her 1965 Etruscan and Roman Republican Mouldings (and the 2000 version with Ingrid Edlund-Berry). Following in the footsteps of L.E. Lord, she wrote a history of the ASCSA, covering the period from 1939-1980. But she first came to Athens and the American School in 1929, just a few months before the Great Depression.

So we have some things in common, Lucy Shoe and I. She was a student at the School; so am I. She was at the School when the Market crashed back home; I am here during the Lesser Depression: Part 2. She liked School history; so do I. She liked Etruscan things; me, too! And of course, when she was here, she lived on the second floor of Loring Hall’s main building, from the day it opened to 1933, and at various times thereafter.

As I’ve mentioned, Loring Hall was initially supposed to be the Women’s Hostel. So when it was constructed, part of the agreement was that the upper floor of the main building was reserved for women, ONLY. Up there it’s got about 7 bedrooms and a small apartment that nowadays is referred to as the Queen’s Megaron (called after the mis-named room at Knossos; Lucy lived here in 1932). When Loring opened, those rules were far stricter than they are now.

As an example, in 1981 Lucy sent a letter and some notes to Joan Connelly, now housed in the Loring Hall box in the School Archives (Box 329/1, Folder 3). Her letter makes clear how different things were then. She mentions specifically about the time she had malaria (!), and she was bed-ridden upstairs. (That’s a nice thought, I wonder if she was in my room.) Her friend Homer Thompson, obviously very concerned about her malaria, came to her bedside to visit her. Apparently this created a gi-normous crisis. At that time, the woman living in the upstairs apartment was a member of the Managing Committee, and she’d been especially active in trying to bring about the Women’s Hostel (which had been scrapped in the late 20s when a bunch of money came in for the construction of Loring Hall). This woman was extremely upset, since she thought that the ‘Women’s Megaron’ (as they dubbed it then), should be ‘sacred’ in honor of the lost and mourned Women’s Hostel that never was to be. The agreement the School had made was that the upper floor of Loring was to be the mini-Women’s hostel, with no man allowed, EVER. Apparently Homer Thompson’s sin caused a clamp down, and no man ever braved those stairs again except for the doctor (Dr. Lorendo) in case of illness.

A lot of interesting things to be said about what was going on at the School, politics-wise, at the time. I’d love to do some serious work on it, but I guess that will have to wait until I actually have a job. I just hope that when I get malaria, my friends will come and visit me.

Incidentally, Lucy also described the housing arrangements usually made in Loring: women lived on the second floor of the main building, men lived on the second floor of the Annex, older men or women, or married couples lived on the lower floor of the Annex, and the visiting professor got the whole West House. This is pretty much how it still works today.

Loring Hall, a la Google Earth. From left to right: the West House and the Annex, then Loring's main building with the two porches on either side.

Over dinner last quarter, Pierre MacKay told me that when he came to his Regular Year in 1959 (more on this year to come), it was pounded into his head to never EVER go up the main staircase: that was the women’s area, and there were dire consequences for those who broke the rule. At some point in time, however, the Queen’s Megaron opened up for visiting male professors as well. Pierre, it turns out, was one of those. He told me that, even when he lived on the second floor in that apartment, he felt VERY awkward and uncomfortable climbing those stairs, having been warned against it for so many years before.

Pierre MacKay discusses Greek history with Regular Member Mark Hammond.

Presenting....

Here we are. The Regular (and Associate) Members for the 2008-9 Year.