Oral History Interview with Sue Kendrick

Ward: …weren’t they

Kendrick: Yes, uh, when they had to go with me to the Loomhouse. When I went to help Lou Tate. And so they were introduced to, uh, the Loomhouse almost as soon as they were, opened their eyes and were able, aware of what was going on around. In fact, Martha was about 6 months old when we took her to an open house at the Loomhouse and the brother of, uh, and the brother of Ann Kiper, John Waitman, looked at (baby?) and said “poor little thing, she can’t even do anything yet” (laughs) “all she can do is smile, she’s so pretty.” We thought that was just great. (laughs)

Ward: What year did you move to Kenwood Hill?

Kendrick: We must have moved in July, the 9th, 19 and 54, I believe is correct. I know it was July 9th because that was my mother’s and one of my brother’s-in-law’s birthday. But I think it was ’54. We’ve been here, it will be 32 years in July.

Ward: So the girls will be, we have pictures of the girls all throughout the book.

Kendrick: Oh, yes. Sam helped take the pictures. He was an amateur photographer and so Lou Tate took advantage of him, as well as the girls, to get many of her pictures.

Ward: Tell about the early days of weaving lessons and what it was like up there.

Kendrick: Oh, Lou Tate was actually a glorified babysitter. Everybody, she let the children weave on Saturdays, so everybody sent all the children over on Saturday with a quarter in their hand and Lou Tate taught them to weave. I had often helped her and that’s how my girls were so involved in weaving. As soon as Martha was 6, or there abouts, why she helped teach people how to weave on Saturdays and of course Sally, not to be outdone had to help. Sally was 6 when we moved out here on the hill and that made it much easier for us to get to the Loomhouse than we had been, when we lived on Wampum Street.

Ward: Of course you didn’t start weaving that early, did you?

Kendrick: No, I couldn’t take time out to weave. Lou Tate always had some letters to type or some mailings to be gotten out or needed her mailing list gone over. She had some sort of typing for me to do every time I wanted to learn how to weave, so my girls (?) me how to weave before I did. I would help with the children even when I didn’t know how to weave because I knew what was all about from having seen it. I could (shuck) threads and put the bobbin in the shuttle even without knowing what I was up to. When the children would come and work on the 2 harness looms which was simply throwing the shuttle from one side and then changing the shed and throwing it back to the other side and the changing shed and throwing it back again by, there was a way to hold onto the…, oh, I don’t know what to call it, to the, a way to change the shed by moving a little rod at the top of the uh, loom. And so Lou Tate didn’t have enough looms for every child to weave and so one of them when their little feet would not touch the, were not long enough to touch the treadle, why somebody would move, change sheds for them. Back and forth at the top of the loom, and the one child would weave while the other changed sheds and them they would swap. And the other, that child then would get to weave while the other child changed the sheds at the top of the loom. Oh, they would weave so many pieces and they would want to take them home at the end of the day, by we put pins in and pinned a piece of paper on saying to whom the piece belonged, who had woven it. Then we would take them off the loom when it got real fat and I would bring them home and fix them on the sewing machine. Then we would cut them apart and give them to the children, the next meeting that they had on the next Saturday. I had so many colors of thread and Lou Tate and my husband both would give me colored threads at Christmas time so that my butter bowl, my father’s bowl in which he made butter, would be full of colored threads. They, um, I was raised on a dairy farm and so my father had this bowl which would, the first one was made out of cedar, with the butter table also made out of cedar, that he had carved himself. But the one that I have now with my threads in it, was not the first one that father had, I don’t know which one of the children inherited that one, but I didn’t get it. I got a commercial bowl, one that was purchased. I think it’s made with, out of ash, anyway, it’s white and I just love my little bowl.

Ward: And so Lou Tate would give you threads, but then she would come over here sometimes.

Kendrick: Oh, sure, she always came over here wanting to use my colored threads. So, Sam, one Christmas bought 24 bobbins to fit my machine so that I had 24 different colors of thread on bobbins. And I had at least that much, that many different colors in the threads too. So that I could stick any color the children want.

Ward: Did Lou Tate charge for her lessons to the young people?

Kendrick: Usually that quarter that they brought with them when they came on Saturday. And that’s the reason I call her a glorified babysitter because that was what she did.

Ward: Well she would provide refreshments wouldn’t she?

Kendrick: Yes, they had punch and different months all of us mothers made cookies and brought them over so the children always had punch and cookies.

Ward: What kind of relaxation did Lou Tate take part in?

Kendrick: She would read omnivorously you might say because she read anything and everything she could get her hands on. And she played bridge. That’s just about the only recreation that I know she had. She taught not only at different places in Kentucky but she taught in Indiana and she taught in Tennessee and she would get in Willie and take off with the looms and loom stands and spinning wheels in the back of the car.

(Break)

We went to Fort Knox and put on a demonstration one time and then one of the men that was high up as far as army was concerned, I don’t know whether if he was a major or colonel or what he was now. His picture’s probably in some of the books. And so we can find out who he actually was. He talked to Lou Tate about doing some occupational therapy with the men at Fort Knox who had been injured. So what we did at the Loomhouse was we put blindfolds on them, we tied either our right hand or a left hand behind us. We would use either only the right foot or the left foot. So we pretended to be blind or disables. And would work out these patterns that could be used by someone who had only one hand or one foot or was blind. And then they were taught at Fort Knox to these soldiers who had been injured in battle. I thought it was a great idea and I loved going to Fort Knox, but I didn’t help with the teaching, someone else did the teaching. But I helped with working out some of the patterns that could be used with only one hand or one foot.

Ward: She also had in addition to her teaching an extensive collection of drafts and coverlets.

Kendrick: Oh, yes. That started back in West Virginia when she would visit in the homes of the children in her school and then people would come to Louisville, see what she had and say, “Oh, my great grandmother or my mother had such and such a pattern, nobody uses it anymore, would you like to have it?” Tate always said “yes”, and so people would give her or send her loads of patterns. At one time I’m sure she had as many as 2,000 or more different patterns. Now some, there are, take the Double Bow Knot, which is often called an Olive Leaf, and sometimes has other names and there are many variations of that one pattern, and so when people would give her something it would sometimes be a variation of something she already had. But she never turned anything down anybody gave her. She took it and yet she had some of the most ratty old pieces of coverlets that had been out in the rain and the whole pattern wasn’t there anymore. And so when we, when I, was taking a class in how to read, draft reading, why we worked out some of those and filled in the pattern woven and our feeling that was what that piece would have looked like if it had all been there and it came out fine.

Ward: Tell the story of The M’s and the O’s.

Kendrick: Well, M’s and O’s goes back in my family to some of my ancestors the uh, two sisters who lived, my great…, I’m not sure, my great-grandmother and great-granddaddy, now they were both (Aines?), lived near, up there at the Falls of the Benson, at Frankfort Kentucky, and the raised the cotton in their garden, carded it, spun it and made the bedspread. It came down through the family and mom finally got it and she said it was too worn to actually use, so she put it in the historical society at Frankfort. Then Lou Tate said she would love to have a piece of that. Mother took her scissors, went down the the historical society, asked the girls to unlock the cabinet, and let her have the bedspread, and she reached inside, unfolded a piece of it and cut a big chunk out of it! I have a piece of a piece that mother took off.

Ward: And you gave it to Lou Tate.

Kendrick: Yes, that piece that mother cut off was for Lou Tate, it wasn’t for me, but Lou Tate gave me a piece of it anyhow.

Ward: And then she was able to look at the pattern.

Kendrick: Right, and make up several variations of M’s and O’s and that’s how she got her pattern for that.

Ward: There were also hot plate patterns that Lou Tate made.

Kendrick: Yes, she had something called an experimental group. I finally became a member of that experimental group after I went back and learned, was learning to weave. But in the beginning the experimental group wanted to make things that could actually be used and it took so long to make it, that off the hot plate mat, that I think, placemats, that they devised a way to make what they called a hot plate mat. It had two that were the same size for your vegetables and one that was the same width, but longer, for your meat platter to sit on. And Lou Tate sold many, many sets of those hot plate mats. They took coverlet patterns and cut them down to size or make them larger if the pattern needed to be made larger, so that they’d fit the size of the hot plate mats. And then these patterns were Xeroxed, no, that was back in the old days when we ran the ditto machine and mimeograph machine, but those (as far as? were?) the dittos so the mimeograph machine was used to make many sets of these which were mailed all over the world to different people that wanted the patterns for the hot plate mats.

Ward: You also talked about The Fool’s Puzzle.

Kendrick: One day a lady showed up at the Loomhouse with what she called Drunkard’s Path, or, The Fool’s Puzzle, that’s two of the names for it, it has some other names as well, and Black on White, Somebody yelled “I’m (?) and everybody wanted to make that. So Lou Tate let different ones get busy on it. I was not in on this. I made a pattern that would fit the hot plate mat and then somebody enlarged it and made a wall hanging and somebody else made a pillow top. And so there you will find many variations of The Fool’s Puzzle at the Loomhouse.

Ward: What about “the end of Harvey”?

Kendrick: (laughs) We had a little rabbit that used to come on Saturday and the children just loved it. So Lou Tate made a little story up about the rabbit, and how he, what he would do, and so we wanted to do Harvey. She drew many pictures of Harvey until she got just what she wanted Harvey to look like. And the one with his little tail, his little (scuff?) showing and his ears, with his back to you called the “end of Harvey”. I love to make the “end of Harvey much better than either of the side views of Harvey ‘cause it’s easier to make. So the “end of Harvey” is the end of a story that Lou Tate wrote.

Ward: You also took lessons, I mean you finally were able to learn how to weave.

Kendrick: Yes.

Ward: How did you talk Lou Tate into letting you learn how to weave?

Kendrick: (laughs) I talked her into it by simply telling her I was going to learn to weave. I was tired of doing all of her typing. And then we weren’t doing so much typing in the days that I learned to weave as when we had been when the Loomhouse was first started on Kenwood Hill. This was many years after that had started.

Ward: Did you take lessons from her directly?

Kendrick: Yes, yes, All the hard work that went into it, like sitting up at night and counting threads under a magnifying glass until your eyes would nearly go out. And drawing it all down onto draft paper. I did all that.

Ward: Because you said you had homework.

Kendrick: Yes, that was it, was to count the threads. She’d give us a piece of material and we would count the threads and actually allow one piece on the, (pause), what kind of paper do you call it?

Ward: (thread?) graph

Kendrick: Yes, on graph paper. Yes. Allow one opening on the graph paper to be for each thread and so you would end up with a fairly large piece of, four pieces of graph paper put together, sometimes as many as six or eight, put together to get your whole pattern on. And we’d color them with colored threads, I colored the, pencils or with colored ink.

Ward: What kind of teacher was she?

Kendrick: She held onto a lot of her secrets. She would, she didn’t tell you, she wanted you to work it out for yourself. And so you would. And then you sometimes came up with something slightly different from what she had come up with when she did the same thing. And that gave her an extra pattern, or and extra edge or and extra idea for something. She was quite generous at giving you what has already been worked out. But she would never tell you her secrets about how she’d arrived at. Which was a pity because today we could use so much of that knowledge that she, that died with her, if we had it.

Ward: Was she patient?

Kendrick: Very patient, yes, with the little children especially. She sometimes got impatient with me ‘cause she’d known me too long. And she, I would ask her to tell me something, because she had been my friend for so long, “Oh, Susie,” she would say, “Go ahead, you can do it!” And leave me on my own especially when we were doing patterns that you would make the reverse, trebling. She often left me to stew about my reverse trebling.

Ward: You were on the founding Board of Directors.

Kendrick: Um, huh.

Ward: And you were also, in the very month after Lou Tate’s death, instrumental in opening the Loomhouse back up again.

Kendrick: Yes. It seemed such a shame for it to die because I had known her too long. I had known her for 52 years. We were going to have a fight, knock down, drag out fight when we had known each other for 50 years. When that year came, Sam had died and I was in Hawaii and Lou Tate was in the hospital with pneumonia and she didn’t know at that time that she had this cancer. But Lou Tate didn’t get to have her fight, which was ok. But she always said that I was the one person that wasn’t afraid of her. And I didn’t do much presuming on our friendship, or our long friendship. Some people seemed to presume on their friendship, but I didn’t.

Ward: Before she died didn’t she start teaching kindergarteners?

Kendrick: Yes. She thought that kindergarteners as well as the 6 year olds, the 6 and 8 year olds, should know something about weaving. So she devised this loom, this visit loom, with little pegs, well, they were suppose to have pegs, they ended up with having screw eyes on each side, and then the piece of material was laid down and the children learned that you went over and under, and over and under, until you formed what would be cloth. It was very interesting to them. And they thought, such a great thing to be able to take, have several red pieces, and be able to take a blue piece and be able to weave it in and out and have a checkerboard sewed up pattern when they got through. And they had done something.

Ward: We did not mention earlier that Ann Piper’s mother whose maiden name used to be Wakeman.

Kendrick: Uh, huh, Waitman.

Ward: Had a gold tooth, who had her mother, Mabel had gone to Berea.

Kendrick: Her mother was Mabel Palmer at the time she had gone to Berea and she was Lou Tate’s roommate at Berea. So Mabel had learned some weaving at Berea and also taken some lessons under Lou Tate. They had remained friends over all the years and so when Mabel was getting ready to marry Bob Waitman why, she wanted to weave her own wedding dress. So she came to Louisville and Lou Tate helped her set up one of the big looms and she wove her wedding dress. And she not only was married in it, but Ann was married in that same dress.

Ward: We have a picture of it.

Kendrick: Uh, huh. And Ann, who doesn’t have any children of her own but has a number of children that, what do you call them?

Ward: foster children

Kendrick: Foster children, expect that someday one of them (too quiet to hear)

Ward: (too quiet to hear)

Kendrick: …that dress.

Ward: I want you to tell a little bit about the founding, being on the founding Board of Directors, well,

Kendrick: Thank you (Keisha ?) for letting me talk. I have always been glad that I was one of the first Board of Directors of the foundation, and, oh, I don’t know, just good to know that you are writing this history. (Pause) ‘Cause I lived Lou Tate very much. I was so glad I’ve been a part of it.

(Pause)

1979?

Ward: July

Kendrick: July, the 7th July

Ward: Yeah, I’m going to write it.

[end of interview]