Oral History Interview Michael Kirk

Note: Airplane noise was prevalent during sections of the interview, making some sections difficult to understand.

Interviewer: We are interviewing Michael Kirk.

Our interview is taking place at Tophouse, home of the Little Loomhouse, in Kenwood Hill, Louisville, Kentucky.

Our topic is Lou Tate and the Little Loomhouse

As we begin, tell me a little something about yourself.

Michael Kirk: My name is Michael Kirk

I was born here in Louisville

I met Lou Tate almost 20 years ago in 1965

I was born in Louisville, but grew up in Southern Indiana.

Moved back here to Louisville as a kid and went to high school at Belver High School in Louisville and I met Lou through a very close high school friend who used to live across the road. So that was how I met Lou.

Interviewer: Who is that?

Michael Kirk

Maury Weedman

As I was saying, I met Lou through my friend Maury. His family moved to Kenwood Hill when we were both juniors in high school, I think.

And the first time I came up to Kenwood Hill, I was just amazed at how different the atmosphere was here because of all the trees and the fact that it was on the hill and the first time I saw the place I said, “What’s that place across the street?”

And I was absolutely fascinated by the cabins up here on the hill.

Maury had already been across the way and had already met Lou, and he told me that there was this very interesting and extremely eccentric old lady who lived across the road. And being a very adventurous youth, I was very eager to meet Lou.

So Maury and I tripped up the hill as many kids have over the years and met Lou and it was almost an immediate love affair, l I just thought she was marvelous. I think the thing that attracted me so much was that, I must have been 15 years old at that time, was that she was so different from anyone else I had ever met.

She live up on the hill, almost a hermit like existence, she drove a wonderful, crazy, old 1953 Ford station wagon. It was dented, at every corner was banged up because when she pulled into the garage, she would invariably run into the corner of the garage, so the car was just full of dents.

She didn’t have a kitchen, and that just flabbergasted me, she invited us in, I believe, I can’t remember if she did. Lou was real funny, not many people were invited in, it was a real sign that you were her quote - unquote, family, if you got to go into the lower house. She did from time to time, when it was all cleaned up; but if you were allowed in when it was a wreck, then you were one of the special people.

She used to call Maury and me and Bob Douglas “her little boys” or “her kids” because since she never got married and really didn’t have any close family in the Louisville area. Friends kind of filled certain needs in her life and Maury and I did odd jobs for her over the years.

We dug ditches and hauled railroad ties and planted bulbs and (? Indistinct) under trees; one summer we helped put a new foundation under the middle house; that is the only thing that kept Wisteria cabin standing is that we put a concrete block wall in down there. We helped dig out the drainage ditches around Tophouse and we hauled railroad ties to help hold back the hill as it slowly encroached on place.

Over the years we helped her dig bulbs and replanted things, trimmed trees and shrubs. One summer, another friend, John Kiper and his wife Anne Kiper, my former friend’s mother and her mother were friends in their youth, John is from Western Kentucky at Langston, did barbeque, so we built a barbecue pit in the hill. That was a (?indistinct – mind bending?) experience because the earth up here is about an inch of earth over rock, so to build the foundation for the barbeque took about four days of digging with picks and shovels and everything else to get the stone out there.

So this little project that we thought would be an afternoon’s lark turned into something akin to building the Great Pyramid. It dragged on for about six months before we got it all done. But after that, we did have a lot of fun over the years cooking out up here, since she did not have a kitchen; whenever she had an open house, everyone would bring potluck.

Everyone would bring dishes of something or other and usually she would buy a couple of hams or chickens or something like that. Get John or someone like that to barbeque them so that she would provide the meat for the get together and everyone else would do salads and things like that.

Generally at open houses, there was pink lemonade, too. That was an old tradition. There was a large, glass punchbowl, I think it is still around, that we used all the time. After the children left who’d been weaving during the day, once-in-awhile, someone would slosh in some gin or vodka and the pink lemonade would become an adult drink at that point.

Lou - - A great lady, very interesting, I think one of the reasons I kept coming back over the years were her stories, I just loved to her. Lou - - It just always boggled my imagination of the people she had known, things she had done, and again, her unconventional lifestyle (from my point of view). She was single, that she had chosen a career rather than having a family.

Her interest in weaving and folk history, she was extremely knowledgeable. She did research work for universities and different foundations and things like this. She believe she did some work for woodemauer.

She was really a recognized authority of weaving, and people from all over the country would send her samples and little bits and fragments of things and ask her if she could tell them about when it was produced, what the materials were, what was the name of the pattern and these sorts of things.

But she never made any money off of all this is and I don’t think that money was important to her at all. She loved this place, she loved living on the hill. When she moved here back in the 1920’s, it was really practically the only house on the hill.

There was an old log cabin up the hill that Hal and Kitty Tenny had bought. Down the hill in another direction was another old house that was, and still is, owned by the Lyddans, Dr. and Mrs. Lyddan. But other than that, it was really the woods and she loved the hill. She loved the history of the area. She always told the story that It was originally known as “Sunshine Hill”, which was an Indian name. The other side of the hill, facing south, was said to be used by the Indians during their summer hunts. They would meet there and preserve some of the catch, smoke the meat and things. I remember trips to the other side of the hill to dig up arrowheads and things like that. So, it was very fascinating.

With Lou, there was always a new story and interesting variations of old stories that I was always amazed at her background. She didn’t study weaving; her college work was in history and that is how she got into weaving, was doing historical research. She took her undergraduate work was at Berea College and believe had some exposure to weaving there. Later, when she went to the University of Michigan to work on her Master’s degree, her thesis advisor and she were talking and they kind of came up with the idea to do her thesis on early American weaving and how it related to early American history.

Many of these old coverlet patterns have names that give them a historical reference like “Whig Rose”, refers to the Whig political party and some of the patterns, are called, like “Federal City”; it’s a pattern that is organized in squares and it looks like some of the maps of some of the first United States cities that were kind of organized in neat grid works and patterns. Another pattern she was very fond of was called the “Bonaparte’s March Across the Rockies”, which is involved with a long tale, that I have forgotten a lot of, about a plot that the French had to overthrow the colonies through a surprise attack from the West.

All this, she could tell you these stories by the hours, how it related to this and that. I’ve always interested in history myself, so Lou was like a living history book to me, I picked up all these interesting tidbits here and there.

She was just a natural teacher; through her stories, you were learning. If you admired something, she would immediately start to explain how it was made, why it was made, what the techniques were, and she was such a vivacious, interested person. She was very vivacious and energetic and her enthusiasm about things were absolutely infectious. She was (? Indistinct – tendectual?) to a certain extent, but I think all brilliant people are. It would have been straight ahead type person, I’m sure she would have gone toward money and things like that. She would go off on little side tracks of things that interested her and that was part of the fascination of being around her.

I remember a conversation once about, she showed me some things that were done by vegetable dyes, and they were so beautiful, the colors and so different than harsher, brighter colors from commercial dyes. And from that conversation, over the next couple of years, she kind of developed a whole program appeared about vegetable dying and people coming out to experiment and you would meet other people and it was like a ripple effect and Lou was like a magnet that drew people around and then you would meet these other interesting people, and so it became like a really extended family.

I remember going out on the hill here and all over the place collecting weeds, goldenrod, jewelweed, things like this, chopping them up and boiling them down for dyes, and do dying demonstrations so there was always something wild, wonderful and wacky going on.

I came up here with things hanging out of the trunk of my car, just do nutso things, but it was great fun and wacko. Not (? Indistinct) the wrong connotation but Lou was always doing something interesting.

People, children and adults as well, learned more about the flavor and history out here then they ever did in a classroom situation because Lou always believed in history as a living thing that people needed to experience and not just watch.

She always called the thing she did her reaction (?). She hated doing demonstrations. In fact, one time she was invited to do a thing in Washington, D.C., I think it was a lady with the Smithsonian, and she refused to do it because all they wanted her to do is bring a group of people up to do demonstrations and she said that people couldn’t get involved and do a hands on situation she wouldn’t be involved with it. And people criticized her for not doing it because they said the publicity would be wonderful and everything. But, that was Lou, if Lou got her head around something, nothing could dissuade her from her chosen path.

I have over the years, I have been invited to many, many of her open houses where people were invited up to weave and experience different things and help get things ready, make signs and put signs up, and get people up the hill, just kind of a helper.

Basically, I’m not much of a weaver myself. I probably never wove more than a few inches of anything up here, but basically learned textiles, mostly through (? Indistinct – milling?) weave and learning to look at things, that was a very important factor; my interest with Lou was there was always neat things around to look at and she; I’m an artist now and was interested in art in high school and took a lot of art classes, and Lou, as much as anyone, taught me how to look at things and she would just have interesting things around.

I am looking at this weaving across the room which is South American backstrap weaving and just the fact that it includes the loom itself. The uses of figures and animals and she had things from, she had wonderful (? Unknown word – molahs?), which is a special kind of cut. appliqué technique from, I believe, Panama. And she had pieces of cloth from India and she compared contrast “Look how this culture did this and that culture does that.” I learned so much about history and different cultures and civilizations through weave designs and the history of cloth making. As she pointed out, weaving, if you studied the history of weaving, you were studying the history of civilization in many ways through the techniques, the approaches to it.

She had little bits and fragments of very ancient things. She had Navaho rugs and you could, it was just wonderful how you could look at these things and start to pull ideas together, in how cultures were similar. That American Indian weaving looks a lot like Southeast Asia weaving in certain design motifs. In fact, many years later, when I was working with the Louisville Art Gallery, at the main library here in Louisville, we did a show of the work of the Laotian - Hmung tribal group from the mountains of Laos, and just I was bowled over, their work looked so much of the South American work I had seen up here on the hill.

I did a little research of my own then on design motifs and how geometry is a very natural form in weaving because the nature of the threads; it is much easier to do a geometric pattern than a flowing, curving pattern. There are just remarkable similarities between different cultures and their approaches to weaving. Greek weaving and South American Indian weaving can be very similar at times.

Interviewer: Were you interested in art before Lou Tate?

Michael Kirk: Oh yeh, I was very interested I had taken art and been interested in art all through my early years that Lou kind of put a different flavor and different slant on it just by... she collected all kinds of stuff. And she had, actually, it was her nephew, his name is Wood Vassman (?), but she called him her kid brother. And he was a career Army person and spent a lot of his time in the Orient and he would send her interesting things from Japan and such. Sometimes just odd things like fish kites. The first time I saw Wisteria cabin, was in her hallway, the ceiling was filled with fish, paper and cloth, fish kites; it was just magical.

I just came up here and there was always something neat to look at. She had old family pottery and china out with flowers and next to that would be old hat pin stuck in something and next to that would be a clay pot that some kids had made just because one day they had decided, “Hey, lets make some pottery.” That’s what I mean that everything was tangential, that things just flowed out in a ripple effect. So there was always something interesting to see. Nature things. Seeing them up here, I started to appreciate a wider outlook, seashells and gourds, and just seeing interesting things. She’d use these for design inspiration.

Or there were maracas around; she loved music and people would sometimes bring up guitars to open houses, especially in evenings after everything was over and people would play guitars and Lou would get those maracas out and play along, because one person she was particularly fond of, Alfredo Marcanos (?) a Mexican who’s lived here in Louisville for many, many years, and Alfredo would come out and play and came out often, which was exciting. His wife would come out and do some weaving and such.

So, over the years, through Lou, I met many fascinating people. I met Helen Kitty Tenny who used to live up the hill on Possum Path kind of through Lou and through Maury, and these people have been important parts of my life for many, many years now and many people I still see on a regular basis. I met Bob Douglas up here, he used to live on the other side of the hill and he came up here as a kid, really quite a young person, and studied weaving and, there were always interesting people up here as well as Lou herself. So she again, I guess I have used this word before, it seemed that she was a magnet that attracted interesting people and then interesting things kind of developed from that interaction.

Interviewer:Did she ever talk to you about the early days of the “Little Loom” and how it came about?

Michael Kirk: Yes – Lou, I believe, as I can piece it together that the “Little Loom” was actually a suggestion of Mrs. Herbert Hoover. After Lou graduated from college, she worked one summer in a school in Virginia, a mountain school, a settlement school run by the Hoovers, it was kind of a private, charitable thing that they did. And Mrs. Hoover pointed out that if the women in the area, could do some kind of work in their home they could still be homemakers, but could supplement their income. Weaving was an important part of the heritage in that area, as it is in Kentucky, but many people at that point, this would be the early 20’s, many people had forgotten a lot about weaving. In fact, there would be looms in houses, but nobody could thread the loom anymore, they had forgotten how to thread the looms, but some of them certainly knew how to weave, but not thread the looms. That’s how Lou got involved with some of her early research was she’d go up in the mountains and the hills and hollers and ask people if there were any looms, and if there were, there were often old weaving drafts around, which were usually little, thin, long strips of paper with marks on them that would show the patterns, and Lou would barter, and say, “If you let me copy all the weaving patterns, I’ll thread the loom for you.”

Getting back to the development of the Little Loom. Lou worked with a doctor, I’ve forgotten his name now, I believe here in Louisville, and they worked on several different designs for a simple, portable, small loom.

And the “Little Loomhouse”, the name, comes from the “Little Loom” because this was a small, relatively inexpensive loom that could be used in the home and women could weave placemats and small pieces on it; some of the larger pieces out here like coverlets and such could actually be woven on these looms in strips and then they’re sewn together into larger pieces.

She worked for several years on the development of the loom and when she perfected the finished design, which is the one still be used now, I believe she wrote, I believe I saw this once in helping sort through old papers and such, that she wrote a letter to Herbert Hoover explaining how Mrs. Hoover had been helpful in suggestions and such and I believe she sent some of her early booklets and pamphlets to him to show him how it had all paid off.

There is a wonderful scrapbook somewhere around that has photographs of her experiences in Virginia showing her at the school with some of the different people and there is some note cards that were in the scrapbook along with the photographs that were just remembrances of things that went on.

There is a wonderful story that the president, Mr. Hoover, making a summer home near the settlement school and one night, the teachers of the school had been invited out for dinner with President and Mrs. Hoover, and they had been out berry picking all day and they had all eaten all these berries and they weren’t very hungry. Lou said, “You couldn’t very well tell the president that you weren’t hungry”, so they kind of pretended they ate. (Couple of sentences that were not understandable due to airport noise).

It’s sad I wasn’t a history buff because these personal insights to people like that I have read about in history books and such were always fascinated me, in fact, the story goes that Mrs. Hoover actually kind of gave Lou her name. Lou’s name was actually Louisa Tate Bousman and she was at the White House in a receiving line and Mrs. Hoover was introducing her to people and after awhile, Louisa Tate Bousman got to be a real mouthful and Mrs. Hoover turned to her and said, “For now on, you are just plain Lou Tate.” And it has worked out really well because it is bit snappier that Louisa Tate Bousman.

It is also interesting that Lou threw people off because they did not know if she was a man or a woman. In those days, master weavers were often men, and there are quite a few old things, letters around here that are addressed to Mr. Lou Tate. So it kind of kept people wondering.

Lou was a very brilliant lady. I think it is easy to kind of get lost in her eccentricity and I admire that part of her, but she knew so much about history. And she had a strong, logical mind. Weaving is a very mathematical process and you have to be a very logical person and understand some of these mathematical concepts in order to understand the true structure of weaving. And Lou could just look at a little, tiny sample of a piece of fabric and tell you how the loom was threaded, what the treadmill pattern was, which pedals you had to press down to get this kind of pattern going.

She taught to some of the students draft reading and analysis and again, she could just look at a piece and just, Bam, she knew how it was made, she understood the underlying structure. That always amazed me because I don’t think that I am particularly logical or mathematically oriented person, so that was always fascinating, very logical and her ability to analyze structure.

Here is another aside, during the war, she did design work for the Army. She actually did drafting for aircraft production, I believe. So Lou was a many multi-talented lady. During the war, she also, well I believe she was an honorary member of each area of the armed forces, she had an honorary commission in the Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force. And part of this came about because she did work after the war with physical therapy. To my knowledge, she was one of the earlier pioneers in using weaving as a form of occupational therapy for wounded solders and certain type of things that they did was very good for restoring muscle coordination and control. She did a lot of work at Fort Knox in those years; she told me one time she met George Patton at a party out at Fort Knox and she thought he was really kind of pompous (laughter) and again, the interesting people she had met through the years.

Another slant, besides the Army work, and this was a tie in again with the Roosevelts, was that she had continued this idea of trying to teach people weaving to supplement their income, a cottage industry as it were, and this is a real interest of Mrs. Roosevelt’s. During the Depression years, WPA and all that, Mrs. Roosevelt pursued a lot of different possibilities of ways that people could help themselves, and that she helped underwrite a furniture industry or factory in New York near their home at Hyde Park and some very, very beautiful things were produced there. I know that Mrs. Roosevelt visited Kentucky several times to see what was happening here at the Loomhouse. And I believe that Lou traveled back and forth somewhat and she actually did a design for table linens for the Roosevelts and I’ve seen it around somewhere, it still exists I image some of the samples that were exactly like the ones she produced for the Roosevelts.

She also did table linens for the Hoovers, this is kind of how she met some of these people. I believe at that time, there weren’t many people around doing custom, hand-woven things. It took so long that you could never really make much money at it. Of course, dollars then and now are very different things but she did put in an amazing amount of time to produce a finely woven piece of cloth. That you just couldn’t make any money at it; but there are linens, tablecloths around here of the finest, white, damask linen that was woven by Lou in this incredibly intricate patterns. Many of the patterns were variations of the older coverlet designs and she would translate them into a very finely woven linen, as opposed to the original design, which would have been a much heavier yarn, so it would have been a bedspread, but then she translated the design. In fact, the Hoover design, was a fine linen cloth that was, I believe, a variation of the “Cherry Wheel” pattern, that was a series of quasi-circular designs and it was done in a real interesting kind of rainbow pattern, colors and whites, and it had pink bleeding into yellow, into blue, to pale green, so it was very handsome pattern.

Interviewer: Did she talk very much about her childhood, or her youth, or her time at Berea?

Michael Kirk: She didn’t talk too much about Berea, for some reason, she had, must have had a falling out over the years with Berea about something. I believe there was some tension because Berea later got into weaving, I don’t know if she considered the program at Berea kind of a, not a threat, what am I trying to say, somewhat conflictual. Everyone knew about Berea, and sometimes maybe she didn’t get the appreciation that she should have. I suppose that whole field of folk weaving and folk history, and all that it is very specific and certain people would be very interested in it.

She talked somewhat about her early years, I remember that she was born in ? Virginia, though she spent some time in Bowling Green, and then moved to Louisville. She talked a fair bit about her family, that they were a relatively close family. Her father and mother were poor people in their lives. Her father was a railroad man, I can’t really remember if he was an engineer or a conductor, I believe he worked for the old ? railroad, and they lived in Old Louisville in her childhood, out Third Street and the place up here on the hill, her father got as a summer residence , I believe her parents helped her buy it, and she bought it in the ’20’s; at that time, they used it in the summer and the weekends. I learned all that history who built and owned this place over the years. At one time it was a sort of an artist colony. Before that, the lower house, which we always called “The Loomhouse” was used as a church, and I believe that the name for the house, “Esta” has religious meanings, I can’t remember exactly what they are.

Her mother, I believe, had a long illness, and Lou helped nurse her through all that and then her mother died, and then she took care of her father, so she had a lot of family obligations related to that. She had an elderly, neighbor aunt that lived in Old Louisville, so the old-fashioned, tight knit family.

That could be one of the reasons Lou never married, I’m not real sure on that. She talked about an occasional beau, here and there, but she never really said about any of the great love interests in her life. She had such a mischievous sparkle in her eye, that I can’t imagine that she wasn’t a popular young lady, in older pictures, I think she was really a quite an attractive woman.

Gosh, I don’t know if I ever knew exactly how old she was. She always wore her hair in the same way, which was kind of a funny little “page boy” cut, it was always looked like she had put a seat belt around her head, she wore bangs, I’m sure she cut it herself. She always wore a very plain, simple dresses; she had arthritis and gout pretty badly at the time I knew her, and she would wear tennis shoes, because they were the only thing that were comfortable and I never saw her in anything other than tennis shoes, a lot of times she would go bare footed or just wear socks because her feet would really hurt her because of the arthritis and she’d walk up the hill in her socks.

Trying to think more about stories of her childhood….

Interviewer: Did you get the distinct impression that she really graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in history or do you think she just studied for her Master’s?

Michael Kirk: I’m not really sure on that, I kind of thought she had gotten a degree, in retrospect, maybe she just studied, I don’t know if she did actually finish her degree or not, I suppose there be ways to look up old records.

Interviewer: But she would never say actually?

Michael Kirk: I don’t think she every said, ”I earned my Master’s degree at…”

Interviewer: She never talked about herself a lot.

Michael Kirk: Yes and no, its hard to, … She didn’t sit down and approach that as the topic, of conversation, just little bits and pieces would come out. When I talk with interesting people like that, I ask a lot of questions to pull some of these things out in the conversation. I guess I was always under the impression that she had indeed earned her Masters at Michigan.

That day, I suppose it was fairly, not everyone went to college, least of all earned a Master’s degree and again, a woman, in that day, was fairly unusual. I think that Lou was just interested in her own thing and turned it into a small business over the years in terms of doing the custom weaving for the different people and research, which she said was very important to her.

She loved to dabbling into all that, but she didn’t have the kind of mind to put it together. She did all these interesting pages of data, and there are thousands of them around here, that she wanted to publish, a large volume or all that. She published a couple of small books, several of them on Kentucky coverlets and I think that one book was called, “Weaving is Fun”. In its day, it was probably a very unique book, and I’m sure that lots of people who came after her stole prodigiously from the work she did, but she didn’t put it all together, later people did.

Again, she was a real authority and there were people in the field knew her. If you had a degree in weaving or early American, it would pop up. I remember she did a very nice article for “Antiques Magazine” at one time on Kentucky coverlets, “Antiques Magazine” did a whole issue on antiques in Kentucky.

A lot of museum people knew her, it was like she had different lives, there was the professional life, there was the life here in Louisville, I don’t think people understood how widely she was known in certain very small circles

She talked with different people at different museums around the country and how they would sometimes write her ask questions or they would correspond back and forth. She had a friend at the Metropolitan Museum at one time who was the textile curator who would send her little bits of samples and she would show me a piece of weaving that was an Egyptian Coptic fragment, just a little, tiny thing, but was dated around 800, so it was over a thousand years old.

And all these wonderful, early American coverlets, little pieces of them, these things are hundreds of years old, dating back to the pre-Revolutionary times, not that she didn’t respect them, but they weren’t “precious”; it was part of the living tradition of this place, if you have a coverlet, you used it. We would hang them on the walls here in the lower house to keep the drafts out in the winter, so you would walk in here and find all these things probably that museums would die for and they were just hanging on shower curtain hooks to keep drafts out. She respected history, but she didn’t have the kind of “scholarly” respect that it was “precious”, she would always say, “Oh, Don’t let this place turn into a museum.”, she wanted it to be a living, functioning place, that if someone couldn’t keep it going, where kids come up here and learn weaving, might as well just give it all to the Smithsonian and forget about it.

She often made comments that she hated historical houses with red velvet ropes, marking everything off to make it all very “precious”. She liked the idea that a place kept on going, like Colonial Williamsburg, she was very impressed with what they had done there. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t advised them, for example, on weaving and such, I remember one time she said that during the 1950’s

Airplane noise – bits caught: -During the 1950’s

-Some people from African were here

-Heritage of weaving, talk to people and advise them,

-Many things she was involved in

-Any one person get a handle on it

Interviewer: Did she ever tell you about going to Nova Scotia or Chicago or different places?

Michael Kirk: I remember that she had some very good friends in Nova Scotia and she went up there and she did a little book, I believe, ? designs and she corresponded back and forth, she met a couple of people that lived in Nova Scotia that would come down from time-to-time for (vacation?) during the summer. She also did a book on algebraic equations in weaving, that I believe ? Nova Scotia people.

In the ‘30’s, an exhibition was (?) at the Speed Museum, of work done out here and I think it was called something like “Contemporary Hand Weaving”, and it premiered here in Louisville, then moved to Chicago to the Marshal Fields department store, and was considered very avant-garde stuff at that time. And I believe there are some old copies of the original brochure on the Speed show here. In fact, in going back through the stuff, we found some of the original pieces that were shown and traveled to Chicago

I think that Lou probably did some work over the years with industry, advising the textile mills on designs and things like this. I always thought it would have been wonderful if she could have … There again, it was a side of her that did not want to pursue it in the “right” way, everyone today calls it the “business way”, or “aggressive way”, but no, she could have worked with some of these huge textile firms, mills and come out with a Lou Tate collection of historically accurate reproductions of some of these old patterns. It would have been great for the history and great for the ? history, too because so many of these things are so beautiful and they could be done in current colors and things like that. I think that people, there is a lot of interest now; there are a lot of magazines of Colonial living and things like that where people are into the “authentic” early American antiques and such, and it would have been a great money maker. But again, I don’t know that was all that important to Lou.

Interviewer: Why don’t you think it wasn’t that important to her? Have you ever thought about that?

Michael Kirk: Well, I think basically, she liked her lifestyle the way it was. It wasn’t an easy lifestyle, but, I think she just didn’t want to be involved with the rat race. She loved people coming here. Lou was pretty old by the time I met her and she was not in particularly good health; she had had a heart attack, and I think she had slowed down a great deal by then. Her real period of activity were the ‘20’s, ‘30’s, and the ‘40’s. See, I didn’t get here until ’65, so she was pretty old by then.

At that point, I think her interests had turned more to working with kids. She loved working with little kids, she developed a little, experimental loom, she called it a kindergarten loom. Shed had, I mean literally toddlers, weaving on those. You would always come up here and find little, little kids working on weaving and I think that that, she always enjoyed that, it helped to keep her young, this interaction with kids. She was awful good with kids. Kind of nonsense, yet there was a very whimsical side to her, Lou – a lot of people couldn’t figure her out, she had a pretty bad temper, if you ever made Lou really angry, she didn’t get over it so quickly. I think that was a problem over the years, that she kind of burned her bridges, as it were.

But she interacted really well with kids. The kids acted willfully(?), I mean they weren’t being destructive of anything like that around her, listen, not that they didn’t have fun, she loved having fun with kids. Part of shat she called “The adventures in cloth making” , she’d have grass skirts and the kids could wear those, old costumes they would wear. Part of her turning kids onto history would be thinking about primitive man. What did first man wear for clothing? She had animal skins, old moth eaten animal skins, what 20th century kid had ever felt a bobcat skin?

And then she would make yarns, she called them, “Grandpappy yarns”. Folk tales kind of things, how the wild cat was caught on the hill and someone scared the skin off of it. Interesting tales that most city kids would never come into contact with. Weavings related to rabbits up here, she called it the Harvey pattern, the disappearing rabbit, that was all based off of a family of rabbits that lived in one of the gullies up here, and ravines, and everybody loved watching the little baby bunnies.

That is what I mean by her going off on these wonderful paths of different things. She was pretty go ahead and pursue that, I think that is one of the reasons why she did not zero in on some of the other things that could have made her money, it would have locked her into that than her freedom. Lou was a very free person, she didn’t live by someone else’s standards, she didn’t have a kitchen, she cooled for over 40 years on a hot plate, it was never that important to her to have a stove, if she had money to spend, she’d buy yarn or order new linens or something like that rather than worry about a new stove in the kitchen.

She really had her own lifestyle and her own schedule. You would often see the lights on very, very late at night, I know because of the arthritis and everything, she didn’t sleep very well, she would get real stiff, so she would get up and down during the night. When Maury and her kids were teenagers, we’d go out to the movies or whatever, bug around really late and get back and see Lou’s lights on the hill, and sometimes we’d sit around and talk with her, the door was always open. She loved murder mysteries and when she got up at night, sometimes we would take the books back to the library for her. But she was very close with the, the closest library, I’d have to say the Iroquois Branch Library, and I’m sure she read every murder mystery in that library a dozen times, she’d forget if she’d read it or not, she’d get half way through it and say, “Oh, I’ve read that book.” There was always a pile of murder mysteries next to her bed. She’d get up and read her mysteries and type a little, work on this and that, you know, it was just her own schedule.

Interviewer: Where you here ? with Landmarks celebration, or did she ever talk to you about that?

Michael Kirk: Yes I was, I was in college at that time, at Stanton Murry, majoring in Art, but I came up specifically for that. And she was always very, very pleased that that happened, and I believe that Bob Douglas was instrumental in getting the place on the National Register of Historical Places. It always thrilled her that that happened. See, that is another thing, she started doing it and never kind of followed through on all the paperwork. Bob came in and pulled all the information together, did the right forms, and the place was declared a national landmark, a state landmark, a local landmark. And she was very proud of that status and hoped that would help with the preservation of the cabins. She always wanted this place to be preserved, again, not a museum, but she always hoped that there would be some help through one of the historical organizations to try and help preserve the physical facility here.

Interviewer: As she became older, how did you find her becoming?

Michael Kirk: Lou - - I think Lou became bitter late in her life, I think part of it was she was in so much pain all the time from the arthritis and everything, I think she became rather impatient with herself. That she couldn’t do the things she once could. She also had very high standards for herself and I think she expected everyone to have those high standards.

Ahhhh

Constant irritations related to certain things, the problem with the land above Tophouse, and the landslide, and the fact that the hill was encroaching on her houses and the water damage, and she didn’t have the money to take care of it and she couldn’t get any help. She talked to everyone in the world, she had a running lawsuit with the builder for many years ,the builder said he owned part of this land and blah, blah and it dragged on for years and years and years, and it sapped a lot of her energy and made her quite bitter, that it seemed like law and justice were two different things. He had a lot of money so could do whatever the hell he pleased. I think that didn’t sit well with her.

I tried to help out over the years, the ‘70’s, well, around 1974 through ’76, basically, I worked real hard at trying to come up almost every weekend and helped keep things and try and get something going, to take over the reins because Lou was in poorer and poorer health. (indistinct) But it was very difficult because she didn’t know how to let go and you can only go so far and she would say, “That’s not the way I want it done.” She didn’t seem to understand that if you are asking people to volunteer their time, efforts, and energy, that you have to let go, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t in some cases, and at that point, suddenly, people who had been active for quite a long period of time, got kind of disgusted with the situation and basically kind of backed off. Indistinct?, change from time to time.

About 1976, I took a job in Tennessee at a small community college, I had already graduated and gotten my Master’s and taught a couple of years here in Louisville at the elementary level and at Bellerman College part-time, and I really wanted try college teaching , so took a community college job in Galvastine (?), Tennessee. And had been there for about two years, so I really didn’t see much of Lou for a couple of years. I want to say that I felt very guilty, I had worked as hard as I could with Lou, trying to help, but she became rather negative and I couldn’t quite cope with it any more and one day, I just didn’t come back. Of course, I’m a guilty sort of person, didn’t see her for almost two years, and then, I had come back, my ex-wife’s family was in Louisville, we came back one Christmas (indistinct), and Lou came.

It was very touching for a few minutes, she had gotten older and was on a cane at that point, the physical things were starting to really get her down. And I was really kind of worried about this interaction, but in a very brief period of time, it was like old, things were forgotten, and we were chatting in a very warm and friendly manner. And I came up later in the holiday and saw her, it was very nice. I think that we had some Port together; Lou was very fond of Gallo Port, and many glasses of it, and I always hated it, but Lou really liked Port, so I would share a glass with her. She drank a lot of Port (laughter); I think she had a little bit of a drinking problem at certain times. Well, some of that might have been the loneliness and she was in a lot of pain, she just ached from the arthritis. I think she just tippled a little too much at times.

The Port was kind of a tradition, I had a glass of Port with Lou.

I always kidded, I really did feel very close to Lou, and since she didn’t have a family, I would often send her a Mother’s Day card, birthday, or Easter cards and things like that. She was always very appreciative and I’d bring her things that I had done in college, like a kid bringing a teacher a goodie, she was like a favorite teacher. I’d bring her pottery in college, she always admired my work.

I studied textiles at Murray, not in terms of producing them myself, things like dying and batik, because it is much, ? weaving because it is too time consuming. But she would ask me to do workshops and exhibitions and things like that; I’d put together shows and short workshops and some teaching. Lou really helped me develop as a teacher, watching her work.

Toward the end there, I was living in Tennessee, and was there for two years, and came back to Louisville, it was a rough time in my life, I was going through a divorce and all this. I heard that Lou was very ill, that she had been diagnosed as having cancer. I came up a couple of times, I guess it was about, what was the year she died? [end of tape #19]