Oral History Interview Wilma Moberly & Charles Moberly

Teka Ward: Today is April 9, 1985. My name is Teka Ward. I’m interviewing Wilma and Charles Moberly. We are at 710 West Main Street, Louisville, KY. Our topic is Lou Tate and the Little Loomhouse.

As we begin, I would like you all to tell me something about each of you.

Charles: …manufacturing sales position. I sell products that are used in the petroleum and chemical industry. I’ve been with the company twenty-seven years and just had my anniversary there. My working hobby is to help my wife who is an antique dealer. We have the privilege of traveling in the surrounding states to do antique shows and to get to share our love and what little knowledge we have of textiles and textile tools with the public in the other states. And not only sharing a little of our knowledge, we get to sell some of these items that we are able to acquire and get to see them go into homes [where they are] used by people who appreciate them, who will keep them so that they can continue to go on. And some youngster coming along today, fifty years from now, can see a coverlet, a spinning wheel, or a hand loom.

My first meeting with Lou Tate: I was honored to get to talk about Lou Tate. I presume the first time that I had the privilege of meeting Lou Tate [was when] I was living in South Louisville in an apartment on Second Street and going to school at U of L at night working full shifts in an office. And Lou had one of her Derby Open Houses which was always the Sunday after Derby at that time.

My wife and I went out and I didn’t know where in the devil she was taking me because I didn’t know anything about Lou Tate or the cabins. My wife was a Louisville native and I’m from Central Kentucky; the little town of Lanchester.

All right, we went out and Lou was having her Open House, with refreshments and people--good attendance, I must say,--and at that time the buttercups, as we call them in the country, I think they call them daffodils in the city-- were in bloom, and [also] the wild flowers. It seemed that spring didn’t come quite as early; then. The trees were just starting their little tender buds.

And I got to watching Lou and all I saw was looms, so it didn’t mean a lot to me at that time. My wife was a little more knowledgeable of this type thing and after we visited around and observed and watched the children weave; I observed Lou working with children. I love children myself although we don’t have any. And we stayed around until after the crowd had cleared out and introduced ourselves to Lou and talked with her about weaving, and that and the other, and we got to know Lou.

And then each year we looked forward--that was about the only time we would go out, was for the After the Derby Open House, and we looked forward to that each year. As I mentioned, watching and observing her and the children, I think about the first thing I remember was her telling the little kids gathered around her about Daniel Boone coming over the hill behind the cabin and about him chasing the bear over the hill. And Lou told the story so vividly that those children saw Daniel Boone and they saw the bear. Now whether we had bear out in South Louisville, I don’t know. Maybe they did.

So many things can come to your mind, but the things that stand out was [the fact that] Lou was unselfish in many ways. Having worked there several years and we were getting ready to have a display and an Open House of coverlets and so forth, and some of the coverlets we wanted to use were rather soiled. They’d been in the cabin; they’d gotten musty and molded and she wanted my wife and me to take them home to wash them.

We were a little afraid of taking these valuable coverlets and we were green hands and didn’t know how to wash them. We had never washed one at that time. We had not studied coverlets or anything else to the degree that we have now. And the thing that I can always remember: Lou said, “If you can’t use it, there’s no need having it. If it tears up, so what if it tears up!” Although she was dealing with some valuable pieces of textiles and history, I admired her in that-- if it couldn’t be used and appreciated by other people, why have it?

--Pictures. Lou loved pictures. And I wish I could say, pitchahs (sic) like Lou could say pictures. I don’t know of any activity that was special out there that was advertised that Lou didn’t have a photographer out there taking pictures of every subject and every thing going on and when you went back for the next meeting, she had those pictures there. And having gone through some of the papers and digging [through them] after we, as the members of the Foundation, started working, I was very pleased just to run onto some of those pictures and to find one of Lou and [me] standing in the doorway of the Upper House, or the Upper Cabin, we should say, and that picture then was on the door for several months. They may be out there now.

I never had but one meal that Lou prepared. Now we used to take our pot lucks and we’d sit on those picnic benches, and hoping they didn’t break down. They had been propped and patched and you’d take your life in your hand because over the hill you could have gone. But we had heard about chili suppers. You know, if Lou told you something, she’d tell it so vividly, you thought it’d just happened three weeks ago or last January, but it may have been twenty years. But it was always vivid. And Lou, if she told you a story and she told it five other times, she always told it the same. Lou never got mixed up with her past in any way .

We were honored on one cold winter night to be invited as guests at Lou’s chili supper. Now, as most of you know, Lou didn’t have many of the comforts that we have in the house today. And we wondered how Lou was going to cook a chili supper.

Well, we went and Lou had tables scattered; probably weaving tables, I can’t remember, or loom tables, I should say, all across the living room of her cabin and there must have been fifteen or twenty of us invited. And Lou had prepared that chili, cooking it on the Warm Morning [stove] in her little kitchen.

I had always admired her fireplace and that night for this dinner, she had a fire going in that fireplace for my benefit and I’m sure we were in danger of the whole cabin burning down. I have eaten chili here and there and , as I said, traveled a few states. I have never yet had another bowl of chili that would equal Lou Tate’s chili and I wish I had her recipe.

One thing that I regret that Lou didn’t do was that she didn’t have more of her written material done professionally and hardbound and made available to more people. My wife and I took with us some of the surplus loads of material that was found out there to a show in Michigan to sell for the Loomhouse. Knowing that Lou had studied in Michigan, a lady came up and was looking at the material and she was so excited. And I thought, oh, here’s a lady from Michigan where Lou studied; she knows Lou.

The lady wasn’t from Michigan at all. She was from California and what she said to me was, “I can’t believe I have found something by the Lou Tate.” We’re seven hours from Louisville and this lady was some two thousand twenty-five hundred miles from her home and had found something by Lou Tate.

Lou had one gift that I wish all of us were blessed with, or I wished I was. I didn’t realize the amount of formal education Lou had until after she died. I didn’t know that she had the degrees. I’d heard her speak of teaching in Michigan and some of the other states, but I thought it was just on a low level.

And I didn’t realize that she had all the formal education Lou had. And this was an ability that Lou had if she was talking with the governor or a politician or wealthy business man, or whatever; she could talk on his level. And if she was talking to one of the craftsmen from the mountain who possibly had less than grade school education, Lou talked with them at their level. All people felt at ease with Lou.

I guess the thing that, if I could be like Lou Tate, loving history as I do myself, I wish I could have the ability to remember and relate history with Lou Tate. Lou, in my thinking, was a walking history book. As I said earlier, if she told you something it was as if it happened yesterday, although it may have been months, weeks, or years prior. And Lou could tell you so many things that had happened in our city, our county, our state, things that had happened in the textile world and it was all so accurate. It was as if you were just seeing it happen in front of your eyes.

Lou talked to my wife and to me about textile tools and where they were available and she mentioned Tennessee and I thought, Tennessee, my, you must be crazy, Lou. But in traveling and doing some research, we found Tennessee was and still maybe-- I guess you’d say today-- has a rich heritage in early textile things and textile tools. We do not think of it as being one of the states that contributes a lot to the arts, but Lou knew what Lou was talking about. Having [had] the privilege to have worked with Lou Tate and studied under her and learning how textiles and textile tools [work], my wife and I have been privileged to sell a large number of textile instruments, especially spinning wheels. I guess we never sell a wheel that we don’t remember Lou Tate and we thank Lou Tate and I hope she hears us, because, if it had not been for Lou Tate, I doubt that we would [have] ever had the interest that we had or would have ever had the knowledge that we do have of these things, if it had not been for Lou.

I guess the cutest thing I can remember of Lou is when she would tell you something and laugh and hit both hands on her knees and I can still see her standing up there at that upper cabin telling some big tale and then hitting her knees and laughing.

She would always do this when she was telling about the pink punch or the pink lemonade. Now I was not there when she was serving the pink punch or pink lemonade. I think maybe we have had it once, but it was not the pink punch that Lou was referring to. She told me the story of some shindig she was having and they were serving pink punch or pink lemonade, and I believe she always referred to it as pink punch. And it seems that the party was a little dull and Lou decided, or someone maybe in the crowd, maybe Lou didn’t do it, decided to liven up that crowd and they put a little extra ingredient in the pink punch and Lou never forgot that and she could tell that and always could get a big laugh out of it.

I do wish I’d had more time with Lou. I wish I had been around her more in her later years. Although she was so knowledgeable, and would share with you, there was a lot more that she could have shared that she didn’t share. Although unselfish as she was, she would take you a long ways, but she would never drain the well completely dry; she always left a little and didn’t give you the whole bucket.

Wilma: I’m Wilma Moberly from Louisville, Kentucky. I grew up in Louisville. I had heard of Lou Tate and the Little Loomhouse as a child. In the early fifties, when I was in high school, I once went over to the Little Loomhouse with friends. She spoke to us about taking weaving lessons and, being in high school with all the activities, that was probably the end of my thoughts about the Little Loomhouse for several years.

After my husband and I married, we would see her ads for her big Open House that was always held on the Sunday after the Kentucky Derby . She would run these ads in the Sunday paper and these ads would always picture the Little Loomhouse and that she would love to have visitors from out of town and just anyone who would like to come for the Open House, and there would be demonstrations of weaving. We were both employed full time; my husband was also going to school. We didn’t have a whole lot of time, but we did go over several times during the year and especially around the Derby time. In the sixties, we went over and we got to talking. She said, “Aren’t you going to take weaving lessons some time?” And I said, “I would love to as soon as I can find the time. Have you ever thought about giving spinning lessons?” One of the reasons I thought of this was because she had a large spinning wheel; a walking wheel, sitting there. And she said, “But it’s not complete.” Well, I wouldn’t have known whether it was or it wasn’t. But she said, “If I had some people who were interested enough who would help me,” she said, “possibly, we could have a Spinning Bee here sometime.”

Well, I had read about Spinning Bees like the Quilting Bees and the Spinning Bees in history, and I thought, that really sounds like fun. Now, I must put in here that Lou misplaced things but she never lost anything. That included your name, if you gave her your name. She handed me a three by five card . She said, “If you’ll put down here that you will help with a Spinning Bee, if I could get some people to come to teach, she said, “possibly we could have one some day.”

Several years passed and one day I answered the telephone and I had a call from Lou Tate. She said she was going through her files and she thought it would be nice to have a Spinning Bee. I really didn’t know what this involved and I said, “What would you like for me to do?” She said, “Well, help coordinate the activities.” Well, I didn’t know what was involved, but I did go over and talk to her about it. And when I got there she had in mind several people who she knew that she possibly could contact about coming to teach and one of them was Sarah Bailey from Bledsoe, Kentucky. Another was Brother Kim from St Meinrad, Indiana, a Monk from the monastery there. And she had already written some letters and had gotten some correspondence back because these people were interested.

And she said to me, “Why did you want to learn to spin?” And I said, “Well, as a child, I can remember going to my aunt’s home and seeing her spinning wheel sitting by the fireplace and as I would go in I was so tempted [that] every time I had to go over and turn that wheel. My aunt didn’t know anything about the wheel. She couldn’t explain it to me, but there was a certain mystery to me about that and that’s the reason I would like to learn to spin.”

She says, “Well, we’re going to have a Spinning Bee.” So by this time it was in the early seventies and Lou seemed to have a knowledge. It was almost like she was probably twenty or twenty-five years ahead of her generation in what she thought and what she could see the future was going to hold. She said to me, I recall her saying, “In 1976 when we have the bicentennial everyone is going to be interested in these old spinning wheels.” And I thought, how does she know this? But then, as we started to advertise, some of the weavers there started to get interested in the spinning. And they had never thought that they’d ever even want to spin.

And this whole thing mushroomed, the idea mushroomed, and we had the first Spinning Bee that was held in this area. And people came from far and wide. Some people came to learn; others just came; they just wanted to see and at that time I had a small Saxony wheel of my own. I did not know whether it was complete or not and I brought it to the Spinning Bee only to find out that it was not complete; that it had been sold to me as complete by an antique dealer who I was sure was sincere and thought it was complete. So out of this Spinning Bee grew my desire to learn more about spinning wheels and textile tools.

Being an antique dealer, I was already interested in this equipment and how it worked. In trying to learn to spin, I became very, very upset. I finally decided I would never be able to coordinate my feet and my hands. And I was working with Brother Kim trying to learn on a little Saxony wheel and I finally decided that I’d better quit this and go to the large Walking Wheel. Maybe I can coordinate my hands because I could control the speed of the wheel with the one hand.

So I went to Miss Sarah Bailey who was there trying to teach with those of us who had never attempted to spin before and I became very upset on the morning of the second day. I told her, “I will never learn this, I cannot learn.” And she said, “Yes, you can and you’re going to stick with it.” And she was very, very persistent and at the end of that two day Spinning Bee, we were all so excited about spinning and some of us truly loved it at the end of those two days. We started thinking about when could we possibly have another Spinning Bee. And toward the fall we began to think about dyeing and having someone to come to talk to us about dyeing. Then by the next spring we were planning for another spinning bee. These spinning bees meant a lot to me. And as a result I have come to love spinning. I have become a collector of spinning wheels and textile tools.

I’m interested in the different tension devices on the different wheels, because by looking at the different tension devices we are able to tell in what area of the country that wheel was possibly made. I try to limit myself to wheels that represent different areas of the country because you can get a lot invested and you also have to have a place to store this equipment. Just recently I returned from Indianapolis, Indiana, doing an antique show, and my thought Sunday night as I returned home was-- that wheel, that I just sold, went to a girl who truly is going to love that wheel; is going to use it. And the thought ran through my mind that, you know, I would have loved to have kept that wheel, but you can’t keep all of them and the joy that I have is seeing someone purchase that wheel who is actually going to use it. And although that person lived in Lafayette, Indiana they will be able to possibly teach someone else and the craft will never die.

My appreciation for Lou Tate is very, very deep. I owe a lot to her. She was so unselfish and [gave so much] knowledge to others. I wish that I had just a fraction of one percent of the knowledge that she had in the weaving and the spinning area, and in her knowledge of coverlets and coverlet drafts.

One time I recall she had been asked to speak to the faculty wives club at Hanover College. (This goes back probably in the middle seventies.) And she wasn’t feeling well then and she, in turn, called and asked if I would go and take a friend. And if we would go and take some coverlets and some coverlet drafts and present a program to these faculty wives. We went and when we got there we put this display together like she had told us to do. She also had given us printed material and we were really speaking for her. So many of the people there were familiar with her and they had looked forward to meeting her.

Since she wasn’t able to go, she gave us these coverlets, she gave us these coverlet drafts and I said to her, “You know, Lou, I hate to be responsible for these.” She said, “Don’t worry, if you can’t take these and use them and share them with people, there’s no use to have them.” She said, “If they get destroyed or [if] you can’t find them when you get ready to leave, don’t worry about lt. You’ve been able to share it with someone and this is the important thing.”

Teka: What are textile tools?

Wilma: Textile tools cover a large area. Just like the shoe cobbler would need tools for his trade, the spinner and weaver would need textile tools. There were niddy-noddies; there were yarn winders of all types, squirrel cage swifts, umbrella swifts, striker or wheel fingers, the hackles, the cotton gin to remove the seed from the cotton….

Teka: What do some of those things do?

Wilma: OK, actually a swift is an unwinder for yarn; everybody thinks it’s a winder. It’s actually an unwinder. After you’ve taken the home spun off the wheel and put it on a yarn winder and tied it into a hank and you put the hank on the squirrel cage swift or the umbrella swift and then you wind off of that to fill your bobbin for weaving. Everything depends on something else.

Another textile tool that is real interesting is the warping paddle. I’ve been very fortunate to find a few of these in the last few years and the textile tool collectors are very, very excited about this, because this actually went between the warping frame and the loom. It was fixed so you could keep your thread straight and it looks just like a paddle. Sometimes you’ll see them and people will have [labels] on them that it’s just a paddle, but you can easily recognize them by the holes that are in them and how they are arranged. They were very interesting.

Charles: I think everyone thinks of Lou as a weaver, but Wilma and I talked with her many times and she taught us so much about spinning and the things that went with it. Personally, I feel that Lou was probably a good spinner.

Now, when we had the Spinning Bees, Lou was always going to spin, but she never did. I feel by that time the arthritis had already crippled her hands. Probably, she could not operate a wheel at that time and rather than not look good, she just never did do it. But Lou knew too much about spinning, not to have had an interest in spinning, as well. Lou told us about textile tools which we had referred to and you’ve asked us about. And lots of those things she mentioned then went in one ear and out the other, because Lou did not have examples of all of these at the cabin.

We, in our fifteen or twenty years, sold and researched and traveled and [went] to seminars and museums and have found or seen these things that Lou Tate told us about. And Lou’s history lives again when you find these things.

The drafts: I think of everything I’ve ever seen at the Loomhouse, irregardless of all the fine examples of coverlets and those things, and fine patterns of weaving that we’ve seen there, were the weaving drafts. I think Wilma and I have been privileged to see as many things dealing with --we go primarily to the things withstanding because our level of spinning, before weaving, I can understand it better. I could never be a weaver because it’s too complicated for me. But, we have traveled, we have been to museums, we’ve have seen seminars, we have seen books that have been published in recent years on these things on the subject matter, and I have yet to see a draft in any of our travels, in any antique show and if it had not been for Lou Tate I would never have known what a weaving draft was and I probably would have never seen one. And any of these things we see or find, Lou Tate had told us about it. I don’t know if Wilma mentioned it . One thing that Lou told us and when she told us again, it didn’t make any sense to us, but she mentioned that you could tell, when you found a spinning wheel from what geographic part of the country that it came from by the way the tension device of that wheel was constructed.

Teka: This is the end of Side One, Tape One.

This is the beginning of Side Two, Tape One. Yes, continue about the tension and the …

Charles: Then, I as we have found wheels from different parts of the country, we find these different tension devices. Then just in recent years, a young fellow from Michigan, by the way, who has a tremendous collection of wheels, has written a book on American spinning wheels and this is the thing that he has pointed out in his book, that the tension devices of wheels pretty much pinpoint them from the East, the Midwest, South, or whatever, by the type of tension the particular wheel has.

Wilma: In discussing the tension devices on wheels, Lou Tate had told us that tension devices would tell you the area that the wheel was from,. But actually when we speak of tension devices, we’re speaking actually of the knob that tightens the wheel after you’ve put the band on, so that you’ll be able to spin on it. And this could be on what we call, above the table tension device; it could be a tension device that was near the spindle. It could be in different areas. You also have what we call the Miner’s head which is a completely different type head on a spinning wheel. The Shakers used the Miner’s head although the Miner’s head was a patented head. It was patented by a man named Amos Miner and the heads were bought because they were patented and then they were put on the wheels. But it’s fun finding the wheels and trying to figure out where they’re from as far as the tension device.

It doesn’t mean that because you find a wheel in Tennessee that it was made in Tennessee, ’cause it could have been brought there by ancestors from Pennsylvania. But it makes for an interesting hobby; an interesting collection.

Charles: When we were speaking of tension devices, we are speaking of the Walking Wheel or the Wool Wheel, not the Saxony where you sat down to spin.

Wilma: The tension device was determined by the maker. And the maker in one area, usually whoever made the wheel, would follow that particular style.

We were speaking of the Walking Wheel or the Wool Wheel, better known in the Old World as the Great Wheel. Actually they were made to spin wool on. Now, anytime you say something can’t be done, however, then you’re putting yourself up for someone to come up and tell you, “No, I have done that.” And this is true when you say that you cannot spin flax on a wool wheel, because I have been told that a few people have attempted this and have been fairly successful, [although] I have not seen them do this. So when we refer to the Saxony wheel--actually the term Saxony came from Europe. The Italians, got here to the U. S. because they could spin flax on it. The [name], flax wheel, has become attached to that wheel. However, this is not entirely true because you can spin wool, you can spin flax-- you do need a distaff if you’re going to spin flax,-- but you can also spin cotton and you can spin the animal fibers on the Saxony wheel. So the Saxony wheel is quite flexible.

Lou did tell me, in little bits and pieces, about traveling on mule back, down into Kentucky and into Tennessee when she would get these calls to go back in to the mountain areas because so-and-so’s grandmother or mother had some drafts of some looms…

Charles: Not of looms, of patterns.

Wilma: …of coverlet patterns and that they also had some coverlets that they would possibly be interested in letting her have. She would tell about this and she never really at any one time specified any particular area. But along with talking about this, she would tell me about Tennessee being so rich in the spinning and weaving and she would get so excited, because I think it took her back to her younger days when she thought about this. And she would say, “I am really more interested in the overshot coverlets and you can tell that in what I have here, however, I can really appreciate the Jacquard loom.” and she would speak about the cards, the punched cards, that the professional weavers would use who were weaving the Jacquard coverlets. And she’d say, “These cards that they had were nothing more than an IBM card that we have today and people think they’re so smart now with all these computers and all this IBM equipment and they just don’t realize that even back then that this was actually the forerunner of the IBM.”

Charles: I may add that among the coverlets that Wilma mentioned, that Lou liked the overshot. When you find a true devoted coverlet collector today, the ones who are really knowledgeable and study it; they want an overshot coverlet that was done by some little homemaker on a little loom rather than a Jacquard which brings more money, mind you, because the person who’s buying it does not really know the history of how hard these others were made. But Lou had the love for the overshot and the people today who buy coverlets and have really studied them, like the overshot [coverlets] over the Jacquards, but there are people who will not have an overshot. They think that the Jacquard is the thing because it has a tree or a house or a dog in it. But they were done by a professional at that time and not by that little person who used a little loom similar to Lou’s or something even more rustic because they were those handmade ones that took up the whole room. They actually did stitch and then sewed them together.

Teka: You all used to take her to the library.

Wilma: Yes, we used to take her to the library, many times take her; many times just go and take the books back. Lou’s subject matter that she would choose was very, very deep. She would come out of the library with books concerning the history of the world. If it was a book that had maybe been written fifty years ago, or if it was a book that had just been written in the last year or two, she was up to date on this. And she would read about the battles. She was particularly interested in battles. Also, kings and queens of different countries and she would discuss this. I think she also read many books dealing with philosophy.

Sometimes when I would go and take the books back and perhaps, I think you could maybe take out, I don’t remember whether it was five or ten Sometimes I would carry a big stack of books back to the library for her. I would look [at them] as I would go in and I would think about the subject matter and I would think; I wonder if she really read all these. And yet, I would come back and I would refer to a particular book and she would start spouting on that book and she could go on for hours, if you had the time to listen.

And Lou retained what she read. I never will forget doing some. I had headed up a particular program --I don’t really recall what the program was now, over there at the Little Loomhouse. And several weeks had passed after we had had the program. One day she called me and told me to come over. She had something for me. And I went over and she had this book put out by the Coverlet Society of America, based in Chicago. Now this book had been printed in the early fifties. And she made no reference to herself when she gave me the book. It was a hardback book with just one coverlet after another in it. Not until I arrived back home and started looking through the book did I realize that in the front of the book, one of the people that they acknowledged for helping them put this book together was Lou Tate. She had never told me this and that wasn’t the important thing to her or that some of her coverlets were pictured in there . But the important thing was that she was able to give me this book as a token of appreciation for what little I had been able to contribute during that particular workshop.

Charles: Wilma, is this the book that [we found] in the bookstore and you had to be a member of a particular group and not every person could buy it. Wilma could not have bought this book so this book even means more to her, the fact that we would never have been able to attain it by ourselves.

Teka: You were on the founding board of directors. I believe both of you were at the meeting.

Wilma: We were at the organizational meeting at the University of Louisville for the Lou Tate Foundation.

Charles: When the first board of directors was appointed and I did have the honor of serving on that first board, I did not complete my term due to some health problems and work required by my own occupation.

Teka: What was that first meeting like? Who was there? What occurred?

Charles: The first organizational meeting? Basically it was the people who in recent years worked at the Loomhouse and then a lot of older people. These were people that were members--what was the organization? I need some help here--the Kentucky Weavers--, if my memory is correct, there were a lot of ladies, especially, at this meeting who had worked with Lou Tate years ago. Most of these people, I had not met, prior to this organization. Of course that was when the lawyer, Mr. Fowler, I believe, was there and sort of presided over the meeting and got out the terms of her will and that the organization could be founded and we could keep it going and, you know, that we could have the cabins and that and…

Wilma: We did not know how, and I don’t know that anyone knew, besides her lawyer, what provision she had made. One of the things, if I remember correctly, was that we would have five years to make this a working center. She did not want it to become a museum. She wanted it to become a working center and that if within five years, if this could not be accomplished, that this would go back to the Department of the Interior, rather than to her family. And I feel like, personally, that there have been a lot of strides and a lot of hard work done to see that it will become the type of center that she wanted it to become.

And I think that if Lou were here today that she would be happy with what has been done, maybe not with a lot of the physical changes. (Charles says something here that’s not discernable.) I think they were needed but she didn’t put any emphases on that type of thing and that was one of the problems out there because the facilities had gotten in such bad condition but I think it’s truly a landmark here in Louisville that we all should be proud of. And I appreciate personally the work that has gone in to it. And a lot of people have contributed a lot of time and I think it’s been done out of love; its been done out of respect for Lou and I feel that anything that any of us can do would only be a small part to help keep this craft going.

Charles: I don’t think Jefferson County or Kentuckians know how fortunate we are to have something like this. A child reads a history book that our forefathers made their own clothing and they did this….Reading it in a book doesn’t really tell you anything, but when a child comes to the Loomhouse and sees you making thread from flax or some wool and then taking that and weaving it into a piece of cloth which can be made into a jacket or dress; it lives. You would be surprised in antique shows how many adults come by--we get a good education--and they look at a spinning wheel and they explain to this eight year old child how you weave a cloth off this wheel. They don’t know any more about it than a child. And adults can learn as much at the Loomhouse as a kid can. This is something that if we can keep it and keep it going, history will live as long as the Loomhouse can show a child and adult how our forefathers worked, not only how they made the cloth but they had to make the item [tools] that the cloth was woven on or that the thread was spun on and if we can do that, Lou Tate’s walking history book will continue on walking.

End of Tape One, Side Two. Editor’s comment: I can hear Charles talking, very faintly, but cannot get enough volume to understand the words. Perhaps there was some “bleed through” due to the age of the tape.