Oral History Interview Peggy Mastropaolo

Teka: Today is April 10, 1985. My name is Teka Ward. I am interviewing Peggy Mastropaole. We are at 710 West Main Street, Louisville, Ky. Our topic is Lou Tate and the Little Loomhouse.

Before we begin, I’d like you to tell me something about yourself.

Peggy: OK. My name is Peggy Mastropaole. I’m a former art teacher. I have a degree in art from Centre College, which really doesn’t say much because they only had one art teacher when I was there, and so I did not get a whole lot of opinion. Had I known I was going to major in art, I would have transferred. But because of scholarships, I did not transfer and I have a fine liberal arts education.

I like many different areas of art. I’ve done a lot of stuff with textiles, like batik, vegetable dying, weaving. I teach in my home; I teach pottery lessons, hand-building. I’m very much into miniatures for collectors, I make miniature food, hats, baskets for a friend of mine in Minnesota to sell and I enjoy making little miniature exhibits. I haven’t gotten to do much of that yet, but I intend to. So, I kind of hit a lot of different areas in art. I would very much like to learn to watercolor, but haven’t done that yet.

Teka: When did you first meet Lou Tate, or hear of her?

Peggy: OK. I first met Lou Tate when my Girl Scout Troop went up there for a meeting at the Little Loomhouse. I still have the thing that I wove. It was a little Kleenex holder. It’s out of that nasty peach and green and… ecru warp. We found one of those warps up there recently, same colors, probably it was the same warp. But I do still have the thing. I wove it up there and I really did like it.

Later on in the Girl Scouts; we went somewhere and I wove some more; wove some placemats. And then after I graduated from college and began to teach, I taught at Shelbyville High School. I was their first art teacher. Some of my children wanted to learn about weaving and I didn’t know anything, really, about it and I saw that there was going to be an Open House. And I went up to the Open House and enjoyed myself and enjoyed the people and decided to take some lessons. A girl named Mary Hammer and I rode out there for lessons. I took lessons after school and probably in the summer time and learned to weave on a three-harness loom and do all the little stuff, you know, all the lace patterns and all the things that Lou Tate taught about the three harness loom.

And then later, I took a drafting course. Let’s see, Vivian Hyatt and Sue Kendrick and probably Brenda Sheeley and I were in the drafting course. And [Lou] would take coverlets and would teach us how to take down the drafts of the coverlets. I can’t remember how to do it now, but, I think, if somebody showed me, I’d remember real fast. I have a whole notebook of notes that I took.

Teka: What kind of a technique did Lou Tate have when she was teaching you how to weave?

Peggy: OK--Lou Tate would tend to ramble on a lot and she would tend to start in on something and, all of a sudden, be off talking about something else, but, like, you know, when she would teach us to do the drafts, a lot of times she would have a coverlet and she would start in and say where she had gotten it and then she’d start in about all the different names, because some to the patterns have a lot of different names.

Let me think if I can give an illustration--I don’t know, but Chariot Wheels, you got a lot of different names for the Chariot Wheel pattern and they can all be the same pattern, but you know, they were real romantic names like somebody has given things. There was one funny little name; it’s called Snails Trail and Cat Track, and it has two little snowballs in the middle and little, kind of op art(?) lines around it.

The Snowball patterns have lots of different names. Sometimes the snowball is called a Bachelor’s Button, sometimes it’s called a Snowball, and if it’s woven backwards so that what’s on the bottom appears on the top--the bottom being the underneath of the cloth--it’s called something else, I can’t remember what all that is either; it’s been a long time.

But, she’d start talking about these and tell us different names. And a lot of the time she would tell us where she had learned this draft and where she had gotten it. Now she had in her cabin; it was just incredible, these little pieces of paper that she had rolled up like little cigarettes and they all had her little scrawled handwriting on them and they had all had these little drafts written down that she had collected over the years and, I mean, the walls were just stuffed with it. They could have been used for insulation. And there were just so many of these little things.

And she would go, like, up in the mountains and I know she went to Cape Breton Island, up in Canada, and she would see all these people and she would look at their coverlets and the things that they had woven and things that they had from the past. She would draft these things down so that the patterns would not be lost because, you know, if nobody does this, then nobody knows how to weave them and if the drafts are there, some weaver is going to figure out how to do it from the drafts.

So she was very, very concerned about that, but she had many little tales that she would tell about: things that had happened when she would collect her drafts; her little stories about the drafts themselves or the patterns themselves. They were very interesting.

It’s really kind of sad that I don’t remember them, because all of these lessons, probably took place anywhere from eleven to fifteen years ago and a lot’s happened since then and I have forgotten a lot since then.

Teka: What would she keep the drafts in? Just rolled up?

Peggy: A lot of them were just rolled up and stuck in between the walls, in the cracks.

Teka: So she took them down herself?

Peggy: Yes, she’d copied them

Teka: So she’d just go pull one down…?

Peggy: Oh well, those were just stuck up there. She’d written on pages [in a book] when we had our classes; she had these pages written up and it was sort of a stream of consciousness, written down, but she would have a draft on it and a picture on it and a few things that told about it and then she would have us, you know, work for that.

And after we got to where we could write them down, something that she had planned out, like; she would have the picture drawn out on the pages. She would have the paper graphed off the way we should do it. And then she’d make us write down the draft. And after we could get to that point she’d haul out a coverlet and say, “Okay, here.” And she’d hand out the magnifying glasses and we had to look at these threads and decide how it was done and then write it down and then after that, she had us warp a loom in a coverlet pattern.

And I still have the piece that I wove. It was a Chariot Wheel out of linen, just a natural colored warp and the weft is kind of rusty colored linen and it’s a real pretty Chariot Wheel. I was going to put it into a dress somehow, but I never have managed to do that.

Teka: You said you went to some of the Open Houses. What were they like?

Peggy: Those were always a fun time and it was kind of funny; I think Lou Tate engineered those Open Houses for a lot of reasons: one of them was that she liked to eat, but she was such an intense person that she never did really eat much. She’d open a tin can when she got hungry, but she never cooked. She had a couple of hot plates but I don‘t know that she had any other means to cook out there.

So she’d have these Open Houses and she’d find out the type of thing that you liked to cook, or what you made best and then she’d say, “Why don’t you bring that out for the Open House?” She found out that I really liked to cook so she was always having me bring out all kinds of stuff to her Open Houses.

And we used to come out there and in the fall, I remember, I used to make something with apples and sweet potatoes and raisins and nuts and brown sugar. I would bake it and then, out in the top house--it was before it was, of course, remodeled, and it was all cut up into rooms and there was this old smelly kerosene stove, I think, and it would stay hot and we would bring [the food] already cooked. Then we’d just sit it on the stove and it would keep warm until we got ready to eat it.

And then a bunch of people, the regulars, I guess you’d say, after the Open House was over, would all settle down and have dinner together and, you know, have a good time. I remember Ed and Betsy Dienes, particularly, and John Prentis, Sue Kendrick and Vivian Hyatt, who were the ones that were there most of the time when I went, and probably Ralph Calvert.

Teka: Did you ever go into bottom house?

Peggy: Maybe, but only once or twice, and only probably as far as the kitchen. I never really got into there. I had never really seen the whole bottom house or even Wisteria until probably this fall.

Teka: What kinds of things would go on at the Open Houses?

Peggy: OK. Well, I was involved in a lot of that.

After she found out that I liked to do vegetable dying, and Ed Dienes was up there doing vegetable dying, so Ed and I would do it together. We would set up all kinds of dye pots and gather all this junk and it would stink; walnuts would rot out there, and the soup waiting for us to have at Open House and she’d keep those on the back of the stove and they’d just sort of stew there for a month or two and then we’d have an Open House. Ed and I would get out there and dye people’s yarn.

That was at the time she was interested in getting the New Zealand spinning wheel and she would order them for people and they would have a Spinning Workshop. And Sarah Bailey came and Brother Kim came. We would have these spinning workshops and then Ed and I sometimes would dye the yarn that people spun or else people could bring their own yarn or a lot of times we’d just dyed up what we wanted to for fun.

A lot of times we dyed up stuff for Lou Tate to use in projects. I don’t really know that any of it ever was used.

Teka: Tell us more about the dyeing.

Peggy: OK. I was really into it at school. We did a lot of it at school in my classroom. Kids would come in. It was just terrible. The smell would be all up and down the hall, depending what I was dyeing that day. Some of my little black kids would come in and say, “Oh, are you cooking greens?” (laughter) A lot of it must have smelled like some of the stuff they ate at home.

I would have my students collect dye stuff and it got to it that some few of my students would come to the Open Houses out at Lou Tate’s and they got very interested in it, so a few of them did come up. But when we would have the Open Houses at Lou Tate’s people would bring the dye stuff and we’d go around the hill and gather stuff and we could always find walnuts to use.

Teka: What about weeds?

Peggy: Oh, broom sage from along the highway makes gorgeous colors, just beautiful--it depends on the mordents you used--but, anywhere from gold to rust to green. Goldenrod, which is all over the place, makes nice yellows and golds. Marigold, bloodroot--except that I really do hate to dig that up, lilies of the valley, tomato vines, just about anything that grows, you can boil it up and get dye out of it. The color may not always be too pleasing, but you can get it out of there.

The one thing I really like about the vegetable dyes is that they do all seem to go together; they’re such pretty, natural, muted soft colors and they all really do go very well together.

Lou did some things for me that I really appreciated, in that, after she found out that I was willing to work and do all these things for her, she started to trust me more. But I would have these crazy, crazy ideas, and she’d go along with me and let me do them.

I remember one time, OK, the mordant in the dye--the mordant is the chemical that sets the dye into the yarn--now if alum mordant gives you just the natural color of the dye stuff, and if you put tin in, it brightens it considerably. If you put chrome in, it kind of gives it a goldish tint. If you put copper sulfate in, it’ll give it a greenish tint. And if you put iron in, it will give it a dark, you know, brownish tint. Now what I usually did was pre-mordant all my wool and that’s real a pain in the neck , but it makes it so you can use one dye bath for a lot of different colors.

If you mordant the wool in the mornings and then, you know, just keep them nice so you can use it, then when you get a pot of dye going, you can throw five skeins of wool in, that each have a different mordant in it, it comes out with five different colors. So that’s really like a magic show, and, of course, for these Open Houses, that was a lot of fun.

I decided to carry it one step further, I mordanted up a bunch of fine wool and we warped it onto a loom in a plaid and then I wove it off the loom in a plaid. The mordanted yarn doesn’t really have a lot of color so you really couldn’t tell that it was a plaid design. So I would weave it all up in a plaid design and cut it off the loom and throw it in the dye pot and it would come out plaid. And I mean it was a real gimmick, but, you know a lot of people really were fascinated by this.

And Lou put up with this and she let me do it, and she provided, I guess, the fine wool to do it, but she really saw that as an attention getting thing and there are pictures taken by somebody of me pulling one of these things out of the dye bath. We dummied up a picture looking like it was coming right off the loom and into the bath and out again. It has plain weaving going in and a plaid [pattern] going out. But, you know, people really liked that. She did let me do things like that a lot.

Teka: And she would let you take things from the cabin?

Peggy: Yes, definitely. Now that was the thing that a lot of people apparently didn’t get to do. But she saw that I would do this and she saw that my kids were interested in it. Her soft spot really was students and young students and she saw that my kids were interested and she would let me take [out] some looms and so I took a few to school.

We had a Dogwood Festival in Shelbyville and it was probably the first they had ever had and she let me take a couple of looms. [First] she had me bring the kids in and we warped the loom and they learned how to use it and we got all this rug yarn on shuttles and wound the shuttles and everything and then took it out so that my high school children could teach the little kids that came to the Dogwood Festival how to weave. It was basically the same type of thing that we still do, you know, just give them a little taste of it, and that was very, very nice. I really did appreciate that.

Teka: Your interest in Lou Tate has continued, even after she died. Why is that?

Peggy: Well, I did feel an allegiance to the place and I have fond memories, even though, like many other people that went out there, I did get put out. I did leave for a while, part of that, well, she would work a person and work a person and work a person and she would sort of lead you on. Like, I wanted to buy a loom from her, but she never would sell me a loom, never.

I finally got the two looms I had from other people. And Sue Kendrick, bless her heart, called me up, and said, (whispering) “I have some tables Sam made. You can buy one from me.” And so I did. But Lou would say, “Well, there might be a loom available,” and then she’d go sell it to somebody else. She wouldn’t sell it to you. I think she was really afraid that if you bought a loom you were going to take it and not come back. I really do. Now she wouldn’t have had to be worried about that in my case, but she did work you and work you and work you.

She was getting, I expect, senile and she would get very crabby at times. And I can’t remember the exact circumstances but I got, you know; I left before I got really put out. And it turned out that, at the time, I was pregnant and I was tired and I just decided that this was one thing I didn’t have to do for a while. And then my husband got his PhD and we left town and were gone for 8 years. And in the middle of that Lou Tate died, so I did not get to see her after I left in about 1974 or ‘75. I didn’t see her after that.

I was very sorry to learn that she was ill. I still did get the newsletter from time to time. And I was sorry to learn that she was ill and sorry to learn of her death. We did try and come to an Open House one time when we were back for a vacation. It was advertised as an Open House and my mother and daughter and I came out there and no one was there! I don’t know what happened on that account. But after I moved back to the area and I saw an Open House [ad] and I saw that they had renovated Tophouse. I came out to the Open House and got involved again.

In the mean time, I had kept in touch with Sue Kendrick and had visited her once while we were home on vacation. But I came out and saw that basically it’s the same place; it’s still people trying to run it without any funds, it still needs a lot of direction. It needs a full time person, who knows what there’re doing, to go out there and take care of it and direct traffic, as it is. You know there are a lot of people who want to do things for it; they just don’t know what to do and it gets a little bit confusing.

But I go out there. I have been going out there and keeping it open on Wednesdays and when classes come through, Sally Moss and I teach the classes. Sally’s mostly in charge of that, but I help her get ready and we teach the little kids that come out there. And then if other people come out there on Wednesdays to weave, I help them. I still do remember enough about it that most of their problems, I can correct. And there are people who come and keep it open on Tuesdays.

Teka: I’ve seen you out there doing the teaching. Do you feel that you are really carrying on the Lou Tate tradition when you’re teaching the children?

Peggy: Oh, yes, because that’s what she really loved, teaching it to the children and really, that’s what I love; teaching it to them. They have such a grand time out there, and really, you can see it in their eyes. There was this one little kid at church that came out with the Collegiate kindergarten. And I didn’t recognize her and she came up to me, just all grins. And she said, “Hi!” and I said, “Hi.” And she says, “I remember you.” And I thought, oh my gosh, where do you remember me from. And she said, “You taught me how to weave.”

Well, you know, every time that kid sees me, her face just lights up. And I know that she had a wonderful experience out there that day. And I just hope that we can continue to do that for children in years to come.

Teka: You went out there first in the fifties as a member of the Girl Scouts and when you returned in the early seventies, maybe 1969 you were a teachers then yourself. What were your memories of Lou Tate; first as a child, and then as an adult?

Peggy: OK. I don’t remember too much of her [when I was] a child. I do kind of remember her as liking to teach children and I remember having a good time out there as a child. I can’t be very specific, but it was a good feeling that I remember. I remember her as an adult seeing that she did love to teach children and that was what she was really interested in; also, seeing that she loved her research, as she called it. She loved to do that.

I remember seeing her not getting along very well with other adults. She always related real well to the children, however. I remember her being very concerned about a lot of things, and one of her concerns when I was there, up until the time when I left, was continuing the Loomhouse on after she was no longer here. And I remember she was constantly saying, “I want to turn the Loomhouse over to a foundation, but you all have to prove to me that you want to do it and that you will continue this.” She was just very insistent on that and it was very much in her mind. She talked about that a lot.

Also, another concern of hers at the time I was up there: she was very mad about a road that goes behind her house. It was called Possum Path. And, of course, this was an old hill and her buildings were probably the first buildings on that hill. And suburbia encroached and they had a lot of houses built up.

Now there was quite a bit built up there when I went out there and apparently one sub-division had just been built up the hill from her, on this road called Possum Path. And they had not done a proper job of grading the road and preparing the land. And, anyway, it would rain and a lot of this stuff would wash down her hill. Her hill was eroding away; it still is.

They did, probably after her death, actually; build a retaining wall up there, but when it storms, the driveway washes down. It is quite a steep hill. She was very concerned about that and I think there may have been some law suits, or talks of law suits anyway.

But Lou Tate did not really have any funds that I know about. She lived pretty much, I don’t want to exactly say, a hermit’s life, but she didn’t really go anywhere. She sold her car a long, long time ago. If she wanted to go anywhere, people took her. I remember taking her to the library; I remember taking her to the store to get yarn.

But most of the time, she’d say, “Hey, could you stop and pick this up? I’ll give you the money when you get here.” And I was always willing to do that. So I used to go to yarn sales and buy rug yarn all the time for her and take it out there. So she really did not leave the hill. Her contact was with people who came to her.

Teka: You’ve even taken the weaving show on the road, haven’t you?

Peggy: Oh, yes. Now I have not been to the State Fair, but many others have been to the State Fair with it. I have been with it to a shopping mall that was having a sort of crafts day type thing and we demonstrated. I have been to Farmington. I have been to the Water Tower. In all occasions we loaded up all this junk: enough looms and enough warp and weft so that anybody who came by and wanted to give it a try could do it. We’d give them a crash course in plain weave and let them sit down and weave. I have done that. That part’s been a lot of fun. I really like seeing the people and seeing their reactions.

And I guess one of the best things that I can say about the whole thing is that I have really been free to experiment and that’s one fond memory I have of Lou Tate. She did realize that I had enough sense to experiment in the right way and she realized that I wasn’t going to do anything really crazy and I was not going to take advantage of her, of what she was doing. So she let me experiment with my weaving, and especially with the dyeing end of it.

She didn’t really care about the dyeing. But she liked to work with the yarns and liked for the people to be able to see that as part of the process, so she did let me experiment in any way that I wanted and that really broadened me. I feel like that is probably my fondest memory; that she enabled me to broaden my horizons about weaving and about dyeing, you know, by just giving me the free reign to do it.

Teka: This is the end of the interview. Side one, tape one.