Oral History Interview Brother Kim Malloy

Lou Tate Foundation

Brother Kim Malloy, April 16, 1985

Verbal History Tape Transcription

Interviewer- Teka Ward

Transcribed March 8, 2007

Teka: This is April 16, 1985. My name is Teka Ward. I am interviewing Brother Kim Malloy. We are in the Jacquard Loomhouse at St. Meinrad Arch Abbey in St. Meinrad, Indiana. Our topic is Lou Tate and the Little Loomhouse.

As we begin, I would like you to tell me a little something about yourself.

Brother Kim: I’m Brother Kim. I’m a Benedict Monk of St. Meinrad Arch Abbey. I joined the monastery in 1956 and also 1958. I am a weaver. I also am on the Administrative Council of the Arch Abbey. At this point in my life I’m almost 47 years old. (laughter)

Teka: Tell me when you first met Lou Tate or heard of Lou Tate.

Brother Kim: In 1964 I began teaching weaving to people in the local area and in 1965, after hearing about Lou Tate, I took my weaving class to Louisville to visit the Little Loomhouse. It was in the spring of 1965.

Teka: How did you specifically hear of Lou Tate?

Brother Kim: Well, in the weaving field, weavers pick up names of people that are weaving, and everything, and it came by that way. Also, I had a book of Lou Tate’s weaving and the title of the book was Weaving is Fun.

Teka: Tell me what the students and you thought when you first drove up there.

Brother Kim: Well, first of all, we got lost (laughter), as usual, and in those days we ended up somehow up on top, looking down at it. And after maneuvering our way around on all the small roads, we ended up in the parking lot.

Most of my students, except for one, in particular, were very enthused about it. One was overwhelmed, not so much by the weaving, but by the collection of junk. (laughter) We spent all afternoon, I think, and picked up a lot of interesting weaving techniques which we learned and would try when we came back.

Teka: How would you define junk?

Brother Kim: Me, myself?

Teka: Or the students, perhaps.

Brother Kim: The student I would define as one of these people where everything is prim and proper and in its place. The thought of having a whole lot of yarn, boxes, and stuff sitting around was a little bit overwhelming. This particular student didn’t particularly like being in my shop, either. (laughter)

Teka: What day was it?

Brother Kim: It was in the middle of the week.

Teka: How did you all make contact with each other, you and Lou Tate?

Brother Kim: I had written to Lou Tate and asked if I could bring the weaving class up to see the Little Loomhouse and she responded with a very generous offer in a letter of letting us come.

I remember, also, when offering to pay her for the trip she was very reluctant. She was very willing to sell the students some of the papers that she had written on different phases of weaving. But she was not too willing to accept anything for the visit although I’m sure that most of the students brought some money to pay her for it . It impressed me at that time that she was willing to do it for nothing which is kind of unusual in the world today.

Teka: When you say that you all learned some techniques; could you be more specific?

Brother Kim: One, in particular, I remember was--one of the children was doing a boundary on the rose path of little soldiers, which almost looked like a tapestry and the kids were so fascinated with it, which the loom controlled and the loom produced, that we came home and produced a whole series of pictures, which she should have seen.

Teka: What kind of …; were these students advanced; what kind of class?

Brother Kim: I, normally, over a period of years, taught here at St.Meinrad, a group of people from the local area, about five or six, who just come in once a week to learn different weaving techniques. Some of them have looms, and some of them don’t, but it’s just a general basic course and then go on. One person, I’ve had for about three or four years and they have progressed to some other major.

Teka: Are they different ages?

Brother Kim: They’re all adults. They range anywhere from eighteen to sixty-five.

Teka: So it was a field trip.

Brother Kim: Yea, and really an off-field trip, that I remember I’d been taking my different groups. It was one of the more interesting ones, because they got more enthusiastic about the whole thing and they saw all kinds of things that we weren’t doing that were possible that they came back and were wanting to try. It kept us busy for about another year trying to catch up on some of them.

Teka: What were your first impressions of her?

Brother Kim: Well, on the first visit, having very little time to talk to her, trying to keep the six weavers kind of in tow and out of everything; she impressed me as a person who had been weaving for a long time and had a very good knowledge of the history and basic techniques of weaving.

It wasn’t until later on that I really got to know Lou Tate; that I got to know really how thoroughly she was into the subject and into the areas in which I was particularly interested in, and in the areas in which we later worked on pretty well together.

The first kind of impression was somebody that was totally devoted to what she was doing beyond anything else, I mean, she was teaching children weaving and the history of textiles in relationship to the rest of history.

The simple life she lived, the total putting every thing she had into her work, kind of oblivious to even the world around her. The fact that she survived on very little and what she had left over, why, she just wove back in to it because of the love of the history of it and weaving itself, and in teaching children about it.

Well, also, I came to the quick conclusion that she was much more at ease and open with children than she was with adults.

Teka: So, after that first meeting…?

Brother Kim: There at the last, probably two, maybe three years, when I received another letter from Lou--actually, I think I’d received the packet of information that was for the students on some techniques.

The next really contact was a few years later when there seemed to have been a spark of interest in spinning in the Louisville area. Lou Tate was planning a spinning workshop and she wrote and asked if she could borrow two or three of my wheels and I wrote back and said I’d be very happy to loan her the wheels, but I would have to come with them.

She wrote back and she said, “That was my intention. I thought if I got the wheels, I’d get you, too.” So I went back and spent two days teaching a spinning workshop and then on the third day of the spinning workshop, I had to return, so Marilyn Kluger, who wrote The Joy of Spinning, taught the third day.

Teka: That first spinning bee was the beginning of many visits and occasions to the Little Loomhouse, wasn’t it?

Brother Kim: Yes, it was. Well, on the first one, I remember meeting a whole lot of interesting people. In teaching, I got to know them better than just sitting around and talking.

And I shared her fascination for history, all periods of history and, at that time, I’d just begun to kind of fall in love with the coverlets. We spent a lot of time talking about the coverlets and then she was doing, at that time, some basic beginning work in some of the Jacquard area and that was really fascinating in learning about the mechanics of the Jacquard looms. So, from that point, I think, our interest in the coverlet area really was one of the starting things that really kept the relationship going and growing.

Teka: I heard that she collected drafts for coverlets.

Brother Kim: Yes, she had a number of these and people had sent some through the mail. I remember one time I was up and she had just received one that they’d found in a letter written by a soldier during the Revolutionary War in Virginia and he was sending this pattern back to his fiancée in Kentucky. She was very interested in it.

Also, I remember making a trip with her to South Union, which is by Bowling Green, to look at coverlets. We went down on a Saturday and stayed overnight. Saturday afternoon a number of people brought in coverlets, of which she copied down the pattern drafts and talked to them about the history and the family and this type of thing while I gave a small spinning demonstration in the museum there.

We sat around and talked later about it and she explained to me that her family had come from the area around Bowling Green and she’d collected a number of drafts in her younger years in this area and it was very handy because she could go in and tell people that she was so-in-so’s daughter or granddaughter or cousin and they were very willing and freely opened up their family treasures-- they had collected an awful lot of these things.

Then after Lou Tate had died and they were going through things they had the director of textile section from the Smithsonian to come down, Ms. Helene Breath -- from Maryland. They showed her a number of these things, too and they invited me up to be with them when they did it

One of the things I’d seen earlier was a draft written on a small thin piece of paper she’d cut from a ledger book sewed together with string so that it would be long enough to write the entire draft. But she had a number of these and they were very interesting to me-- showing a lot of overshot and dimities and things that they would have used for yardage, petticoats; bedspreads; she’d do this sort of thing rather than do the overshot coverlets which we always like to associate with the American Legion.

Teka: We have some articles here that have appeared in newspapers; one of them dated July 9, 1974 in the Louisville Times . Tell us about this.

Brother Kim: The Louisville Times to Lou Tate’s induction made an interview with me in the July 9, 1974 paper. Basically, it’s just a little folksy thing about Brother Kim and his weaving and visit to Louisville and his teaching at the spinning workshops.

Teka: If this was an example of your relationship with Lou Tate; why don’t you share with other people some of what you knew?

Brother Kim: Yes, Lou Tate had a great ability, as I look back at it now, of being able to contact the press and getting things printed when she wanted them printed. And it’s really crazy, because every time she seemed to have something, I seemed to get a little clipping from the newspaper here or there of something that she’d sent out and she’d generate a lot of interest over a period of time, even some of the very last of her workshops.

Teka: When, Brother Kim, was the last time you visited Lou Tate?

Brother Kim: I got a letter from Lou Tate offering me an eight and a twelve harness loom she had stored away that she thought that wouldn’t be used. And I came up to pick it up and this was after she’d had a heart attack. I met her out at the Loomhouse. It was sort of a rainy day and we had a round of talk after loading them on and she was telling me what it was like to go through a heart attack and what things happened during this period.

The one thing I remember is her telling me is that she knew that she was coming out of it, and everything was going to be OK when she could lay there in bed and look at the ceiling and try to figure out the weaving patterns with all the mathematical equations.

That’s basically what I really feel that Lou Tate wanted [to do] was to preserve the cabins and her work teaching the history of cloth making for generations, not only of early America, but what it was going to be in the future. And with it comes the collection of materials in which she’d written and the passed on traditions from one child to the other; from one adult to another. Leaving, despite all the personalities, understanding history, and practical work of the daily things that we use.

Teka: This is the end of side one, tape one, the interview with Brother Kim taking place at St. Meinrad Arch Abbey.