John S. Service Oral History Interview, Chap I-II

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and John S. Service, dated March 7, 1980.

No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with John S. Service requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to grant or deny permission.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

John S. Service, "State Department Duty in China, The McCarthy Era, and After, 1933-1977," an oral history conducted 1977-1978 by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1981.

Opened March, 1980
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

CHAPTER I

CALIFORNIA AND CHINA

Family Background: Protestant Settlers and California Pioneers

LEVENSON: I'd like to start, Jack, with asking about your family background. Who do you want to start with, your father or your mother?

J. SERVICE: I can say they were both white, completely Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, WASPS in other words. My mother's family was New England Puritan. It went way back. I m not sure just how far back, but one of my ancestors on her side fought in the American Revolution and was given a sword by General Washington, which is a bitter point in our family because it was supposed to be handed down to the eldest child in each generation. My mother was the eldest child in her generation, but because she was a woman, it went to the oldest male descendant which is a thing that rankled forever! She was a premature feminist or an early feminist, shall we say.

Her grandfather was a forty-niner, joined a party, left Boston, went to Vera Cruz, I think, in Mexico and across northern Mexico. He was sick, was nursed back to health by an Indian woman, and wrote a book about it which is quite a collector's item. It is called Travels to California (Asa Bemont Clarke. Travels in Mexico and California, comprising a journal of a tour from BrazosSantiago, through central Mexico, by way of Monterey. Chihuahua, the country of the Apache on the river Gila, to the mining districts of California. Boston, Wright and Hasty, printers, 1852) or something like that.

[2]

LEVENSON: What was his name?

J. SERVICE: His name was A.B. Clarke. I'm sure The Bancroft Library has the book, or if not, we can give them one. When we were having our hard times in the steam trap days [1950s] we needed some money and we sold one copy for $250 or something like that.

My grandfather became a banker, small town banker in San Bernardino. My mother, Grace Boggs, was the eldest child. She came to the University of California at Berkeley, and was quite a prominent woman on the campus in the class of 1902.

My father’s father, John Service, came across the plains in 1859. He wasn't quite a forty-niner: he was a fifty-niner. His ancestor was a poor man, poor boy really, who came from Scotland about 1817. Eventually the family migrated across to Michigan. My grandfather came from Michigan when he was about nineteen with a wagon train across the plains. (John Service, Pioneer. Prepared from his own words and records by Fred Field Goodsell, with the assistance of the children of John and Julia Service. Waban? Mass., Privately printed, 1945.)

Of course, the gold rush was over. He was a rather canny and careful fellow. He got a job driving wagons of hay and supplies from the Sacramento Valley over to the Comstock Lode which was just developing. He spent several years doing that, saved his money, and then bought land down in the San Joaquin Valley near Merced, Modesto, and Turlock.

Roy Service and Grace Boggs, University of California, Class of 02

J. SERVICE: So, my father grew up on the farm. He was one of eleven children, eight of whom grew to adulthood. He was the first in any of his tribe to go to University. I've never understood just why he was determined to go to University, but he was. He came up to Berkeley. His father didn't see much point in it but he wasn't going to object or oppose it. My father was in the class of 1902--the same as my mother. He became quite a well known athlete, big man on the campus, president of the senior class, president of the Y[oung] M[en’s] C[hristian] A[ssociation] , which in those days really was something.

[2a]

Descendants of John and Julia Service

1. JOHN SERVICE, JR., was born January 18, 1839, in Canandaigua, New York. His brothers and sisters are:
Sarah, b. May 7, 1837--d. November 30, 1923.
Edward, b. March 29, 1841--d. February 19, 1909.
Robert Thurber, b. January 29, 1843--d. April 26, 1920.
William Bernard, b. April 14, 1845--d. April 17, 1918.
Katherine Ann, b. February 5, 1848--d.
Isabella, b. October 31, 1850--d. January 20, 1925.

John married Julia Irene Warner, July 3, 1867. The marriage license was obtained in Ophirville, California. Julia was born January 12, 1850, at Medina, Michigan.
Their children are:
2. Walter Warner Service, b. April 26, 1868, at Ceres; d. November 22, 1878, in Weston, Michigan.
3. Lewis Hall Service, b. April 27, 1870, at Ceres.
4. Wilber Pomeroy Service, b. June 5, 1871, at Ceres; d. November 19, 1878, in Weston, Michigan.
5. Hubert Elwin Service, b. May 15. 1873, at Ceres.
6. William Roscoe Service, b. October 22, 1874, at Ceres.
7. Ida Irene Service, b. March 24, 1877, at Ceres.
8. Robert Roy Service, b. June 4, 1879, in Weston, Lenawee County, Michigan; d.
September 29, 1935, in Shanghai, China.
9. Lulu Karolena Service, b. January 29, 1881, at Ceres.
10. Lynda Rose Service, b. December 16, 1883, at Ceres.
11. John Henry Service, b. August 30, 1888, in Auburn; d. May 3, 1908, in Palo Alto, California.
12. Lawrence Edward Service, b. March 3, 1890, in Auburn.

Second Generation

3. LEWIS HALL SERVICE (John (1) 1) was b. April 27, 1870, at Ceres. He married Pauline Cristine Harder, December 6, 1889, in Modesto. She was b. June 19, 1870, at Banta, California. Their children are:
13. Walter Wilber Service, b. October 28, 1891, at Ceres.
14. Leonard Hubert Service, b. September 4, 1895, in Peoria, Peoria County, Illinois.

5. HUBERT ELWIN SERVICE (John (1)1) was b. May 15, 1873, at Ceres. He married Flora Amanda Ward, September 6, 1899, in Ceres. She was b. June 8, 1881, in Stockton, California. Their children are:
15. Elwin Hubert Service, b. August 6, 1900, at Ceres.
16. Ward Elbridge Service, b. January 3, 1903, at Ceres.

6. WILLIAM ROSCOE SERVICE (John (1)1) was b. October 22, 1874, at Ceres. He married Estella Updike, October 21, 1900, in Modesto. She was b. August 7, 1879, at Turlock, California. Their children are:
17. Newell Turner Service, b. November 15, 1904, in Modesto.
18. Vivian Irene Service, b. September 16, 1906, in Modesto.
19. Grace Evelyn Service, b. November 26, 1907, in Modesto.

7. IDA IRENE SERVICE (John (1)1) was b. March 24, 1877, at Ceres. She married Frederick Henry McNair, December 31, 1908, at 1740 Oxford Street, Berkeley. He was b. October 28, 1872, at Mt. Morris, New York. Their children are:
20. John Frederick Hastings McNair, b. December 31, 1911, in Berkeley.
21. Virginia Irene McNair, b. June 15, 1914, in Berkeley.
22. Constance Julia McNair, b. February 28, 1919, in Berkeley.

8. ROBERT ROY SERVICE (John (1) 1) was b. June 4, 1879, in Weston, Lenawee County, Michigan. He married Grace Josephine Boggs, June 30, 1904, in Independence, Iowa. She was b. November 26, 1879, at Independence, Iowa. He d. September 29, 1935, in Shanghai, China.
Their children are:
23. Virginia Service, b. August 26, 1905, in Berkeley. She d. March 4, 1905, on the Yangtse River while going Chungking, China.
*24. John Stewart Service, b. August 3, 1909, at Chengtu, China.
25. Robert Kennedy Service, b. May 8, 1911, at Chengtu, China.
26. Richard Montgomery Service, b. April 21, 1914, at Chengtu. China.

[2b]

20. JOHN FREDERICK McNAIR (Irene (7) 2 John (1)1) was b. December 31, 1911, in Berkeley. He married Laura Don Collier, August 5, 1932, in Redwood City. She was b. September 25, 1910, at Weldona, Colorado. She d. December 1, 1937, in San Leandro, California. No children. His second marriage was to Ruth Banks, June 16, 1940, at 1062 Spruce Street, Berkeley. She was b. March 28, 1912, at Gas, Kansas. Their child is:
49. Patricia Louise McNair, b. January 12, 1942, in Berkeley.

21. VIRGINIA IRENE McNAIR (Irene (7)2 John (1) 1) was b. June 15,1914, in Berkeley. She first married Joseph Arthur Bourdon, April 12, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington. He was b. November 7, 1912, in Seattle, Washington. Their child is:
50. Barbara Irene Bourdon, b. May 13, 1938, in Albany, California.
Her second marriage was to Olin Stephen Gordon, November 17, 1944, in Berkeley. He was b. November 2, 1913, in Schuline, Illinois.

22. CONSTANCE JULIA McNAIR (Irene (7)2 John (1) 1) was b. February 28, 1919, in Berkeley. She married Albert Byron Sanford, November 29, 1941, in Berkeley. He was b. March 4, 1907, in Rochester, New York.

24. JOHN STEWART SERVICE (Roy (8) 2 John (1) 1) was b. August 3, 1909, in Chengtu, China. He married Caroline Edward Schulz, November 9, 1933, at Haiphong, French Indo-China. She was b. November 30, 1909, in Kansas City, Missouri. Their children are:
51. Virginia Caroline Service, b. July 3, 1935, in Yunnan Fu, China.
52. Robert Edward Service, b. February 16, 1937, in Peiping, China.
Philip Martin Service, b. Aug. 6, 1945, Washington, D.C.

25. ROBERT KENNEDY SERVICE (Roy (8)2) John(1) 1) was b. May 8, 1911, in Chengtu, China. He married Esta Jane Fowle, September 15,1932, in Berkeley. She was b. May 9, 1911, in Berkeley. Their child is:
53. Robert Gifford Service, b. February 25, 1942, in Murphys, Calaveras County, California.

26. RICHARD MONTGOMERY SERVICE (Roy (8) 2 John (1) 1) was b. April 21, 1914, in Chengtu, China. He married Helen Margaret Gardes, August 24, 1940, in Tsingtao, China. She was b. June 8, 1916, in Akron, Ohio. Their child is:
54. George Wiltz Service, b. February 4, 1942. in Wilmette, Illinois.

27. LYNDA IRENE GOODSELL (Lulu (9)2 John (1) 1) was b. in Berlin, Germany, October 22, 1906. She married Everett Carll Blake, June 24, 1927, in Berkeley. He was b. January 3, 1901, at Faribault, Rice County, Minnesota. Their children are:
55. John Goodsell Blake, b. January 18, 1930, in Istanbul, Turkey.
56. Lincoln Carlyle Blake, b. August 10, 1932, in Merzifon, Turkey.
57. Jacklyn MacCallum Blake, b. March 18, 1938, in Merzifon, Turkey.

28. LINCOLN SERVICE GOODSELL (Lulu (9) 2 John (1) 1 ) was b. in Aintab (Gaziantep), Turkey, February 15, 1908. He married Irene Frances Fogg, September 14, 1935, at West Newbury, Massachusetts. She was b. May 15, 1911, in West Newbury, Massachusetts. Their child is:
58. Fred Field Goodsell, II, b. August 28, 1938, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

29. CAROLINE SERVICE GOODSELL (Lulu (9)2) John (1)1) was b. June 3, 1912, in Marash, Turkey. She married Richard Bonsall Smith, June 16, 1935, at Merzifon, Turkey. He was b. October 23, 1902, in Middlebury, Vermont. Their children are:
59. Fred Wesley Smith, b. February 22, 1937, Istanbul, Turkey.
60. Marcia Karol Smith, b. March 31, 1940, in Boston, Massachusetts.
61. Robert Bonsall Smith, b. March 13. 1942 in Westbrook, Maine.

[3]

J. SERVICE: There's a cartoon in the yearbook--I think the yearbook the year they were seniors-- which shows a young man, obviously my father, wearing a Big C sweater with an obvious Service nose, looking at a notice on the bulletin board. The notice says, YWCA Sunday night prayer meeting; topic, 'the meaning of Service', speaker, Grace Boggs." [chuckle] They were obviously a well known college couple. I may be a little bit wrong on the title, but it was something like that in the Blue and Gold.

LEVENSON: What sports was your father in at Cal?

J. SERVICE: Mostly track and field I think. When he was here football -- what we call football, American football -- had been temporarily discontinued and they were playing rugby.(But "From 1906-1914 inclusive, (9 Big Games) Rugby was the type of football played by California and Stanford." S. Dan Brodie 66 Years on the California Gridiron.) I don t think he ever played football.

LEVENSON: I didn't know that.

J. SERVICE: You look at the statue down on the campus, just to the south of Life Sciences Building, by a man named [Douglas] Tilden: there's a man standing and someone else is bandaging his knee. They're rugby players. They're not American football players.

My father got into track and field and found that he could do almost anything fairly well, but he was particularly good as a distance runner, middle distance runner. He held the Pacific Coast record for the half mile for nine or ten years. The team went east to what they called the IC4A, the intercollegiates in other words, and he, I think, won the half mile and had the best time in the country for that year. Of course, in present day terms the time is not very exciting. He ran the mile also.

When I was in college I beat his time for the mile, but never beat his time for the half mile. Then, when my son Bob came along, he beat my time for the mile. So, there's a little bit of improvement in the breeding or something, shall we say?

LEVENSON: Breeding or coaching. [laughter] Didn't your father do some coaching?

J. SERVICE: I don t remember he did any coaching. He may have coached a freshman team or something like that.

[4]

LEVENSON: He coached one of my interviewees who was the class of 05, Harvey Lyon.(See Harvey B. Lyon: Entrepreneur, Rotarian, and Philanthropist, an interview by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1973, p 15)

J. SERVICE: It was, I think, just a volunteer thing, helping out. As a senior he may have taken some of the freshmen.

LEVENSON: What did your parents major in?

J. SERVICE: Well my mother was preparing to be a schoolteacher. She always told me that she majored in classics, in Latin primarily. But here's an edition of the California Monthly [January, 1927] devoted to Californians in China. They give a list of all the Californians in China. There's various things about them here. You'll see that she is listed as being a social science major. That doesn't sound like Latin to me! Robert Roy Service, natural science, whatever that means.

They were both in fraternities. She was a Phi Beta Kappa and a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, and he was in Psi U and a member of various honor societies.

Student Volunteer Movement: "The World for Christ in our Generation"

J. SERVICE: My father became very involved with the student volunteer movement which was very popular, very strong in those days under the leadership of people like John R. Mott and Sherwood Eddy, E-d-d-y. It was a tremendously optimistic, vigorous, save-the-world movement with the motto "The world for Christ in our generation." Actually in the thirty years or so from the late 1800’s early 1900’s they sent about 14,000 young people abroad.

LEVENSON: From?

J. SERVICE: From the United States.

LEVENSON: Under the auspices of the International Y?

[5]

J. SERVICE: Well, not all YMCA. The student volunteer movement was led by people in the Y, but a lot of the people didn't go out for the Y. The Y didn't send out anything like that many. That number includes many Christian missions.

But my father was particularly interested in the Y. He and my mother both were nonsectarian. The social gospel, the activist gospel of the YMCA--which was not really a proselytizing idea at all, but a desire to save the world by doing good, setting a good example-- I think it appealed to them. A lot of people have compared the spirit of the people going out, their motives and so on, to the Peace Corps.

LEVENSON: Do you find that valid?

J. SERVICE: Well, it s valid only part way because the student volunteers were making a lifetime commitment. Peace Corps people certainly seek to do good. But there is also an element of excitement and seeing the world. And after two or three years they can expect to come home and carry on whatever their life career plans may be. Peace Corps work is secular rather than religious, and temporary rather than permanent. The student volunteers of my parents’ generation were making a life commitment from strong religious motivation.

There was also a sense of adventure in the whole thing surely. My father and mother were excited about going to China. They hoped to go to China. Their first tentative assignment was to Korea. That was changed to China much to their joy.

LEVENSON: Why China? What was the pull?

J. SERVICE: Ah—well--China. Because it was a tremendous country, a great challenge, which was on the verge of changing from ancient to modern. It was a great magnet, because everyone was convinced that great things were about to take place there and there was a tremendous, bright future for China.

LEVENSON: I’m interested because when we get to the thirties and forties and fifties, one sees that there was a special relationship, America with China --

J. SERVICE: Oh, but they had that feeling even then. The Open Door had already "opened." The Open Door notes were history then. There was already this strong American feeling of a special friendship for China. My father's family had had a Chinese cook on the ranch here in California. Father never thought in those days he was going to go to China, of course. But, I think for anybody on the West Coast particularly, China was almost close at hand. It was the obvious place to want to go.

[6]

J. SERVICE: There s a lot of talk about imperialism in mission work. Obviously, for a country, a religious group, to want to send missionaries to another country you've got to have a tremendous feeling of self -righteousness or of rightness, of arrogance, self-satisfaction, conviction that you have the right way and others need to be helped.

But, it s hard to see this when you come down to the persons, the people involved. he effect of missionary work may have been to further imperialism, but it s hard to see the actual people involved in something like the YMCA as being imperialists at all.

My father, as I say, went for an organization that always considered they were working for Chinese. It was really the Chinese YMCA. He always criticized, disliked, the whole structure of extraterritoriality and special rights. He didn't want to take advantage of them or use them. He very much disliked consuls being able to tell him when he could go here or there, and he usually tended to avoid getting involved with consuls because his attitude was they would always say, "Oh, don’t go. It's not safe." [chuckle]

Then, my father was very pleased to be sent to the extreme far west of China, the furthest west really, the last province before Tibet, the end of the line, where he was to open up a new YMCA. He was the first YMCA man in Szechwan province, which was a province of at least sixty million and maybe eighty million people, a huge, heavily populated province.

There was a sense of pioneering, a sense of excitement. Also, there was a sense of great changes about to take place in China. He went out late in 1905. He graduated from college here at Berkeley in 1902. He had already joined the Y, committed himself to the Y, and they sent him to get some training as a student secretary. So he went to Purdue University and worked there for two years or so.

Then he and my mother were married. My grandfather, my mother's father, was very opposed to the wedding. He had some feeling of status and so on. He was a banker and he didn't like his daughter marrying a son of a farmer.

LEVENSON: You say status. Would you call that status or class?

J. SERVICE: Yes, yes, class, I suppose. Class or caste, I don t know. [chuckle] Anyway, he refused to have anything to do with the wedding, sort of disinherited my mother. They went off and were married at the home of a favorite aunt of my mother's in

[7]

J. SERVICE: Independence, Iowa, where part of the family had remained while some of them came out to California. At any rate, they were assigned to the far west of China and went, as I say, in late 1905.

LEVENSON: Before we go on to China, what were the religious backgrounds of the families?

J. SERVICE: My mother's family were Presbyterian and my father's family were Baptist. But, I think that the real devoutness in both families was in my grandmothers. I don’t think either of my grandfathers was religious. They went to church because their wives wanted them to, more or less. [laughter] That's my own feeling.

I think my mother probably would have been happy in the Unitarian Church. But this was long after my father died. In her declining years I think her religion had become quite intellectualized .

As far as my father was concerned, his religion always seemed very much of a personal and deeply felt thing.

My mother was a student volunteer when she first went to China and felt that she wanted to help my father as much as possible. But, I think she grew gradually away from this as she stayed in China. She was much more the intellectual of the two, much more interested in politics and literature.

My father very soon became completely wrapped up in his work. He had an idea of total and complete commitment. He had committed himself to the Y and he never had any idea of doing anything else. I don t mean to say that he was dull. He was obviously an intelligent person, but he wasn't the intellectual that my mother was. He didn't have the interest in intellectual things that she did.

He had an enormous zest, a gift, for friendship. He excelled in small groups, in person-to-person situations. He didn’t have a particularly impressive platform manner, and was not very effective as orator or public speaker.

He had a tremendous competitiveness about him. When the family, he and his brothers, anybody got together, it was always games of one sort or another. There was always the sense of outdoing the other, winning. My father, of course, didn't gamble, but we went through all the card games with great gusto from the earliest time I can remember. They started with something called Five Hundred, which was "Missionary Bridge."

[8]

LEVENSON: What’s "Missionary Bridge"?

J. SERVICE: Well, it was four suits of thirteen cards each, just the same as an ordinary pack of playing cards. But, Chinese regarded playing cards as for gambling, so the missionaries felt that they shouldn't use ordinary playing cards, and this other game, Five Hundred or Rook, was invented. You just had numbers--no kings and queens. You didn’t have spades and clubs. I forget what the suits were called. But we played "Missionary Bridge," and then my father advanced eventually to whist and then auction bridge. Finally we got to contract bridge. But it took a long, long time for us to go through this process. Along the way we played cribbage and pinochle and any other game you can think of: chess, checkers and so on.

He also had a sense of humor, a sort of dry, deadpan sense of humor, which my mother never really quite mastered. It was very different from her idea of humor, but very characteristic of my father’s family.

He was a person with a genuine, warm liking for people. This was what made him, I think, very much loved in China among the Chinese.

Background of the YMCA in China; The Principle of Local Chinese Control

J. SERVICE: I've got a list here, a thing that was put out at one time -- Oh, here it is. When my father went to China the YMCA here at Berkeley, of which he had been president in his senior year, used to put on an annual Roy Service campaign to help support his work in China. (He was always known as Roy in his family and at Berkeley. But my mother didn't like Roy and called him Bob. So all of his China friends called him Bob , and his early friends called him Roy.)

Anyway, this has got a lot of information about him.

LEVENSON: This is very interesting. [reading] "The University of California s furthest extension work, giving instruction in Bible Study, Sanitation, Engineering, Social Hygiene, and Physical Training--a practical religion."

[9]

J. SERVICE: Well, that’s the old YMCA--it was a practical religion, a contrast to the old-line churches and missions in China. The Y was something quite new and very attractive to a lot of Chinese. The Chinese were not exactly flocking to the gospel, but there were a lot of things about the YMCA that did attract young Chinese students particularly.

At this time the government was just starting the new schools, the new universities. They had just stopped, or were just about to stop, the old Confucian examinations. The new universities were set up in the cities. In the old days if you were studying for your exams you could do it at home or in your own village or town. But now the students going to the universities had to come to the cities. So you had a new group of university students, middle school students, growing up in these new, modern schools. The YMCA catered especially to them. It ran schools. It did a great deal of work in popularizing science, basic science, which the Chinese were tremendously interested in. The solar system, and how a steam engine works, all sorts of things. The YMCA used to set up exhibits. They had basic science museums and ran lectures. They had specialists for this.

They started the idea of public health in China, swat fly campaigns, things like that. Then they had a lot of education, free education schools, night schools, for children, for all ages. Teaching English--a lot of people wanted to learn English. The businesses needed people who spoke English, the post office, customs, these sorts of services.

In education, physical fitness was just becoming popular. The Chinese realized that in order to compete with the West they had to be strong. I mean not only as a nation, but also strong in their own personal physiques. That's the basis of an army after all. So, the whole idea of athletics was just starting in, physical fitness and so on, gymnasiums, even ping pong.

LEVENSON: [chuckle] Foreshadowing ping pong diplomacy.

J. SERVICE: Yes. Yes. But we don t need to do a history of the Y in this memoir!

LEVENSON: No, but in context I imagine that for your father to have been sent out to Szechwan, which was way, way out, there must have been a pretty good YMCA base in the Treaty Ports.

J. SERVICE: Not really. It was all pretty new, because the Y had really only started in China in 1896. So, he was there less than ten

[10]

J. SERVICE: …years after it first started. They were still quite small even in the cities. They started first in Tientsin, I think. The Y was relatively small.

The Y was unique among Christian mission organizations in China because it always insisted from the very beginning that it had to have local Chinese support and control. The international Y loaned or provided the services of some foreigners, Americans or a few others, but mostly Americans. It sometimes loaned or had donations of money for buildings and so on. But, in each city the first step was to find a group of Chinese Christians who were willing to sponsor it and lead it, act as directors. So, the foreigners were always working for Chinese and the Y depended on local support. You had to get memberships and so on, and it had to be locally self-supporting.

LEVENSON: Do you know what sort of invitation was arranged? How did they know the Y would be welcome in Chengtu?

J. SERVICE: The Friends Mission [Quaker] had someone there named Hodgkin, an Englishman. I forget his initials but he became quite well known later on and eventually came back to England and headed up the English Friends missionary organization. But, Dr. Hodgkin was in Chengtu and he knew about the Y.

Not all missions were keen about the Y. Some missions regarded the Y as being a rival, as not being truly religious because they didn't put the emphasis on proselytizing. Some missionaries felt that their only job was to save souls for Christ, and therefore the thing to do was to preach.

But Hodgkin had been working in Chengtu for the English Friends, and apparently he thought the Y would be a good idea because there was a big Chinese university, a government university, just being established in Chengtu. The missions were also talking about combining their various activities into a West China Union University. Chengtu was becoming an educational, student center. I think Hodgkin was the one that first encouraged the Y, or got in touch with the Y to see if they wouldn’t consider starting a YMCA in Chengtu. So, there was a friendly welcome in that sense. Hodgkin was still there when my father arrived and helped him. He had mission contacts, but he also had some student contacts and Chinese contacts, so that he was able to help my father.

[11]

A Six Month Journey from Shanghai to Chengtu, 1905-1906

LEVENSON: In 1905, six years before the fall of the Ching dynasty, did your father comment at all on the sort of turmoil that was going on in various parts of China? How was it in Szechwan?

J. SERVICE: My parents didn't get to Szechwan till 1906, because it was a long trip up the Yangtze in those days. 1 don t know whether Caroline mentioned it or not, but they lost their baby going through the [Yangtze] Gorges, twenty-one days by houseboat with no doctor.

LEVENSON: No.

J. SERVICE: Well, traveling was a long, slow business. They got into Shanghai actually while there were riots going on, what were called the Mixed Court riots. So, the first night my father was in China, actually was spent on guard duty, because they were staying in a house that was outside the concession. They didn't know what might happen. Actually, nothing did happen. But, there was a lot of anti-foreign, anti-American feeling.

They had to equip themselves, and then they went up the river by stages. They went by one steamer to Hangkow, and then another steamer to Ichang. Then, there was no way to go except by Chinese junk, houseboat. Speaking no Chinese, they could not travel by themselves. They found a man who worked for the Bible Society. I think he was taking supplies to the Bible Society, and they traveled with him. Mr. Davey, I think his name was.

They had a small daughter, Virginia, who was born in 1905 before they left for China. She was one of the first children born in Alta Bates hospital. [Berkeley, California] Her picture used to be in the lobby of Alta Bates as one of the first babies born there.

Anyway, the baby got sick -- with dysentery, I suppose -- and died, I think, five or six days before they got to Chungking.

Then, my father came down with malaria, which he had very badly and continued to have recurrent attacks of. So, they had to stay in Chungking for a long time.

The final stage of the trip was a ten day overland journey by sedan chair. It’s about 250 miles from Chungking to Chengtu. They left San Francisco in November, 1905. It was May, 1906, before they finally got to Chengtu.

[12]

J. SERVICE: But, this is a diversion from your question--which was what? Do you remember?

LEVENSON: Yes. [laughter] We're—what—five years before the fall of the Ch’ing dynasty?

J . SERVICE: Oh, yes. I think that things were fairly peaceful under the dynasty as far as Szechwan was concerned. My parents went away every summer to various places, to Omei Mountain. One year they made a trip to Tatsienlu, on the Tibet border. I don t think there was much internal disturbance. There were problems of banditry -- but that was always there apparently -- and poverty.

Perhaps in 1910, but certainly in 1911, there was a great uproar in Szechwan about railways. There was talk of building a railway from the east into Szechwan province. The Szechwan gentry were extremely desirous, extremely anxious, that this not be given over to foreigners to build. So they raised some money to build a railway themselves .

In 1911, Sheng Hsuan-huai signed an agreement for foreigners to build the railway. This caused a tremendous uproar, riots and so on, locally. This actually preceded the outbreak in Hangkow and Wuchang on October 10. Some weeks earlier in Chengtu there were riots, and all the foreigners were called into a large compound that was owned by the Canadian Methodist mission. We all lived for some weeks in the new hospital that was just finished.

Then, finally things got so out of hand so that there was fighting between various groups. The foreign consuls decided to evacuate everyone. [1911] They all came down river, and eventually my parents ended up in Shanghai. My father was soon sent to Nanking. So he was in Nanking in 1912 for a few months when Sun Yat-sen was setting up the Republic.

The Y was very much in the center of things because many of the people who were active in the YMCA became leaders in the new government, C.T. Wang and people like that. A lot of the people who were American-trained or active in the YMCA were prominent in the early days of the government. After Yuan Shih-kai took over, some of them had to take a back seat.

[13]

J. SERVICE: When my father went to Chengtu, where there had been no Y at all, he had to really start from scratch. At the same time he had to learn Chinese, which he did at home.

He got a teacher who came in every day in the morning. He sat down at a table and read Confucius, the classics; or whatever the textbooks were. The teacher, of course, knew no English and one sort of fumbled or stumbled along.

My father learned to speak extremely well. He was absolutely superb in his spoken Chinese.

Almost at once he was forced to begin speaking. He had to start dealing with workmen remodeling his house, trying to get acquainted with students, trying to widen his circle of acquaintances , trying to call on gentry and leaders in the community because he had to have their support. He had to get people of substance to act as directors and so on. So eventually he became a marvelous speaker of Chinese--local Szechwanese dialect, pure and perfect Szechwanese.

The Chinese used to love to hear him because he was so good and could joke and all the rest of it. My father actually never learned to read and write very well, which puzzles me a little bit because I don’t know how he conducted Bible classes. I don t think that he could read enough to read the Bible. How he got along--some way or another. Maybe he had someone else read the texts .

But my mother didn't become very fluent. She could speak to get along socially and with the cook. She had to teach the servants everything they knew. She started with raw country boys from the village, shall we say, who had never seen a foreigner, most of them. She taught them how to cook and make bread. My father loved baking powder biscuits and this and that. So, obviously she could manage. But she never learned to read and write, never really spoke very well.

LEVENSON: Did you eat the nearest approximation to Western food that the servants could manage, or did you ever eat Chinese food?

J. SERVICE: [chuckle] We lived Western. Once a week we had Chinese food. It was a big event. Saturday noon we had Chinese food. We all liked it. Later on when I got a little older, every Saturday noon we boys would go over to my father s office at the Y and

[14]

J. SERVICE: then go out with him and have Chinese lunch, usually with some of his Chinese colleagues, secretaries in the YMCA. This was always a big day of the week.

We loved Chinese food, but the rest of the time we ate foreign. My mother taught each cook. We had several cooks. Finally we got this one man--Liu P’ei-yun, who stayed with my parents then for many years--who became a very good cook.

Everything had to be done. It was like living in a pioneer settlement in a way. The local salt was coarse and very black, gray, so that we used to purify the salt. The sugar was coarse and brown. I don t know how we did it, but we actually refined the sugar. I don’t know how my mother ever got it crystallized. The salt I think we just beat up with a mortar.

We bought Chinese flour, but we made our own laundry soap from lye and ash and fats. We bought, or saved pork fat.

Of course, there were no electric lights. We used kerosene lamps. There was no running water. There were no telephones. If you went out, you usually went by sedan chair which meant that we kept our own chair carriers.

We even kept our own cow for many years because there was no way of getting milk which was dependable. Apparently, we even took the cows to the mountains in the summer sometimes.

But, you lived a very self-sufficient kind of life that required a lot of work and supervision. If you wanted to communicate with anyone else you sent a coolie with what we called a chit, a note, around town.

We had our own well. But all water had to be boiled. The well wasn't very deep. The water table was maybe ten or twelve feet down. All sorts of unsanitary things were going on around, of course. There were no sewers or anything like that in town. So all water that was to be drunk had to be boiled. You ate nothing that was raw, uncooked.

The "Y" as Window to the West

J. SERVICE: It took my father several years of preliminary work before the Y really got going.

[15]

J. SERVICE: First my parents started by having classes at home. Chinese students came to their home for classes in English and, if they could get them interested, Bible studies. Most Chinese students wanted just to learn about the West. The West was a subject of great interest to this new generation, this modernizing generation.

They had a steady series of visitors, callers, people who just wanted to see foreigners, or get acquainted with foreigners. Mother had a group of Chinese ladies who used to come in. But all this required a lot of tea, refreshments, that sort of thing.

But I think my parents felt that it was desirable for them to try to live in a foreign, Western way. Earlier missionaries had tried to merge in a Chinese community, had dressed in Chinese clothes, worn queues and so on. This was partly because of intense anti-foreignism. T hey didn't want to be conspicuous.

But, by the time that my parents came along, the great attraction of the YMCA was that it represented new things. It represented the West, and there was a great interest in the West. A lot of these people that came to the house would have been hurt if they had just received some Chinese refreshments. They wanted to see Western things. They wanted to learn about the West.

The foreign community did some relief work during the war (World War I), ran bazaars. One very popular thing they did one time was to run a coffee and doughnut shop, or coffee and hot biscuits I think. Tremendously popular. Chinese would come in, and some people came every day while the thing was running, because coffee, foreign refreshments, and cakes were something that was new and strange and exotic and exciting.

I m not sure that my parents were conscious of this. They may not have thought of it. But, certainly they were exemplars of the West and of Western ideas and Western ways of living. So, I don t think my parents felt any guilt about living in a Western way, because this was what they represented and what the Chinese wanted.

Some Chinese came to them and asked them to have a club which used to meet at the house occasionally. A club of men and women together, young men and young women, who were coping with all the problems of getting rid of Confucian ideas of arranged marriages and so on and who simply wanted to meet with some foreigners, my parents in this case, and learn about how man-woman relations, relations between the sexes, were handled in the West, what Western society was like, learning new ways, getting rid of the Confucian ways.

[16]

LEVENSON: Was there any opposition that you recall to this amongst the more conservative Chinese families?

J. SERVICE: I suppose there must have been. I’m sure that these people themselves were subject to criticism from their elders, yes. There was a lot of generational conflict going on all through that period certainly.

These people, of course, were talking about such things as making their own marriages . Mrs . Chao here in Berkeley is one of the pioneers.(Buwei Yang Chao, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, 1947.) She made up her own mind that she was going to marry Y.R. [Chao].(See Yuen Ren Chao” Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, Composer, and Author , an interview by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1977.) Of course, he apparently agreed too. But, it was quite a famous early case of revolt against the old Confucian family idea, arranged marriages. It was about the time that we’re talking about in China. I m not sure when Y.R. and Buwei got married, but it was probably about this time.

LEVENSON: 1921.

J. SERVICE: 1921. Well, we’re talking about a little bit earlier than that.

LEVENSON: Both of them had arranged marriages, had engagements that they had to break.

J. SERVICE: Yes, yes, that’s right. But, I don’t remember any criticism that was overt or violent or that involved my parents, at least not that I know of.

LEVENSON: It's an interesting concept when you think of what has been going on at the Y in the 60's and 70's --

J. SERVICE: Yes.

LEVENSON: -- the encounter groups and so on, that already in the context of its period, back in the 1910’s, the Y was facilitating relations between the sexes .

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes. That's right. That's right.

LEVENSON: Do you remember seeing Westerners dressed in Chinese style?

[17]

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes. There were some of the older people, particularly in small outstations, who still wore Chinese clothes. The China Inland Mission, and some of the more conservative groups, still went on that idea.

But in a place like Chengtu, which was a metropolis, I don’t think any foreigners wore Chinese clothes by this time.

There were no hotels, of course, in a place like Chengtu. It was the end of the line, so many foreign visitors stayed with us. In a place like Hangkow or Ichang, which were transit points, the missions would set up a sort of a hostel, a missionary home, or something like that. But, in Chengtu there was nothing like this. People would come to Chengtu for missionary conferences or meetings, or an occasional tourist-- but they had to be pretty determined tourists. There was a man named Harry Frank who walked around China and wrote some books about it. A man named Geil visited all the capitals of China and wrote a book about it and also a book about the Great Wall. There was a professor named E.A. Ross from Wisconsin, a sociologist, who wrote a book about China. He stayed there. A lot of people in Szechwan came to Chengtu because they needed dental work or medical care.

LEVENSON: It seems that your mother and your father entertained a most extraordinary number of guests throughout the year, the teas for students--

J. SERVICE: Yes, well, this was an important part of their work, particularly in the early phase of getting acquainted. I think it tapered off a good deal as children came along and she became more busy at home. But certainly before the Y was set up, formally set up and they had buildings, a lot of Y activity was getting acquainted with students, university students, and university teachers. A lot of this was done at the house.

Always, of course, Chinese called on formal occasions, such as New Year’s time. My father’s fortieth birthday was a tremendous affair because in China traditionally when you reach forty, you enter on old age, you become venerable. By forty, one should have grandchildren. So, when my father reached forty there was an all-day-long procession of people that came to congratulate him and fire off firecrackers and so on, and they all had to be fed.

One thing I just remembered. In the early days when I was seven or eight, like most missionaries, we had morning prayers with the servants all expected to come and join in. Then, somehow this practice just stopped. I don’t remember when or why, but eventually we didn't have prayers in the morning.

[18]

J. SERVICE: I think that it was somewhat artificial. Most of the missionaries expected their servants to become Christians. My father may have felt that it was a little unfair to put this pressure on them. It did seem a bit uncomfortable and formal.

We had a wonderful old gardener. He may have been a Christian, a real Christian. Some of the others may have gone through the motions. But, I think that the old gardener probably was the only real Christian.

Eventually my father got separate premises for the Y and it gradually grew until it had fifteen hundred members or so and quite an active program of schools and classes of all kinds. The Y was dependent largely on the goodwill of officials, but also on local support. When they finally built a permanent Y the government actually donated the land. It was quite a large site near the center of Chengtu.

Local warlords usually contributed, helped the Y, were friendly to the Y, attended the Y.

Even before the Republic, before the Revolution, the viceroy came to the opening of the YMCA in Chengtu, which was a noteworthy honor in those days. The provincial viceroy actually attended the opening ceremonies in 1910.

LEVENSON: Would you say that was a tribute to your father s particular skills?

J. SERVICE: Well, I don’t want to blow the horn excessively. I suppose you can say that it was partly because of my father s skill in making friends with Chinese. But the viceroy’s acceptance of the invitation was not based on a personal relationship between the viceroy and my father. It reflected the fact that my father had won support of influential members of the local gentry.

Strains and Hardships in Grace Service’s Life

LEVENSON: You mentioned your sister’s death. Was this felt in any way to be China’s "fault?" Was your mother bitter?

J. SERVICE: I don't think my mother felt that it was China's fault, but it certainly contributed to her very, very strong concern about sanitation and health. Reading things like Golden Inches, (Grace Josephine (Boggs) Service, "Golden Inches," 475 page typescript written 1936-1937 in Shanghai and Claremont, California. On deposit in The Bancroft Library.) the long, unpublished autobiography she wrote in the 1930’s, I realize now, much more than I did then, how repelled she was

[18a]

California Monthly, January, 1927

Letters From China

The letters which follow, with the exception of those from Miss Soo-Hoo, which were written to a friend in this country, were sent us at the instance of Mr. Arnold. They suggest very concretely what the daily grind may be on the other side of the world. Two additional letters, from Martha Huffaker Chen ‘17 and Paul Chatom ‘14, will appear in the personal columns in later issues.

THE Y. M. C. A. IN CHINA
By Roy Service ‘02

Roy Service, whose name is very familiar to all alumni and to undergraduates as well, has sent us a most interesting account of his twenty years in China, which is, unfortunately, too long to be included in full. We print the following excerpts, with regret that it has been necessary to omit the most colorful and dramatic portions.

The work of the Y.M.C.A. in China has developed along pretty much the same lines as in America. Find out what your local Association is doing and you can be sure that in Chengtu we have been doing many of these same things, with variations, of course, because of the different conditions under which we live and work. There are clubs among the grammar school boys. Thousands of poor boys owe whatever chance they have ever had to gain an education to the "Y" free night schools.(In 1923 the Association headed a movement of educational and religious organizations which had over 100 of these free schools running at one time with 10,460 poor boys and girls studying in them)

Lectures and Bible classes and problem discussion groups have been carried on among the students of the government schools. Hundreds of boys have gone out of our Association school into business life or government service. We have had a share, too, in the development of interest and participation in athletic games. We have used lantern slides and the stereoptican a great deal in educational and religious lectures; and have had a good share in bringing in moving pictures for entertainment and educational purposes. We have pushed campaigns for public health. To popularize "Swat the Fly," we made and gave away thousands of fly swatters. Many have followed our example, so that today in the city of Chengtu the fly swatter is as common a sight as in any American city. In times of epidemic we have co-operated with the police in helping to educate the public on preventive measures. In times of famine, the Association has had a leading part in the securing and handling of relief funds.

Besides the regular lines of work we are called on to give help along special and unusual lines. A merchant wants to appeal to foreign trade. He has written out an advertisement in Chinese. Will we please translate it into English? We do it. Or perhaps he needs a sign in English to put up outside his shop, and wants us to plan out the sign. We do it. A father wants to transmit some money to his son who is studying down river or in Japan or in America. Can we find a way? We can and do. A member has fallen under the spell of a Montgomery Ward catalogue. He wants to send a mail order. Will we please advise him as to the things best suited to his needs, figure out the cost and write the letter and transmit the money? We are pleased. The governor becomes interested in a question of the feasibility of shallow-water motor boats for transportation purposes and for river patrol. Could we secure full particulars for him? We do our best, but it requires letters, telegrams and cablegrams. A business man wants to become the agent for some foreign firm. Will we write letters of introduction and help him to establish connections with them? We do, if we think the man is O.K. and the firm a good one. The provincial government is thinking of floating a foreign loan with certain special taxes as security. The man who brings together the government representatives and the people who have money to loan will receive a very tidy commission, if the deal goes through. Needless to say, a lot of people are willing to act in the capacity of go-between. The Y.M.C.A. has American connections. Therefore, can we not put the government representatives in touch with interested capitalists? We cannot. The best we can do is to write about the matter to the American Consul in Chungking, or pass the word on to the British Consul of Chengtu.

(caption below photo)

Roy Service, 02's long distance man, seated among a group of Provincial Government officials and prominent citizens of Chengtu, capital of Szechuan, the Texas of China, to whose 60,000,000 inhabitants he has introduced the Y.M.C.A. He is holding on his lap one of the millions of potential Chinese presidents which the province claims. (caption below photo)

The Chengtu Y.M.C.A., situated in the heart of a city of 500,000 people and boasting 1500 members, is a monument to the work of Roy Service '02. In establishing this "Y", he broke all records for long distance running, reaching a point in far west in China as habitation would permit, on the border of Tibet, the Texas of China.

[18b]

THE CALIFORNIA MONTHLY January, 1927

I could continue for a considerable space to enumerate different services that we have been asked to render during these years. As students have returned from abroad in increasing numbers, and development has taken place along the new lines, these unusual requests are more and more taken care of by Chinese outside the "Y." Thus we have been asked to give a larger part of our time to the more regular, though perhaps less spectacular, lines of work.

During these fifteen years since the coming of the Republic, there have been frequent periods of disturbances. At such times the "Y" has rendered and still continues to render a special sort of service. When conditions become acute from a political or military point of view the "Y" becomes a haven for civilians in danger or distress. In our membership are leading men of all parties and factions. They know that the "Y" absolutely refrains from any political dabbling, and its neutrality has never been questioned. Because of this fact we have been able to serve thousands of people in troubled times.

My wife and I are entering into our second twenty years of life out here, strong in the faith that China will eventually work her way through to peace and unity and a new life; and that the New China will have important contributions to make to the progress of the world as we move onward to "that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves."

R. R. SERVICE 02.

TEACHING AT NAN-KAI

Peitaiho Beach, North China.
July 24, 1925

My Dear-

.... The middle of the summer vacation has arrived so that at last I can settle down to write letters to patient friends. We are again at the summer resort where we spent so many happy months before, and are getting the thorough rest that we need. I have worked hard, much harder than I would believe possible if I did not go through it myself, but I have accomplished a number of things I can be proud of. Do let me air my few hobbies, and allow me to tell you how I spent my time and energy this last school year.

(caption under photo)

NETTIE SOO-HOO ‘17 (Extreme left)

Of course I have been teaching regular hours. I try my level best to get ignorant freshmen to write the English language properly, or rather less improperly at the same time that I try to convince descendants of admirers of Confucius that English literature is worth investigating. Incidentally I read about a hundred compositions a week, and when I am not doing this or the others of my odd jobs, I mother two clubs that the students are especially fond of. I can bank my last month’s salary (which is almost all gone) that you never thought of me as a severely critical director of a play, or a hopeful believer in the happy quality of sounds that are forced through young throats in singing, and yet in the first semester I coached (really coaxed) a dozen members of the English Club to produce Moliere s "A Doctor in Spite of Himself," which is terribly funny. In the second semester, after much practicing, we managed to prepare a program of twenty-five odd numbers that were guaranteed to exercise forty voices in various combinations and entertain some three hundred curious spectators, who were come to see our sweet girl singers in their fresh summer dresses and guileless smiles.

China is still upside down, and we have been constantly entertained with wars, rumors of war, actual flying for safety in the face of danger and whatnot. In the last year or so we have been twice forced to seek safety in the city, as defeated soldiers were expecting to work havoc everywhere they went, looting, burning, assaulting and generally creating terror. Our campus being on the outskirts of the city, we were more exposed to pillaging than we would like. At times, these wretched soldiers did get in, but because we gave them food, clothing and a little money -- all they wanted -- they did no harm. The war is not over yet, but we are breathing a little more easily, as operations are not carried on here now.

NETTIE SOO-HOO ‘17.

CUSTOMS IN CHINA

September 21, 1926,
Hunchun, Kirin Province,
Manchuria, China.

My dear Mr. Arnold,

I am afraid that I have been rather remiss in answering your valiant appeals for "just a little story," but the truth of the matter is that my own private "Powers That Be" have been rushing me about this unhappy land at such a rate in the past few months that I have not had time to settle down and attempt to figure out just exactly where I am, and how I came to be there.

To begin with I was in Mukden, but that satisfied no one but my own humble self, so there was nothing for it but to do a "Ch’u Ch’u kuang-i-kuang" amidst war, pillage and many groans to Wuhu, where I did my best to look wise behind a desk in the Native Customs in that port. Presumably my attempts were so successful that once more these mythical "Powers That Be" thought better of it, and as a consequence I find myself up here in the back of beyond in charge of a small border sub-office. I sincerely hope that I will now be left to stew in my own juice and, I am told, such will undoubtedly be the case.

There is not much to be said for this place, other than that it really is on the map, though far from making any noise about it; in fact it is so small, so quiet and so far away from the toil and trouble of this redoubtable planet of ours that one might almost believe oneself safely dead and buried. But even here we have our "vale of tears," for I am instructed that it is my awful and set purpose to waylay and corral with any and every means at my disposal (unfortunately for the awful and set purpose I have not yet discovered all the necessary means) all movements of cargo back and forth across the Sino-Korean and Sino-Russian frontiers and to levy duty thereupon. For this purpose one has a staff of two foreigners and some twenty Chinese, all to control some four hundred miles of wild and mountainous frontier; dark indeed are the ways of the Authorities.

Yours sincerely, G. M. LANDON '23

[19]

J. SERVICE: by the lack of sanitation, the conditions of the inns, the pigsty next to where you were sleeping, and all the dirt and filth, the general living conditions.

I think that it contributed to her--alienation is too strong a word. But, she dropped out more and more partly because she got more interested in other things--from my father’s work. She became, I think, disappointed. Embittered is too strong a word. After the revolution [1911], for instance, they should have gone back on furlough to the United States. Every six years you were supposed to have a sabbatical in the United States. But the YMCA had not succeeded in getting anyone else to go to West China on a permanent basis. There had been a couple of people who for one reason or another couldn't stay. My father had had to evacuate. [1911] He didn't want to come out, but he had been ordered out. He felt he had to go back to Szechwan. The Y wanted him to go back to Szechwan to get things started again, make sure everything was all right. So, he went back, you see, and it wasn't until 1915, ten years after they went out to China, that he had his first furlough.

He always put the Y first. This is a pattern that was repeated time after time. My mother felt that the family was second, and that he did much more for the Y and gave himself to the Y more than he needed to and neglected the family. It's a pattern that, shall we say, repeated itself later on, in my case I think.

LEVENSON: Did your father become involved with Chinese politics?

J. SERVICE: He actively supported the students in the 1920's when the Kuomintang was coming to power, the period of the May 30th incident in Shanghai and all the rest of 1926, '27. He was in favor of the foreigners giving up extraterritoriality and the imperialist apparatus that annoyed, that infuriated, the Chinese so much.

LEVENSON: Did this make him very unpopular with the so-called European community?

J. SERVICE: I'm not sure because I was out of China then. But, I don't believe it did. I think most of the missionaries that they were close to tended to agree with him.

Most of the time we were way up west in Szechwan province, hundreds of miles from any guns or any gunboat. We were at the end of the line. Going up and down through the Yangtze Gorges, if soldiers or bandits were firing from the banks at the boat,

[20]

J. SERVICE: they would go up and sit behind the armor plate in the bridge, things like that. But, I don't think there was any conflict between my father and other missionaries.

There were some old-line missionaries, I think, that were less inclined to see the merit of the students' arguments because, the students wanted to take over control of the foreign schools and universities. They thought that the Chinese government should set the curriculum and really have effective control of the mission institutions. I think that probably some of the missionaries opposed that. The Chinese weren't ready yet, was the general theme.

But my father didn't have very much contact with the business people--certainly not in Chengtu. It wasn't a Treaty Port. There wasn't any foreign business community there really.

LEVENSON: Did the recurrent violence in China affect your daily lives?

J. SERVICE: Well, you see, what happened in Szechwan was that after the Revolution, 1911-12 Revolution, things really fell apart. Szechwan was fought over by a lot of Szechwanese, but also became a hunting ground for people from other provinces, especially Kweichow and Yunnan.

When Yuan Shih-kai tried to become emperor , the revolt actually started in Yunnan, and the leader Tsai led an army from Yunnan into Szechwan province in 1916 to give battle to the local commander, who had bet on Yuan Shih-kai. The Yunnan army stayed on and on in Szechwan. Almost every year, in these years we're talking about, there was fighting going on--this was a part of the life. Some of it was very bloody, some of it not so bad; but almost always with looting, first by the defeated or evacuating army and then, of course, by the victorious army. Each side grabbed what it could.

Sometimes they would persuade the chambers of commerce, the leading businessmen to pay them--a ransom, in other words. But, if the ransom wasn't paid, or even if the ransom was paid, there would still be looting and burning.

LEVENSON: Did this affect your day-to-day life?

J. SERVICE: Oh, sometimes. There was one period when we all moved down into the ground floor of the house because the compound had mud walls. We moved into the ground floor and lived and slept in my father s library because, in addition to the mud walls, we

[21]

J. SERVICE: were surrounded by bookcases. We put mattresses against the windows. There was artillery fire going across the city from one side to the other, from one camp to the other, passing over our area.

There was a mission hospital, an American Methodist Mission hospital which for some reason was not being operated. Whether they just didn't have money or what--I don't know. But, it was empty. The missionary community thought they ought to do what they could. So they opened it on an emergency, temporary basis to take care of the hundreds of wounded soldiers.

I was, I suppose, maybe ten. Anyway, I volunteered. Some of us children volunteered to act as orderlies and fetch-and-carry boys, boy scouts. I remember it was a terrible, terrible thing to see these wounded people. Most of them had been wounded several days before. The fighting was some distance away at that time. The wounds had not been properly dressed or taken care of. So, they were suppurating and so on--awful. I remember having to leave the operating room where the doctor was cutting. I went outside and was sick. I just couldn't take it.

The foreigners did what they could. My father was always helpful in things like this. Several times he actually was able to act as a go-between, mostly to save people that were caught in between the firing. He was known to people on both sides, to officials, to the generals, and so on.

In fact, he was so well known that the British consul general there wasn't any American consul in Chengtu, never was. The nearest American consul was in Chungking, and that was only part of the time. Most of the time the nearest American consul was six, seven hundred miles away in Hangkow. But, the British consul general made a protest at one time to the American legation in Peking about my father's having contact with officials. The consul thought that only he should have contact with the officials and resented my father s being on very good terms with the local generals, the top people!

LEVENSON: So, he was doing para-diplomacy.

J. SERVICE: Well, he was getting along. He had to.

LEVENSON: You describe so calmly a situation that would be truly horrifying to most people--warlords fighting, bleeding bodies being brought in, et cetera. How did this all affect your mother?

[22]

J. SERVICE: I suppose it affected her more than us. She was conscious of the dangers. Children can adapt, and like excitement. Let me jump ahead to an episode in the Chungking days. We spent the summers, like most of the foreigners, in bungalows along the top of hills on the south bank of the Yangtze, across from the city. One summer--I think it was '23--a Kweichow general, from the south, decided to take over Chungking. These wars were usually more skirmish and maneuvering than hard fighting. For several days, the defenders' front line was along our range of hills. Then, one night the attackers made a night attack. Altogether, spread about, there must have been a good many thousands of troops. And Chinese make a night attack very theatrical and frightening. Everyone shouts "Sha! Sha! Sha!" ("Kill! Kill! Kill!") and fires their guns into the air or at anything that looks like a target. The defenders fired a few shots but discreetly fled, long before the attackers got close.

While all this was going on, the servants had come into the house--their quarters were flimsy lath and plaster, while the house was brick. And we were all lying together on the floor to get below the level of the windows. Actually, we children were under the beds. The house was dark (we assumed lights would draw fire) and stood on a sort of elevated terrace. A group of soldiers--I suppose a squad--came charging up the steps to the front door, which had glass in the top half. My father decided he had to go out and tell them we were foreigners. In fact, he was shouting that, but the din was so great that the soldiers couldn't hear him.

Just as my father had his hand on the knob, a soldier outside--the leader, I assume--fired his rifle from the hip. The bullet shattered the glass and passed just in front of my father's forehead. But some of the pulverized glass bounced into his eye. He fell to the floor, and thought he was blind. But he was able to tell them we were foreigners and to ask the name of their general. When they told him, he said, "I know him"--which was true. The soldiers were sorry, but we didn't know for several days whether Dad would lose his sight. He didn't. To go back to your question: this sort of thing was obviously hard on my mother.

LEVENSON: You wanted to tell me about your boyhood in Chungking and an incident that occurred.

J. SERVICE: This was in the summer of 1923 I think. It was actually at the same time that my father was nearly shot by this soldier during a night attack. That morning, we three boys had gone down along the range to see some friends. Foreign houses were

[23]

J. SERVICE: scattered over several miles up and down the hills. We took with us a Daisy air rifle which our parents had bought from Montgomery Ward. We met a patrol, sort of an advanced patrol. Apparently these were incoming warlord troops from Kweichow. They were very much interested in our air rifle. They thought it was some fancy, new, foreign type of rifle [laughter] which was very much something they would like to have.

So they stopped us and questioned us and wanted to know about that rifle. Naturally, we didn't want to lose it. So my brother Bob tried to explain to them--he spoke the best Chinese of any of us he tried to explain that it was just driven by ch'i. "Ch'i" is rather a vague word in Chinese but usually means air or gas.

Finally Bob said, "My brother there--" (I was holding the rifle) "I'll stand here and my brother will shoot me in the chest and you'll see what happens." [laughter] He had a khaki shirt on, I suppose. So he stood bravely--I suppose he was eleven or twelve--and I shot him in the chest with the air rifle. We convinced the soldiers that the rifle was not one they wanted. [laughter] They let us go on our way.

That night, of course, things turned much worse.

Speaking of the effect on the kids, after these various episodes of war, we found we could pick up all sorts of stray bullets, stray ammunition. We started a collection of various kinds of gunpowder, various kinds of bullets. We would pull a bullet out of cartridges that hadn't gone off, you know. Of course, we got many different kinds because every Chinese warlord army had arms from wherever they could get them. There might be old Russian stuff, and old Japanese stuff, and locally made Chinese stuff, different arsenals, different sizes, different kinds of powder.

We'd been having typhoid shots. So, we had a lot of these little bottles that typhoid vaccine used to come in. We had these all lined up, different kinds of powder from these various shells which we quite casually had unloaded ourselves with a pair of pliers. [laughter]

Reading my mother's notes, I was reminded of a time when the attackers had seized a peddler, a man who was at least dressed up and acting as a peddler selling food or something, down at the gap below our house. The road came up to a gap in the hills there.

[24]

J. SERVICE: They accused him of being a spy, and they hung him up from a tree this way with his arms behind him [stands and puts hands behind back] and then suspended him, just lifting him off the ground, which is a very painful way, and they beat him on the back with split bamboo. Of course, he was screaming bloody murder. It went on all day, more or less. We went down and watched. My mother was not very happy about that.

But, you know, China was a cruel place in those days. I think we accepted these things since they were a part of normal, daily life, and they didn't affect us nearly as much as they did my mother or as they did Caroline when she came to China after we married.

Caroline's reactions to China simply surprised me. We were in Yunnan, which was a very backwoodsy, undeveloped place when we went there in '33. She was much more put off by it than I was. It didn't bother me.

LEVENSON: Jack, you said you had a few things from our last session that you'd like to expand on a little bit.

J. SERVICE: Well, I felt after we'd finished talking the other day that maybe I hadn't been quite fair to my mother. I'd given the impression that she had turned sour perhaps, or against, the missionary cause that my father was dedicated to. I don't think that's quite fair.

She had, of course, a harrowing introduction to West China with the loss of her child and then the serious illness of my father. She was plagued by ill health. It's obvious from reading her own account that she was suffering a lot of the time. Years later when she came to the States, the doctors at the Mayo Clinic thought she had probably had gallstones. She also had, I think, two miscarriages after the baby died, before I was born.

Probably I didn't mention the isolation of West China, the other day. It took two months usually to get there. That was before the steamer started running through the [Yangtze] Gorges, when you had to go by junk.

LEVENSON: From--?

J. SERVICE: From Shanghai. It was six months perhaps to get an exchange of letters with her parents in the United States, or anybody in the United States. They used to order supplies, but it might take a year for the supplies to get there. Your magazines, your mail, everything, was always much delayed.

[25]

J. SERVICE: There was a lot more housework than I think I mentioned. We lived a pioneer existence. My mother made marmalade from the skins of the oranges that we ate at breakfast. She made mincemeat, and did a lot of preserving.

There were no tailors, so she had to make clothes for all her children, besides her own clothes and the normal things of the house, the curtains and all the rest of it.

We had to do our own laundry, of course, at home. It was the time when men wore stiff collars, and she had trouble getting the servants to starch them properly; so, at times, she did my father's stiff collars and cuffs. It seems incredible to us now that they fussed about these things in West China!

She had to train new servants, really, from the ground up. They had never been in a foreign house before, and they had to learn everything.

So, I think by and large she did have a fairly hard life. Visitors often stayed and stayed a long time, but they were very welcome.

One thing that I remember as a child was that we always ate at the table, the family all together. It was the way my father's ranching family had eaten. They were a big family. My father carved.

It was always an occasion to have guests. I remember hearing my parents ask, "What's the news?" If visitors came from the States that was fine, but even if they came from Shanghai or down river, they had much more news than we had locally. So, there was always a lot of conversation and interest and excitement, having people visit and stay with us.

My mother did go on teaching in the Y even when she had three children at home. She usually taught at home, English, economics, and so on. Also they had night prayer meetings. Sometimes she was asked to teach older people who wanted to learn some English but didn't want to go to the YMCA and join a class with young people. For "face" reasons they would ask her to teach them privately, and this was usually done at home. So she did have quite a busy life.

LEVENSON: In her autobiography, your mother speaks of Chinese women friends, but she doesn't name any of them, as she does her American and other friends. Was she able to form friendships with Chinese women?

[25a]

A DIRECTORY OF FOREIGNERS RESIDENT IN CHENGTU JANUARY 1919

Presented with the Compliments of the Chengtu Y.M.C.A.

Dr. and Mrs. F. F. Allan
Miss M. A. Asson
Mr. and Mrs. P. M. Bayne
Pere Beauguis
Rev. and Mrs. C. L. Blandford
Consul and Mrs. A. Bodard
Miss Mabel E. Bovell
Rev. and Mrs. N. E. Bowles
Rev. and Mrs. E. R. M. Brecken
Miss M. Brimstin
Miss L. Emma Brodbeck
Dr. H. L. Canright
Rev. and Mrs. C. R. Carscallen
Mrs. E. F. Carson
Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Cavaliere
Rev. E. A. Cook
Pere Conderc
Rev. and Mrs. W. M. Crawford
Mr. R. J. Davidson
Mr. and Mrs. R. H. Davidson
Rev. and Mrs. J. P. Davies
Dr. Jouveau-Dubreuil
Mr. D. S. Dye
Pere Flachere
Mr. and Mrs. G. M. Franck
Mr. A. Ginouves
Miss A. L. Golisch
Rev. and Mrs. A. Grainger
Miss L. Grainger
Mrs. W. E. Hampson
Rev. and Mrs. G. E. Hartwell
Miss L. G. Hartwell
Mr. L. Newton Hayes
Mr. and Mrs. G. G. Helde
Consul-General W. M. Hewlett
Rev. E. Hibbard
Miss E. Householder
Miss A. I. Hutchinson
Rev. and Mrs. D. S. Kern
Dr. and Mrs. O. L. Kilborn
Consul-General and Mrs. M. Kusa
Pere Laroche
Mr. and Mrs. W. M. Leonard
Dr. and Mrs. A. W. Lindsay
Miss Jean Loomis
Mr. and Mrs. L. A. Lovegren
Dr. W. E. Manly
Miss I. D. Marcellus
Miss I. M. Marks
Miss B. G. McNaughton
Mr. F. Merrien
Mr. and Mrs. E. N. Meuser
Dr. and Mrs. W. R. Morse
Dr. and Mrs. H. J. Mullett
Rev. and Mrs. J. Neave
Rev. and Mrs. G. B. Neumann
Mr. and Mrs. R. F. Pilcher
Mr. and Mrs. T. E. Plewman
Dr. Poupelain
Mr. D. C. Reib
Rev. and Mrs. R. C. Ricker
Bishop Rouchouse
Miss M. A. Royer
Dr and Mrs. H. F. Rudd
Mr. and Mrs. R. R. Service
Miss B. M. Shepley
Miss L. B. Sherritt
Mr. and Mrs. H. T. Silcock
Rev. and Mrs. R. L. Simkin
Dr. C. E. Slaght
Miss E. P. Sparling
Dr. A. B. Speers
Miss U. F. Steele
Dr. and Mrs. C. M. Stubbs
Dr. and Mrs. J. Taylor
Rev. and Mrs. W. R. Taylor
Miss Frances J. Therolf
Dr. and Mrs. J. E. Thompson
Miss M. I. Thompson
Mr. and Mrs. F. B. Tolliday
Rev. and Mrs. T. Torrance
Mrs. E. I. Upcraft
Miss J. M. Ure
Pere F. F. Viret
Rev. and Mrs. E. W. Wallace
Miss C. Wellwood
Rev. and Mrs. A. H. Wilkinson

[26]

J. SERVICE: No, I don't think really in any very meaningful way, not in an intimate way. (I have to keep peeling off layers of memory.)

In Chengtu when I was small there were very few Chinese women that were educated. Very few of them had gone to school. Even fewer had learned English to any real extent. Practically none of them had studied in the United States or studied abroad so that it was very difficult to establish communications, rapport. My mother, as I said before, never really mastered Chinese very well. She learned household Chinese, but she never learned enough Chinese so she could develop an intimate friendship, I would guess, with any of these women.

Also, entertaining was quite formalized. Most Chinese entertained at restaurants, and women normally were not included. If you were invited to a home it was usually an official home--and the women ate in the back rooms, they didn't eat with the men--so that it was a stilted occasion.

I just don't think that my mother--although she knew some of these women and they were interested in coming to the house--had friendships with Chinese women that took up very much of her time or were intimate.

Now, when she got to Shanghai [after 1925] things were quite different because in Shanghai there were a lot of Western-educated women, women who had either been educated in Western schools in China or had actually studied abroad. When she got into women's clubs and the women's group activities in Shanghai and in the national committee of the YWCA, she was thrown in close contact with many of this type of Chinese woman, and some of them she did get to know very well. Some of them were American-educated or actually American-Chinese women. But, it wasn't really until Shanghai that I would say that she developed real friendships with Chinese.

The Service "Hotel"; Distinguished Visitors and Occasional Tourists

J. SERVICE: Going back to what we said earlier I've mentioned the fact that there were no hotels in Chengtu. I think that our house became a well known place to stay. It often had people there. Usually they were very interesting people. My father was rather fascinated by Tibet. So, he got to know some of the missionaries up there and was happy to have them stay with us.

[27]

J. SERVICE: My father established contacts with some Chinese businessmen who used to trade in Tibet, for them to bring out Tibetan things and so on.

My mother loved to read and she read everything she could get. She ordered books from Shanghai and America. And the local foreigners exchanged books. Talk around the table was usually interesting.

LEVENSON: What notable "foreign devils" were there, either as residents or as visitors? You mentioned, before we turned the tape on, the [Walter C.] Lowdermilks.

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes.

LEVENSON: I don't know whether they were up there at the time?

J. SERVICE: I don't think he was, because they got married later on. She, Mrs. [Inez] Lowdermilk, was there in the Methodist mission. There was this E. A. Ross that I was speaking of from Wisconsin. There was a geologist from Oberlin that was out there. There were plant explorers that used to come through, like Joseph Rock, working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Occasionally a businessman. There was never anyone there in all the years we were there who represented the American government. No foreign consular officer got up that far.

As I say, we sometimes had a consul in Chungking, but not all the time. But, no American consular man ever got up as far as Chengtu. The British, of course, traveled much more, and they had the British consul there although it was not a Treaty Port.

There were people like [Eric] Teichman and [Alexander] Hosie who traveled for the British and went through Chengtu. They were checking things like the efficacy of the Chinese suppression of opium. But, this was before I remember things. This was the early years when they went through.

There was an American tourist, a wealthy woman named Tracy, Mrs. Tracy from Cleveland, Ohio, who had met my mother in Nanking, in 1912. She came back to China a few years later and went up through the [Yangtze] Gorges and up to Chengtu, which was quite a trip for a tourist in those days. She became a good friend of my mother's. When we came home on furlough in 1915-16, my mother went down to Florida to visit her in Palm Beach.

[28]

J. SERVICE: Friendships with local residents tend to become very close when you are so isolated. My parents made many lifelong friendships with other missionaries that were there, mostly American but some Canadian. I think if you live together in isolated circumstances, you do tend to establish--well, you do in the Foreign Service too. You serve in a foreign post with somebody, then you're a friend for life.

The Family's Growing Love of China

LEVENSON: Did your father "fall in love" with China in the way that so many people did?

J. SERVICE: Yes, I think so. It's a funny thing, how to describe people's attitudes towards something like China. He certainly developed a tremendously strong affection for the Chinese people, the Chinese people he knew and, I think for the Chinese people in general. He felt strongly interested in China, much concerned and involved in China. He was always optimistic about China, that things were going to come out all right. But this was part of his personality anyway.

All of us in China--although we never really were trained or educated in Chinese; we didn't go to Chinese schools; we didn't learn Chinese; we didn't even have Chinese playmates--almost all of us grew up with this strong attachment to China. It is a rather hard thing to account for.

LEVENSON: Why is it hard to account for?

J. SERVICE: Well, simply because we led a very different, separate life. I never had any Chinese playmates. I grew up in China spent all my childhood there without learning to read or write anything in Chinese. I learned to speak Chinese from the servants, but my parents saw no advantage or necessity, desirability, of having me learn to read or write.

We never thought of going to a Chinese school. We eventually went to an American school in Shanghai which tried as hard as possible to be like a school in the United States. It had no Chinese students. It didn't teach courses in Chinese history or in Chinese language.

We lived in compounds separated, isolated, insulated from China in many ways. And yet, as I say, all of us that I know of, or practically all of us, who were B-I-C, Born in China, ended

[29]

J. SERVICE: up with a tremendous nostalgia for China, a desire to go back to China, strong feelings of ties to China and particularly the Chinese people.

Now, I think that's the key. I think it's the people. Here s a random speculation. The real contact, clue, key, we had to China was our servants. The servants, by and large, were village people, country people. They came from the countryside into town to find work, and maybe they found work with us.

But, they all had the simplicity and honesty and virtues of peasants, country people. They devoted themselves completely to the family. Well, maybe they were in some ways like the mammies that we read about in the old days of life in the South. But these were not people who had any tradition of servitude. In the countryside they had never acted as servants. When they came to work for us there was never any humility or servility or anything like that.

They were people. They were independent people, and they worked for you, and they looked after your interests. They were completely devoted to the family, regarded themselves as almost part of the family, served the family I would say wholeheartedly. They were just good people. Maybe this has something to do with why so many of us liked China, because really the only China we knew was through our servants.

Jack s Early Memories: Western Style in a Chinese Compound

LEVENSON: Do you think that’s enough about the background?

J. SERVICE: [laughter] Yes, but I could go on and on if you want.

LEVENSON: What else?

J. SERVICE: I'm over-prepared!

LEVENSON: Wonderful.

J. SERVICE: Where are we? [reading agenda] Oh goodness, "Early memories." All right.

I was born in 1909. I was very late. Apparently, I was born three weeks or a month later than they expected me. My mother always said I had long fingernails when I was born, a sign

[30]

J. SERVICE: that I was, what to say, not premature, postmature.

LEVENSON: Postmature, or else a mandarin. [laughter]

J. SERVICE: I don’t remember anything, of course, until the summer of 1912 when I was three. I mentioned that all the foreigners, including my parents, were evacuated in 1911, late 1911. My father came down to Shanghai, and then went to Nanking.

Then, after a few months in Nanking, he went back to Szechwan. He was very anxious, and the Y was anxious, for him to return to find what had happened and get things going again.

Families weren't permitted yet to return. So my mother went to Kuling which is up a mountain near Kiukiang, near the Yangtze River, and spent the summer there. I got very sick and apparently they thought that I'd had it. I have a vague recollection of a room, a very bare room, which I think was my sickroom. I remember the room spinning around. It's probably my first memory.

Then, after the summer we went down to Hangkow on our way back up the river to Szechwan to join my father. My mother got quite sick in Hangkow. She had recurrent bad health. I think that part of the whole picture of her reactions to China was that she was plagued with rheumatic fever, and, oh, various things. I've got some notes here. We don t need to go through them.

Anyway, she was sick in Hangkow. We had a servant who had been with my mother at the mountain, a Szechwanese, who had come down river with us. He used to take me out to the Bund in Hangkow every day for a walk. I remember the Bund. I remember walking down the Bund--it was an esplanade on the Yangtze--with my mother along with Liu P'ei-yun, this cook of ours.

Sometime in here I remember we were out on a little trip or a walk in the countryside. The paths between the rice fields in Szechwan were very narrow, [gesturing with hands about two feet apart] just maybe wide enough for two people to pass. I remember walking along this path and seeing a rather large, stout Chinese coming towards me and then suddenly finding myself in the flooded rice field.

I remember my mother was absolutely frantic about this because, of course, the rice fields were fertilized with what we always called night soil, human manure, which was raw usually. Therefore, everything was supposed to be highly unsanitary, as it really was. Well, my mother was simply beside herself till we could get someplace where all my clothes could be taken off, I could be scrubbed down, and so on.

[31]

J. SERVICE: And her anger that this man has pushed me off the path--I have no recollection of the man actually pushing me off. I just don't remember what happened. He may have jostled me off. He may have just been unfriendly to foreigners. A lot of people were in those days. Or he may have felt that as a child I should have stopped and waited for him to go by, which probably a small Chinese child would have done, would have waited for the elder person, this man, to walk by.

My father, of course, was not agreeing that the man had pushed me off. My mother was sure that he had, out of meanness.

We came back to the States in 1915. I remember some things about coming back to the States. I remember my surprise, for instance, at seeing white men working on the docks. Of course, I had never seen any white man doing this kind of physical work before. The idea had never occurred to me. To see men on the docks in San Francisco loading and unloading cargo was very strange.

I went to the Panama Pacific Exposition. Then, we went out to Cleveland, Ohio, where my father spent the year working in the Cleveland YMCA. I remember first grade in a public school fairly well.

Most of my memories of Chengtu really are when we went back. We went back to Szechwan in 1916, after the summer in America. We lived in Chengtu then from 1916, and I went to boarding school in Shanghai in 1920. So that most of my memories of Chengtu are of the years when I was seven, eight, nine, ten.

LEVENSON: By then you had a brother, didn't you?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, I had two brothers. Bob was twenty-one months younger. Dick, Richard, was about five years younger than I was.

LEVENSON: You mentioned living in a compound. Was this a single family compound where you lived around the courtyard, or did you live in a Western style house?

J. SERVICE: No, it was a Chinese-style house and it was a single family courtyard. It belonged to the Methodist mission. They had had for a while a school, a middle school I think it was, in the next-door compound. So, these two compounds were opened up. They gave that up and the YMCA used it at first for temporary quarters for the Y. Then, eventually, I think we moved over there, and another family came and lived in what had been our house. But, most of this early period we were the only family in this place, the only foreign family.

[31a]

(Directory for photos not included in this text)

1. Asa B. Clarke (1814-?), great grandfather, photograph of daguerrotype, 1839, aet. 25.

2. W. S. Boggs, grandfather (1852-1942), and Grace Boggs, later Service, 1886.

3. Virginia Clarke Boggs with Grace Boggs Service, ca. 1889.

4. 1740 Oxford Street, Berkeley, fall 1905. Destroyed in 1923 Berkeley fire.

5. Robert Roy Service, father, 1898.

6. Robert Roy Service at the University of California, Berkeley, 1901.

7. Grace Service in wedding dress.

8. Roy and Grace Service on board ship, first trip to China, 1905. Baby Virginia died en route to Chungking.

9. Grace Service, Chengtu, 1906.

[32]

J. SERVICE: There were several different mission compounds. The American Methodists, the Canadian Methodists, the Friends, would each have their own separate compounds. Each compound normally had one afternoon a week or maybe one afternoon every two weeks for its "at home" in tennis. Everybody played tennis. They'd have tea. We would all go, of course, to the Candadian Methodists on their day and to the American Methodists on their day and play tennis.

My father and mother were very keen that we children should be independent, not wanting to be catered to or looked after, waited on by the servants. This was a big thing. We always had to pick up our own clothes and pack our own bags when we traveled, wash ourselves, and not let the amah give us a bath.

When we had the tennis at our place we always earned money by picking up tennis balls.

Home Studies; The Montessori and Calvert Systems

LEVENSON: How do you look back on your childhood in China? Was it a happy period for you?

J. SERVICE: Oh, very happy. Yes, certainly. It was an odd life in the sense that it seems odd to have lived in a country and spent all your childhood there, and look back and realize that you never had a Chinese friend! We never played with Chinese children. I think for one thing, that my mother was terribly conscious about sanitation and so on.

Most of our servants didn't have children with them. The family was back--if they had a family--back in the village. I think our gateman at one time, or the cow coolie, did have his family with him. They lived out in the gate house. But, I don t think that the children of the servants would have played with the master's children anyway. I don't think there was that normal expectation.

In any case, my mother was simply obsessed that Chinese children were allowed to do things that we should not do, eat things we weren't allowed to do, and so on, so that we rarely saw them. Sometimes on Sundays there might be a visit to some family, university family or somebody in the Y, something like that.

[33]

LEVENSON: I've got a question down here on the agenda, what was your sense of identity as an American boy growing up in China? I know that's a hard one to answer.

J. SERVICE: Well, how much identity does any child have?

LEVENSON: That's a good question!

J. SERVICE: It's a matter of looking back on things now, of course, from a long time and a long distance. Looking back I'm surprised at the Americanness that my parents were so anxious apparently anxious to instill. We played mostly with American children, as I said, but also with some Canadians. But, we didn't go to the Canadian school. My mother felt that the school wasn't very good. It was just starting in. It was the equivalent perhaps of a one room or two room school in the early days in the United States. The teachers were usually untrained, whoever happened to be available, maybe some missionary daughter who had finished high school but hadn't gone on to college, or a wife who happened to be available.

My mother was a teacher. She had taught. After she finished at the U[niversity of] C[alifornia] and before she got married she had a couple years of teaching. At any rate, she thought the Calvert School was better.

But, also she wanted us to have an American education. She was very definite that we were coming to America eventually. We were going to an American school, American university. There was that feeling of identity.

The Americans always got together on Thanksgiving for instance. There was always some sort of a program on the Fourth of July. It seems odd that we would have, but maybe it's not odd for exiles far away from home to have put this stress on Americanness.

Obviously we felt very different from Chinese. We couldn't play with Chinese, as I mentioned. The Chinese were dirty and unsanitary. Yet, there was never any feeling of antipathy or hostility, nothing like that. My father obviously, as I said, loved Chinese. We liked our servants, and the servants were almost members of the family in some ways.

But, we did feel, I m sure, a sort of a separateness, if not superiority, to Chinese. We were used to being considered as rather freakish, because if you traveled you were always

[34]

J. SERVICE: surrounded by crowds of people, really crowds, who would keep pushing in closer and closer just to see you, just to look at you.

You were always called yang kuei-tzu, foreign devil, but without any particular animosity, because this was the only name that most of these children on the street knew for foreigners. "Look at the yang kuei-tzu! Look at the yang kuei-tzu!" as you went down the street.

Of course, in villages in the countryside, you had no privacy at all. If you had to stop at a restaurant for your noonday meal when you were traveling, they'd keep getting closer and closer till finally my father or somebody would say, "Please move back. Give us some air."

If you stayed in a Chinese inn, they would try to come into the room, but you could close off the room. Then they would wet their finger and poke it through the paper of the lattice windows. [gestures] That lack of privacy bothered my mother, I'm sure, much more than it did we children.

LEVENSON: Were you curious about America? I know you spent that year in Ohio.

J. SERVICE: I don't remember being curious about it before then. Yes, I suppose we were curious. We read, of course, about America.

My mother was the political member of the family. She subscribed to The New Republic, I think, about as soon as it started. We got other magazines, Atlantic, and something called Survey or Survey Graphic which was published then. Century magazine was being published then. I think I read all of those. We also got things from Shanghai, The North China Herald, a weekly newspaper in Shanghai, and something called Millard's Review, which later on became the China Weekly Review. I suppose we were interested or curious about the United States, although I don t recall being much concerned.

Let me describe the day. Maybe that's the best thing to do.

My mother had started me when I was five on the Montessori system, which I think is sort of interesting, that she, way up in West China, had written and gotten a Montessori preschool outfit.

[35]

J. SERVICE: So, I had learned how to read and write--read at least-- before I started first grade. I was ready for first grade, and I had that in public school in Cleveland, 1915-1916.

My mother had talked to the teacher in the first grade. Because I could read before I started first grade the teacher said, "Well, obviously little Jack can go quite well. I think
he can skip second grade."

My mother decided to order the Calvert School [curriculum], which is a home study system. But, it has only six grades. They do the eight grades in six years. She ordered the third grade in the Calvert system. So, in effect I skipped more than a year, you see.

Every morning the first thing to do, first order of business, was your classes, your schoolwork. The Calvert system sent out textbooks, daily assignment sheets, examination questions. You sent the completed examinations back to Baltimore to the head office and they graded them.

I would get up and get to my studies. As soon as you finished your studies for the day, you were free. So, I was very eager on this. I used to finish up, do my recitation, and I might be through by nine thirty or ten o clock.

Then the day was yours. I was very fond of reading and my parents had the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eleventh edition I think. I was very keen on--I'm talking now, oh, about eight, nine, ten years old probably--very keen on looking up things in the encyclopedia, categorizing things. I remember using the encyclopedia to look up all the Crusades and to study antelopes and various kinds of animals, one thing or another leading you on.

Maybe every other day or so we would go in the afternoon to some other compound, always in a sedan chair when we were small. Later on I would walk, but we always had a servant with us. Eventually we got ponies, Chinese horses, small horses. We'd play with, children at this place or that place and come home.

We used to watch, of course, what went on around the house. We'd steal cookies from the cookie jar in the kitchen and watch the cook cooking the meals and so on, play around the compound.

[36]

Summers in the Mountains

J. SERVICE: The big thing, I think, was the trips that we used to take. My father was very keen on finding a good place for the family to go in the summer. It was accepted that you couldn't stay in a place like Chengtu during the summer months because it was very damp, very hot and humid. There was a lot of disease, cholera and so on, in the summer time. Almost everyone tried to get away.

The family kept trying to find an ideal place, and finally my father found a mountain which rather stood out from the range that was north of the Chengtu plain. It was about six thousand feet high. The top of it had been a place of refuge. If a mountain was difficult of access, the local people would put a wall around the top, and when there was banditry, civil war, or other disturbance, villagers from the area would go up and take refuge.

Anyway, there was this old chai-tzu, they called it, up there at the top. It belonged to a temple in one of the villages near the foot of the mountain. My father rented this place, took a long-term lease on the top of the mountain. First we, and then quite a few people built small cottages up there on the top of the mountain.

When we took over this mountain--when my father started this summer colony you might say--it was completely undeveloped. So we all helped building trails and paths, connecting the houses and going out to scenic places.

We boys used to have a little secret hideout of our own, a little shack in the woods, a lean-to where we would go and fix lunches. Good fun, not too different from American boyhoods in a way, a place in the woods and so on.

So we went there for three or four months every summer. My father would take us up there and then go back to Chengtu--it was two days travel, fifty miles-- and then come back, oh, maybe several times during the summer for a weekend or maybe a week or more.

But, always during the summer we would take a trip to the mountains. As I got older, each summer we would go further, explore new mountains.

[37]

J. SERVICE: We were exploring. It was new country. Foreigners had never been to a lot of these places before. Each year we got higher, nine thousand, ten thousand, finally quite high. Eventually we got to fifteen thousand feet.

LEVENSON: You told me you had some footnotes from our last interview that you wanted to add.

J. SERVICE: I think you asked me something about why we made these trips to the mountains every summer. I failed to mention what probably was the most obvious of all. That is, that both of my parents loved the mountains. They had a great feeling for nature. My mother, for instance, had John Muir's--books several of them. I remember reading some myself as a boy, particularly one about a winter trip that John Muir made by himself, climbing Mount Shasta.

This love of the mountains was carried over when we came back to the States, because every summer that we were here we went off with some of my uncles to the High Sierra.

Even in 1916, the family had a reunion at a place called Bass Lake which is a resort lake up from Fresno. But, in 1924 and '25, and again in '27 when I came here on the way to college, I went up with my uncles--my father and my uncles--up to Tuolumne Meadows. In those days that was quite a trip, dirt road, gravel road.

The road down to Lake Tenaya was a one-way road, you know, one hour up, one hour down. I drove with a cousin in an old Model T Ford, and the road was so steep at one point that we had to turn around and go in reverse. The gas fed the carburetor by gravity, so that if you had to go up a steep hill, it wouldn’t reach the carburetor. Going backward we could make it.

It was quite a trip, but not nearly as much as when the family first started going there. My uncle--Fred Goodsell, who married my father’s sister--has told me about going up with the Service family, camping in Yosemite valley in either 1903 or 1904 when they went by wagon.

The main purpose of these expeditions to the mountains was fishing. They really camped. They took sacks of potatoes and sacks of onions and sacks of this and that. We lived on fish and pancakes. The real purpose was fishing. But, I wasn’t very keen on fishing.

[38]

J. SERVICE: Every day we would go off to some fishing lake near the meadows, within walking distance. Then, I would decide what mountain I was going to climb. I would spend the day scrambling up one of the peaks around there. I climbed all the peaks within one-day walking distance of Tuolumne Meadows, I think. In '27 my cousin and I climbed Mount Lyell. At any rate I developed a liking for the mountains naturally.

J. SERVICE: When I was growing up in China, the best part of the year, really, was the summer and these trips. Then, eventually, as I got older--when I was ten, nine and ten-- why, we’d make a trip to the mountains in the winter because there was always snow up there, at six thousand feet. There was never snow in Chengtu. Chengtu was about fifteen hundred feet in elevation but practically never saw snow. We’d go up usually for, oh, five or six days in the winter time and see the snow.

LEVENSON: The topography of Szechwan--I remember- Chen Shih-hsiang telling me-- really does look like some of the fantastic Chinese scrolls. Was your sort of mountain like that?

J. SERVICE: Well, not so much there. Through the Yangtze Gorges you get some of the scenery that you see in paintings. But, these mountains were really more alpine mountains, Matterhorn type. hang on. [Brings out framed watercolor by A.C. Morse]

This is painted from our mountain. We were out in front of the main range, and you can see the main range back here in the distance. We gave names to these places. These are the Three Muffins over here and some peak called Chiu-feng up there

[Interview 2: April 6, 1977]

J. SERVICE: The high point of the summer, was when my father took us on vacation. My mother always said my father never took as much, vacation as most other men did. But, he would take a week or ten days or so, and we would take a trip up into the mountains beyond our summer resort.

There were usually temples, incidentally, on top of these mountains, either Buddhist or Taoist temples. Both religions apparently shared the idea that the higher the mountain, the closer to heaven. So, there were old temples. By this time, after years of civil war and disturbance, they were generally in deplorable condition, but usually there were a few old monks there. We would stay at these temples.

[39]

The Winter Harvest; Ice Cream Making in Cheng tu

J. SERVICE: Yes. Let’s go back to China for a minute. You asked me if there was anything else I could think of.

The last two winters in Chengtu we made the trip up the mountain. One reason we made those winter trips was that my father had a passion for ice cream. We couldn’t have ice cream. There was no ice, you see, in Chengtu.

He had gotten the idea of building an icehouse up on the mountain. There was a caretaker to look after the bungalows, and he would put away ice, you see, in the winter. Then it would either be kept for the summer or we would send somebody up the mountain to bring it down.

Well, it never worked out very well because for one thing the Chinese just couldn’t really fathom the wasteful idea of using sawdust, mainly, for packing ice. They would never use enough sawdust to preserve it.

So, we went up to supervise the building and the filling of the icehouse. The ice wasn’t very thick and the only source we had--there was no pond or anything--was cisterns. We had cisterns and we'd take ice. It was quite thin ice. [about one inch thick, gesturing] It never kept till summer. By summertime we never had any ice.

So, what finally happened was that along in April my father would send a man from Chengtu fifty miles up the mountain to bring ice down to Chengtu. We would know about when he should arrive, and everything would all be ready. The custard would be made, and we would expect the man in about four or five o’clock on the second day.

We had an awful time getting ice cream makers. We ordered stuff from Montgomery Ward. Every year we sent an order to Montgomery Ward, and it would take a year maybe for the order to get to Chungking. The first one, my father decided was too small. It was a two quart or something like that. Then, we got another. Finally we got a six quart freezer.

Before the man arrived the custard would all be ready. Then, the man would come puffing in with what was left [laughter] of the load of ice. Then, we would make ice cream.

[40]

J. SERVICE: Again it was very difficult to get the Chinese to use enough salt. So, this meant we had to really do it ourselves because wasting salt--salt is very valuable and precious.

But we would finally get six quarts of ice cream. There were five people in the family. So, we couldn’t eat it all. People would, of course, be invited in to help share the ice cream, the Yards and other friends. We gorged ourselves on ice cream about, maybe twice a year. All this building of ice houses and so on, all it would produce was about three gallons of ice cream!

A Geographic and Ethnographic Trip into Tibet

J. SERVICE: In the final year I was in Chengtu, in 1921 when I was just having my twelfth birthday, my father and two other men made a trip that they had talked about for years. It was over the range, and then into the Min River valley north of Kwanhsien and then into what was called "tribes country" where the people were all Tibetan peoples.

It was quite an intellectually active missionary society in Chengtu. [brings out journals] It had a West China Missionary News and the West China Border Research Society which was started in 1922, 1923. I wrote an article for the Missionary News on this trip that I'm talking about.

All these people felt that they were on the edge of things, on a sort of frontier. They were interested in research on the various ethnic groups of aboriginal peoples, Tibet and so on, and a lot of the pre-Chinese groups that were still living in Szechwan, Lolos and others.

Wherever they went, my father and these other people made notes and maps. My father carried a boiling point thermometer a hypsometer, to get a very precise reading of the altitude, and aneroid barometers--things like that we always carried. Over the high pass, we got a reading of 15,300 feet on the barometer and 15,000 feet on the hypsometer.

All these places we went to in the summer trips were along a range north of where we were, which lay between us and the upper valley of the Min River, which comes down through Kwanhsien and waters the Chengtu plain.

[41]

J. SERVICE: My father had heard, from talking around, that there was a trail over this big range that had been used, oh, ten or fifteen years earlier when the Chinese had really tried to put down opium production in West China, all of China. The Chinese had been fairly successful in stopping the production of opium in order to meet the British terms for stopping the importation of opium. As a result the price of opium in the Chengtu plain was very high and people would grow opium back in the mountains and smuggle it out across the mountains into Chengtu, into the Chengtu plain.

Anyway, there was supposed to be this opium smugglers' trail over this range. My father always talked about trying to cross the mountains into the Min River valley. So, this year, finally in 1921, we did it.

But when we started we didn’t know very much about the height of the mountain or the distance. Our guide claimed that he’d been over it, but later on it turned out he didn’t really know much about it. It took us much longer and was much more difficult and higher than we expected.

We expected a trip of about four days from habitation to habitation, four days to cross the range. We had supplies and food, but actually it turned out to take us a week, seven days. So, we ran out of food.

LEVENSON: How many people were on this trip?

J. SERVICE: There were four Americans. My father and I and a doctor who had been doing a lot of anthropological work, mostly measuring skulls of the people along the Tibet border. He was trying to prove some theories by skull measurements. I don’t know what it was. Then, there was another YMCA secretary, a colleague of my father’s, named George Helde whose wife had died in childbirth the summer before. My mother had taken the child down to Shanghai. He’d just come back from the States.

We had, I think, about twelve load carriers because they couldn’t carry very much in the mountains. I think a fifty, sixty pound pack was about all they could carry. Even though we were roughing it, for some reason we carried camp cots. My mother had made sleeping bags for us. We didn’t know anything about things like mountain boots. I wore straw sandals which was what we always wore in the summer, these Chinese straw sandals.

LEVENSON: What did your mother make the sleeping bags out of?

[41a]

No . 31

Round Top, Behluding
Penghsien, Szechwan, China,
29 July, 1921.

Dear Mother,

I suppose you remember that funny German professor that acted so comical the time you and I were going to the Alumni Reception held in May, 1902, at the old Hopkins residence in San Francisco. Here is a card that I received from him this week! He had written to President Barrows of the University about Dr. Larsen who taught in Chengtu years ago; the President was asked to make inquiries about Dr.L. He had his secretary write to the Legation in Peking; the Legation wrote to me; so I wrote Prof. Putzker a letter. He would seem to be still young, if his handwriting is any index.

The house seems quiet. Robbie and Dick are changing their clothes in their room and the only other person roaming around is amah, who is dusting and cleaning in my bed-room. It is 9 a.m. and we have been up since 5--at least I have. Rob, George, Jack and Reg got off at 8.05. Although Bob has been preparing for this trip for months and weeks still the last few hours are always busy ones with the departure of such an outfit.

[For the three men and Jack they had 10 carriers; each with about 50 lbs on his back. In addition to this each of the men carried his own food for six days or so. This was mostly in the form of dry corn pones made of the coarse native yellow meal. Then they took a "fu-teo", or headman, who carried a lantern and a few odds and ends. There was a guide and two servants, both ours. Our table-boy went to do the cooking and the horse-boy went as coolie. Besides all this equipment Bob has sent a load of food to Weichow by the "big road”. It has a about 80 lbs. of canned goods in it. The party goes by an opium smuggling trai1 over which no white men have ever passed. It is said to be wild and to go into the high mountains. To go from here to Weichow by the ordinary road would take 5 days or 5 1/2. The route they are taking may take 7, and there are practically no inns or villages on the way, so they have to take a tent fly to help out the poor stopping places for the night. These are what the natives call “cliff nests"--sort of caves under crags. You see with the carriers they make quite a crowd. The men looked a strong, fine lot. They are all mountain fellows and jollied up well with Bob who always likes to start with the men feeling good

There are two cameras in the crowd, two fine compasses, a new aneroid, which George Helde brought out, hypsometers, thermometers, and what not. It’s quite a scientific expedition. Everything they took had to be wrapped in oiled sheets, &c, and of course many things could not go in until the last moment. I had the cook make two 5 gal. oil tins full of sweiback for the trip. Anna Morse had some prepared, also. Then my cook baked 6 big loaves of fresh bread. (The poor thing has baked every day for a fortnight because we ourselves eat lots of bread all the time.)

[41b]

page two

Dr. Norse is very keen to get head measurements, as in this country the aborigines have been practically left alone for all time. They are a new people to the civilized nations, He is taking instruments for measuring skulls, &c. The other day he was up here trying then on us. My "cranial index" is 81.21 while Bob’s is 78.9. Reg says I have a “man’s head"! He is going to try to get some measurements while in there. Bob finally took 14 watches and hopes to barter then for some of the metals they use--pots, wine flasks, &c.

The two little lads went down the hill a short distance with the party this a.m. and then came back. I had them take off their soiled khaki things so they could put them in the laundry this a.m. As soon as the men left I scoured around and gathered up all the dirty things in the house and set "Old Five" at his work of washing.

It was quite a job to get the men outfitted in more ways than re bread and sweiback. The latter will keep weeks in tight tins and when the pour boiling water on it and pour it off at once, adding butter or jam it is mighty good and strengthening. They can get no fruit in there – it’s wild, “cactus country”, not wet like this side of the mountains so they are taking dried prunes, jam, &c. They left with two roasted chickens (done in the fireless), cake, cookies galore, hard sweet chocolate, &c, &c. We have been preparing for the trip for a long time. Of course they took a minimum of clothing and only a few white
enamel dishes. Reg is taking a tin box full of medicine, so they will be well looked after in case of need. Reg is older than George and Bob. Bob is the toughest and can stand the most. Geo. is next, Reg is older and quite portly. I think he and Jack will be about equal on endurance and Reg will be a good pace-setter.

Jack had sort of a bilious spell on Monday and to stay in bed all that day. He has been stuffing pretty well since he got home, thinking the home fare better than that of the boarding school. He was quite frightened, I can tell you, because he feared he might lose out on the trip. He took medicine carefully and went slow on his eats. Reg said he was all right night before last and he seemed quite as usual yesterday, so he was fit to go.

The last week there has been no letter from you. Tell Father to take a tape (or you do it for him) and measure his head around the place where the hat fits him. Geo. thinks it will not suffice for him to send us his American "head size" to use in buying him a hat here. That is one reason that I did not send him the hat this summer. We sent one to the Coast for a friend and it was too small. They have head sizes in the hats, but they are not accurate by our standards. I am glad if Father will like one of those hats it is nice to know something we can get here that he would care for.

I did not tell you of Bob s wonderful sleeping bags, made of wadded silk floss in quilts, sewed up. They are very light and extremely warm. He has two and Jack has two; both of them have oiled sheet covers for them. They also took cots and plenty of “bug powder”. After they leave Weichow, they are to push on

[41c]

page three

under the guidance of a servant of Yao Bao San’s. This Yao is an old friend of ours--a rich lumber merchant, who brings down logs from the upper reaches of some of the rivers in that high country. His man is now awaiting the party at Weichow.

Bob has taken both his rifle and shot-gun and I hope he gets a little game. He should in such wild hills. The ammunition and guns are heavy enough. He will feel provoked that he took them if he gets nothing. Of course, it is perfectly wonderful for Jack to have this trip, and I cannot be too thankful that Reg Morse is of the party. He is probably the best physician in West China and certainly the best surgeon. In case of accident he can be depended upon to do the very best thing. Besides he was in that country last summer, though not over this opium trail. He knows all the peculiarities or the "arsenic springs", high altitudes, &c, &c. We expect the men back about the 22nd or 23rd of August. Bob has been keen for this trip for years and years but has always given it up for some reason or other. He was all ready last year and gave it up because of George Helde. I am so glad he could go this year. I just did everything I could to help him get off. I know it will do him a lot of good. They intend to make a map of the road with distances. They have pedometers, &c. Geo. just brought out over $100.00 worth of apparatus from home. Some wealthy Aunt fixed him up. He was elected a Fellow of the American Geographic Society for the map he made last year.

I am knitting a sweater for myself out of some taupe wool Mrs. Tracy sent me. It’s lovely but rather light weight. I think it will look well with the giddy silk skirt that Geo bought me. I have also ripped up all the old rose sweater that I made for you in 1915, and which you gave back to me. It was soiled and pretty large-- had also stretched out a good deal. I have it all wound in skeins and intend to wash it in a few days. Then I shall knit it up again into a sweater, with white wool. I think there will be enough to do a sleeveless one also---if not large enough for me I can give to one of Mabelle’s girls.
I finished my sports stockings and they are very good looking. I can wear a thin old silk pair underneath if the wool irritates me. I am sending you the foot size taken in the stocking. Please tell Father to get me a pair of LOW brown sports ties to wear with them. I do not want tan. I want very good-looking sports low shoes with flat heels for walking--- not too heavy but good looking. And I hope he won’t get them with tooth-pick points. You know I have a narrow foot. Geo. brought me some perfectly elegant shoes, but they are too wide and I have to offer them for sale.. He got me three pairs and only one is a fit. It is a pair of black dull leather pump a with highish heels--terribly stylish and attractive. I thought by ordering three pairs from him I would be fixed until I left China, but the brown and the white pair cannot be used.

Lots of love to you both from the three of us left on Round Top.

Devotedly,
Grace

[42]

J. SERVICE: It was called silk floss. I'm not sure what silk floss is. But, it's sort of beaten raw silk. We had a covering of oiled silk to try to make them waterproof, but they weren’t very waterproof. We had a tent of some sort. Of course, we had to take along cooking supplies. My mother prepared a lot of zwieback, very dry toast that would keep. We had pancake flour which only needed water. Rice, of course. The men all carried their own supply of rice.

But, the trip turned out to be much tougher than we expected because the trail had not been used and was nonexistent in many places. We had to chop our way through very dense thickets of bamboo at certain levels and rhododendron and so on.

Then, we finally got above timberline and it was foggy, and rainy. We lost our way because in the fog we followed a line of cairns, or ducks, on the rocks that apparently had been made by hunters. Hunters did go up in the mountains to shoot musk deer because musk is quite valuable.

We had to spend the night above timberline and finally crossed a pass at about fifteen thousand feet, as we determined by the boiling point of water, boiling point thermometer. Got down as fast as we could on the other side to get into the tree line, below timberline, so we could have a fire.

One of the men didn‘t show up, dropped behind. My father and some of the men who were in stronger condition, went out that night and tried to find him, but they had nothing except a kerosene lantern. It was very difficult retracing our route anyway, in the dark above timberline.

The next day they went back up and they found him. He had fallen, slipped. His load had been carried by someone else, but he’d just gotten weak from exhaustion and exposure because of the night we’d spent up at this elevation.

We finally got down into a valley which led into the Min River. But there were heavy rains and we kept running into situations where we had to ford the stream. It was a very
deep V-shaped canyon. If the stream came against the wall of the canyon and we couldn’t get past, we had to cross the stream. That meant building bridges several times. So, we had to take time off to chase up the mountainside to find something to bring down and build a bridge. We built three or four bridges.

[43]

J. SERVICE: We finally got out into the Min River valley and then continued westward into Tibetan country. Foreigners call it Tribes country. On the Chinese maps it’s shown as part of Szechwan province. But the people were all Tibetan people. I’ve got some old photographs of it actually, a few, not very many, [brings out photographs]. Lamaseries and so on.

LEVENSON: Who took the pictures?

J. SERVICE: I had a little camera, but I wasn’t much of a photographer.

I got mountain sickness when I was going up the pass the first day. Then, I had to be carried for a while. But, after a while it left me and I was all right. Then, I was perfectly okay. That was the only time I wasn’t on my own feet. I walked all the rest of the way. As I said last time, I achieved man hood at the age of ten, as far as being able to walk a full day’s stage!

LEVENSON: What s a full day’s stage?

J. SERVICE: Usually twenty-five miles roughly. That happened to be a long stage. That was a thirty mile stage.

LEVENSON: How did your supplies last?

J. SERVICE: After we got into populated areas, then we were all right. We just lived pretty much on the countryside. It was only crossing the big divide and then the valley on the other side, that canyon where we were caught by high waters, that we had a hard time. But, once we got into inhabited areas, we lived pretty much on what we could buy, eggs, meat, chicken, and so on.

LEVENSON: What did you observe of the Tibetans? How much had they seen of Westerners at that point?

J. SERVICE: Oh, there had been a few foreigners up in this valley, but there hadn’t been very many. Well, they were just incredibly dirty, as I recall.

We called on a -- what the Chinese call a t’u-ssu. A t'u-ssu is a sort of a local chieftain-- a small potentate. He was hospitable, polite. He offered us buttered tea which we found pretty hard to take. My father complained afterwards that he had to be polite for the rest of us. He consumed a fair amount. But, it was very rancid butter and had lots of yak
hairs floating on top of it. The tea was very bitter and very strong. So, all in all, it wasn’t a very appetizing concoction.

[44]

J. SERVICE: But, then we got even with the t’u-ssu because we still had some canned stuff at this point. We picked up some canned stuff, I think, that was sent around, not over the mountain, but brought around the Min valley. Anyway, we had a small tin of Limburger cheese so we opened it. But he wouldn’t touch it. He said it was rotten! [laughter]

LEVENSON: About how far was this trip all told?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I don t know. We were on the road, I think, probably for something over three weeks. Mr. Helde made a map of it as we went along, a rough map. He wasn’t doing any surveying job, but taking, you know, pocket compass readings and things like that. But, I don’t suppose we traveled more than two hundred miles, maybe, or something like that, because some of those days we didn’t do very much traveling. Even in the Tribes Country we weren’t on the road all the time. We were stopping to see places.

My father was interested in going up there because the timber, the lumber, that was used in the Chengtu plain came from there. They had a forest of real trees, hemlock and so on. He was rather interested in backing this cook of ours who wanted to become a businessman in the business of bringing trees down and supplying lumber for the new university.

My father eventually did loan some money to this cook who went then into the lumber business and brought timber out, down the river. It all floated down the river. But, that’s a sad story because the man turned out to be sort of a scoundrel and never repaid my father. My father was not a businessman.

LEVENSON: I guess few missionaries were --

J. SERVICE: Yes.

LEVENSON: -- except perhaps in Hawaii!

Was there a serious scientific purpose to your expedition?

J. SERVICE: I think that all these people felt that they were enlarging Western knowledge. Certainly old Dr. Morse felt that he was going to learn something by measuring skulls --

The man who made a map was covering an area that no foreigners had ever visited before, over the Great Divide, not up in the Tibetan part. The principal purpose, of course, was pleasure and interest, exploration if you want.

[45]

J. SERVICE: But, my father was also interested in collecting Tibetan things. So, he was interested in finding or looking for good things. I don’t recall that he got very much on this trip, because where we were was a rather poor and sort of border Tibetan area. Tibetan and Chinese were mixed in most of these areas. The lamasery that we went to was not a particularly large or wealthy one, so that I don't think he found anything really good. That had to come from further into Tibetan territory.

One thing that I didn’t say, and that is about all these trips and traveling, which as I say, were sort of high points of life in my childhood, was that always there was the effort to do more and more and more, as far as I personally was concerned--certainly at my father’s urging--also to be able to walk further, to do more.

It was when I was ten that I for the first time walked thirty miles in a day. I mean I did the full stage of thirty miles, more than thirty miles, actually 100 li, it’s three 1i to the mile. My father was a great walker and he was always hoping that his son would be the same. It was a great day when I did the 100 li.

"War Games" with John Paton Davies in Cheng tu

LEVENSON: You mentioned the name Davis a little way back, off the tape.

J. SERVICE: Davies.

LEVENSON: Davies, excuse me. I know how to spell it, if not pronounce it! His name will come up again later, I know. What can you say about John?

J. SERVICE: John [Paton Davies] was a very good friend. He and I were more or less bosom buddies for one period when we were children. He was about a year or maybe eighteen months older than I was.

This was during the First World War. We had a book by a man named [Arthur Guy] Empey, an Englishman, E-m-p-e-y, called Over the Top. This was sort of inspirational stuff, to try to whip up the enthusiasm of the people on the home front back home, describing life in the trenches, but written in a glamorized way.

[46]

J. SERVICE: I remember it had detailed diagrams of the trenches with a firing step and a parapet and communication trenches. We had some room in our back yard, so we decided to build some trenches, scaled down to our size I suppose. We dug them out ourselves with a firing step and parapet, you know, those slits for firing and so on. We always had Chinese firecrackers. We bought fire crackers which were very cheap. Light the fuse and throw it across at the other's trench.

Much, much later, when [Senator Joseph R.] McCarthy started on us, somebody who had obviously been in Chengtu remembered this and told, I think Fulton Lewis Jr. , that Davies and Service showed radical tendencies very early because they had played "Communist war games" in their childhood in Chengtu.

LEVENSON: Who said this?

J. SERVICE: I don't know. It must have been somebody who'd grown up in Chengtu-- some other child. Of course, some of the missionaries during the McCarthy days went very right [wing], you know. Some of them didn’t. Somebody got this story. Anyway, we were accused of being, having Communist tendencies very early because of these war games we played, which were just our acting out this book about World War I trenches!

LEVENSON: How old were you approximately then? Let's see.

J. SERVICE: Nine or ten.

LEVENSON: Nine or ten. Well, that is the first mention of Senator McCarthy, and perhaps the most ridiculous.

J. SERVICE: Shall we stop there?

Boarding at the Shanghai American School, 1920-1924

LEVENSON: When did you go away to boarding school in Shanghai?

J. SERVICE: By 1920, I'd gone through the sixth grade of Calvert School. So, the question was what to do with me. The obvious thing was for me to go down to Shanghai to the American school. My mother went down the river with me. It took, I think, six weeks, a little more than six weeks to make the trip.

LEVENSON: Good gracious.

[47]

J. SERVICE: Anyway, we got to the school late. It was October, late October when we got there. My mother expected me to go into high school because I'd finished the grades. But, I'd just had my eleventh birthday, and I was very late for the school year. The school wouldn't let me go into the first year of high school. They made me do eighth grade over again, which was very boring. It was a bad idea, but there was no help for it.

This school was for American children. About half were day pupils from Shanghai. There were some missionary, but most of them were business and official children. The other half were boarding pupils, and they were practically all missionaries' children.

As I’ve said already it was single-mindedly trying to be an American school. There were a few non-American, white children, but there were no Chinese. They taught nothing about China. They didn’t teach the language or anything like this.

We even tried to play baseball and American football and basketball, but not sports where we could compete with any other schools, because no one else in Shanghai played baseball except for the American community team. We were rather foolish, I thought, in pursuing American sports. That’s when I first saw Harry Kingman because he played for the American local community team.(See Harry L. Kingman; Citizenship in a Democracy, an interview by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1973, pp 31-39)

As soon as Kingman came out to Shanghai as a Y secretary, he began playing for the community team in Shanghai, a local team. Of course, he was far better than anyone else. He was a star. He’d played for the big leagues, I think the New York Yankees. So, he quickly became the star of Shanghai. We were all very much impressed, in fact dumbfounded, to see the way he could throw the ball from first base to third base across
the diamond, almost like a bullet, without its rising at all.

He became a pitcher. I don’t think he was a pitcher in the big leagues, but in Shanghai he was good enough to be the star pitcher for the local team. So we all knew Harry Kingman, although I didn’t see a great deal of him outside of watching from the bleachers.

[48]

J. SERVICE: And football was a similar problem. We had to play against a local pick-up men’s team or against the American Navy. If a gunboat or something was in town, they would have a team.

In any case, all these things were quite irrelevant to me, because in eighth grade at eleven, I was still two years younger than anyone else in the class. Also, I got my growth rather late. So, I was very much of a shrimp, and hadn’t started really to grow. Furthermore, having grown up in a place like Chengtu in West China, I had never seen a roller skate or ridden a bicycle. I'd never played any ball games. I'd never had any participation in athletics. Being very small and unskilled when it came to choosing teams, I was always the last one to be chosen. I hated ball games and never really participated very much, any more than I had to.

This was why I waited out two years before I went to college because I was fed up with being two years younger than everyone else. I was fifteen when I graduated from high school, and I waited two years before I went to college.

LEVENSON: Apart from hating sports and being bored in your classwork, how was the rest of school?

J. SERVICE: Well, it was tough at first because everyone had read about British boarding schools and they had the idea of having fags, smaller boys who did errands for the bigger boys. This I found a little hard to take.

Also, just having so many other Americans, I think, was hard to take. I mean I‘d lived in a community where I went over to play with the Davies boys one day or the Canright boys another day. I just wasn’t used to having so many of my kind.

The whole business of hazing and fags and so on made the first term rather tough, or at least the first couple of months. My name, Service, sounds like Latin servus, "slave," so some boys tried to call me slave, and I had a couple of fights over that. After I was willing to stand up and fight it out, we outgrew that sort of thing.

I was fairly homesick in those first two or three months but there were YMCA people in Shanghai that kept an eye out for me. My parents had a friend who was a classmate at U[niversity of] C[alifornia] , who was working in the consulate there, a man named Sawyer. He used to take me out, for walks on Sundays, things like that.

[49]

J. SERVICE: I was fascinated really--I became fascinated--just by Shanghai. It was such an exciting and, for me, strange place. Transportation, railways--There was a little railway out near us, not far from the school. We were in the Hongkew section of Shanghai, in rented buildings. There was a short railway that ran through Shanghai down to Woosung. I used to go out and just sit and watch the train. If you put your ear to the rail, you could hear the train coming or I'd listen to the telephone poles, you could hear the whistling in the wires.

Then I found I could go down to the docks and watch the ships. I used to do that weekends, not always alone, sometimes with other boys. The school finally found out about this and were horrified. You read novels about crime, and the docks and the waterside are always supposed to be the worse places! Here we were young lads, [chuckle] eleven and twelve, spending our Saturdays wandering up and down the docks of Shanghai or going across the river to Pootung.

The second year I was there, we lived in what was really a residence, which had been rented and used as a dormitory. There was a heavy, cast iron drainpipe and we could get out of our window and go up and down the drainpipe. So when friends were leaving for West China, I used to go down and see them off. Their boats left about midnight.

Eventually the school found out about this because someone reported it to the school. They had seen me down at such and such dock seeing some boat off at eleven o clock. Well, of course, we were supposed to be in bed by eight, I think, eight or eight thirty. So, this got back to the school, and they were going to expel me. But I couldn’t easily be expelled because I lived a month away, a month or more travel away. So, they relented.

I enjoyed Shanghai. I learned how to read some Chinese by the numbers on the cars, because the numbers on the street cars were in English and Chinese. So my first Chinese that I learned was the numbers.

We had a little bit--not very much--spending money. We used to go off to Chinese shops, little tiny sort of Papa-Mama shops, you know, that sold all sorts of things to eat, various things. This was all strictly against the rules, but we used to buy peanuts, buy duck eggs. Chinese were very fond of duck eggs that had been hardboiled and then sort of pickled in salt. They were very salty inside. Things like that --

[50]

J. SERVICE: One year there was a big missionary conference in Shanghai. There was a Scout troop, and I joined it as soon as I could. I was very active in the Boy Scouts and eventually became senior patrol leader, although it was rather embarrassing because I could never become a first class scout since I didn’t swim. You see, in my boyhood in West China there was no possibility of swimming, no place to swim. I was a second class scout while I was senior patrol leader.

When the school moved to new premises in the French Concession in my last boarding year, 1923-1924, it was isolated, and there were no stores or anything nearby. So, the scout troop set up a little store. We sold candy bars and things like that. We started Saturday night movies. We ran that partly because we had a very, very active scout leader.

But, in any case, a lot of people were coming into Shanghai from other mission stations, interior and so on. Someone got the idea that they might need help in being guided to wherever they were going to stay, missionary homes or some hotel or somebody’s home, residence.

So we set up a traveler’s aid post in the main railway station and took care of these people. But, in between train times we would wander all around the yards, and of course, we had great larks.

It gave me--I wouldn’t say it gave me--I already had the sense of adventure and of charging about and exploring, from the very beginning, from my father. Of course, what we kids were doing charging around the railway yards of Shanghai, I don’t know, [chuckle]

But foreigners could do almost anything, you know. No one was going to stop you. Actually, no one was going to touch us, as I found out. Chinese kids would have been stopped, I m sure, from running around the railway yard. Chinese kids would steal in there, go in there to pick up scraps of coal, half burned coal, or something like that.
They’d be chased away. But, no one was going to chase away foreign kids. Foreigners lived a sort of special life, were special persons.

LEVENSON: Well, it seems as though you certainly got away with murder at that school.

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes.

LEVENSON: Was the education reasonably good?

[51]

J. SERVICE: Yes, I think quite good. Fair. Most of us did quite well when we came back to the States. You know, most of the children went on to college. Most of the missionaries were college-trained people. There were some that weren’t, Pentacostalists and so on. But, in those days they were very much of a minority. So, most of the missionaries--and certainly most of the children that went to Shanghai American School-- went on to college, and I think most of us did pretty well.

LEVENSON: What did you do with your school vacations?

J. SERVICE: Usually people invited me. I don't think that this was arranged, because some of these people were people my parents didn’t know. But, my friends would apparently ask their parents, "Well, here is this boy and he can’t go home for Christmas. Can’t we invite him here?"

This business of having people visiting you for a long time was accepted. Everyone did it. People had to stay with somebody. So, there was never any problem. I always had invitations for Easter and Christmas vacations to someone else’s home.

I went to Soochow one Christmas vacation with a boy named Smart. His father died and his mother moved to Berkeley later on. I went out to Shanghai University once with some Baptist people. Several times I stayed with YMCA friends, particularly the Wilburs who knew my parents.

Twelfth Grade and Graduation from Berkeley High, 1924-1925

LEVENSON: I guess your parents finally got a home leave in 1924. Is that right?

J. SERVICE: Yes, that s right, in 1924, from Chungking where my father had been asked to start a YMCA. It was my father’s second home leave, although he had been in China by that time, what, nineteen years?

The original plan was, I think, that the family was going to go through Europe. But, for some reason that couldn’t be done. So, we came straight across the Pacific, to Berkeley. My grandparents' house had been burned down in the Berkeley fire. [1923] It had been on Oxford Street in that block which is now an experimental University garden.

[52]

J. SERVICE: We stayed up here on Spruce Street with an uncle. Then, we rented a house at Spruce and Rose, and I went to Berkeley High for my last year of school.

LEVENSON: How did that strike you after Shanghai?

J. SERVICE: Terrible.

LEVENSON: Really?

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes. I disliked it very much. It was not a happy year at all.

LEVENSON: What was the matter?

J. SERVICE: Well, I don't know. It was just a huge, big school.

LEVENSON: About how big then?

J. SERVICE: Oh, it was over two thousand. It was sort of overwhelming for that reason.

LEVENSON: About how many had you had in your school in Shanghai?

J. SERVICE: Oh, the whole school had been about four hundred, but that included the lower grades and high school. High school was a hundred, hundred and fifty, something like that. I forget, there were something like thirty people in my class there, my junior class, my last year there.

But, for one thing you arrive from a place like China with your clothes absolutely ridiculous, you know, by American standards. I said my mother made our clothes. Even after we went to Shanghai, Shanghai clothes didn't look like anything here.

We didn’t realize in China that boys, by the time they’re seniors in high school, wear long pants. When I started to Berkeley I had just had my fifteenth birthday--I was still very much of a runt and I was wearing short pants. I got a lot of kidding about wearing short pants, a senior in high school! So, I got my father quickly to take me out and buy some long trousers, some cords. Everyone wore cords in those days. Of course, they had to be dirty. So, it took me a while to get these dirty enough to be respectable.

I didn’t want anyone to know I had been in China because the first time we came to America, when I was six, we were always being embarrassed by being shown off as coming from China.

[53]

J. SERVICE: People would say, "Oh, speak some Chinese for us!" or "Get something we can use for chopsticks. Let's see you eat some rice," and this sort of thing. I made my parents promise not to let anybody know we were from China, not make a big thing of it. So, I tried very hard to keep it a secret that I was [laughter] a strange freak from China.

You have no friends. You come as a senior. Most other people have got their friends. And I worked very hard, maybe because I had nothing else to do.

LEVENSON: Were you behind academically?

J. SERVICE: Oh, no. I did very well.

LEVENSON: I didn’t mean to suggest that, but I mean how good was your preparation in China?

J. SERVICE: I think the preparation in Shanghai was okay. Later on when I started to college I had a problem because I didn’t have trigonometry. But, last year of high school here at Berkeley I did extremely well, which was a great boon when I applied at Oberlin which will come along a little later.

LEVENSON: What can you say about Berkeley High then about the social customs and the mood of the times? America was booming.

J. SERVICE: Yes. Well, I just didn’t know quite how to cope in many ways I think. I was, as I said, very young. I was fifteen. I didn’t know how to stand up, shall we say?

We had to take gym and I was very awkward at basketball because I hadn’t played these games as a boy really. We had to play basketball.

I remember one day a black boy, I jumped up to guard him, and instead of throwing the ball where I expected him to, he threw it right in my middle, purposely of course. [clutches stomach] 1 I mean it was excruciating pain to be hit in the nuts by the basketball.

I remember going up a stairway one day. It was a temporary building where a mechanical drawing class was being held. I was coming down the stairs and a heavy, burly guy--I saw him coming up the stairs but paid no attention to him, and we passed a corner and he suddenly threw his weight against me and grabbed my private parts. Well, you know, this was a shock.

[54]

LEVENSON: Was he black?

J. SERVICE: No, he wasn’t black. He was white.

I took mechanical drawing and loved it. It was terrific! I liked it very, very much. So, I bought a T-square and did some voluntary work at home. I was so pleased with it, I took the work done at home to show the teacher. He said, "Oh, now I know who has been stealing T-squares." Some T-squares, drawing material had been taken. So, he accused me of having stolen the T-squares because I did some work at home.

LEVENSON: How did you deal with that?

J. SERVICE: I was just stunned. I denied it, of course, and said no, I had bought it myself. But he talked about denying me credits, all sorts of hassling. Finally, I got a reasonable grade out of it. But, we were on very bad terms after that. I think he remained convinced that I had stolen equipment from the school.

I got good grades. But I never have gone back to any Berkeley High reunion.

LEVENSON: Sounds as though you had a rotten time.

J. SERVICE: At any rate, as I say, I got good grades. That was the important thing.

I remember great excitement--it was early '25. Classes were let out and we all went to the auditorium to hear Calvin Coolidge take the oath of office. It was the first time it had ever been transmitted nation-wide by radio.

LEVENSON: Is there anything you want to say about graduation before we go on?

J. SERVICE: No.

A Sense of Distance from Younger Brothers

LEVENSON: You haven't mentioned your brothers. You’ve hardly mentioned your brothers at all. How did you get on with them?

J. SERVICE: Well, yes. It's a sort of a, shall we say, not an unhappy subject, but a subject I’m not terribly happy about. I was two years older than Bob and five years older than Dick. I

[55]

J. SERVICE: liked school. I was advanced in schooling, so that our intellectual difference was really much more than the chronological difference.

I was very much of a bookworm when I was a small boy in Chengtu and, I think, probably quite arrogant and hoity-toity as far as the younger boys were concerned. We just didn’t play a great deal together. Later on as we became adults, things changed. But, in our youth we didn’t really have very much in common. Sometimes we’d play together, but not a great deal.

On our Tibetan trip for instance, this big divide trip, my brothers didn’t go. They were too small. I was the only one that went. On the earlier expeditions I don’t think they went. I’m trying to think about the winter trips to the mountains, whether they went along or not. They probably did, but I think they rode a chair where I walked. So, there was a certain feeling of, perhaps understandable feeling of, superiority by the eldest I suppose.

LEVENSON: How did they make out in Berkeley? Did they do better, do you think, being younger?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I think so, yes. I think so.

When we came back, see, I was--Although my brother, Bob, was two years younger, I was four years ahead of him in school. When I was a senior in high school he was in junior high, and Dick, the youngest, was in primary school.

LEVENSON: What were your career plans after graduation?

J. SERVICE: I had no particular plans nor career ideas. I was just beginning to get some at this time. One thing I was very determined about was that I didn’t want to go to college right away. I had, I thought, really lost out a great deal by being so much younger and smaller, physically smaller, undeveloped, than my classmates. So I got my parents to agree that I could stay out for two years before I went to college.

[56]

CHAPTER II

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT YEARS: SHANGHAI TO SHANGHAI, 1925-1933

Apprentice Architect in Shanghai

J. SERVICE: The sensible thing to do was to go back with my parents to Shanghai. I had liked mechanical drawing very much. The YMCA had an architectural office in Shanghai because they had quite a large building program at this time. This was mid-twenties. They were building YMCAs and residences around China. So, they had an architectural office and through a little parental, pull I got a job as an apprentice draftsman in this architectural office. I worked there for eighteen months.

I liked it quite a bit, and I thought for a while I would be an architect. For some reason I convinced myself that to be an architect one had to really be an artist and creative and I didn’t have that. So I thought I could be a civil engineer which was related to architecture, but more practical.

LEVENSON: How was the office set up?

J. SERVICE: An architect named A. Q. Adamson was employed by the YMCA as head of the YMCA Building Bureau. He was a trained architect, but his main function was administrative. He ran the office, made sure things were done.

They also employed a Hungarian architect named Shafer whom my parents had known quite well. He was a refugee. He had been a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. During the Russian Revolution they broke out of the camps, or no one kept them in the camps. He and a lot of other Czechs and so on worked their way clear across Siberia and finally got to China.

[57]

J. SERVICE: He had come up to Chungking when my parents were there on a contract to survey a motor road from Chungking to Chengtu. So, they had got to know him. One way or another he had gotten a job in this YMCA Building Bureau. He did most of the designing, actual architectural designing.

Then there was a crew of draftsmen, most of them Chinese except myself.

LEVENSON: What tradition did he design in?

J. SERVICE: Most of the houses, the YMCA residences, were very utilitarian, perhaps a trace of European. He built the foreign Y in Shanghai which is Italian Renaissance, I suppose.

LEVENSON: Eclectic?

J. SERVICE: Eclectic, yes, but more Italian Renaissance than anything else.

LEVENSON: What were your functions?

J. SERVICE: I was simply, as I say, a very junior draftsman. I was given jobs of working up floor plans. Shafer would give me the rough layout and the size of the rooms, and I drew the very simplest type of detailed floor plans.

I don't think that we had to conform to any particular building codes, certainly not in Chinese cities. We probably did have to in the [International] Settlement of Shanghai. We were building one building there, and that’s what I worked on most of the time, the Foreign YMCA in Shanghai. It was a big building, I think about ten or eleven stories, which for Shanghai was big. There were several Chinese YMCAs in Shanghai. Then there was a Navy YMCA which was built to take care of seamen, particularly navy seamen.

LEVENSON: Did you get out to the building sites?

J. SERVICE: I don't think the Foreign Y was started because I was still working on the plans. [laughter] So I don't think that I actually saw it under construction. I didn't get to any of the other sites because they were all inland or elsewhere.

LEVENSON: I was wondering if it was the custom for architects to supervise the building.

[58]

J. SERVICE: Yes. I think that the YMCA Building Bureau usually had someone to supervise, just as here.

LEVENSON: Right.

J. SERVICE: The bureau made the contracts and, of course, you have to have some representative to supervise, make sure the contractor fulfills the contract. But, who that was in Shanghai I don't know, because there was no one around when I was there. It may have been Adamson himself that would go out and check. I don't know.

LEVENSON: Do you have any idea how the fee system worked? Did you get ten percent or was it on a flat fee for work done?

J. SERVICE: This was an office of the YMCA, and people were simply paid by the Y.

LEVENSON: Salaried?

J. SERVICE: Salaried, yes. I assume that the Y was having enough of a building program going on that it paid them to hire their own staff, rather than work on any sort of a fee system.

I actually worked in the office building of the national committee of the YMCA. The national committee had a building in the downtown area of Shanghai. We were on one of the top floors of that.

A Blank Period, A Fairly Quiet Year

LEVENSON: This was an exciting period in Chinese history. How much did you see of what was going on?

J. SERVICE: Well, actually, you see, I missed most of the excitement because the 1925, May 30, demonstrations took place when we were still in the States. It was just about the time I was graduating, just before I graduated. I remember my parents being very concerned and very alarmed at what was going on, reading the newspapers. But, by the time I got to China in the fall of '25 the excitement was over.

Then, the Northern Expedition was starting in 1926, coming up from Canton. Chiang Kai-shek was leading one wing. I remember our house boy that we had in Shanghai, our cook boy,

[59]

J. SERVICE: being very concerned, very excited about it--he was obviously a patriot of the Nationalists--and talking to him about how good these people were. Most of the foreign press was treating them all as Reds and Bolshies. Chiang Kai-shek was called a Bolshevik and so on. But our cook was very pleased and excited about it.

Then I left Shanghai in late ‘26 to come home. I was actually in Shanghai from September 25, 1925, until December 26, 1926. Then, I came on a long, round the world trip to go to college. I actually read about the events of the spring of 1927 when I was in Paris. I remember buying the Paris Herald Tribune and sitting there--in front of the Madeleine, I think it was--sitting down and reading all these exciting things about the attacks on foreigners in Nanking and so on. But on the whole, except for the fact that the Northern Expedition was starting and people were beginning to be concerned about what seemed to be the anti-foreign thrust of the Kuomintang, it wasn’t a terribly exciting time.

There was a build-up of foreign troops in Shanghai. There was alarm. Almost every country was bringing more forces into Shanghai by the time I left. But, it really wasn’t until '27 that the big crunch came. So, I came in between.

LEVENSON: What did you do with your spare time and how did you live?

J. SERVICE: Well, I remember very little about it. It just was not a very exciting period, sort of a blank period.

I lived at home with my parents. I had a bout of asthma, quite a serious bout of asthma. I had jaundice that year, went into a hospital for several days. They didn’t know how to treat jaundice. But, otherwise it was a fairly quiet year.

In the summer of 1926, my parents went to Tsingtao where they rented a cottage. Tsingtao was one of the places where people from Shanghai went for the summer. But, I couldn’t get that much vacation, of course, so I only went up for a short while.

A friend of theirs, a Methodist missionary who later on became a bishop, was going to Peking. So, I went up to Peking with him, summer of '26, and we had, I forget, maybe a week in Peking.

[60]

J. SERVICE: But, the most exciting part of that trip was that--the fighting had just stopped between Feng Yu-hsiang's army and Chiang Tso-lin's army. Feng, the so-called Christian general, who had a very good army, well trained troops, had withdrawn from Peking, had been forced out of Peking by Chiang Tso-lin. He withdrew northwestward up the railway to Nankow Pass and then fortified himself. Finally after some very severe and heavy fighting he had been driven out of the Pass northward into Inner Mongolia,

The railway had just been opened up. We got on one of the first trains to go. It was terribly crowded and we managed to get ourselves onto the cow catcher of the locomotive. It was a huge locomotive. This was the only railway in China that had American locomotives. It was because of the very steep grades. They had thought that American locomotives, being heavier and more powerful for the Rockies, would be better.

So, it was a great locomotive with a large platform out front. We had, I suppose, eight or ten people, all crowded on to this platform, in front of this huge, puffing, snorting, double-barrelled steam engine, went up through Nankow Pass and so on. That was a lot of fun.

We saw the trenches and saw the battlefields. There had been a lot of serious fighting.

Some of the Sights of Peking

J. SERVICE: My missionary guide was very much interested in the plight of the women involved in the night life of a city like Peking. So he took me on a tour of the brothels of Peking. Being dragged around by a missionary--who, of course, was not doing any business, he was just going around and talking to the people, the girls and the madams, and just observing--was a bit bizarre, it seemed to me.

LEVENSON: What did he hope to accomplish?

J. SERVICE: Well, I don't know. I assume he had a sociological missionary interest in the conditions. He obviously had done it before.

LEVENSON: How did the situation strike you?

J. SERVICE: I think we better take this thing out of this!

[61]

LEVENSON: Okay. I’ll make a note. Can you really see anything wrong with that? Gladstone did it after all.

J. SERVICE: Yes, well, it just seemed like an odd. It seemed to me to be a strange thing to do. I was curious in a young way, I suppose, but I had never really--I knew such things existed, of course, but I had never thought of visiting a brothel before. We went all through the places outside the Chien men [the old main gate of Peking's Tartar City].

LEVENSON: How did you react to the brothels?

J. SERVICE: Oh, if you mean was I attracted or excited, no. I was just sort of perplexed as I recall, curious. I don't remember having any very strong reaction.

LEVENSON: What did you parents say about that?

J. SERVICE: I never told them. I never told them, [chuckle] just as I never told my parents about these other incidents. My parents never knew about these things in high school I talked about. You feel sort of ashamed that you don't react or don't defend yourself , but it all happens so suddenly that you can't. So, you just feel ashamed of it afterward I think. But, this thing, there didn’t seem to be any point in telling my parents about it.

I saw the main sights of Peking. You couldn’t see very much of the Forbidden City, but you could see the Temple of Heaven.

The man I was with stayed with someone in the Bible Society, and they had an old Dodge which was a famous car. It was a Dodge touring car, about 1924 or '25 model, which apparently was a very sturdy car . It wasn’t a four wheel drive or anything like that, but it would go on the worst kinds of roads and was very popular in North China and Inner Mongolia. Roy Chapman Andrews was making his trips about that time, and this was the kind of car they used. I remember riding around Peking in this old Dodge touring car.

LEVENSON: Was there anything else you wanted to say about those China years?

J. SERVICE: I don't think so.

[62]

A Long, Solitary Tour Through Asia and Europe

J. SERVICE: I had the idea of studying engineering in college. It was always taken for granted I would go to [University of California] Berkeley. No other place was ever suggested. But if I was going to take engineering, I needed trigonometry and I hadn’t had trigonometry. So, we planned that I would come here to Berkeley for summer school.

LEVENSON: This was in --

J. SERVICE: Nineteen twenty-seven. I had always wanted to make the trip through Europe. It had been talked of in '24, been impossible. So, it was planned that I would travel alone from Shanghai as far as Ceylon, and at Ceylon I would be picked up by some people from the YMCA coming on a following ship. Then, I would travel through Europe with these people.

But after I left Shanghai their plans were changed by the YMCA. They were told they couldn’t take the time for the trip. They had to go directly to the United States. So, my parents telegraphed me, did I wish to go on or did I wish to come back? I could do either one. Of course I decided to go on.

The ship went to Singapore. I left it there and went up through the Malay states. At Penang I got a British India boat to Burma, spent a little while there, went up to Mandalay and back, and then to India.

There were YMCA people in all these places, and my father had written to some of them. So I could always check in with the YMCA people, and they helped me plan my sightseeing.

When I got to India I went to Calcutta and a very nice man there helped me plan my India tour, which was quite an extensive tour eventually.

I traveled along, had a sleeping bag, a sleeping roll, and I spent nights on trains when I could -- a very sensible thing to do.

Here are some pictures of India, I got up to Darjeeling. I had quite a trip, Taj Mahal.

LEVENSON: Did you make comparisons in your mind between India and China? How did India impress you?

[63]

J. SERVICE: I don't remember too much. I remember being very depressed. I did not like India, never have liked India. I'm sure my feeling was the same then, that it was so much more of a hopeless place than China, the attitude of the people.

But, I’ve been to India so many times since that it's a little unfair for me to try to really analyze what was my feeling at the age of seventeen, except that I never felt the affection or closeness or sympathy with the people of India that I do for the people in China.

LEVENSON: Did it bother you that it was a colony?

J. SERVICE: No, I can't say that it did. To be perfectly honest I thought the British did a good job of running it, the railways and so on, were good.

Then I picked up another steamer in Colombo, Ceylon, and went on to Europe. The ship landed in Genoa. I had talked to people on the boat--it was in March--and decided the best thing to do was to take another boat down to Naples, then come north with the spring.

I had gotten a guidebook by this time and looked up pensions, cheap. So I went to a rather modest pension in Naples. At the first meal--they had meals served at a long table, family style--there were two American women right across the table from me, and talking away about San Francisco, San Francisco Bay.

I said nothing because no one said anything to me. But, at the end of the meal one of the ladies leaned across the table to me and said, "Do you speak English?" I said, "Yes, I speak English and I come from the same part of the country you people come from." So, they were quite interested.

We chatted a bit. They had just arrived in Naples and I had just arrived in Naples. So, they said, "Well, we’re going out this afternoon to Pozzuoli," I think it was, near Naples. "Would you like to come along?" I said, "Fine." They said, "Well, meet us down here in the lobby in half an hour."

When I came down there was a young American woman with them, a very attractive young woman. They asked my name to introduce me. I said, "My name is Service." One of the women looked surprised and said, "Younger brother of Roy Service?" I said, "No, son."

[64]

J. SERVICE: It turned out that both these women were schoolteachers in San Francisco and had been classmates of my mother’s and father’s at Berkeley. The young woman was a ward of one of them, a singer. She'd been singing in the San Francisco opera, minor parts. But, she had done well enough to get a job, a learning job, in the San Carlo opera company in Naples for a year.

She was going to take some time off and travel around Italy with her guardian and her guardian’s friend--these old, old ladies they seemed. [chuckle] They were in their mid-forties, I suppose, if they were in my parents class because at this time my parents would be forty-seven.

At any rate, I sort of tagged along through Italy with these people and then spent a week in Switzerland. It was April and you couldn’t do much climbing. It was between seasons.

By this time I had gotten the idea of bicycling through England. I went to France, but I didn’t like France because the French that I had had in the American School I found was very little help when I got to a real French-speaking area.

Sixteen Hundred Miles by Bicycle Through England

J. SERVICE: So, I was keen to get to England. My parents had some friends whom they’d known in West China. They were Friends with a capital "F," Quakers. I went to them and told Mr. Silcock that I wanted to take a bicycle trip.

He tried to talk me out of it. But, when he saw that I was really determined he said, "Well, I’ve got an old bike downstairs in the cellar," [laughter] which he dug up. It was a real old, heavy bike, but it had a gear shift which was quite unusual for those days-- only three speeds, though, not like the present ten speed things.

Eventually I set off to make a tour of England, probably having never ridden a bicycle more than five miles in my life. I’d only learned a year or two before, in Shanghai. The first day I got from London to Oxford. The second day I could barely walk, just barely could walk. [chuckle] I had discovered to my great surprise that England was almost all hilly.

[65]

J. SERVICE: He helped me plan the trip, I laid out a terrific trip, and eventually I did about sixteen hundred miles by bicycle. I was on the bicycle for a month.

I started off with a big rucksack on my back. I'd bought a rucksack in Switzerland and I thought that was the thing to carry. I soon realized that the thing to do was to get it off your back and onto the bike. [chuckle] But, I made friends. You meet people along the way that are also cycling.

I joined a cyclist touring club in England. They have guidebooks of places to stay, bed and breakfast places, you know, lots of people that take you in. In those days at least they took in bicyclists. This is before youth hostels or anything like that in England I think. It was very reasonable, very cheap.

I had a terrific time, except that in the Lake Country on the first of May, I ran into snow. I climbed, what is it, Helvellyn in a snow storm--I didn’t have proper clothes for that cold weather, nor proper gloves, but eventually things got much better. I got up as far as the Trossachs in Scotland, then came down the east coast. Of course, it would have been a
lot easier if I had started up the east coast because the east coast is flat. I could do a hundred miles a day without too much trouble there if I wanted to.

I saw lots of cathedrals. I think I’ve still got some pictures, a few. I had a camera but, goodness, there are not very many, [showing photographs] That’s something that, an enlargement. But, here are some pictures. What's that? Is that Wells? It’s probably on the back.

LEVENSON: Ely. Very nice.

J. SERVICE: Oh, that's the lakes.

LEVENSON: Very few people in your pictures, Jack.

J. SERVICE: Oh, well, I was taking pictures of buildings. It's true, I think this is probably still true. Although the pictures I’ve taken in China in the last two trips do have people. There’s Salisbury which is the best. Salisbury and Durham, both very different, but both, you know, gems.

LEVENSON: Yes.

J. SERVICE: But, it's true I wasn’t taking pictures of people, in those days.

[66]

J. SERVICE: The roads were not terribly crowded in England, although they weren’t very good either. A lot of the time I was off the main roads. I had a terrible time when I tried to avoid going through Birmingham. Of course, the maps in England are fantastic. You buy all these maps that are two miles to the inch, the Ordinance Survey, half inch maps, which show every road and every path. But, trying to avoid Birmingham turned out to be a nightmare because all the roads radiate in toward the center.

I was wandering around in some small village quite late at night looking up and trying to read the signs on a building. Suddenly a voice behind me says, "What do you think you're doing?" or something like that. It turned out to be the village bobby and he wanted to know who I was, [chuckle] where I was going, why I was looking up at the building.

I said, "I m lost." He said, "Where are you trying to go?" I told him what village or town I was aiming for. He said, "Which direction do you think it is?" Of course, I pointed in completely the wrong direction.

But he felt sorry for me and they let me sleep in the police station. They gave me a bench I could lie down on, and I spent the night there.

From Southampton to Berkeley

J. SERVICE: I finally ended up at Southampton and took the Mauretania. I got a third class ticket which was actually the lowest--it wasn’t the tourist third, it was real third--on the old Mauretania which had four smokestacks and was the holder of the blue ribbon across the North Atlantic.

I found quite a few other young people, American young people, aboard traveling third. They started exploring around and we found we could get up into the upper part of the ship. So, I used to go up to the upper part of the ship.

One night I was up in first class, just leaning over the rail watching the waves. They looked so much better from a first class deck than they did from a steerage porthole. [laughter] A man came up beside me and in a stern voice said, "Do you speak English?" I said, "Yes," and he said, "Well then, go downstairs where you belong." So I went downstairs.

[66a]

1. John S. Service, three months old, with mother and teddy bear, Chengtu.

2. The Service Family: Jack, Dick, Roy, Grace, Bob, ca. 1922.

3. Grace Service with her oldest son Jack, 1924. Jack is 15 years old.

4. YMCA Building Bureau, Shanghai. The drafting staff.

5. Robert Roy Service and first Chinese teacher in Chengtu, 1906.

6. Jack (left) at boarding school in Shanghai, ca. 1921. Jack is 12 years old.

7. John S. Service, graduation from Oberlin College, 1931.

8. Jack winning the mile, Oberlin College, ca. 1930.

[67]

J. SERVICE: We came into New York. A group of us stayed up all night--because we were coming in early--to see the Statue of Liberty. I had to go through immigration because we were third class. As I recall we had to shower and take some sort of physical examination. I had a terrible case of dandruff, and so the inspector told me I d better do something about the dandruff. But, I was admitted into the country. I'm sure it wasn’t Ellis Island, but it was an Ellis Island type of procedure for people in third class because most of us were immigrants.

The next day, I think, was Lindbergh’s arrival, after he’d flown the Atlantic. I stayed with some people out in Yonkers named Yard who were very good friends from Chengtu. Mrs. Yard had been my mother’s boon and inseparable companion for many years.

They were living in New York at that time. Mr. Yard had left the mission field. I forget now exactly why. But, they lived in Yonkers and I was staying with them. One of the daughters, the eldest daughter, and I went downtown to see the big ticker tape parade for Lindy.

I stayed with them and then came across the country, visiting various relatives whom I'd never seen. My mother had given me family trees and instructions about going to Chattanooga and going to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and going here and there and visiting people. I did it all faithfully, according to instructions and spent a day or two here and there and got out here [to Berkeley] in time to start the summer session which I very quickly found I detested.

LEVENSON: Why did you detest it?

J. SERVICE: I was taking trigonometry. You see, I had to get this damn trigonometry .

But I don't know--Berkeley was a big place. Summer sessions are not a very good introduction to a place like Berkeley, lots of schoolteachers and so on. But, it just seemed to me a very large, impersonal place.

I expected a little more ivy and so on, school spirit. Of course, there's nothing of that atmosphere in the summer session. No one could care less about you and who you are and what you're doing and all. So, I wrote my parents and said that I thought that I really wasn’t going to like Berkeley very much and I would prefer to go to a smaller place such as Oberlin.

[68]

A Switch from U.C., Berkeley, to Oberlin College

LEVENSON: What put Oberlin into your head?

J. SERVICE: I’d known lots of people from Oberlin because it had been a great breeding center of missionaries. There were a lot of people in China from Oberlin. One or two of my teachers at SAS, at Shanghai American School, had been from Oberlin. I had two classmates and very good friends at SAS who were going to Oberlin. One was Clarence Wilbur, Marty Wilbur, [C. Martin] and there was another boy that was going there. So, Oberlin just struck me as the logical place to go.

My father--whose idea always had been, as I think I mentioned before, that you treat children as adults as much as possible and encourage them to make their own decisions and do what they feel they should do--he cabled back and in effect said, "You're the one that’s going to college. If you can get yourself into Oberlin, good luck!"

This was the middle of the summer. I wrote off to Oberlin. There wasn’t time, of course, to write to Shanghai American School for my record because this was before the age of airplanes, and it was three weeks across the Pacific. But I did have my record at Berkeley High which was superb, all A's, except maybe one B+ for that mechanical drawing course where I had the fight with the teacher.

Being a missionary’s son and coming from China I'm sure was a help but, on the strength of my senior year record at Berkeley High, Oberlin admitted me in August. Of course, things weren’t so tough in those days.

Oberlin was having a little problem recruiting men. They were getting more women than men applicants. So, I think that my sex helped me a bit. At any rate, I was admitted to Oberlin.

In the later part of the summer of 1927, as soon as summer session finished, I went down to the ranch of one of my uncles and worked on the ranch picking fruit. Marty Wilbur arrived by ship from Shanghai and he came down and worked a few days. Then, we came up and took the train, went to Oberlin.

[69]

Meets Caroline Schulz on the Train

J. SERVICE: By coincidence on the train I met Caroline Schulz,

LEVENSON: Who became Caroline Service.

J. SERVICE: Who became Caroline Service much later. [laughter]

LEVENSON: What do you remember about that?

J. SERVICE: I don't remember her at all frankly.

What happened was that we were on the main transcontinental line as far as Toledo, Ohio. In Toledo the people going to Oberlin had to shift to a branch line, sort of a loop line, that went south of the main line down through various towns, Oberlin, Elyria, and then up to Cleveland. It was a very small train on this branch line that was going to go through Oberlin. There were only a few cars. In one car we found ourselves with quite a number of young people of college age.

One girl who was a very extrovert type started asking people, "Are you going to Oberlin?" It turned out most of us were. There was no other place to go to on that line. So, we got together and Caroline was one of the group. As I say, I don t recall Caroline because I remember much more this girl who was running around getting us together.

Oberlin College; "A Good YMCA Atmosphere, Friendly and Optimistic"

LEVENSON: How did the Middle West impress you after the sorts of freedoms You’d had in Europe and in China? The little, tiny town of Oberlin

J. SERVICE: Oh, I liked Oberlin. Oberlin, I had no problem there at all. It was nice. It was a town of three or four thousand, I suppose, at that time. It's gotten bigger now but not too much larger. The college was somewhat smaller but, maybe fifteen hundred altogether including the conservatory.

They had a freshman week which was great fun, at least it seemed a lot of fun to me. Everybody get acquainted and learn the college songs. Plenty of ivy and rah rah and college spirit and warmth, sort of a good YMCA atmosphere, friendly and optimistic.

[70]

Champion Long-Distance Runner: "A Wonderful Feeling of Well-Being"

J. SERVICE: My father had never let me run competitively when I was in high school because he thought I was too young. He thought that boys should have more of their development before they try to compete in anything like running

But cross-country starts as soon as college starts in the fall. So, I went out for freshman cross-country. It didn’t take very long to find out that I could run quite well. In fact, after we’d been training for several weeks, just before the real season was starting, we had an all-squad race competition. Freshmen couldn’t compete in intercollegiate athletics, but on this occasion, the freshmen and the varsity people all ran together.

I forget--I came in second or third overall, which means that I was able to run with the varsity, and I beat all the other freshmen.

So, this then became really quite an inordinate part of my college life. Looking back on it afterward, I spent a lot more time and energy on track and field than anything else. It was actually a year-round activity because you had cross country in the fall, and you had indoor track during the winter and then you had spring track in the spring. It was a series of getting in condition for each season.

I became good in the league we were in. I won the conference mile. Ohio is full of colleges, thirty some, I think. But, the athletic conference we were in was about nineteen colleges, most of them originally denominational schools: Ohio Wesleyan, Denison, Oberlin, Wooster, and so on, all church schools. At any rate, I won the conference mile, in other words the mile championship, for the three years that I was eligible to compete.

There was something else on running. Last time I put emphasis on running and peer relations, that at least it made me feel that I was as good as anyone else, shall we say. But, I think it’s much more than that, much more important than that.

Partly, there is a sheer physical, sensual pleasure in running, I suppose, like dancing or almost any other sort of rhythmic exercise. Also, there s a wonderful feeling of

[71]

J. SERVICE: well-being, of being in good physical shape. They talk about being "fit as a fiddle." It's not a good word, because you’re not taut like a fiddle. It’s quite different.

But also there's the whole question of whatever is required, I think, in being a distance runner. Whether you’re a good distance runner because the qualities are innate or whether you develop them through the sport, I don’t know. But, you know, there’s something in the idea that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

It s a solitary sport that requires a great deal of perseverance and determination. It's also a very, man-to-man type of competition. There’s nothing tougher than a neck-and- neck drive down the backstretch and around the last turn and down toward the tape.

It’s not merely a matter of who's the best runner or the stronger, but who's got the most determination, resolve, and guts. One guy has to break. If you’ve got the control and discipline, you’ll be the lucky guy that doesn’t.

LEVENSON: What I’ve read emphasizes the painfulness of long distance running.

J. SERVICE: Well, painfulness only in competition. Of course, when I was doing it they hadn’t developed some of the new training methods which are obviously very much more arduous.

Cross-country, which I liked best, was in the fall. It was beautiful around Oberlin. We ran through the woods, the countryside. It was a fairly popular sport and so you’re running with a whole pack through the autumn foliage and all the rest of it.

What to Major in? A Switch from Engineering to Economics

J. SERVICE: I did fairly well my first year, except with my idea of engineering. I had signed up for a very heavy math course. It had a woman instructor who, I think, was probably just starting teaching. At any rate, I don't think she was a very good teacher.

They had the honor system in Oberlin. You always sign the honor pledge at the end of the blue book, "I have received no

[72]

J. SERVICE: help," and so on. On the first blue book that we took in this course I forgot all about the pledge, and I didn’t sign it.

So, when I got my blue book back, zero. Well, it was another thing like this mechanical drawing thing business. [Allegation that Jack stole a T-square in high school] I said, "I’m very sorry, but this was the first blue book I’ve taken, and I just forgot all about it." Well, she finally gave me credit. Anyway, I had decided by that time I didn’t like mathematics, not all that much.

This meant that I wasn’t going to be an engineer. My college experience really was a sort of a floundering, groping around, not knowing what I wanted to do. After a good start in my first freshman semester, I seemed gradually to go downhill. Then in my junior year I began to get interested again and to come up. My junior year and my senior year I did quite well. But, there was no Phi Beta Kappa key like my future wife got!

LEVENSON: What did you major in?

J. SERVICE: Well, this again was a funny business because after I lost interest in engineering, I didn’t know what to major in. I ended up with a minimum economics major, because economics just seemed the sensible thing to do--practical.

But, I took courses like economic history of the United States. I liked history. Economic history of the United States was history, but it would count for economics. I had to take a course in accounting. I took a course in foreign trade and things like that. But, I got by with just a barebones minimum economic major.

I actually took my introductory economics in the fall of 1929, right during the crash. I don't think our professor had any conception of what really was happening on Wall Street. Not many people did, except that stock prices were going up. When the market broke, he believed that this was just another business cycle. This one happened to be worse, but we would come out of it all right. In fact, for a long time he was quite optimistic that it wasn’t going to be a very serious one.

I had one professor, a quiet old fellow who I think was probably a Socialist, but he was very discreet about what his real beliefs were. He sometimes would make a quiet remark that indicated that he didn’t believe the old classical economics that the head of the department taught--who was sure that the Depression was not a very serious or deep one.

[73]

LEVENSON: When you were taking your economics were the theories of Keynes brought in at all?

J. SERVICE: Not at all. Well, Keynes may have been mentioned, but none of our professors were Keynesian, and certainly we learned nothing about Keynes' theories. I mean it was pretty much Adam Smith with maybe a little Marshall and Ricardo, but it was not Keynesian.

Finances ; Waiting at Tables and Summer Jobs

J. SERVICE: I managed to be reasonably self-supporting through college. My father got a special allowance from the YMCA for each child of college age. This probably just covered my tuition. Then, I had a board job waiting tables through college. I worked in the summers, various jobs, so that I was fairly self-supporting.

LEVENSON: What did you do in the summers?

J. SERVICE: My father had a friend from when he was Y secretary at Purdue before he went to China. This man was now, I think, head or near the top of a power company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. So, my father wrote to him, and he said, "Yes, I can give Jack a job."

My first summer I went out there with a friend from Oberlin, one of my Shanghai friends. We were simply put to work on a construction crew that the power company had. We spent most of the summer building a power substation and doing some repair work. It was just good sweaty hard work, spade and shovel, and pouring concrete. It was instructive, my first real contact with working class Americans and working class language.

We lived at the YMCA, saved our money. You could get a meal, a three-course full meal-- for 25 cents in those days. The Y was a good place to live and we could swim there.

The second summer -- My friend Eddie Reischauer, whom I had known from crossing the Pacific together, was a classmate of mine. As a matter of fact, we had become housemates because his brother, named Robert Reischauer, was a senior when we were freshmen. He was in a group of men that had gone together, about eight or ten people, and simply taken over a house. There were very few dormitories, but other students lived out in town. At any rate, this group of seniors had a house, and there was a question of who was going to take it over when they left. Ed Reischauer was a freshman, as I was and Marty Wilbur. So Ed organized a group to take over the house and I was a member for
the next three years.

[74]

J. SERVICE: Anyway, the Reischauers had a friend, who used to be in the YMCA, I think, out in Japan, but was now working at the University of Michigan Student Christian Association. The association ran a summer camp, a semi-charity camp, in Michigan, fifty miles or so from Ann Arbor.

Ed got a job there his freshman year. Then, his sophomore year, he was able to get me a job there. So, I went to this summer camp after my sophomore and junior years. Not after my senior year, because after my senior year I started working at Oberlin Inn. I had two summers at this camp, which was very good.

A few days after we arrived at the camp, the truck driver decided to quit. We were about fifty miles out of Ann Arbor where we got most of our supplies. This truck driver took the camp truck into Ann Arbor and telephoned, "I m quitting."

I just happened to be with the camp manager, this ex-Y man from Japan, when the word came in. He said, "Well, what do we do now?" I said, right away, "I can drive. Let me do it."

This was wonderful because instead of being a counselor and having to deal with a lot of tough kids from Detroit, inner city, and so on--I was the camp truck driver, which put me outside of the business of having to cope with the children and do exercises, calisthenics, swimming class, and all the rest of it. I was the man that went off every day to town and brought in supplies, brought in hay to make beds, helped run the camp pump, and brought in ice. We had to bring lake ice. This was when I had my early romance with the iceman’s daughter. [laughter]

LEVENSON: Oh really?

J. SERVICE: Well, it wasn’t a romance in any very serious sense, but we used to wrestle in the hay a bit. She would take me to the ice house. It was all lake ice, you see, in Michigan. In the winter they put it in big barn-like structures with layers of ice and layers of straw, huge big blocks. So, she would take me to the icehouse, and we got quite well acquainted before the summer was over. She was a big husky gal.

LEVENSON: Have to be, handling that ice.

[75]

Extracurricular Activities: The Honor Court

LEVENSON: What other extracurricular activities--I’m not referring to what went on in the icehouse—did you enjoy?

J. SERVICE: Not really very much at Oberlin. I was nominated for class office, but didn’t actually make it. I was on class committees. I was on something called the men’s senate eventually. I was president of the men's honor court. We had an honor court. After my embarrassing initial experience of forgetting to sign the honor pledge, I eventually ended up being president of the men's honor court, which was supposed to deal with infringements of the honor system.

I m sure there was much more cheating than was ever reported. People were supposed to report it. It’s like the West Point system pretty much. Not many were reported. But, if one was reported, why then, the honor court, of course, had to try to deal with it. I think we only had one or two cases that were reported to us.

One, we decided, was not a serious thing. I think one man was asked to leave school. If we gave an adverse decision, why, it was automatic. You had to be expelled. But, it wasn’t a particularly active--thank goodness--not a very active job.

There was something called the Oberlin Peace Society which the president of Oberlin who was a sweet, gentle scholar named Ernest Hatch Wilkins, was interested in. This was the same time that Oxford students were having the same sort of ideas; if enough people say they won't fight, why, we won't have any more wars. So, we had occasional speakers and peace resolutions and things like that, all--it turned out, of course-- unrealistic. No one could foresee Nazism in those days. This was still the twenties, late twenties, 1929 or so, '30 maybe.

I was fairly active in that. It fitted perfectly into my YMCA background. A lot of the people very active in the international peace movement--Sherwood Eddy and others-- were YMCA people.

[76]

A Change in Religious Attitude

J. SERVICE: The religious side of my life took a drastically downward turn. Oberlin was a church-founded school, but by this time it didn’t have any direct or formal connection with the Congregational Church. But, they did have a requirement that you had to take a course in religion your freshman year. This was just an innocuous history of the Bible sort of thing. Then in your junior or senior year you had to take a one semester course.

I found that I was able to discharge my religion requirement by taking a course in psychology called the Psychology of Religion. Our textbook was [William] James' Varieties of Religious Experience. By the time I had gone through that, I had become, shall we say, completely agnostic. It was quite a disillusioning sort of a book. The professor who taught it was obviously a complete agnostic himself, atheist or agnostic. I'm not sure which is the right word.

So that I ended college with no feelings at all, shall we say, in religion, and a complete inability to understand my parents'--particularly, my father's still strong feeling about it.

LEVENSON: Was this painful to you?

J. SERVICE: To some extent, yes. Not terribly so. I mean it was sort of an enlightenment at the time, rather than discouragement. It was interesting to be able to look in an impersonal way, objective way, at religion, how it was something that almost every people had felt the need of, and that some people got support and benefit from. But, I didn't feel the need.

LEVENSON: Did your parents know this?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I don't know how much they knew, I never was much of a letter writer. I think I wrote once a week, but I doubt if I ever discussed with them--I did later on, I think, tell them something about my lack of being able to feel concern about religion.

Later I did join a Unitarian Church after I retired. But this was partly, I think, a desire to associate with a group of people that I liked, that had the same sort of feeling about the world, the universe, that I did, and a sense of wanting to establish some roots when I came back to Berkeley, to affiliate with some sort of organization. The Unitarian Church, the

[77]

J. SERVICE: Fellowship, is hardly a very religious organization. But, it does have the same sort of residue of Christian, humanistic, ethical ideas that I ended up with.

The Spirit of Oberlin; Values of a Liberal Education

LEVENSON: We're leading into something that I wanted to ask about, the sort of spirit Oberlin tried to convey to its students. You mentioned the two religious courses and the peace movement.

J. SERVICE: Oberlin was devoted or consecrated to the value of a liberal education in quite a broad sense, that it was the best training for young people to have, and you should defer your professional training till after you had a liberal education. They did have at Oberlin a pre-med course for people who were going on in medicine, but that's about as close to any technical training as they came. There was a kindergarten for teacher training, but that was separate from the college at that time. And, of course, you had the musical conservatory. But even the musical conservatory was also part of this whole liberal education idea, that a liberal education included, properly, some knowledge and appreciation of music. Actually I didn’t get much music out of Oberlin. But, that was my fault, not Oberlin's fault.

LEVENSON: Did Oberlin actively teach a service mentality?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, very much so. I mean it was something that was very much in tune with my own background in the YMCA. Service to mankind or service to the community was the highest thing you could do, the most honorable. It was definitely a Christian school.

LEVENSON: Were there any Chinese students during your stay?

J. SERVICE: Yes, there were a few; most of them were older. The Chinese that were there, as I recall, were people who had been to college already in China and were getting what was the equivalent of a master's, or getting extra training. They had been teaching at Oberlin-in-China, something of that sort.

We had a program of sending people who had just graduated from Oberlin out to teach at this school in Shansi province that Oberlin had connections with, an American Board school. Most of the Chinese were from there. I’m not sure that there were any Chinese undergraduates. I don't recall any.

[78]

J. SERVICE: There were people--Oberlin was quite an international school-- people from a lot of different countries. Of course, in those days it was not unique, but it had been one of the first schools to admit Negroes and had been the first school that had women, coeducation, so that it was a school that had a proud tradition of being in the vanguard, progressive, and so on.

LEVENSON: I get the impression that you had a group of B-I-Cs [Born in China].

J. SERVICE: Oh yes. We did tend to cluster together.

LEVENSON: Hang together.

J. SERVICE: Yes. Marty Wilbur, of course, has remained a good friend. Eddie Reischauer was a B-I-J [Born in Japan]. And there was another boy from Japan that lived in the house later on. Also a fellow named Willis from Shanghai that I worked with at Fort Wayne that first year as a laborer.

There were people not only in our class but years ahead of us that were from China. There were a lot of people from China at Oberlin.

But, things like track, of course, took me out of this China group. Not many men from China happened to turn out to be good runners. [laughter]

College Dating

LEVENSON: What about meeting Caroline? You mentioned that you met her on the train on your way to Oberlin in 1927.

J. SERVICE: The group on the train included a girl who was an organizer type. She had a friend from Detroit. I got to be quite good friends with this boy, and he took me home at Christmas vacation. At that time I met the organizer girl’s younger sister. The next year she came to Oberlin.

So, in my sophomore year, I became very much attached to Dollie Hiatt. It was in that year I learned how to dance. I hadn’t learned how to dance until that time.

It was a very serious college crush. I was, you know, very inexperienced and probably very naive, and with my missionary

[79]

J. SERVICE: background and so on, I tended to be serious about these things. I didn’t have any facility at playing games or flirtation.

My mother came to the States, and visited me at Oberlin the beginning of my junior year. She was unhappy, I think, that I had gotten so deeply entangled. She convinced me that I was making a great mistake and that I should break off, that this was the only thing to do.

So in the fall of my junior year for a while I was just sort of drifting around. We all knew quite well a woman professor of English literature named Mrs. Lampson. She was really quite a character, a good teacher.

I and one of my house mates, a boy named Dudley Reed, whose father was at the University of Chicago, used to go around and call on Mrs. Lampson. She encouraged people to do this. We called on her one afternoon and Dudley in a joking way said, "Can’t we do something about Jack here? He doesn’t have any friend," and so on.

Mrs. Lampson said, "Well, you know, Caroline Schulz is an awfully nice girl," and had had some sort of a breakup recently. Well, I hadn’t really thought about Caroline Schulz, but I knew her. She had been at the dormitory where I waited tables. She was a very attractive girl, in a vivacious way, lively way.

Some time after that, maybe--I forge--a week or ten days after that, I just happened to run into Caroline on the campus one day. There was going to be what we called an All College dance. So, I asked her if she would go with me. She looked surprised and said yes. So we started getting acquainted.

From then on things progressed very well through our junior year. But by my senior year not so well because I began to be very serious about studies and what I was going to do. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Some of my professors that I knew quite well obviously took a dim view of people getting married at an early age, of college romances that got too serious.

So by the time I was to be graduated I had chilled things off. This was tough on Caroline. But, it seemed to me to be the sensible and logical thing because you can't get married or you couldn't in those days--till you were settled and established and knew what you were going to do. Why carry on a romance that was sort of hopeless? So, I rather pushed Caroline aside the last part of my senior year.

[80]

J. SERVICE: It wasn’t until late the next year, when she came on a trip to Cleveland and visited Oberlin and I saw her after some nine months, that I decided that this was a mistake. Of course, I’d had a pretty lonely year in Oberlin too. [laughter]

A Fifth Year in History of Art

J. SERVICE: The last semester of my senior year I took a course in art, in the history of art. It was called "History of American Architecture," I think.

The professor was a very fine lecturer, a dynamic sort of a person who had great enthusiasm. It was contagious. He was interested in things like, oh, the Greek revival. There are lots of houses in that part of Ohio, northern Ohio, that were built in the early 1800's, Greek revival style.

At any rate, I thought this was absolutely terrific. This really gets back to my architecture, gets back to my liking for art. I was quite good in art. I had taken courses in practical art which I did well at, sketching, charcoal, things like that, well enough for the teacher to have my stuff shown.

So, I thought, "Well, I m going to come back and study history of art and make a thing out of this." So, I did for a year.

LEVENSON: This was a fifth year, was it?

J. SERVICE: This was a fifth year, after I got my A.B. degree. I went back and I had a job.

My father's grant from the Y was not for graduate study. That had run out, maybe at twenty-one. But, I got a tuition fellowship from the college and a job as a night clerk in the little hotel that the college ran in the town.

LEVENSON: The Oberlin Inn?

J. SERVICE: The Oberlin Inn, yes. At the Oberlin Inn job I worked from midnight till six. This paid my room and board and $2.50 a week, I think, in cash. At any rate I had a good year, did very well.

[81]

J. SERVICE: I did very good work academically. History of art, I found, was not a terribly demanding subject. Actually, I found the year a little disillusioning in a sense because, although I enjoyed it, the approach was very much detail. You identify a painter, for example, by the way he paints trees, the way he paints the leaves of a tree, or just some small detail. Too much of this business of cataloging and identifying. I was taking a course in medieval architecture.

The professor was going away, I think, to give a lecture. He was going to be away several days. So, he said, "Jack, will you take my lectures while I'm away?" So, I said, "Well, I'll have to do a lot of reading and studying." "Oh, no. You don't have to do a thing," he says. "My notes are all here." Of course there were slides. And it’s true. I found out he had all the notes written out for each slide, and he even had the jokes and everything. So that it was really no trick at all for me to take over his course and lecture for him while he was absent, although I had not yet myself gone through that part of the course. In any case, my enthusiasm for history of art chilled somewhat by the end of the year.

I developed the ability to take several short naps during the day. I would work from midnight till six. The day clerk came on at six. I'd go right upstairs and sleep from six until eight. After lunch I would sleep for maybe two hours or two and a half hours. I coached freshmen cross-country, and then I would get to go out to the track and work with them. After dinner I would usually go to the library. When it closed at 9:40 p.m., I would rush back to the hotel and sleep from 9:45 or so until midnight. With these three short stretches I did very well. I got the habit, I mean the ability, to go to sleep almost
immediately.

LEVENSON: That's a wonderful thing.

J. SERVICE: Yes. So, it worked out.

LEVENSON: I imagine it's been very useful to you.

J. SERVICE: Well, I haven't kept it up. [laughter]

LEVENSON: Does that seem like a good place to stop?

J. SERVICE: Unless you’ve got something else

LEVENSON: I was going to ask you about the effects of the Depression.

[82]

J. SERVICE: Well, it was quite apparent by that time, '32, that this was no ordinary Depression, and there was no hope really of my being able to continue graduate study. I'd have to get a Ph.D. in order to do anything with the history of art, either as a curator or teacher, professor. So, I just had to think of something else.

LEVENSON: When I asked about the Depression I was really referring to Oberlin and what effect it had on you and your classmates.

J. SERVICE: A lot of my classmates had a disastrous time. They had to take any kind of job they could get. A lot of them couldn't get any jobs. Some of them went years without finding anything to do. I solved the problem temporarily by this year of graduate study.

I don't remember that it affected Oberlin, the college, very much. I think the college was well endowed. Things went on pretty much in a normal way. I think later on that they may have felt pinched, but by the time I left in '31, '32, it wasn’t hurting the college.

It affected my family, of course, my father, but that's a later chapter, because my father was discharged [from the YMCA].

Oh, there's something I should mention which was an effect of the Depression. In, I think, my junior year when I was still floundering about --

LEVENSON: That was 19--

J. SERVICE: About 1930. I had the idea perhaps of getting a job with the Standard Oil Company in China. I think I wrote them. I may have done that through some sort of office at the college, because they usually sent recruiters around. Oberlin was one of the places the recruiters went.

But, in 1931, which was the next time they were going to come by, they wrote me a letter and said they were very sorry, but because of conditions they were not recruiting for China. So, perhaps it was due to the Depression I didn't end up selling oil for the lamps of China. [laughter]

LEVENSON: That sounds like a good place to stop, don t you think?

J. SERVICE: Okay.

[83]

Three Significant Families; The Yards, the Davies, and the Arnolds

[Interview 3: April 28, 1977]

J. SERVICE: I wanted to get married by this time. I had reestablished my feelings about Caroline. But you know, you have to have a job. So, there was this question of what to do.

My mother was back in the States. I was in Chicago with her visiting the Yards again who I had grown up with in Chengtu.

There are three families that have been woven in and out of my career. One of them is the Yard family. They, as I think I may have mentioned, were a missionary family from Chengtu. Mrs. Yard was my mother's very, very closest friend. There were four Yard girls. One was a little bit older than I was. She died, incidentally, yesterday.

LEVENSON: I m sorry.

J. SERVICE: The three Service boys were sort of in between the Yard girls.

Then, the Davies family. John Davies parents were missionaries in Chengtu. Another family is the Arnold family. Julean, that's J-u-1-e-a-n, Julean Arnold, was a classmate of my parents at Berkeley and then went out to China and for twenty-five or thirty years was US commercial attache in China. He was very well known.

He donated his library to the university here after his death. I'd take out books on China here at the library, look inside, and find a bookplate of Julean Arnold.

He had three sons. One was a little older than I was. The second son was just about my age, then a daughter, and then a younger son. They had moved to Shanghai. They were originally in Peking. But a commercial attache in Peking was almost useless, so the office was moved to Shanghai. I had spent vacations with them during my boarding school days in Shanghai.

I stopped in Chicago and was staying with the Yards and talking with the Yard girls about what to do.

LEVENSON: This was in --

[84]

J. SERVICE: This was 1932, the summer of '32. I wanted to get married; I wanted a job. Graduate study was simply out of the question, physically unfeasible. A Ph.D. would have been a long study anyway .

What Career? Why Not the Foreign Service?

J. SERVICE: So, one of the girls and I'm not sure whether it was Priscilla, the second one, or Elizabeth, the elder; probably Elizabeth--said, "Why don’t you try the Foreign Service examinations? John Davies just took them and he passed."

I don't think I had realized that John had just taken them and passed. At any rate, I hadn't thought of the Foreign Service before. The more I thought about this suggestion, the better it seemed, the more reasonable, logical it seemed. Why not? If John Davies could pass the examination, why couldn’t I?

I was with my parents. We came out to California, to southern California, and there we met the Arnolds who were also Californians. Harrison, my own age, also had taken the Foreign Service exam the same time John did, but he didn't pass. He had gone to a cram school in Washington.

He was very enthusiastic. He was going to take it a second time, that fall, the fall of '32. He was very enthusiastic and encouraged me, but he said, "You can’t possibly pass it the first time. The thing to do is to apply for it, take it this year, but just for practice. Spend this year studying and preparing for it, and then hit it the second time" -- which would be '33.

I didn't like this idea very much, but a few days later we were driving from southern California up here to Berkeley. About midnight we went through Fresno. I happened to see a Western Union. In those days Western Unions were more important and more common, and they stayed open all night in places like Fresno.

To apply for the Foreign Service exam one had to make application six weeks before the date. The date was in September some time. I suddenly realized when I saw this Western Union station that if I was going to get under the deadline, the only way would be to send a night letter.

So, I said to my father, "Why don't we stop and I'll send a night letter from this telegraph office?" I got under the wire.

[85]

J. SERVICE: Eventually I got my designation to take the examination, which I did over here in San Francisco in the Federal Mint building, in the basement room with about twenty other people.

LEVENSON: What appealed to you about the Foreign Service at that point?

J. SERVICE: We'd known consuls in China, some of them quite well, particularly after my parents moved to Chungking. Well, basically it was a job. But it seemed like an honorable, respectable, a good job, a job that would have interest and so on.

Of course, I always assumed if I was going to do it, I would go to China. This I just sort of took for granted. I felt that I had a background that would probably help me. But, I think it just seemed like an attractive, white collar, pleasant job. My father was unhappy about the idea.

LEVENSON: Why?

J. SERVICE: For various reasons. I think he felt that consuls and diplomats generally were inclined to be frivolous persons, perhaps too much drinking and smoking, and too much emphasis on social life, and things like that.

Finally, when he saw I was serious about it later on, he was quite willing, except that he did emphasize his concept of a career, that you make a commitment to it. If you're going to do it, why, really do it. Don’t expect to just dabble in it and try something else. His whole idea was that it could be a career job, a service job in the YMCA sense. If I went into it he hoped I would do it in that spirit.

A Drop-In Student at Berkeley, 1932

J. SERVICE: I came to Berkeley and they didn't know quite what to do with me. I registered as a special student. You could get in apparently at Berkeley in those days without doing it six months ahead of time, because I just came and registered.

They sent me to an elderly gentleman named Barrows, General [David Prescott] Barrows, who had served at one time in the Philippines. Was he governor of the Philippines or
in the cabinet of the governor?

LEVENSON: He was director of education.

[86]

J. SERVICE: They thought he would be the logical person to talk to about how to prepare for the Foreign Service. But he didn’t know very much.

I registered in a couple of courses. I took a course in Chinese. But, mainly I just used the library.

When you apply for designation to take the Foreign Service exam, they send you an old examination. So you have a sample. This gives you some information about it. And I had my friend Harrison who had come to Berkeley then.

I mainly just got out basic textbooks. The exam included international law, commercial law, maritime law. I got basic, simple textbooks, reviewed a lot of history and economics. I used the Morrison Library a great deal. I just holed up in the Morrison Library, as I recall, used that as my base.

I lived in a rooming house which was right where the Zellerbach Auditorium is now. Harmon Gym was just being built across the street. I roomed with another fellow whom I didn't know. We just found ourselves roommates. I paid five dollars a month.

LEVENSON: For a room?

J. SERVICE: Yes. He was a student, but he worked nights as a parking attendant at a night club in San Francisco--they had night clubs even in '32--at a place called Bal Tabarin. He parked cars for people and lived on tips.

There was another boy in the attic there who was putting himself through school by selling rubbers, condoms , to the fraternity houses. It was a rare place!

I ate most of my meals at a place called White Tower which was a very cheap hamburger place on Bancroft. The main gate of the University was then Sather Gate. All that block where Sproul is is all new since then.

I waited tables some at fraternity houses. The Psi U people, my father's fraternity, found out about me and invited me around. But, obviously, we weren’t made for each other.

Finally I got a job on a fairly regular basis as a night clerk at what was then the Berkeley Women's City Club, and is now the Berkeley City Club. They wanted some man there at

[87]

J. SERVICE: night because the upper floors were for women living in residence. So, I would come around--I forget--about midnight and sleep usually for a few hours on the divan, take a swim in the pool sometimes.

The Lake Merritt Marathon

J. SERVICE: One day in the fall, I went out to the track to see what was going on. Brutus Hamilton had just started as coach at Berkeley. This was his first season actually.

He was glad to see an experienced cross-country runner. He was a coach of distance runners himself. He'd been famous because he had coached Cunningham at Kansas, who was an Olympic miler, but not successful in the Olympics.

But, anyway, he was interested in building up some distance runners. The basis, the foundation, for distance running is cross-country. So, he was glad to have an old hand along. I ran with the squad which, as I mentioned earlier, was smaller than the squad had been at Oberlin.

The Lake Merritt marathon came along. This was promoted by the Oakland Tribune in those days. It was misnamed a marathon because it was just once around Lake Merritt, which hardly qualifies as a marathon.

I forget whether it was my idea or Hamilton's, but anyway, I entered and won it to everybody's surprise. I was an unknown, a complete outsider. It had an amusing sequel later on that we’ll mention.

LEVENSON: Who awarded you the prize?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I've forgotten who actually handed it to me. Of course, Senator [William] Knowland was very young in those days. He wasn't in the scene. I was given a nice, a fine, gold watch, which we lost in Yunnan, circumstances still unknown. Caroline hid it away, and it was hidden so carefully that we've never found it since. [laughter]

LEVENSON: You wanted to fill in a few things from last time, Jack.

[88]

J. SERVICE: Yes. One was the summer of 1932, late summer of '32. My family went up to the Sierras, and my father and I walked from the floor of Yosemite valley over to Tuolumne Meadows in one day. This is noteworthy mainly because it was the first time that I outwalked my father. In other words it was a sort of a mile stone. We did, I suppose, about forty miles.

LEVENSON: In one day?

J. SERVICE: Yes. We leapfrogged two camps, you see. We passed Merced Lake hikers' camp, and then Vogelsang and then down into Tuolumne Meadows.

But, the shocker for us was that the valley at Tuolumne Meadows had changed from what we remembered of it when we were there in the twenties. So many people now were going up there that they had had to set out special campsites.

There was a place along the river where my uncles had always camped. So, we simply assumed that we were going to find them in the same place. We got there in the late afternoon, dusk coming on, having had nothing except a couple of sandwiches since early morning, and found that where they used to camp was no longer a campsite.

We charged up and down the valley trying to find them in various campsites. It got darker and darker, and we finally had to go to the Tuolumne Meadows hikers' camp. They were able to give us a cot for the night.

The next day we started out again and found them by going to the ranger station and finding out where they had been assigned.

I was twenty-three and he was fifty-three. So, it was hardly a fair contest, but nonetheless it was a turning point.

Foreign Service Examinations, Written and Oral

J. SERVICE: The exam was in late September. As I said, I took it over in San Francisco. It was a three day examination, three long days, three hours morning, three hours afternoon. First day was all general, which was general IQ or reading knowledge. You read paragraphs of unfamiliar material--complex, technical text--and then had to answer questions about what it said. All

[89]

J. SERVICE: this was done against time. We had a whole section of mathematical problems, but they didn't really require detailed knowledge of mathematics. It was mostly reasoning, analysis in other words.

General knowledge, you know, lists of names. Are they people, rivers? What are they? Then, of course, as I say, you've got law, economics, history, and I think language the last one…

When I came out I thought that I had done all the mathematics and checked them all. I missed one. [laughter] At least, I got my scores, so I know I missed one.

In the three hour exam, the first hour you would do, say, four or five questions. But, you always had a choice. Then the second hour, write two thirty-minute papers, answers to two questions. But, again you had a choice. Then, the final hour was one long question, from a list of topics. I almost always found within the choice something that I could handle pretty well.

I got through the exams with almost no sleep. I can do this for a time. This is really how I got through college by cramming, not by steady work.

I would take the exams in the afternoon and then usually go to a movie show in town and then come home and work practically all night and then go back to the exams the next day.

LEVENSON: I have an addendum. In looking at the names of your references for the Foreign Service I saw Monroe Deutsch and one or two other well known Berkeley names.

J. SERVICE: Monroe Deutsch was an old friend of my parents. I think he’d been in Berkeley the same time they were. But, they knew him quite well.

LEVENSON: Did you know him?

J. SERVICE: On that trip through Europe when I met two teachers who were classmates of my parents, we went to Amalfi. Who should be staying at the same pension in Amalfi but Monroe Deutsch? [laughter]

I knew some of them but I admit some of the names were put in there largely because they were friends of the family rather than my personal friends.

[90]

LEVENSON: You have Robert Sibley.

J. SERVICE: Yes. Again an old friend of my parents. I had met him. I knew him slightly. He had been quite good to my younger brother Bob at Berkeley.

LEVENSON: D. Willard Lyon.

J. SERVICE: D. Willard Lyon was an old worthy in the YMCA. In fact, he was the man who first started YMCA work in China in 1896, I think.

LEVENSON: R. R. Rowley.

J. SERVICE: Rowley, yes. His mother-in-law had been an old friend of the Service family. She had lived with us here at Berkeley when we came on furlough in 1924-25. When my parents went east and they wanted somebody to stay in the house, Mrs. Strite, Rowley's mother, was an old friend of my father's mother and came and stayed in the house with us.

LEVENSON: So there wasn’t really anything very significant about these names?

J. SERVICE: No. I picked one Chinese name there. Chee Su Lowe. I wanted a Chinese name. He was a California-trained mining engineer who had gone out to China to work for the Chinese government on some mining project they had in West China and had gotten into trouble. This was around the time of the revolution.

Like Chinese often did in those days, he had trouble about his American citizenship. I forget what the argument was, but my father succeeded in getting him out, and he was always very grateful. They lived over on Chabot Road here in Berkeley at that time. They were old friends, also from UC Berkeley.

LEVENSON: When did you hear about the results of the exams?

J. SERVICE: It was in December. I had continued at college, at the University [of California], after I took the exams, since I didn’t know how it was going to come out.

LEVENSON: So here we have a list of your grades!

J. SERVICE: There it is.

Levenson: Your average was seventy-nine.

[91]

J. SERVICE: If you got an average of seventy, you were allowed to take the oral. I got in touch with Caroline. Her parents were just outside of Washington at an army engineer school, near Mount Vernon. She knew the man who ran a cram school in Washington. She felt that I ought to come to Washington and go to the cram school.

But it seemed to me that going to a cram school for an oral examination was a waste of time and money. I would have had to borrow the money. The oral examination--I knew something about it by that time--could be anything. They just mainly want to see you, talk to you, get an idea of you and how you react.

I got to Washington just before the examination. The examining panel in those days was very high level. There was the man who was executive head of the State Department, named Wilbur Carr; the head of personnel of the Foreign Service; there was an assistant secretary named Castle; there was a man who was in charge of the exams who had drawn up a new type of examination which they were giving then, which was very different. This was why my friend Harrison had failed because he was there the first year of the new type of examinations.

They asked me all sorts of weird questions

LEVENSON: What sort of weird?

J. SERVICE: If I were offered ten thousand dollars if I could shake Mussolini's hand within ten days, did I think I could do it and how would I go about it? So, I explained very briefly how to get to Rome the fastest way possible and then said that I would go to one of the American newspaper correspondents, and I mentioned there were several there-- New York Herald Tribune or somebody--and explain the proposition to him and ask him to talk to the information minister of the Italian government whom he would have contact with and explain that I would give the money to charity if Mussolini would do this. I said I thought Mussolini would go for the story and publicity.

They said, "You wouldn't go the American embassy?" I said, "Oh, no. I wouldn't go near the American embassy." They were obviously pleased!

They asked a lot of questions--"Who do you think is an important or interesting character in current affairs?" I said, "T.V. Soong." "Why?" Well, of course, I knew that anything you gave you had to know why. You had to be able to follow it up. I said, "Because he has just balanced the Chinese

[92]

J. SERVICE: budget," and I thought that was quite a memorable achievement. T.V. Soong comes into the story later on, of course, but he helped me pass the Foreign Service exam.

Actually, on this whole subject of the written and the oral exams, the fact that I had not known in college what I wanted to study was a great help to me. I had had a very good liberal education, a very broad one, because of the fact that I didn't have any limited or definite career motive. So I took a lot of history. I took a lot of English literature, some political science. I got a basic major in economics. I had a wonderful preparation, quite accidentally, for something like the Foreign Service, for this type of examination.

They asked me, for instance--this was January, '33--"What would be the first thing you would do if you were suddenly made dictator of the United States?" I said I would do something about restoring the price level because of deflation. I explained something about the effect of deflation on the farmer, lower prices. He was losing his land, foreclosures and so on.

They said, "How could this be accomplished?" I said, "One way would be to devalue the dollar, reduce the gold content of the dollar." I don't, of course, claim any originality, but at least a Republican administration--Hoover was still President--accepted my answers!

The man who was the grand wizard, the head of the examination board, who devised the examinations, was a history professor, former history professor, from Princeton named Joseph Green. His question was, "I see by the dossier, Mr. Service, that you’ve had some courses in medieval architecture. Could you please tell me something about the difference between late Romanesque and early Gothic architectural ornament?"

Well, this happened to be the section of the course that I had given the lectures on for the prof that had been away. At that point I could open up and give him a chapter of a book! So, I started in. He said, "Well, I see that you know something about the subject." [laughter] That was the end of that.

The chief of personnel had only one question. He referred to my China background. "If you are successful and are appointed to the Foreign Service, will you volunteer for service in China?" I said, "Yes."

[93]

LEVENSON: When they asked about your upbringing in China was there any implication at any point that they wanted to establish how "American" you were?

J. SERVICE: I don't recall any particular questions about that. Later on, of course, this became very much of a concern.

The written exam was heavily on American history and things like that, so that they knew that at least I could pass muster on that sort of thing.

I think the exam--the questions about the Y were just exploratory--a lot of it is just pulling you out, seeing how well you express yourself, how much you know about anything you're saying. They asked me about how many secretaries the Y had in China, how extensive the work was, something about the history of the Y. I was able to answer them satisfactorily.

I had told them that I could speak some Chinese, and you'll note in these results that my language was terrible. [chuckling, shows test scores]

LEVENSON: What language did you take?

J. SERVICE: I offered French. I had had a little French in Shanghai American School, but it was abominable, so I told them I knew some Chinese. They sent me around to see a Foreign Service officer up in the Division of Chinese Affairs, who turned out to be someone my parents had known and I had known slightly in Shanghai.

He was rather busy and surprised. He said, "Well, I haven’t spoken any Chinese for a long time." A lot of people didn’t keep up their Chinese very well. He said, "Just tell me something about yourself, where you were born, where you went to school, and what you’re doing."

So, I rattled on for a while in my terrible Szechwanese. He said, "Well obviously, you know some Chinese." [laughter]

After the oral, the examiners said, "Wait in the waiting room outside, the anteroom." So, I went back there and--I forget--fifteen or twenty minutes later, somebody came to me, a clerk, and gave me a piece of paper and instructions about having a physical examination at the navy dispensary.

Well, this was a tip-off. If you were sent to get the physical, then you had passed. They didn't tell you officially until some days later. I went and passed my physical exam that afternoon at the Naval Dispensary.

[93a]

ADDRESS OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS TO
THE SECRETARY OF STATE
WASHINGTON, D. C.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
WASHINGTON

REPORT OP RATINGS IN THE WRITTEN PART OP THE FOREIGN SERVICE
EXAMINATION HELD SEPTEMBER 26-28, 1932.

Name of Candidate: John S. Service.

Examination number: 3151.

[93b]

ADDRESS OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS TO
THE SECRETARY OF STATE
WASHINGTON. D. C.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
WASHINGTON
JAN 24, 1933

Mr. John S. Service,

Care of Colonel E. H. Schulz,

Fort Humphreys, Virginia.

Sir:

It gives me pleasure to inform you that you passed the recent Foreign Service entrance examination with a rating of 83.00 per cent, and that your name has been placed on the list of those eligible for appointment as Foreign Service officers.

A statement of your ratings appears below.

Very truly yours,

Chairman, Board of Examiners
for the Foreign Service.

Final report of ratings.

Average percentage on written test . . . . . . 79.00

Oral test …………………………………. 87.00

2)166.00

Average percentage …………………… 83.00

Modern language (Oral) . . . 34.00

[94]

J. SERVICE: Then, there was the question of what to do. I had asked the man who examined me in Chinese for advice. This was January, '33. He said, "Look -- there’s going to be retrenchment in the department. Appropriations are going to be cut. There are simply going to be no appointments of any Foreign Service officers. You've undoubtedly passed the examination since you took the physical, but I can't give you a clue when you may get appointed, how soon."

I mentioned that I was thinking of going back to China anyway. My father was going then and my mother was going to follow later. He said, "Well, that would be an excellent idea. If you go to China, apply for a clerk's job, a clerkship. You'll probably get one if there is a vacancy because you will have saved the Department of State money by being already in China; and the fact that you've passed the examinations and are on the waiting list for appointment will also be in your favor."

So that's what we did. I went with my father to China.

LEVENSON: Supposing you had been offered a foreign service position outside of China, would you have taken it?

J. SERVICE: Oh certainly. I'm sure I would have. Simply that--A job was critical at that time. Almost any other job probably too. I don't know.

Trainee in the American Oriental Bank, Shanghai

J. SERVICE: My father and I had a difficult time sailing because the Bank Holiday intervened and my father couldn't get the money to pay for the steamship ticket. They weren't anxious to take checks in those days since all the banks were closed. [chuckling] But, he had a brother in Berkeley who had a jewelry store down on Shattuck Avenue, L.H. Service, and he helped out. All the old Berkeley people knew L.H. Service.

Anyway, we got on a Danish freighter and got to Shanghai.

LEVENSON: Were you at that point formally engaged to Caroline?

J. SERVICE: Yes. Oh, I'm sure we were formally engaged. After I passed the examinations we had agreed. I'm not sure that I gave Caroline a ring then. I don't think I gave her a ring till later. Even then it was a ring my mother had, that my mother gave me, that I gave to Caroline. But anyway, we considered ourselves engaged.

[95]

LEVENSON: Then, you arrived in Shanghai in 1933.

J. SERVICE: Shanghai was having a deflation. Things were not good in Shanghai. American firms were letting people off. My brother Bob had been to Berkeley, had dropped out--he didn’t like Berkeley, was unhappy--and gone out to China. He had been fired by the company he was working with. He was working as a sales representative for a machinery manufacturer.

There was an American-owned bank in Shanghai, the American Oriental Bank, which was run by a man named Raven. My family knew Raven very well. We also knew a Hungarian who was number two in the bank. Like our architect friend, he was a man who had come out across Siberia from a Russian prison camp. He had stayed in Shanghai and gone into banking.

At any rate, the bank agreed to take me on as a trainee. The salary was $200 a month, $200 Mex. a month, which at that time was--well, less than $100.

LEVENSON: Two hundred dollars what? What was the word you used?

J. SERVICE: Mexican. We'd say Mex.

LEVENSON: Was that the currency in Shanghai?

J. SERVICE: Yes. Well, Mexican dollars, had circulated very widely in the early days of China trade. By this time the Chinese government was putting out is own dollars. But, the word Mexican still was used. You saw Mexican dollars with Spanish, all sorts of different kinds of coins. Most of the coins were now minted in China. But, the phrase when you meant Chinese dollars was always Mex. or Mexican

LEVENSON: I hadn’t heard that before.

J. SERVICE: When you meant American dollars you said gold. You never said U.S. dollars. You said gold, even after Roosevelt devalued.

At any rate, I was sort of a trainee in the bank, working with the Chinese clerks as a teller, learning how to be a bank teller.

[96]

Missionary’s Son Becomes a Social Drinker

J. SERVICE: In April, 1933, soon after my father and I got back to Shanghai, the Arnolds invited me to dinner. Harrison was there also. He had taken the exams that fall of '32, for his second time, and had failed again. He was back in Shanghai. The Arnolds were great connoisseurs of Chinese food, the whole family was wonderful, always had good food, knew the best restaurants.

The noteworthy thing about the dinner to me was that we, the family, drank. We had drinks before dinner, drinks during dinner, as I recall, drinks after dinner. But, it was my first experience really, in a polite and aboveboard social way, with alcohol.

Of course, my family had always been, like most Protestant missionaries, dead set against the evils of John Barleycorn and liquor. At Oberlin it had been absolutely verboten. I had tasted a little bit, you know, like bootleg hooch, bathtub gin.

But, to suddenly find that it was perfectly okay and normal--in fact tasted rather good--was another sort of a milestone in my life. Fortunately, I found I could drink reasonably well. This is useful socially in China because all business, all social affairs, and a lot of other affairs, are conducted at the banquet table, connected with feasts. Finger games, toasting, and drinking is an important part.

Later on I found out, much later, when I was on the Foreign Service selection board in 1949, that there are a lot of people in the Foreign Service that weren’t very successful in handling it. It’s sort of an occupational disease, I m afraid.

LEVENSON: Alcoholism?

J. SERVICE: Alcoholism, yes, or drinking too much.

LEVENSON: Did you ever commit any of the sorts of excesses that some strictly brought up people go in for when they're on their own--binges, and so on?

J. SERVICE: No, I don't think so. In those days, Shanghai, particularly when we were there later from '37 to '41, we went out with a group of young people that drank a good deal at dinner. I've wondered at times: "How did I get home?" But apparently I never disgraced myself. I did enjoy it. However, I always found that when it was not available I could get along without, or I could quit it

[97]

J. SERVICE: I picked up smoking in Peking in 1936 when I was studying Chinese. We learned our characters by having them written on cards. I would study character cards usually very intensively for maybe half an hour. Then I'd need a break and I started smoking. So, I got the habit really from my study breaks in Peking. That's a habit I did get very badly and much worse relatively speaking than drinking. It was particularly troublesome during the war when cigarettes were hard to get in China. [laughter]

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