Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Laura Laubenthal

J. Taylor Hollist

44 South Belmont Circle

Oneonta, New York

JTH = J. Taylor Hollist
LL = Laura Laubenthal

[Start of Track 1, 00:00]

LL:
This is the December 1, 2011 interview of Mr. [J. Taylor] Hollist by Laura Laubenthal at his home on 44 South Belmont Circle in Oneonta, New York. So, Mr. Hollist, what is your full name?
JTH:
Joseph Taylor Hollist.
LL:
Okay. And in what year were you born?
JTH:
1936.
LL:
Could you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?
JTH:
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but I only lived there for maybe three years. I don’t remember anything about Phoenix. And then we moved to St. Anthony, Idaho because my father lost his job during the Depression. My mother and father were both from the St. Anthony, Idaho area, and so they went back to live with my grandparents.
LL:
How did you end up in Phoenix in the first place?
JTH:
My dad had tuberculosis and he went down there to recover from his tuberculosis. Actually, he had recovered from his tuberculosis before he got married. In fact, he was concerned whether he should get married at all because he had this history.
LL:
Oh, goodness, so he had it more than once or just that one…?
JTH:
No, just the once.
LL:
Oh, okay.
JTH:
The sad part about it is his sister came from Idaho and my grandfather came down to Phoenix to visit him and they were getting ready to go back to Idaho and my dad started coughing up blood because of tuberculosis in his lungs and so forth. My Aunt Nancy, which is my dad’s sister, decided that she was going to stay and take care of him. The sad part about it is, my Aunt Nancy caught tuberculosis and died and my dad survived.
LL:
Oh no! So tuberculosis was pretty common back then?
JTH:
Yes. I was tested for tuberculosis many times during my lifetime because of my dad’s history and so forth, but I never did test positive for it.
LL:
That’s good. Oh, goodness! Well, could you tell me a little about Idaho then?
JTH:
About Idaho?
LL:
Mmhmm.
JTH:
Oh, we only lived there about two years. We lived at my grandparents’ home at a place called Parker, Idaho, which is near St. Anthony. Then, my dad bought two acres of land in Wilford, Idaho, which is near St. Anthony also. He moved a house onto the property with the help of neighbors and some horses. I remember the horses pulling the house, sliding the house on timbers, I guess, like telephone poles to the place and my dad…they cut it up and did it in two sections. We lived in that house for a couple years.
LL:
How many horses did it take to pull that?
JTH:
I don’t remember exactly, but seemed like I remember two really straining it. It was the first time I had ever seen horses strain like that to pull, you know, really work horses. I was very impressed with that.
LL:
My goodness. While living there did you work on the farm, or what did you do?
JTH:
Well, it was before grade school and we had a garden, but I don’t remember too much more. There was a canal out front; that’s the canal part of Idaho. I used to throw rocks into the canal and I remember one rock skipping on the canal and hitting my sister and breaking her tooth.
LL:
Oh no! Where did you go after that?
JTH:
My dad got a job at Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City, Utah. That was an army hospital for World War [II] and the soldiers who were in long-term care would come to Bushnell Hospital and of course it’s closed down now. It was an intermountain Indian school after it was a hospital and my dad worked in supply, I think, in drugs and so forth. He had bookkeeping experience. He had gone to business college down in Arizona. He got a degree from a business college.
LL:
Oh, okay. So he wasn’t associated at all with the army really, he worked for the hospital?
JTH:
He worked for the hospital. He was a civilian working for the hospital.
LL:
All right.
JTH:
And our school burned down between my fourth and fifth grade. I watched it burn down. I had nothing to do with it, but…
[laughter]
LL:
What started the fire?
JTH:
Well, they think it was paint. Paint containers and rags or something like that, that’s what they think. It burned down completely and so we went to what remains of Bushnell Hospital. It was closed down by this time. So I went down there to school in the fifth grade. The sad part about it was I took my geography with an east-facing wall and it should have been a north-facing wall. And to this day, my map directions are turned around from what they should be. I have two sets of map directions. One is the way I feel and one is the way it is on a map, which I get along with okay, but…
LL:
So east is your north usually?
JTH:
Yes, yes.
LL:
Wow.
JTH:
Now, most people don’t have direction bearings like that, but in Utah the mountain range runs north and south and so we were very direction-oriented between north and south. The mountains keep us direction-oriented there.
LL:
Wow. What kind of activities did you do out in Utah with the mountains?
JTH:
Well, I lived in Utah until I got married. Even five years after I got married before I moved here to Oneonta. What activities did I do? In Brigham City, I went to church every Sunday, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. What I enjoyed most about the church was the Boy Scout program and I became very interested in Boy Scouts. I hiked with the scout troops and our patrols in the mountains of Utah and that’s why I became a scout leader here in Oneonta, because I enjoyed Boy Scouts so much. I served as scout master here in Oneonta for twenty years.
LL:
That’s great. Were the scouts affiliated with the church here in the area, or…?
JTH:
Yes, yes.
LL:
Okay.
JTH:
I had the church scout troop here in West Oneonta. Although, we had some people in the scout troop that were not members of our church…part of the scout troop.
LL:
Could you tell me a little bit about how you met your wife?
JTH:
How I met my wife?
LL:
Mmhmm.
JTH:
I met her when I was attending Utah State University in Logan, Utah. We had a class together…psychology class together. She knew my sisters before this time at Weber State College. I have two lovely sisters. They’re still wonderful people and I don’t think she would’ve looked at me a second time if she hadn’t known my sisters.
[laughter]
LL:
What is your wife’s name?
JTH:
My wife’s name is Suzanne.
LL:
And what are the names of your sisters?
JTH:
Martha and Nancy.
LL:
Okay.
JTH:
We just celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary just this last summer and all our children were here.
LL:
Oh, that’s great.
JTH:
You can have that. This is our Christmas card for this year. [See photograph of greeting card with family photo on the front.]
LL:
Aww.
JTH:
That’s our family. All our grandchildren and our children and their spouses all came to Oneonta. We spent one day at [The] Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown and one day at our lakefront property, which is on Goodyear Lake, near Milford Center, New York.
LL:
How many grandkids do you have?
JTH:
We have fourteen grandchildren.
LL:
That’s great.
JTH:
Actually, there’s one grandchild that did not come. He is eighteen years old and he’s adopted and he has a mind of his own.
[laughter]
LL:
Aww. Could we talk a little bit about your career? When did you first become interested in math?
JTH:
I’ve always done well in math. In grade school, numbers and writing down numbers were always easy for me. Multiplication tables and addition has always been easy for me. I did have trouble with story problems in ninth-grade math, but other than that, I have always done well in math. I wanted to be a high school math teacher, and so when I went away to college, my first degree was in secondary education with math and physics minors. But when I went to graduate school, I didn’t want to do it in education. I wanted to do it in straight math, so I went to graduate school for five years at the University of Utah. And I majored in math. My main professor was in geometry, so I got interested in geometry and that’s what got me my employment here in Oneonta at Oneonta State College. [It] was in geometry, because I had this specialty in geometry.
LL:
What made you decide to study M.C. Escher?
JTH:
I went to a talk on M.C. Escher at Syracuse University at a math conference one evening. It was actually an evening and Saturday conference. The main speaker, what do they call them, the keynote speaker, was a Professor [H.S.M.] Coxeter from [the] University of Toronto. He said he had corresponded with Escher. So after his talk, I went up and said, “can I come to Toronto and look at that correspondence with M.C. Escher that you have?” because this is my history bent in me in searching all these things in history. He said he’d given his correspondence to Cornelius Roosevelt of Washington D.C. When I was down visiting my sister in Virginia, which is right next to Washington, D.C. …in fact, my brother-in-law worked for the United States Information Agency. I called Mr. Roosevelt on the telephone and talked to him for over an hour, because he had been an M.C. Escher collector. He told me he’d given all his correspondence and all his collection to the National Gallery of Art. So I went over to the National Gallery of Art and they couldn’t find his collection. But, I was insistent that he gave it to them and then they looked at their gifts, and sure enough, there was the gift, it’d just been stuck in the basement and they hadn’t even cataloged it yet. I went there for two weeks. Later, I went down there for two weeks on my sabbatical and studied and they gave me free reign of all the stuff that he had collected and all the correspondence with M.C. Escher that were there. He even gave me free reign of the copy machine there. I could copy anything that I wanted. First, they thought maybe I was just someone off the street there for five or ten minutes, but when I would come back day after day, the minute they would open in the morning I would be there and I would stay until they closed at night… except I would go out for lunch with my brother-in-law. He worked about two blocks away from the National Gallery of Art. That worked out real well. I would ride in with him in the morning and ride back with him at night. I’d stay at my sister’s house and she would always pack us a lunch.
[laughter]
LL:
Aww. That did work out well!
JTH:
Yes, it did.
LL:
How long did that whole process take you, chasing around trying to find those letters and researching?
JTH:
Well, they found them within an hour of when I was there. Yeah.
LL:
What was the gap of time between Toronto and finally getting to them at the National Gallery?
JTH:
Oh, probably within a year.
LL:
Okay. And then, what did you do with the research you did?
JTH:
All the research?
LL:
Mmhmm.
JTH:
I published it in various journals; gave talks on it at math conferences. My first publication was in a journal named Leonardo out of Berkeley, California. I submitted to the Math Magazine and they rejected it. I was doing some research at the University of Utah and I noticed this journal Leonardo there on the shelves and I said “Oh, that’ll fit exactly.” So, I sent my article to them and they had some good suggestions for revision, which I revised and then they published it.
LL:
Do you know why the first university rejected it?
JTH:
It was a quarterly journal.
LL:
Oh.
JTH:
No, I don’t know why they rejected it. Usually when they reject it they give suggestions for improving the article. I was a referee for the Math Teacher for many years and we usually gave suggestions for improving the article. There was once, I reviewed an article for the Math Teacher and it was on the difference between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning and I could tell that the person that wrote the article didn’t know the difference between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. I told him so and gave some examples of inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning and then six months later, I reviewed the article again and he hadn’t changed a single thing in the article. This time, I rejected the article. We have three [categories] when we review articles for the Math Teacher. You can either accept the article, you can reject the article, or you can accept the article with suggestions for revision.
LL:
Oh, okay. So, the first time was it accepted with suggestions?
JTH:
Yes, the first time it was accepted with suggestions, yes. It was easy to reject it a second time, since he didn’t accept any of my suggestions. He didn’t know the difference between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning, which is both a very [big] part of science and mathematics.
LL:
Right. What type of math concepts did you talk about in your paper that you wrote for Escher?
JTH:
I’ve written four articles on Escher. The one article was mathematical in nature and the title of that one was “Mathematical Symmetries in the Art of M.C. Escher.” And there’s examples from this book you brought called M.C. Escher: Visions in Symmetry by Doris Schattschneider. For example, if you take this one here, a symmetrical drawing of, how many people are there? Three different colors, right? [See first symmetry work of art.]
LL:
Right.
JTH:
Three different colors. He has his construction lines for doing the people in this. If you notice if you do a half turn about this point here at their heads, it’ll map into itself, is the term we use in mathematics.
LL:
Okay.
JTH:
If you slide it, from say, this point to this point, that’s called translation symmetry. The other one is called rotational symmetry. Now, there must be some, I’m trying to think if I can see any other type of symmetry in this figure or not. There’s rotational symmetry, translational symmetry, and oh yes! A horizontal line down through the middle, if you reflect it over that line, it’ll map into itself.
LL:
Okay. I see that.
JTH:
Also, a vertical line down through the center of it, if you flip it over, let’s see, will it map into itself? Yes. Yes. This figure, let’s see. No it won’t. Maybe this one here? Oh, yes. A vertical line will map into itself, not the same color though.
LL:
So the blue turns into the orange and white to blue?
JTH:
Yeah. The light maps into the blue and the blue maps into the light. Yes, that’s what I was trying to do. [Note: ‘white’ and ‘light’ refer to the same figure depicted in the artwork.] Same color mapping.
LL:
Okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s all the same color except for that one.
JTH:
You can do a multiplication table with these. You can do the rotations and the translations and the reflections and you do a multiplication table. Let’s see, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at these, in fact I’ve never looked at this one in that light!
[laughter]
LL:
Oh!
JTH:
Say this one, let’s see, if I flip this one over here and translate it to there, see, you can see this better than I can. This one will flip into that and translate into that, same of that one. Then, this one, can I rotate that one around that through some center? I don’t know. I can translate it. Well, anyway, you can do vectors here too. A vector is a directed line segment. So say you take the person’s nose and you take another person’s nose, and from that nose to that nose is a vector: a directed line segment. Then you can go from this nose to that nose and that’ll be another vector. You can do what’s called a linear combination of those vectors. A whole number times vector 1, from that nose to that nose, plus another whole number from another vector, say, from that nose to that nose, we’ll call that vector 2, and you can let the ‘a’ and the ‘b’ vary over the integers. You know what an integer is? An integer is a whole number, positive or negative whole number, and zero is part of the integers. You can get what we call an infinite set of translations. You assume the whole plane is covered by this figure, not just the part you see, but it continues on the whole Euclidean plane, as we say. [It] varies over the integers. Let the ‘a’ and ‘b’ vary over the integers and that will also be a vector. We’ll call it vector 3. That’s some of the mathematics you can do in Escher’s art.
LL:
How do you think Escher decided how big to make his pieces, considering it can span over the entire plane?
JTH:
Well, he made two trips to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. There are tilings made by the Moors there, and he made sketches of those tilings. Then he would put animal shapes in those tiles. The Moors didn’t believe in making diagrams of any living thing, so in a sense he [Escher] was going against their religion. I don’t think it bothered him at all.
[laughter]
LL:
Is that something he often did? Pictures with living things in his patterns?
JTH:
After his second visit. He went to the Alhambra in 1926 and 1936 and after his 1936 visit, he started making these symmetric figures of tilings. We call these tilings. They’re also called, what’s another name for them? A mathematical term…tiling is a mathematical term though too. My memory’s losing I guess. Now here’s one that people thought had translation and glide reflection symmetry. [See second piece of symmetry artwork] See the birds flying to the right and the birds flying to the left. What ruins it from having glide reflection symmetry: the birds flying to the right, their tails point up, and the birds flying to the left, their tails point down, and that ruins the glide reflection symmetry. This has only translation symmetry in it.
LL:
Oh, okay. So there’s no other term for what that would be then?
JTH:
No. We have only one type of symmetry in this with the birds flying two different directions, interlocking. It’s called a tiling. But only translation symmetry exists in that one.
LL:
Did he always keep the tile grid pattern in the piece when it was finished or did he eventually erase the [lines]?
JTH:
This is from his notes anyway, they’re always that way. Doris Schattschneider went over to Holland to study Escher’s symmetries before she published this book. She has all his notes, see, with all his sketches. That’s why Escher is not accepted as a great artist by the art world because he was not afraid to use a ruler or a compass in making his diagrams. It’s mathematicians and chemists and physicists, crystallographers, that Escher appeals to.
LL:
Okay.
JTH:
Now I gave a talk at a symmetry conference in Washington D.C. years ago on symmetry and the art of M.C. Escher and I had a head of the chemistry department from, what school was that? Chemistry department of, what’s the Ivy League school that’s in New Jersey?
LL:
Princeton?
JTH:
Princeton! He was chemistry department head and he was interested in Escher.
LL:
Oh! Hmm.
JTH:
I was talking to him and giving him some of my findings and the head of the conference says, “No! Don’t do that!” He got me and said, “Don’t do that! He’ll publish your work. You need to publish it!” I said, “No, no. I’m not worried about that.”
LL:
What’s the attraction for chemists in Escher’s work?
JTH:
Chemists and physicists I think are interested in crystals and crystallography. Some of Escher’s stuff, he gets his ideas from crystals. One of his first conferences that he went to was the Union of
[Start of Track 2, 30:00]
International Crystallographers. Crystallographers have classified their crystals and given them names. Well, actually, they’re symbol names. They’re not “name” names. There are symbols and various kinds of symmetry in those crystals. Escher got ahold of one of their publications and it fascinated him and that’s when he started doing some of his symmetric drawings.
LL:
Okay, I can kind of see almost a crystal-type pattern in those.
JTH:
Yeah, yeah, in those. Uh huh. Now this particular one here, Circle Limit III, when I first saw that, I said, “that is the most beautiful example that I have ever seen of the Poincaré Model for the Hyperbolic Plane.” [See third piece of symmetry artwork.]
[laughter]
LL:
Could you explain what that is?
JTH:
Yes. Little did I realize when I saw it that that’s where Escher got his idea, was from the Poincaré Model of the Hyperbolic Plane. The Poincaré Model for the Hyperbolic Plane…hyperbolic geometry is a non-Euclidean geometry. Okay, we usually think of Euclidean geometry as the geometry of this earth, that we live in, you know. That’s what Euclid did, was try to create his axioms to fit our world. Well, Euclid had a postulate, fifth postulate that was long and drawn out. It’s called his parallel postulate, and everybody said that should not be a postulate, that should be a theorem. Do you know the difference between a postulate and a theorem? A postulate is something you accept without proof. It’s your basis for your reasoning, is a postulate. A theorem is something you prove from your accepted postulates, or axioms. Historically, people thought Euclid’s fifth postulate should not be a postulate, it should be a theorem. So, they tried to prove it as a theorem, and in doing so, they ended up with developing what we now call non-Euclidean geometry. Or, hyperbolic geometry is one of the non-Euclidean geometries. Poincaré had a model: lines with these curves and points were points within this circle. And he developed his Circle Limit Three from, maybe there’s a picture in there somewhere. He got his idea anyway, from Poincaré’s Model. I’m fairly certain there’s one in here, but I don’t see it right away in this book. Maybe if I look in the index under “Coxeter” I’ll find it. [inaudible] Coxeter was the one that had a model, Poincaré Model of the Hyperbolic Plane, that Escher got a hold of. It was triangles. Triangles got smaller and smaller as you go to the edge of the circle, and so, Escher put in these fish in those triangles. When I went to Coxeter’s talk at Syracuse University that night, he said this point here in the center is no different than this point here. See, there’s four fish wings [that] come together here and four fish wings come together here. I almost made a fool of myself and said, “Eh, nah, that’s not true.” If I do a half-turn about this point here, it maps into itself, but if I do a half-turn about this point here where four fish wings come together, it doesn’t map into itself. So, it can’t be the same. As I was driving home, I said to myself, “I’m thinking in the Euclidean sense, he’s thinking in the hyperbolic sense! In hyperbolic geometry. He’s not thinking in Euclidean geometry. So, he’s right.”
LL:
Hmm. Okay.
JTH:
If you do a half-turn about this point here, it’s the same as doing a half [-turn about this] point here. If you think hyperbolic rather than Euclidean.
LL:
Does hyperbolic [geometry] have to take place within a circle?
JTH:
Well, no, it doesn’t. It’s just that this is a model to fit the axioms.
LL:
Okay.
JTH:
There’s more than one model that fits the axioms.
LL:
I see. Well, thank you for telling me about that.
[laughter]
LL:
Could you talk a little more about being a professor at SUNY Oneonta? What did you do there?
JTH:
I taught calculus, I always taught a geometry course, ‘cause that’s what they hired me for. Sometimes I’d teach two geometry courses, but always one geometry course. The only upper-division courses I taught were geometry and modern algebra. Linear algebra I taught upper-division courses in, linear algebra II; abstract algebra sometimes we’d call it. They needed some help in computers. Back in those days, computer science was in the math department. So, they needed some help in computer science, so I did teach a few computer science courses, mostly programming. Programming in computer science fits mathematicians very well. They like code. I had a hard time going from DOS, which is “Disk-Operating System,” which is all computer code, to Windows, which we all use now. I didn’t have control. And using computer code, you have control over what happens. When you go to Windows, you don’t have that much control. You can do a lot of stuff, of course, in fact, you could do marvelous things as time went on, but…
LL:
About what time were you using DOS?
JTH:
When were we using DOS?
[laughter]
JTH:
In the 1980s?
LL:
Okay. Interesting.
[laughter]
JTH:
I think I have my years right. Disk-Operating System.
LL:
Would you say that that’s a way that the college evolved, shifting more towards computers while you were there?
JTH:
Yes. When I taught programming languages, I always knew more than the students and I could always do more than the students, but in Windows, sometimes the students knew more than I did. They could do better at it than I could, so I didn’t really care to teach Windows-type courses. I got out of computer science teaching when it became more Windows [-oriented]. I would still teach Basic language, or Pascal language. There’s other languages [that] came along, but by then, I was out of computer science. So I always taught math.
LL:
Was geometry your favorite type of math?
JTH:
Yes, geometry was my favorite. I never got tired of geometry. In all my years…
LL:
What did you get tired of?
JTH:
Oh, I got tired of pre-calculus courses, like trigonometry or algebra. I get tired of algebra, but I never got tired of geometry. I never got tired of calculus either, but anything below calculus once in a while I’ll get tired of teaching.
LL:
What were some rewarding moments that you had while teaching?
JTH:
Some rewarding moments? Studying M.C. Escher and giving talks on M.C. Escher at math conferences; publishing on M.C. Escher, learning about him. I spent fifteen years studying his life and what he did and so forth. The highlight of my career was going to an M.C. Escher conference in Rome, Italy. I was invited to give a paper at the Italy conference. You must know that the conference was not sponsored by the art department of the University of Rome. The conference was sponsored by the math department of the University of Rome. That shows you the math department’s interest in M.C. Escher. They originally had it in Rome because Escher had spent some time in Rome. When he graduated from college…let me backtrack just a little bit. He wanted to go to college and major in art and his father thought that art was a waste of time. That was a useless thing to major in. So they had an agreement that he would major in architecture. Well, when he got to college, he really majored in art, not architecture, M.C. Escher, that is. After his graduation from college, he and his friends took a trip to Italy. They went all over Italy, and all his friends ran out of money within a week, but Escher seemed to have some kind of inheritance. I don’t know where he got it, either his parents or his grandparents or somewhere. [He] had some money to stay and he did landscaping. Now, if Escher would have stayed with landscaping, he never would have become a famous artist. Because he diverted to symmetries, impossible figures, things that change…the pictures change as you look at them, from convex to concave. Or, as you go around the figure, things look in and then they look out. Impossible objects that he created is what fascinates people, mostly college students to this day.
LL:
That’s very true. So, how did your life change once you retired, after working so hard on Escher?
JTH:
I changed my emphasis of research to Mormon history after I retired. Since my retirement, I’ve been retired now…eight years. I’ve spent all my time doing research in Mormon history, mainly along the Susquehanna River. Joseph Smith was married in Afton, New York, which is only about forty-five minutes from here, and he worked for two farmers down there. He met his wife in Pennsylvania, which is just across the border into Pennsylvania and so that has interest to me. I feel like I’m the authority on Susquehanna River church history.
LL:
Could you give me a little background on your religion? I’m not too familiar with it.
JTH:
The Latter-Day Saint religion?
LL:
Mmhmm.
JTH:
Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York…he was living in Palmyra, New York. [see Mormon map of New York and Pennsylvania.] He was a young man and there was a lot of religious revivals going on in the area. Palmyra’s up near Rochester, New York. He read from the Bible. His family were Bible-reading people. In James, “if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God.” He [Joseph Smith] said, “Well, I lack wisdom. I don’t know which of all these various religions I should join.” His mother joined the Presbyterians and he kind of favored the Methodists. So, he went into a grove of trees to pray, and he received a vision that he was not to join any of the churches of that day; that he was to present a new religion, which ended up being the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormon is just a nickname for that church. In Ohio they were having a lot of success with converts in the Cleveland area. Because the Smith family lost their home in Palmyra, because they missed a mortgage payment, they were out actually seeking work and so forth. They moved to Kirtland, Ohio, which is near Cleveland, Ohio, and that’s where the headquarters of the church was. The church was originally organized in Fayette, New York, which is up in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Then, they went to Missouri and finally to Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons formed a community in Nauvoo, Illinois, which became as large as Chicago at the time. They made a mistake of voting the same as a bloc, because they were the dominant numbers in that part of Illinois, they controlled the elections, because they voted as a bloc. Then, they would be with the Whigs one time and with whatever the other party was, either the Republicans or the Democrats another time. They didn’t do too well. They were not well-liked and they were driven out of [town]. That’s when Joseph Smith was killed. He was killed. They jailed him. Then, a mob stormed the jail and he was killed. That’s when Brigham Young took over leadership of the church and they went to Salt Lake City. And the reason they went to Salt Lake City was [because it was] a place no lived, or no one wanted. There was a man by the name of Sam Brannan, who took a boat of Latter-Day Saints from New York City all the way around the end of South America and back into San Francisco. He went and met Brigham Young in Wyoming. They hadn’t gotten to Salt Lake City yet, and he [Sam Brannan] tried to talk Brigham Young into coming to California. He thought California was the place to be. Brigham Young said, “no no, we need to be where no one else is and [no one else] wants [us].” So, that’s why he settled in Salt Lake City. And Sam Brannan went back to California and he became California’s first millionaire. He made his money on railroads and hotels. He didn’t mine gold. He made his money in the gold rush times. He bought the gold. He sold the miners whiskey and supplies, and he had hotels and places to house them. So he did very well and he ended up having railroads. Well, Sam Brannan’s big fault was he liked women and whiskey, which is both against our religion. His wife divorced him, and she demanded half of what he owned in cash. That ruined him, because what he owned was not cash, but railroads and hotels, and [so forth]. There’s a place in California called…can’t think of the name of it…he was going to call it the Saratoga of California. He was trying to imitate Saratoga, New York as a resort place. He was drinking and he slurred his words and said “Calistoga,” or something like that. Anyway, so the name of that town is that today. He ran a railroad up to that. There’s some hot springs there. I visited the place and of course the historical museum there has all about Sam Brannan.
LL:
What was your goal in traveling to these different sites?
JTH:
Which sites are you referring to?
LL:
Any of the Mormon sites.
JTH:
Oh, any of the Mormon sites? Well, I’ve always been a history buff, so I try to learn the history behind them and visit them.
LL:
Does it give you a deeper connection to your religion to see where these things happened?
JTH:
I think it does, yes.
LL:
In what order did you go to these different places?
JTH:
Well, when I moved here to New York, of course Mormonism started up in Palmyra, New York, so I visited that right away. Harmony, Pennsylvania, near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, is where Joseph Smith lived and translated the Book of Mormon, so that was of interest to me. Then, I learned about Afton, New York, where he was married…Josiah Stowell, who Joseph Smith worked for, and Joseph Knight, who he [Smith] worked for. I learned about them later, actually within probably the last fifteen years, where their homes were and where their farms were. I learned about them recently. Joseph Smith convinced Joseph Knight and Josiah Stowell that he was to receive the plates for the Book of Mormon. They were up in Palmyra the day before he was to receive the plates. Joseph Smith was not given the plates. He had to meet the angel at the Hill Cumorah at the same time, September 27 I believe it was, for four years before he was to receive the plates. I guess he had to prove himself, that he was worthy of such a task of translation.
LL:
Did you say you also went to Nauvoo?
JTH:
Yes. My wife and I served a mission at Nauvoo. 2005 [to] 2006. Now, Nauvoo is a little bit like The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown. They have a blacksmith shop, a brickyard, and Joseph’s Smith’s home is there, Brigham Young’s home is there. John Taylor’s home, who was the third president of our church, is there. Heber C. Kimball’s home was there. He was a counselor to Brigham Young in the first presidency of the church. I worked in the blacksmith shop there. I wasn’t very good at it, but I did hammer a few pieces of metal to demonstrate for the people who would come there. I worked in the brickyard and we made little sample bricks to give people. Back in those days, they had a kiln that they built. We had a kiln of today like they [brick makers] do. An oven, I guess you’d call it. I worked in the Jonathan Browning gun shop. Now the Browning guns, the automatic rifles, and all the automatic machine guns and so forth, they were invented by his son, John Moses Browning. John Moses Browning was born in Ogden, Utah and his father joined the Mormon church in Illinois and moved to Nauvoo and had a gun shop there in Nauvoo. Now, Jonathan Browning in Nauvoo, this is before the day of bullets. John Moses Browning, who was born in Ogden, Utah, his automatic guns had bullets like we have today. So, it was interesting to work in the Jonathan Browning gun shop and demonstrate. He was a really good blacksmith. He made his guns by old-fashioned blacksmith methods. We’d demonstrate, we didn’t actually do it, but we would demonstrate what he did. We had samples there of what he did. They had a tin shop in Nauvoo. We didn’t actually make tin items, but we had tin items to demonstrate with that were made somewhere else. That’s what Nauvoo is, a place a little bit like The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, except there’s a religious side of it too.
LL:
Okay, so all of those buildings, were they placed together or were they originally set together in that location?
JTH:
No, no. They’re in the same places they were when the [Latter-Day] Saints were in Nauvoo. The Brigham Young home has been restored. They had some place in Virginia, the historical place in Virginia…
LL:
Williamsburg?
JTH:
Williamsburg, yeah! They had some of the [historical] architects from Williamsburg come there to Nauvoo and do some of the archaeological diggings, to find out where the outhouse was of Brigham Young’s. First time I went to Nauvoo, they were doing archaeological diggings, you know like they do with the trenches, to find out where the outhouse was, and then they built an outhouse there. They found out where the cistern was and they put a cistern in there. They had a root cellar, found out where that was and put a root cellar there. Because most of Brigham Young’s home was still there, but it had been added to since Brigham Young lived there. So what they did was they tore off the new parts and made it back to where it was when Brigham Young lived there.
LL:
What did they find in the archaeological digs? Any small artifacts?
JTH:
Well, they would find the china that was in the outhouse or wherever they put it; the broken china. Then they would buy china of that make and put it in the Brigham Young home.
LL:
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
JTH:
And other homes too.
LL:
Did you say that your wife went with you on the trip?
JTH:
Yes, after we retired.
LL:
Okay. And what did she do while in Nauvoo?
JTH:
Same thing I did. Well, she didn’t work in the Browning gun shop, but she worked in the Brigham Young home, would do tours in the Brigham Young home. The Women’s Relief Society was organized there and she would give tours of that. There were some sites we would call men’s sites and some sites we would call women’s sites. The Browning gun shop was very popular with the men and women gave tours in the homes.
LL:
Makes sense. What else have you done as a retired person?
JTH:
I got interested in what I call CCAL: C-C-A-L. That stands for Center for Continuing Adult Learning. I am now the treasurer of that organization. We offer courses at Oneonta State and Hartwick College here in Oneonta. Courses of everything: poetry, Shakespeare, history courses of all types. I’ve given a course on Escher, M.C. Escher. I was requested to give a course on fractals. A fractal is something that’s self-similar. What are some examples of something that is self-similar? Many trees grow in a self-similar pattern. The branches of the trees grow that way. If you look at one branch, it’s similar to another branch, except larger. The similarity, it [does] have to be the same shape, but not necessarily the same size to be [a fractal]. So fractals, there’s fractal geometry too. It’s computer-generated geometry.
[Start of Track 3, 60:00]
I was asked to give a course on that, which I did. Can I think of anything else about fractals? Your cell phone has a fractal in it. The antenna of the cell phone is a fractal. See, you need a long antenna. If you didn’t have a fractal antenna, you’d need a long antenna coming out of it like in your car. The antenna of your car is a long antenna. But if you do the fractal, if you zig-zag around with your fractal, you make the pattern the same. I’m not doing it too well, but you get the idea. You don’t need a long antenna. That will take the place of a long antenna. So, they use those in cell phones. That’s one example of a fractal being used…in cell phones. [See hand-drawn fractal example.]
LL:
I see. Who teaches the classes and who takes them? Anyone who’s willing?
JTH:
Yes, anyone who’s willing.
[laughter]
JTH:
We pay $120 a year to join this organization. That hires us a[n] executive secretary, who organizes the courses. We pay her. I was just doing the budget. [inaudible.] Our administrative council is meeting tomorrow and I’m getting the monthly financial report ready for them. I just was working on it. The Francis Rowe House in Oneonta on Maple Street is used by non-profit organizations. There must be close to a dozen non-profit organizations that use that home. CCAL, we have an office there in the home. We share it with FOF. What does FOF stand for? Future of Oneonta Foundation. We share a bedroom actually, an old bedroom in the house upstairs. We have computers in there and telephone and so forth. Our executive secretary works three afternoons a week: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. She organizes the courses. Now, there are men lawyers and doctors from Cooperstown that have taught courses. What’s his name? Heinz? Heinz? I’ve taken courses from him on history of Cooperstown. The Cooperstown historian has taught a course. I’ve taken a course or two from him. I’ve taught courses on Escher and fractals, as I said. Mostly retired teachers teach it. You don’t have to be retired to join the organization, but most of the people that join it are retired. Those are the ones that have time to take the courses. The courses, well except for the fee of $120, are free. We offer courses in hiking. I’ve taken at least three of those, hiking the trails in the area. And what other kind of courses do we offer up there? Anything imaginable. Oh! We also do bus tours.
LL:
Where do you go on the bus tours?
JTH:
We’ve been almost everywhere. We always take one every summer up to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center for the ballet. We took a tour to Buffalo. We were in Buffalo two nights; bus tour in Buffalo. We were going up there to see whose architecture?
[laughter]
LL:
Frank Lloyd Wright?
JTH:
Frank Lloyd Wright! [laughter] Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. That’s the main reason, but we also got to see things in Buffalo. City hall, took a tour of that. We walked down the streets of Buffalo from our hotel. I usually call it [the] Holiday Inn in Buffalo. We were right across the street from…[what] president was killed in Buffalo, MicKinley? Which president was killed in Buffalo? He was killed at the expo. The International Expo was held in Buffalo. Electricity was the emphasis. All that power for Niagara Falls…
LL:
Okay, Tesla? Was it the Tesla…
JTH:
Tesla had a lot to do with alternating current and electricity. Transporting electricity over power lines. That’s part of the Niagara Falls. There’s a monument of Tesla up there, in the Niagara Falls area. We didn’t go to Niagara Falls on this trip. It was just a Buffalo, New York trip we took. I’ve taken some other tours too. We studied the Oneida colony, on one of our tours. We took a [trip] up to Oneida, New York. You’re familiar with the Oneida colony probably?
LL:
Oh, I haven’t been, I’ve just heard of it.
JTH:
Okay, the Oneida colony is…well, he believed [in] free sex, you know, in the society. As long as Noyes was heading it, it went very well. Oneida Silver came from that. Noyes thought that marriage was promoting jealousy. If you have free sex, you don’t have jealousy. [laughter] That’s what we learned in the course anyway! But, of course Noyes lined himself up to the more beautiful women too.
[laughter]
LL:
Oh no!
JTH:
But, anyway…okay, another question, I guess.
LL:
You say that you watch your grandchildren a lot. What are some activities that you do with them?
JTH:
Well, when we’re here we go outside and swing a lot. We have a playhouse down there at the other end. They go in there and play and I go in with them. They like the backyard. Let me tell you something about that playhouse down there. It’s a white one, if you could turn over to the right there. [See photograph of white playhouse.]
LL:
Yeah.
JTH:
My son and I moved that from a neighbor over here. It belonged to a neighbor and his daughter. He saw that we had a young daughter, and this was years ago, and he said, “would you like it?” I said, “oh, sure.” It’s a nice little playhouse. And I was going to cut it up and then put it back together. Then, I said, “oh, that’s too much work.” My dad said you could move anything on pipes. So, I put boards down on the ground and put pipes on the ground and we rolled it on these pipes, my son and I. We did okay until we got to the indentation across the street where the road kind of indents down. You know, that’s the way roads are. They have a little place where run-off water can go. We got it caught in there. We couldn’t move it. We were just pushing it by hand. Then two other men came along walking around the circle. There’s people walking around the circle all the time here, ‘cause that’s the way it is. This used to be an old race track, by the way, for the fair. Belmont Circle used to be the old race track for the fairgrounds here. To these other two men we said, “will you help us push it?” And the four of us were able to push it out of the indentation in the side of the road. Then I jacked it up there and leveled it up and put cement blocks underneath it.
LL:
That sounds just like moving the house in Idaho!
JTH:
Oh, yes, yes! [laughter] Except that was a bigger house.
LL:
How many of your kids still live in the area?
JTH:
Only one. She lives in Binghamton. She’s working on her doctorate. She’s applying for a job right now. She’s supposed to finish up her doctorate in May, so she’s applying for jobs right now. So, she probably won’t be in the area, unless she’s…she’s applying to Oneonta State in the math department. Unless she takes that job…
LL:
Where do your other kids live?
JTH:
I have two that live in California, one that lives in Utah, and two that live in Illinois. We went to Illinois for Thanksgiving. Our one daughter in Binghamton went with us and her family went to Illinois. So, we had a big gathering in Illinois for Thanksgiving, which was very nice.
LL:
Yeah, that is nice. It must have been nice to have your fiftieth anniversary and have everyone together.
JTH:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The nice part about it was we had three good days, you know. No high humidity and warm and it was wonderful.
LL:
When was this exactly?
JTH:
It was in June…no, July. We were married in June, but our children wanted to go to the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York. So, that’s why we had it in July, because that’s when the pageant was.
LL:
What is the Hill Cumorah Pageant?
JTH:
The Hill Cumorah Pageant is American’s witness for Christ. It is actually a story of the Book of Mormon that’s portrayed on the hillside there for two weeks, I guess. Well, people that participate in it are there two weeks. Two weekends and the time in between is really the Hill Cumorah Pageant, [of] lights and music on the hill. Our family had been in the pageant as, what do you call it? Not staff…participants in the pageant. Cast members, I guess we call ourselves.
LL:
What roles did you play?
JTH:
I played Mormon one year. I played Lehi’s Guard one year. I played Vision Lehi. There’s three Lehis in the play: Vision Lehi, Wilderness Lehi, and Boat Lehi. I can’t remember if that’s the right term or not, but we have the same costume on and they just shine the lights from this part of the hill to this part of the hill. So, I was Vision Lehi one year. What else have I played? I played Crowd. I played Disciple of Christ. Our family’s [been] in it eight times as cast members.
LL:
Would that be eight different years then?
JTH:
Oh, yes. In fact, we didn’t go every year. We would be in it one year and then we would take off two years and be in it again. They like to give lots of people opportunities to be in it ‘cause they have a lot of people. They may have three thousand applicants for sixty, I mean six hundred, positions. Six hundred people. It’s a six hundred cast and they probably get two or three thousand applications for the six hundred.
LL:
That’s amazing! If the cast is so large, how big is the crowd watching?
JTH:
The crowd watching is probably ten thousand.
LL:
Oh, wow!
JTH:
And it’s open-air.
LL:
Does everyone sit in the hills, or is there like a…
JTH:
No, they have chairs. Folding chairs that they put out. No, they’re not folding chairs. Just chairs.
[laughter]
JTH:
They’re interlocking chairs, I guess.
LL:
Wow, that’s amazing. Was there anything else that you would like to tell me?
JTH:
Anything else I’d like to tell you? Lately I’ve been doing research on Francis Rowe. I’ll give you this folder on her. [See photograph of Rowe materials.] This CCAL organization I belong to is a non-profit organization and she gave the house to the city of Oneonta for their use. I said, “what kind of a woman would do this?” So, I’ve been doing research on her lately. This has been my last maybe, half a year. I’ve been working on her. This is some of the material I’ve found on her. I had a hard time finding a good picture of her. This is the best I’ve found. It’s out of a newspaper article. All the dots in the newspaper article show up when you enlarge it.
LL:
Pixels?
JTH:
The pixels, yeah, show up. But that’s the best picture. She went to Oberlin College in Ohio: music school. They sent me some group pictures of her. I was looking for a better picture than that, but they sent me maybe three group pictures of her, maybe more than that. One, two…there she is right there. She’s in there. Yeah, these are different pictures of her from Oberlin College and some other correspondence. I visited her grave up in Oneonta Cemetery here. She started Oneonta Community Concerts, which is now going on in Oneonta. So, she’s always been a community person. Her dad owned a business in town: a crockery business, a grocery business. They sold all kinds of house wares and stuff. She worked in that, especially after her dad’s death she was head of the business. Her father was director of Wilber Bank. So, when she died, her estate was estimated to be [worth] nine million dollars. Six million of that was in IBM stock.
LL:
Wow.
JTH:
So in a sense, she died as a wealthy lady. She had no children. She was married for seven years, but she got divorced and had no children. She had three nieces that got close to three million each…I mean, a million each, for a total of three million. The rest of her estate went to places like the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and Salvation Army, and all kinds of organizations around Oneonta. In fact, I’ve got a listing of them here in this one paper here of all the organizations. Her estate after she died went to Fox Hospital, College Adelphi, College at Oneonta…let’s see, Pathfinder Village, YMCA, Hospice, Catskill area Hospice. Oneonta Community Charity, I think that’s her home. This home is maintained by Wilber Bank, or now, Community Bank. The heating bill, snow removal is all paid for by that. The people that use the home, the non-profit organizations, use it rent-free. That’s why I became interested in her, is because the organization that I belong to, CCAL, was using her home. I just wanted to learn more about this lady…what kind of lady would do this.
LL:
Well, that’s very interesting. Thank you so much for participating in this interview, Mr. Hollist.
JTH:
Okay, you bet.
[END, 79:31]

29:59 - Part 1

29:59 - Part 2

19:37 - Part 3

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