Cousin Bill Llewellyn was the son of Charles B. and Emily Frame Llewellyn. I had not had any contact with him until a few years before my mother died in 2013. We spoke on the telephone and emailed some, although he was not very adept at the computer and preferred the telephone. Eventually I lost touch with him altogether.
He was very fond of Uncle Walt Llewellyn, and deeply missed him after Walt died in 2011. We visited Bill and his wife Consuelo at their home in Hilton Head Island, SC earlier in 2011 where I took their photo. She was Bill’s second wife, after he’d been widowed earlier in life. He met Consuelo through the doorman in their building in Manhattan where they lived. He would have been 104 today! He actually lived to be about 95. I have been unable to find his obituary anywhere.
Bill shared some memories with me and photos which I’ll share in this and further posts about him. He served in WW2 in the Navy. Here is a photo of him in his uniform.
He told me he and Uncle Walt had some youthful adventures together, sometimes during Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia! It sure sounded like they were two rascals.
Bill graduated as an engineer from Rutgers and the university taped and transcribed a fairly lengthy interview with him in 2004 that was posted online here at this link. https://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/interviewees/30-interview-html-text/1480-llewellyn-william
I will go ahead and post the first segment below and follow up later with further installments. Since he told his own story in his own words I’ll let him do the talking. His chuckles were normal in his conversation.
RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY NEW BRUNSWICK
AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM F. LLEWELLYN
FOR THE
RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES
WORLD WAR II * KOREAN WAR * VIETNAM WAR * COLD WAR
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY
SANDRA STEWART HOLYOAK
HILTON HEAD, SOUTH CAROLINA
FEBRUARY 7, 2004
TRANSCRIPT BY
DOMINGO DUARTE
Sandra Stewart Holyoak: This begins an interview on February 7, 2004, in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with William Frame Llewellyn and Sandra Stewart Holyoak. Mr. Llewellyn, first of all, you have my thanks for coming out this morning and taking time to sit for this interview. To begin, I would like you to please tell me where and when you were born.
William Llewellyn: [laughter] I was born on October 16, 1919, in Germantown, Philadelphia. SH: Can you tell me about your father and how you came to be born in Germantown?
WL: [laughter] Well, my father, Charles Benjamin Llewellyn, was born May 20, 1883 in Pennsville, Ohio and grew up on a farm … just outside of Salem, Ohio, and he had hay fever and he had asthma and he could hardly wait to get off the farm. … In those days, the way off the farm was to work for the railroad, and so, he wanted to work for the railroad and the only thing that stopped it was, he was colorblind. … So, fortunately, he ended up much more prosperous … in his later years than he would have if he’d gotten with the railroad, I think. So, he apprenticed as a machinist at the Buckeye Engine Works in Salem and, in later life, … I said, "Don’t you want to have a shop or something like that?" He said, "I had to work with my hands and with tools when I was a kid." He said, "I never want to touch them again."
SH: Really?
WL: Yes. So, he never wanted to go back to them. …
SH: His apprenticeship was in Salem, Ohio.
WL: In Salem, Ohio. I think that’s where the Buckeye Engine Works was. I was … the child of their old age. He was thirty-six, I think, when I was born and my mother was thirty-nine, and so, I heard most of the anecdotes from my sisters, who were … seven and eight years older than I was, knew them [his parents] as younger people and knew more than I did. … So, he finished his apprenticeship and little Quaker kids, in those days, when they wanted to get off the farm and get to civilization, went to Philadelphia, where all the wealthy Quakers lived, and my father went there and got a job. … His first jobs were as night boiler-room operator, this type of thing. … In those days, they mostly had their own generator, I think, and so, there was a boiler and, perhaps, some steam engines operating in some of these buildings and he worked in those. … One of them was for one of the restaurants in Philadelphia and … the Quakers in the community didn’t think it was a good idea for a young Quaker boy to work for a restaurant which served booze. So, they got him a job with Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten Co., who were manufacturing chemists in Philly. One of the things I remember, they refined a lot of quinine in one of their plants there, and so, he worked for Powers, Wightman and Rosengarten, but they were taken over, in 1927, by Merck’s, in Rahway, New Jersey, and then, he was transferred to Rahway. That’s how we got into North Jersey. I remember my mother mentioning once, during a casual conversation with me when I was a boy (probably in my early teens?), that there had been a brief period when she any my father had thought they might be rich! Now I realize that would have been just after the First World War; when they conceived me, and bought the fine colonial home at 202 Elm Street in Cheltenham. They expected to live out their lives there as part of the Philadelphia Quaker community. … But almost immediately, things began to go wrong. My
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mother contracted tuberculosis when I was less than a year old, and had to go to a sanitarium in the Poconos for about nine months. Then we had Cousin Esther Winder move in to run the house and-of course-take care of me. And we always had domestic help after that so she wouldn’t get over-tired and have a relapse. Then in about 1925 or ’26 my pancreas burst one Saturday when he was working in the big vegetable garden we always had. I can remember the ambulance taking him away, and of course-at five or six years-had no idea how close we came to losing him. But they sewed it up, and he never had diabetes and lived a normal life until he was eighty. The final blows to the Cheltenham "dream" were the Merck buyout in 1927 of Powers Weightman-Rosengarten Co. who he had worked for, for many years, as Chief Engineer; and his transfer to the Merck operations in Rahway, NJ as their Chief Engineer.
SH: If my math is correct, you were six or seven when you moved to Rahway.
WL: Well, yes, he was transferred there, but he commuted and we stayed in Philadelphia until 1930 … So, I was ten when we moved to Plainfield, and so, the first ten years, I lived in Philly…
SH: Can you tell me about your mother?
WL: Well, she came east, too. [laughter]
SH: She was also a Quaker?
WL: She was a Quaker. She was born on April 10, 1880 and grew up in Barnesville, Ohio, and Quaker girls, in those days, came east and they got jobs as domestics with the Quaker families in Philadelphia and got off the farm that way. … That’s the only conversations I remember with my mother where she talked about what she did. [laughter] …
SH: Did they meet in Philadelphia?
WL: … They met in Philly. Well, no, they had met in Barnesville, because there’s a "Friends Boarding School" there, that was built in the early 1870’s (The school opened on January 1, 1876 for its first class of twenty girls and twenty-five boys). My mother’s grandfather, Aaron Frame, had been a leading figure in the school’s construction: he led the committee in the local Friends (Quaker) Meeting that decided to build the school; he sold some forty-two acres of his farm, at one hundred dollars an acre, for the school campus and associated farm; he was in charge of construction and the head-carpenter for the original school building! So my mother was closely associated with the school; lived in the vicinity much of her childhood and attended school and graduated from it. And my father attended home the first two years of High School (which was the end of his formal education) … So they surely became acquainted with each other during this period. But my father was three years younger than my mother. So when he was in school there, she was working in the school kitchen, where she stayed for two years after graduating and before moving east to Philadelphia … Where they met again and the courtship began!
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SH: Do you know any of the history of either side of your family, such as how they came to this country or why they became Quakers?
WL: No, I can’t go back very far. My mother got into genealogy towards the end of her life and [her work] traces it back, but I really don’t know anything back beyond … my mother’s grandfather. My father’s father, I never met. He died before … I came along and I just didn’t know anything about his ancestry, that way, no.
SH: You did know your mother’s mother and father.
WL: Yes, yes.
SH: Were your parents from large families?
WL: My father … was the oldest of three. He had a sister, Mabel, and a younger brother, Bill, and my mother was one of, Lura, Emily, Joe, I guess there were three there, too. No, there were four children (My mother was second oldest of four kids).
SH: They did not start dating until they came to Philadelphia.
WL: Yes, that’s my understanding, and my mother’s family, … they were sensitive and quiet, almost arty type of people. My grandfather was a machinist and carpenter and a good craftsman. My father’s family were farmers, I think, and he was a kind of a rough go-getter. … My mother used to talk to me, because … my sisters left home when I was ten, eleven, twelve. I can remember [the] stories she told me and she wasn’t sure she wanted to marry Charlie. He was successful and a hard worker, but he just was kind of a gruff type of a guy, and so, she took a job for a year at the Friends Indian School in Tunesassa, NY … just outside of Buffalo, New York, … the year before they got married and she told me, basically, she just wanted to decide whether … this is the way she wanted to go, you know, and he won out. [laughter] … He visited her regularly and she was a beautiful woman in her time, I think. …
SH: What interesting stories she must have had.
WL: Yes. … Then, they got married on April 5, 1907 back in a Barnesville meeting house, yes, Quaker ceremony, and I didn’t realize how much they were tied to Barnesville until they sent all of us, my sisters and I, to Barnesville for our freshman year of high school.
SH: Did they?
WL: And then, we went the last three years to Westtown School, which was outside of Philadelphia, which was a lot closer, obviously, to where they were living, but, when I got to Barnesville, I remember, I got sick one time and the nurse started talking about my parents and I didn’t realize [that] all these people knew my parents out there, you know. [laughter] … I didn’t realize I was a city boy until I got out there and saw where they’d string a pig up by its hind legs and hit it with a sledgehammer to kill it. … They ran a farm in conjunction with the school, and so, everything was kind of interesting. … I took a walk one Saturday down a dirt road about a
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mile from the school, down a little hollow, and [there was] a little house there and a woman came out and I got [to] talking to her. … Gosh, I can’t think of her name at the moment, but she asked me my name. She said, "Oh, yes, thy father was Charles Llewellyn and thy mother was Emily Frame," and I thought, "My God," you know. [laughter] Her name was Hattie Hartley and years later I found her name where she had signed my parent’s wedding certificate! So she had been at their wedding and I met her in the middle of nowhere! So, we all went there for a year, to kind of find out where they came from.
SH: That is wonderful.
WL: Yes.
SH: Were these boarding schools that you attended?
WL: Yes, they were boarding schools.
SH: Was the school in Philadelphia a boarding school as well?
WL: Yes, yes. The Quakers kind of pushed this boarding school idea, I think, and that’s where we went. [laughter] …
SH: Did you understand why they did that?
WL: Yes, yes. We sort of knew that [was the reason]. … Actually, when my sisters went to Barnesville, eight years before I did, which would have been, … I went there in ‘33, so, they went there in 1925, or somewhere around there, why, the girls still had to wear bonnets when
they went to meeting and it was still the old Quaker plain dress. One of the last holdouts for that behavior by Quakers was at Barnesville.
SH: However, it was coed education.
WL: Always coed yes. The Quakers had coed schools. We treated our women as equals in the Quakers, long before anybody else did. [laughter] Turn that off [for] just a minute.
Since this is where the tape was paused I’ll conclude this first installment. Just a quick attachment of the only email I saved from him. The cute photo he mentioned is one of me sitting in Granddad Llewellyn’s lap playing with his pocket watch when we were at their Indian Lake cottage in the Pocono mountains around 1955.
From: "W.F.Llewellyn" <billcon@hargray.com>
To: "Ed Sager" <esager@strato.net>
Subject: A Long Overdue Visit........
Date: Monday, August 10, 2009 4:10 AM
Dammit Ed, I've been meaning to get a note off to you ever since the "Orange Picking" photos you sent in May. But in my late 80's I seem to get overwhelmed by all this stuff I want to do....... and I end up watching something on the "tube" and not getting anything done! Sorry.
Anyway: I have enjoyed all the pictures you sent, and especially all of those from your archives (you've accumulated some great ones there!). Incidentally, you were one cute little kid!! You must be spoiled rotten! Those pictures of you in Uncle Bill's (I know, I should say "your grandfather's" I suppose?) lap are absolutely about the cutest I've ever seen. And so many of them bring back memories, great memories, of people I knew so well: Aunt Ella (who always started her letters to me in the late 70's when my first wife was sick - "Dear Nephew Bill"; Bob's wife, Jane Hosmer, a really great gal (I knew her at Westtown and her first husband Ernie Foss); and Aunt May was everything a Maiden Aunt should be, I think....
Do your files have anything of the Ohio farm, outside of Salem, where they lived until they came east at various times to Philadelphia? (I can't remember the name of the town right now?) Just curious.
But I have enjoyed the pictures you've shared......... Thanks,
Bill Llewellyn
P.S. Do me a favor and add your phone number to your next note. I'm beginning to think in terms of phoning people more from now on......... It's so much easier than than typing notes?! I signed up for "unlimited nationwide calling" with the local phone company the other day, too. Which makes that option even more attractive (and cheap).
W. F. Llewellyn
7 Salem Rd., Hilton Head, SC 29928
billcon@hargray.com
843-785-2059
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