Parents, Early Childhood, and Education
Hicke
Let's just start with when and where you were born.
Poole
All right. I was born on July 25, 1914, and in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. I was one of three living children. My mother
had another child, another baby, who had died amid one of those flu epidemics that they had in those days, and they didn't
apparently know how to do very much about it.
My recollections are fairly faint from that period of time, because when I was four years old, my parents moved from Birmingham
to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hicke
Let me just stop you right there and ask you a little bit about your parents.
Poole
Yes. Both of my parents had had what was in those days called a normal school education; a normal school education was one
that I think went just a little beyond what would be a high school education now.
Hicke
Teacher training sort of thing?
Poole
Yes, it's like that. My mother taught for a short time. She was having babies, so she couldn't keep it up. My father was an
assistant principal in Birmingham. It was all segregated in those days.
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Hicke
Of an elementary or high school?
Poole
Elementary, yes. I think it was elementary; I'm pretty sure it must have been.
But he had differences with the superintendent. The superintendents of all schools were—if they had them at all, they were
white. And he had some differences with him, and so he retired.
Hicke
And that's when you moved to Pittsburgh?
Poole
He decided to get out of the South.
We moved to Pittsburgh. The only recollection of that I have is that—it was what I later on came to understand to have been
on the train—the coaches were segregated. They would take a normal day coach and they would have a partition. On one side
of the partition would be the white passengers; on the other side of the partition would be the non-whites.
I don't really remember this, but what I do remember is that my mother had some kind of a fur or fur-like coat, and she had
her pillow. I was not quite four, but I slept on the seat, and with this coat over me.
Hicke
This was the train ride from Birmingham to Pittsburgh?
Poole
Yes, I can remember that part of it. And I can remember that when we got to Pittsburgh we were met; my mother had some relatives
who lived in Pittsburgh. They met us somewhere. I can't tell you that it was in the station or whether we went to their house.
We lived in several places in the city. I went to the public schools. I had one brother.
Hicke
And his name was?
Poole
He was older. His name was William. My father's name was William.
Hicke
What was your father's full name, and your mother's name?
Poole
My father's name was William Thomas Poole, and my mother's name was Eva Louise Gayles.
Hicke
Do you have a middle name?
Poole
Yes, my middle name is Francis.
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Hicke
You had another brother?
Poole
No, I had only one brother and one sister. Her name was Marjorie Ellen, and I was the youngest in the family. She eventually
married one of her high school sweethearts, John Morsell.
Hicke
And did your father take up a new position as a teacher?
Poole
No, he never taught anymore. He went into business. The Pittsburgh schools were not segregated. That was one of the reasons
why he moved there.
I can remember pretty much my school days.
Hicke
Oh, tell me about them.
Poole
I can remember the kindergarten days and all the little nursery rhymes that we used to sing, "Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket
full of rye," and things like that. And first learning to write. I had trouble learning to write. I made my characters backwards;
it was one of those things.
But I learned to read early. Before I was old enough to go into the kindergarten, I could read. My mother and my father were
meticulous about teaching us all to read.
But they didn't teach me to write, and so I had a hell of a time writing. I think what the teachers were teaching was the
Spencerian, and that was—my motion of writing didn't go that way, it went the other way. And my characters slanted this way—[demonstrates]
Hicke
To your left.
Poole
Yes, to the left, and they indicated that was absolutely forbidden. So I had a tough time, but I finally mastered how to do
it in a way that was acceptable to them. Except one thing: I never, ever learned to write, make a written "f," the letter
"f."
Hicke
Script, cursive.
Poole
Yes. I can't do it to this day. [laughter]
Hicke
Well, I think that's a minor flaw. Is that why you don't use your middle initial so much? Or maybe I just haven't seen it.
Poole
I use it, yes.
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Hicke
And that would be a capital letter anyway. So you write everything else and you print the "f." [laughter] That's great.
Poole
I just didn't have that knack, and I don't have it. I think at one time I could do it, I could swing fairly well into it,
but it doesn't look like an "f." [laughter]
Hicke
Well, it sounds like you enjoyed school, though.
Poole
Oh, I did. I did like it and had some very good friends. The teachers were pretty good teachers, as I remember them. My recollection
of them is that they were patient and interested in us. You know, they used to read the Bible in school in those days too.
Hicke
That was part of your lessons?
Poole
Sure. When you got old enough. When you were in kindergarten they didn't do it, but when you got to about the third grade,
sure they did. They all did that. As a matter of fact, I found myself interested in the stories that they spun from the Bible,
Solomon. And the Old Testament was great stuff there. Well, they would tell these stories, and I read a lot of it, and I became
really interested in the Bible as literature. When I was in college, I took a year's course in that, and I found that one
of the most fascinating courses I've ever taken. Just as literature.
But if you spend a lot of time on the Bible as literature, you can't help but escape the philosophical aspects of it, too.
That led me eventually into a great love of English literature, English poetry, and then the poetry of other languages. Because
I remember when I was taking this course in English literature, the destruction of Sennacharib was something I've never forgotten
to this day. I didn't remember the name from my grade school, but I remember the story. This is the Assyrians.
So when we were doing this when I was in the third grade, you were just quiet. You didn't ask a lot of questions about it.
But I would go home and I would ask my father about that. He would point out—he would locate that part—
Hicke
On a map?
Poole
—where—they used to call them the children of Israel, in Egypt. They were warned to, I think it was to put the lambs' blood
on the door or something like that, and those that didn't have it were in trouble.
Hicke
Did you ever get a chance to travel to some of the bible lands?
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Poole
No, I have never been to Africa, the African continent. But I thought it was pretty good stuff, you know, that the Lord was
able to handle this thing. [laughs]
"Then the Assyrians attacked, and the Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold." Oh, hey. That used to just make me get
chills up and down my back.
Hicke
That's one thing I think the King James version probably has, is that beautiful language.
Poole
Yes, "...they sure then came down like a wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming in scarlet and gold, and the sheen
of their spears was like stars on the sea where the blue wave rolled nightly on deep Galilee." Oh, I know the whole thing.
That's one of the things I don't forget.
But I did like that. I liked going to school. I had a tough time with mathematics at first, so tough that my teacher talked
to my mother and suggested to her that there were people who would give you special training on that if you wanted—but there
was a charge for it. My mother and father said that they wanted me to do it, and if that's what it was, it was fine. So they
did.
I got over that hump. I didn't have another difficulty until I got into high school, and then I had some difficulty with algebra.
Hicke
I can understand that! [laughs]
Poole
Yes, I had some difficulties with algebra. But they had special courses that you could take after school, and there was no
charge for it. I did that, and I learned the knack of it. The next thing was geometry, and I sailed through geometry. I loved
geometry. But algebra, I had some trouble with it.
I went to high school, which was, oh, I suppose, maybe about a half-mile away.
Hicke
Do you recall the name of it?
Poole
Schenley High School. The grade school I went to was the William H. McElvey School.
Hicke
Did you have music or any kind of after-school sports, other activities?
Poole
Oh, yes, I did. In high school, I was on the track team, and I also had violin. I still have it.
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Hicke
Do you still play?
Poole
No, no. But it's somewhere around here.
Hicke
You had lessons, or did they—
Poole
Yes. I had a teacher named Mr. Beelhart.
Hicke
Oh, good! You remember everything.
Poole
Mr. Beelhart was the teacher, and he lived in a part of Pittsburgh called Bellevue.
I did pretty well in school. I made the honor roll. I enjoyed it, I liked it. I think I had a pretty normal growing up.
Hicke
Let me ask you something about your family activities. Did you have birthday celebrations and—
Poole
Oh, yes.
Hicke
—outings or—what did you do for—
Poole
Well, they had some of these very large amusement parks in and around the city. We'd go to them on holidays and things like
that. My father had two brothers in Chicago, and he would sometimes take us over there. We would spend about a week over in
Chicago. Once or twice, we went to kind of a summer resort that I remember in Pennsylvania, about 100 miles away from Pittsburgh.
It was like a resort, and we would go there.
Hicke
On a lake?
Poole
Yes, there was a little lake up in the Pennsylvania hills.
As I say, I had a lot of friends.
Hicke
Did you have any other relatives that lived right in the—you did have some that lived in Pittsburgh, right?
Poole
But they died. They were my mother's aunt and uncle, and they died. But I had a lot of friends in Pittsburgh.
Then my father wanted to make sure that we got a good education.
Hicke
Yes, they sound very education-oriented, your parents.
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Poole
Yes, and we had lots of books and things of that sort. He loved opera, so we used to—I didn't go to opera as much as I used
to listen to the regular Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan [Opera].
I acquired a real love of music. Not so much opera as he did; I liked the symphony, and I still do. In fact, Charlotte and
I had—well, she died nearly three years ago. We had symphony tickets. First it used to be the symphony played in the Opera
House, and then when they built Davies Hall we continued that. So I guess we had symphony tickets for more than twenty years.
Hicke
You go back to Seiji Ojawa on the—
Poole
Oh, yes. Seiji, he was too—he'd throw that black mane around—
Hicke
Dramatic.
Poole
[laughs] And [Herbert] Blomstedt is kind of a workman. And of course, they built Davies Hall now. We still have seats; they're
good seats, too. They're loge seats, and they're excellent.
But in her last days when Charlotte was too ill to go to the symphony, I would most of the time trudge by myself, and then
it got to the place where I didn't really want to go. We used to have the twelve concerts. I cut them down to six, and much
of the time I didn't use the tickets.
But I've been thinking about it in the last three or four months. I've decided that I am going to go over there to the business
office and tell them I want my old seats back, and I want the full thing, and I'm going to listen to them. And once in a while
I'll take somebody. I'm going to do it.
Hicke
Yes. I think if you don't have those series tickets, you really tend to not go at all.
Poole
Yes. Well, I've had the tickets, but they were the short ones. But I went, and I took a friend of mine who had never heard
"The Messiah." That was great. Then, I had—one of my former associates when I was practicing law—as a matter of fact, he got
me into entertainment law.
Hicke
Who is this?
Poole
Bob Gordon is his name. In fact, he'd been teaching a course over at Berkeley. It would be a course in the law school, I think,
and it would be on music and the practice of music law. [interruption]
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Hicke
Well, we're just unwrapping a platinum record that says, "Presented to the Honorable Cecil F. Poole by Warner Brothers Records
to commemorate more than one million copies of the Doobie Brothers `Toulouse Street.' "
Poole
Yes, they were a client. They had some major litigation against their former manager, who had deserted them when they were
young and decided they didn't have any future. Then when they became famous—this is the one that took off for them.
Hicke
Platinum records are pretty rare.
Poole
And he decided it was not a divorce, it was only a companionate separation that they had had, and so he wanted to come back
to share. He was asking for a couple of million dollars and that sort of thing.
Hicke
Oh, that's impressive.
Poole
I was a tough guy with him, though. I have a gold one, too.
Hicke
Are you going to put that up on the wall?
Poole
It used to be on the wall at the other building, but I haven't gotten it up on the wall here yet.
Hicke
Okay, well let's just go back to high school a bit. Were there any other courses that you particularly enjoyed?
Poole
Yes, I liked languages. I liked Latin. I took two and a half years of Latin. I went through Virgil and Caesar and—
Hicke
"All Gaul..."
Poole
Yes. And as a matter of fact, when I went to college, I took some more Latin—oh, I also took French in high school. I took
the Latin lyric poetry course. Then I got to the place where some of the footnotes were in Greek, so I took six weeks of Greek
so that I could understand what the footnotes were in the language.
Hicke
Was that in high school?
Poole
That was in college. I took Latin and French in high school. And woodwork. But I knew I was going to be a lawyer. In the first
week—the junior high schools were just coming into vogue then. They built a junior high school maybe 300 yards away from my
house. But I had already "graduated" from McElvey School, so I had a choice: I could have left McElvey School and gone to
the junior high school, which used to take them through the ninth grade.
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Hicke
McElvey probably went through the eighth grade?
Poole
Through the eighth. I didn't want to. So I stayed there, and we graduated. Our graduation feature was the story of Rip Van
Winkle. [laughs] That was a great song.
So I went to Schenley.
Hicke
For ninth grade.
Poole
For ninth grade. Then the first week or two, the homeroom teacher had each of us to write down what she or he—
##
Hicke
—you said the home room teacher made you write down—
Poole
What we wanted to do when we got big, when we were grown. Someone wanted to be a doctor, someone wanted to be a carpenter,
someone wanted to be an automobile mechanic, whatever it was. And I said I wanted to be a trial lawyer.
Hicke
How did you know?
Poole
Well, my father had had some litigation, and he had a lawyer. They were arguing over how much money was due—I can't remember
now whether it was due from him or to him—but he had a lawyer, and everybody knew him. He was very popular. His name was William
G. Stanton. He was a little, short fellow in size, but he had a booming voice.
One day, I guess my father had this case and Mr. Stanton was representing him. They were going so well that I said to him—at
night he would tell us what had happened that day—"Gee, I'd like to go." So my father said well, maybe he would take me, and
my mother said, "He shouldn't miss school." My father said, "Oh, he won't miss much." My mother didn't think much of the idea,
but my father said I could go with him.
So I went to the big courthouse down on Grant Street in Pittsburgh. It looked like everything was built for giant people,
you know.
Hicke
Sure. Very imposing.
Poole
I listened to it, and I thought Mr. Stanton was something. He would parade like a peacock around that court. He would make
a statement with his hands up in the air, and he would argue, "I object, Your Honor!"
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Hicke
Put on a real show?
Poole
Best show I had ever seen in my life. [laughter] So I thought about that. I knew that lawyers had cases and they went to court
and all that, but I had never been in a court.
So I told Mr. Stanton when they had a recess or something that I thought it was very good. I enjoyed that. So he said one
day, "I'll tell you what you do. Some time when your father can, I'll take you to one of the other courts." This was a civil
case that they had. "I'll take you to one of the courts and you'll—" because we used to see things in the paper about people
were being tried.
So he did. They wore these robes. That was hot stuff. So as I say, when we wrote this thing— He was a trial lawyer; that is
how he was described, and that's what I wanted to be.
So they had school counselors, and the guy said, "Well, you know, if you really want to be a lawyer, you should take these
classical things."
Hicke
This was high school?
Poole
High school. Sure. So I did. I took algebra, and I took geometry, and I took calculus. Then I took the languages, and then
I took physics.
Hicke
You probably had the usual run of English and history and government and so forth.
Poole
Oh, yes. Yes, I liked that.
So the time came, I finished the Schenley High School, and then there was a question: what was I going to do? My father had
always wanted to go to a university, but he didn't. He couldn't. In his mind, there were only three schools—there were three
universities only: those three were the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Harvard [University].
So when I was a junior, my folks took a tour. My brother didn't go on this, but my sister and I did. We went to Atlantic City,
New Jersey, and we went to New York City, and we went to Boston. They had some old friends who lived there.
Hicke
In Boston?
Poole
In Boston, yes. So we went to Bunker Hill. I remembered the midnight ride of Paul Revere, of course. And then we went to
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Cambridge. I was unimpressed with the masonry at Harvard. [laughter] It just didn't do anything for me.
Hicke
All that red brick?
Poole
Yes, all that red brick there, and then some of the colonial—. So my mother said, "Well, one day, would you like to go here?"
It was too far from home, that was one thing. So I wasn't terribly interested in that.
Well, my brother went off to school, and he went to the University of Michigan. He came back telling great stories of these
romantic things, this awful fun they were having. And I decided that's where I would like to go.
He was four and a half years older. He finished school. He went there two or three years, and then he transferred to the University
of Iowa. Why, I don't know. But he went to Iowa. But he told me so many great stories about high times at Ann Arbor that that's
what I wanted. So my mother thought that I at least ought to make an application to a couple of schools, because if I didn't
get into one, I'd get in the other.
I said, "No, I don't really think so." [laughter] So I went to Ann Arbor, and I thought if I didn't like it after I had been
there for a while, I would think about going someplace else, one of the Eastern schools, like maybe Chicago or Harvard.
Hicke
You did get accepted and all that.
Poole
Oh, yes. I got accepted at Harvard, too.
Hicke
Did you apply to other schools?
Poole
I did apply. I applied to Michigan; I didn't apply to Chicago. I applied to Michigan, Columbia [University]—and I can't tell
you why Columbia now, but I did—Michigan, Columbia, and Harvard, and I got accepted.
Hicke
Before we go on, let's talk more about high school. What about your summer vacations? Did you work or did you travel?
Poole
In the summer vacations, during the time I was in high school, I got a job working on a garbage wagon. So did Billy Eckstein.
Hicke
Billy Eckstein. He was your friend in high school, you said.
Poole
Yes. And Billy got me the job, working on the truck.
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Hicke
Oh! Was he singing then too?
Poole
He had a good voice then, but you know, he was one of those—he would sing at parties or something like that. But I did that
one year, and then my mother didn't think much of that job. So I gave it up.
One year I went to summer school. They had a summer school, and I went there. It was a lot of fun because you didn't have
to do too much. Oh, I got into photography. I began to like photography, and I took a lot of pictures. Some of the pictures
they printed in the yearbook.
Hicke
How did you get started on that?
Poole
Well, my mother went away on a vacation one year, and she brought me back a Kodak camera, you know with the bellows on it?
Hicke
Oh, yes.
Poole
It was just so great. She brought that camera to me when I was in my last year. I was still at McElvey School, the grade school.
Up the street from me, there was a little girl with whom I was in love. Her name was Irma. I had this camera, and Irma said
that her father had a camera. I said, "But this is a special camera."
So I took a picture of her, which didn't come out. [laughs] She was very disappointed, so she told her father about it. Her
father was an electrician. He had a camera. He took one of her, and then told her to call me—we lived only about a block away
from each other—and had me come over, and he took a picture of the both of us. So here we are standing up like this.
Hicke
Straight and stiff.
Poole
Yes. And he took this picture of us. She gave it to me. I kept it in my room.
Then I discovered that despite that act of devotion she really wasn't very much interested in me at all. [laughter] So I thought,
well, the heck with that. But I never did forget my—I always took a lot of pictures.
One summer, I didn't do much of anything. One summer I went to summer school. One summer we traveled.
Hicke
And the other one was the work with the garbage?
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Poole
Yes. You could only do that—because it gets very cold in Pittsburgh, very cold. So I did that.
And you know, what I remember also is going to parties where kids were sneaking off to smoke something which I later knew
to be marijuana. I never—the only time I ever so much as puffed a marijuana cigarette was when I was in the district attorney's
office, and [Governor Edmund G.] Pat Brown was then the D.A. He put me on a special assignment to work with the narcotics
agents, and they would go down Mission Street, and they'd pick up some guy they knew to be a seller, and he would have some
in his coat pocket.
So one of the policemen said to me, "Have you ever smoked one of these joints?" I said, "No." He said, "You never did?" I
said, "No." He said, "Just try it." So he gave me the thing, and I took it and [pffff] it up, and swallowed it. [laughs] My
eyes cried. That was the only time in my life that I've ever done it.
Hicke
And that was more or less in the line of duty.
Poole
By the police, yes. [laughter]
Hicke
When you said Billy Eckstein was one of your friends, what about other friends? Do you recall any of the others?
Poole
Sure. I had a number of good friends. I suppose my best friend was a fellow named Henry McCullen. Henry and I were friends
from before either of us went to high school and still are, only I don't see him very much. But whenever I come to Pittsburgh,
if he knows I'm coming, he'll try to set up a meeting with some of my still-surviving old friends from way back then in those
days.
I can't think of anything that was terribly eventful. I remember when [Charles] Lindbergh flew. That was a great thing for
us that he went in the Spirit of St. Louis. We talked about it for days.
Hicke
How about the economy?
Poole
The Depression came, and they would have bread lines. They also gave away a lot of apples. I don't know why, except that they
were plentiful.
When I went off to Michigan, that was in 1932.
Hicke
So that was the worst of it?
Poole
That was very tough.
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Hicke
Did it affect your friends?
Poole
Yes. It affected everybody. And times were just very tough. I never went hungry, but times were bad. See, what happened was,
in the midst of the Depression, manufacturing went down low, and Pittsburgh—that part of Pennsylvania depended upon the steel
and coal industries. It was very tough.
I remember—that was a bit later though, I guess—I remember a man who was thirty or forty years old, but he was a local intellect.
He became a union organizer, and everybody said that he was a radical. I would see him periodically. When John L. Lewis was
organizing the coal miners, and Phil Murray was organizing the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the steelworkers,
this fellow, McKinney, was an organizer. I would see him, he would have been in a fight. But as I say, he was a very bright
person. He told me that one of these days everybody was going to belong to unions. He said, "And then they're going to get
those wages back up, and people are going to live better."
Hicke
Was politics discussed in your family? Were you ever involved in any politics?
Poole
Not a whole lot. They were discussed on a large, impersonal scale. I guess I wasn't troubled by politics when I was in high
school, although a lot of the kids had family members who were much involved in it, and there was talk about it, I remember
that. But I didn't have anyone who was involved in that. I would just read what they said in the Post-Gazette. Not all of it made a great impression with me.
But all of this time I knew what I was going to do, or what I hoped to do, anyhow. I sometimes thought about teaching. And
to do that, then, of course you had to get a college education and you had to do all that stuff. I was really determined I
was going to go to college. I really didn't question about it. I had good grades in high school.
Hicke
And it came easy for you, or fairly easy?
Poole
Yes, fairly easy. And particularly, I was always bolstered also by the literature things and the classical things, because
I read them for myself.
Hicke
What did you read for your own pleasure?
Poole
We had the Encyclopedia Brittanica. By that time, we had a pretty large house. On the third floor where my brother and I slept,
we had what you'd call now a family room. We had our own music area
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up there, and books on books on books. Everybody read books in my family.
It was a good, big old house we had. It was right over the hill from the University of Pittsburgh campus, and right over the
hill from Schenley High School, too, going that way, and the campus was up this way. Incidentally, eventually the university
condemned—took the house by eminent domain. They spread the campus out and my mother and father had to move.
But as I say, we had lots of magazines and lots of books and things like that. We had the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson
and James Oliver Kirwood. I had both the Latin and the English translation of the Æenead. I knew the whole saga of the Trojan Wars.
I must say that, in that respect, not many of my friends shared that with me.
Hicke
I can believe that. Unusual.
Poole
And I had become already a frequent reader of the Old Testament. I wasn't much for the New Testament, but I liked the Old.
These guys were fighting each other and doing things, and God was punishing them for doing it. [laughs]
Hicke
Good stories.
Poole
Yes, great stories. And I was encouraged to do a lot of reading, and to read different things. My father was a great reader.
Hicke
Did you have a library in the neighborhood?
Poole
There was a library—oh, sure, the Carnegie Library. There was a branch library about three blocks—oh, let me see. From where
we first lived, it was about three blocks. So when I was just about five years old, they would have a story hour. I would
go down, the little kids on little seats, we'd sit there and they would read the stories for us, and I used to like that.
One time someone tried to teach me to draw, but I never was very good at that. It didn't ever come out to anything.
Hicke
It's kind of fun, though.
Poole
Well, when I really was small, I guess I did enjoy it, because I used to mark up a lot of paper. But when I tried to get serious
in reproducing, I didn't do it. So I decided that wasn't going to be it.
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And then I was going to tell you, I became very fond of music, classical and jazz and whatever it was.
Hicke
And you were playing the violin.
Poole
Yes.
Hicke
Did you play in concerts or—
Poole
I played in the high school orchestra for a long time. But I really was never that good on the violin. Other kids were really
tremendous on it. I used to get mad with them, they were so good. [laughter] But enough for me to be able to—and my sister
played the piano, so we could do pretty well.
Hicke
Yes, that's a nice combination.
Poole
And I was going to say, my brother went off to Michigan, and then to Iowa. My sister went off to NYU [New York University].
Hicke
Well, I think that might be a good place for us to stop today.
Poole
All right.