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Interview #759: Theoryland: An Hour with Harriet McDougal Rigney, Entry #4
Matt Hatch
Now, did you grow up in the house where you live now?
Harriet McDougal
The carriage house
Yes. I began…my first memories are of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My father had been stationed at Pearl Harbor when the attack came, but he was on a troop transport going one way or another from Pearl; I don’t know which way he was headed. He was then stationed at the University of North Carolina running a huge NROTC program. Two years later, he was ordered to the Pacific, and mother brought me back to Charleston; she had bought the house that I now live in—as we say, she had “bought it in” from her sister and brothers when her mother died the year I was born, and Daddy was fortunately at sea, because she took out a mortgage, and if he had been on land, he’d have killed her. He had a horror of debt, and would never have agreed to that, but she just trotted over to the bank and did it. And so we came back—the house was rented, and we lived in the carriage house, which was Jim’s office much later. And then when the tenant—I’ve forgotten what he did; he left Charleston, or he died, or whatever—we then moved—oh, Daddy came home, is what happened—and we moved up to the Navy Yard, which was a huge…it had had forty thousand employees during the World War. He was made acting Commandant of the Navy Yard, and we lived out there for a while.
Matt Hatch
And you held on to the home land, or rented it out?
Harriet McDougal
Yeah, and he was acting Commandant—they didn’t make him full Commandant; he had thirty-seven years in, and they knew he wanted to retire in Charleston because of mother’s enormous family being there—so we moved all the way ten miles down the road. And I never had the Navy experience of bopping from school to school, and all that stuff.
Matt Hatch
How long were you out of the house then, before you moved back in?
Harriet McDougal
I don’t remember. Maybe a year, maybe two years.
Matt Hatch
So it was your mother that owned that; she was the one that went and bought it, and then obviously when your father came back, he was okay with this?
Harriet McDougal
Oh yeah, yeah. And he knew he wanted to retire in Charleston.
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