An Interview with Bob Young

Excerpts of an interview conducted in 2015 for a documentary.

Let's start as routinely as we can with family background, and your trail from Dallas suburbs to Cambridge and then London.

It's so clichéd I hardy dare say it to you. My grandfather's father owned slaves. My grandfather became one of the richest men in Dallas because he had a lumber yard in a town that was burgeoning. My grandfather was more or less lassoed by my grandmother who was an orphan who worked in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. She came back with tuberculosis and therefore my granddaddy, who had lots of money, not billions, but, you know, lots of money, decided as was the thought at that time that they should go and live in the mountains where the air is pure. Think of …

The Magic Mountain.

Magic Mountain, thank you. My mother wrote an account of her childhood which is a very moving document. It was typed up for my 70th birthday, a hundred something pages. They lived on this ranch. My grandfather was a monster. When his wife wouldn't sleep with him he got out his six gun in front of the children. And my mother was held responsible for the death of her 16 year old brother because my grandfather became interested in the Farmers' political movement in America at that time and left my mother when she was 16 in charge of her little brother who got ill. My mother rang the doctor who said give him some castor oil. and he died. And they blamed her. Oh, and then when she married my father and they came back from their honeymoon, her sister rang her and said, ‘I'm having trouble with my boy friend,’ who was somebody who came back from the war shell shocked. My mother, who said she had a terrible time on the honeymoon because my mother didn't know anything about sex - said ‘I can't do this now.’ That night the boy friend killed himself. She thought she was responsible [for that death too].

Yipes. What a burden.

So they settled in Dallas where my mother's family was prominent - where they could have be