WEBVTT

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We're going to have to bring stuff with us to make the picture look good.

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Oh yeah, this is the Sony Beta Cam.

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Yeah, everything is Japanese. It's true.

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The cars, the cameras.

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Everything but the ballet.

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Everything but the ballet.

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The microphones are still German, that's right.

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Yeah.

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Or Danish.

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That one over there, not a microphone.

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It's Danish.

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Vang Hulsen?

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Yeah, Vang Hulsen.

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I like the style of them too.

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Can we borrow some fish?

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Right now.

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Alright, here we go.

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Dr. Fisher.

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Tell us the story.

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Dr. Fisher is not my name.

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Dr. Fisher.

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I have you down here a note to ask you about Tom Fisher.

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So I do this and my mind just goes,

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tell us the story of how you met Mrs. Page.

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You want to start that way?

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Well, I guess that's one of the most important parts of my life,

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but I'll have to tell you first, you're talking to a very, very old physician.

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Now if it interests you how I got married in 1930, I'll tell you.

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It began by the fact that I was working in Munich, Germany

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at the Kaiser Willem Institute.

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I can tell you about that later,

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but I got a letter from Ruth, my sister,

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saying that they were going to have an international ballet, Congress.

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Well, since I was an old time Congress goer,

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being in the medical profession,

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I said, well, that would be interesting.

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I thought that at least I could,

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if I didn't know much about the characters,

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I could look at the figures.

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And so I went, believe it or not,

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at this ballet down at the opera house in Munich.

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The thing went for a whole week.

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And one day I was sitting there

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and I saw a very good looking girl sitting near me

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and being young and interested.

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I looked at her and I thought,

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I'll just follow her out and see what the proposition is.

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She ran out and she thought I was a German

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and I knew she was an American, but I wasn't sure.

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And she finally came to Ted Shawn, whom I had known somewhat,

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and Ted introduced me to her.

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And she was naturally a little bit flustered, and so was I.

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So she ran off with a bunch of girls, apparently, to some other show.

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And I thought, well, it's a love-labor loss

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and maybe I'll never see her again, but glad I did see her.

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Well, believe it or not, the next night at the opera,

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she was sitting about three seats away from me.

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And so this time I thought I'd be a little more aggressive about it,

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and I introduced myself.

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And from then on, we decided that love did have an object in life,

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and so we've been married now since 1930.

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And I think she's exactly the right choice.

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So I thank the ballet and the International Ballet Congress for it.

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And your sister Ruth.

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And my sister Ruth, exactly.

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So by many ways, she's impinged on my life,

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although I don't think she really thought that she was going to get me married

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as a result of going to a congress, no.

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What's the first memory you have of your sister Ruth?

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Well, we lived in 1705 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis,

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which is a very middle-class, nice place to live.

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And that was 1901 when I was born.

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I don't remember her for the first year or two.

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But then I became aware that I had a sister and a brother.

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It didn't mean anything to me.

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I think the first time I realized that she was a girl was that when I was a child,

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they sent me to kindergarten at a girls' school called Tudor Hall.

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And then I realized that I was a male, not a female,

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which struck me as a little surprising.

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So I went to kindergarten there, and then they took me out of that place

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and sent me to a public school.

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Then I was aware that Ruth Page wore Peter Thompson.

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You remember Peter Thompson dresses?

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Well, I had to wear one as a kid, and I had long bangs,

86
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and I thought it was god-awful.

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But that's what we all wear because that was the school uniform.

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That was at Tudor Hall.

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So when I went to public school, I thought it was great.

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I could wear a pair of pants.

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Well, the interesting thing to me about that time and my perception of Ruth

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was that she was a nice sort of person to have around,

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but nothing one way or the other particularly.

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But as I look back on the environment in which we lived,

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in many ways it was rather unusual, but I guess not so.

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It was made up of people, many of whom became quite famous,

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like for instance our opposite neighbor was Janet Flannery,

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who subsequently went to New Yorker and was in Paris.

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And farther down the line was Judge Elliott,

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who became the president of a big life insurance company, John Hancock.

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And then around the corner was Meredith Nicholson, who was a well-known author,

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and then there was Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley,

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who lived on Lockerbie Street.

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Well, then there's the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

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Believe it or not, I remember the name of the conductor, Harris Schaeffer.

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Why should I remember that?

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And I can't even remember my own middle name now. I don't know.

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But the whole tenor of life in a middle western town,

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and I guess more so also in the east, was a sort of peaceful existence

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where nobody really worried about teaching you anything.

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You just taught yourself.

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I became aware that I was interested in science and I was interested in medicine,

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and my father used to give me the tonsils he took out,

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and I would examine them and cut them, make sections of them,

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and look at them under a microscope, which I thought was a very interesting thing.

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You were how old when you did this?

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I was about 12.

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When I was nine, he gave me a microscope,

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and he told me, if you learn how to use it, you can have it.

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And I still have it, some 70 years later.

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Well, to get back to Ruth, I think I became aware of the fact

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that she was getting interested in dancing because my mother was showing great interest.

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My mother was a pianist and an artist in her own right.

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And she got Ruth, I think she took Ruth rather seriously as a dancer,

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which of course I couldn't imagine anybody taking anybody seriously as a career dancer.

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And I was only aware of it really when the Anna Pavlov Company came to Indianapolis,

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and in those days they came and they stayed a week or ten days.

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And there were a bunch of good-looking, I thought at that time, ballet girls.

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I even remember the name of one of them, Hilda Butsova.

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I don't know where she ever became.

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I hardly knew her. I mean, I just looked at her, and that wasn't a bad idea.

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But we got to know Pavlov, Caccetti, the ballet master, and a lot of people like that.

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So I began to realize it was a serious business, but I had nothing to do with it at all.

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And I never have. I've always been peripheral,

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even though the fact that my wife was a well-known dancer also, with Ted Shawn.

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And so I've looked at the dance world with curiosity and sympathy and interest ever since then,

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but never having any real understanding of what I was looking at.

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I think the closest I ever came to it was when I was in medicine at the Cleveland Clinic

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when one of the dancers popped his Achilles tendon and took care of him.

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So you see, my relationship was very tenuous with the dance world,

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even though I'd been interested and exposed to it a good deal.

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What was your father's reaction to Ruth's desire to dance?

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Well, he was...

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Could you start and say my father? Oh, go ahead.

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Yeah, my father was an old-time specialist practitioner.

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And you probably wouldn't remember the type.

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He was very dignified, and you never would think of saying no to him.

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He used to come home and he would point out all the things that should be done by my mother and by the servants,

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but he never would do anything himself, because that was not what he did.

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He operated and he took care of people, and you never sassed him back.

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He never said, no, I don't agree with you. You just agreed with him and did what he wanted.

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And curiously enough, I didn't know it at the time, but he took Ruth's career quite seriously.

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In a way, he was like Tom Fisher, Ruth's first husband.

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And he kind of liked the glamour that was associated with ballet

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and paid more attention to it than I did.

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So I think that he and mother both provided a very strong crutch for Ruth's endeavors at the time,

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which in a community like Indianapolis could not be considered very sympathetically.

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People said, you mean to say that your sister is a dancer?

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What do you mean by a dancer? What does she do, the foxtrot or what?

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That was the time when Irene Castle and people like that were, you know, they were the big shots.

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But ballet hadn't arrived really until Pavlova and Diaghilev, people like that, came on.

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And the big shows started in Metropolitan and had things.

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And then it went to the thing, but at the beginning it was at a very low ebb, I'm sure of that.

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So Ruth was, in a way, a pioneer in the whole business.

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I would have said, but I'm no authority on that.

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She certainly was a pioneer. I've often wondered if your mother,

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who obviously was interested in music and in art herself, was a force in shaping what Ruth...

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Yeah, I think she was. And in those days, a young girl couldn't go around alone.

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And you always had to have a chaperone and all that sort of thing.

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And mother did go. And for instance, when Ruth, during the war, my father and my brother both went to the war, went to France.

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Father's a doctor and my older brother is an artillery officer.

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And Ruth and mother went to South America and just left me alone.

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So I was alone during the war.

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But I think this was the sort of thing that mother did, made it possible for, I don't think anybody in those days,

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would have sent a girl of Ruth's age off with a ballet company to South America,

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and heaven knows where they were, they were all over the place, during the war.

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But that was the kind of, I think, moral support that mother gave and made it socially acceptable.

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Are we running out of tape? No, no.

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Was your mother a kind of unconventional person, would you say, Dr. Page, in any way?

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She was unconventional only later on in life, during her active life.

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She did all the conventional things and supported artistic endeavors in Indianapolis and was quite a force.

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You know, in those days, people like that, even though they were not professionals,

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they gave matinee music house and things like that.

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And everybody was supposed to be put in there two cents worth.

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My father belonged to the Indianapolis Literary Club and he was periodically giving papers on Shelley and Keats and heaven knows what.

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All of which has died out, you know.

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The personal affairs of people have been replaced by, quote, celebrities.

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And the world has changed very seriously because the average person who could contribute a lot of their own talents

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doesn't do it anymore because there's always some celebrity around.

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I just point out to you, for instance, in the last scandal, the number of experts that have appeared.

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Heaven only knows why anybody said he was an expert on terrorism.

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We never heard of terrorism, so they became an expert overnight.

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We've got more dietary experts probably than we have diets.

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And so the world has really changed tremendously.

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If you would talk a little bit more and sort of draw a picture and perhaps slightly more detail of what it was like to grow up

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in those days in a house where people really provided their own entertainment, their own artistic sort of...

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Well, I think that, of course, I'm awfully biased on this sort of thing because I'm still very old fashioned

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about what I think people... how they thrive, how they develop.

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And in looking back on it, I would say that we had about as ideal an environment in which to grow up and exhibit our own talents.

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As I can imagine, we were taught nothing.

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In other words, we went to school, we did our homework, nobody helped us on our homework, we didn't have tutors, we didn't have anything.

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And when your time was free, there was no television, there was no nothing, no videotapes, and not even a phonograph.

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You just simply did what you wanted to do during that time.

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And Ruth would dance and it didn't bother me. I didn't care whether she did or didn't.

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I was interested in nature and science, so I spent most of my time looking at the scum from a pond and using a microscope and looking at...

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Is that bothering you?

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You all right now?

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Yeah.

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Are we rolling back again?

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You were talking about the scum from the pond?

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Well, I naturally got interested in microscopy and from that began to get interested in medicine.

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I remember an episode about Otis Skinner, the famous actor, and it was the first time I'd ever seen an operation.

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I was just a kid and my father said, wouldn't you want to come down and see me do a mastoidectomy on Otis Skinner?

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I said, yeah. My most vivid recollection of that was the minute I saw the knife go into the tissue and the blood start spurting, I just conked out completely.

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Fainted dead away. I never saw the operation.

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So I didn't think that was a very good entry to medicine, but that all disappeared and I found that I was not unique.

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But the uniqueness was that Otis Skinner spent nine months living in our house after the operation, and he subsequently had a house here in Hinesport.

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So Cornelia Skinner and I grew up together.

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Well, there's how these interactions... you didn't have to be introduced to people.

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You just found you were living next to one of them or something like that.

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That's the reason I liked it. For instance, Booth Tarkington was a neighbor of ours, and of course I was much younger than he.

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But years and years later a very odd thing happened.

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I got a box of, when I was working at the Indianapolis City Hospital, I got a box of dried leaves from Kenneth Roberts, you know, the famous.

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And he said, I understand you work on high blood pressure, and I think these dried leaves will cure high blood pressure.

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And I thought, who in the dickens is this guy?

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So I fed it to some of my dogs and three of them died promptly.

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And then I wrote back and I said, I think you've got something wrong here.

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And I got a letter from Booth Tarkington, which is an absolute classic, telling me that Kenneth Roberts had gotten a heart attack.

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And he got mixed up and sent me white hellebore, which is a very poisonous plant, and that he had tried it on his wife and made.

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Well, this was the kind of thing that you get when you live in a...

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Now today I would probably never know Booth Tarkington.

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But he knew this and he followed me over the period of years.

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I read the Penrod stories and Otis Skinner read them alive to us.

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I mean, he read them to us. It was in the manuscript.

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You remember Penrod?

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Yeah, could you give me that?