Ernest Graves
Part I
Lieutenant General Ernest Graves1
The Early Years, 19241946
Q:
General Graves, when you were born in 1924, your father [Colonel Ernest Graves] had
been retired from the Army for about three years.
A:
That's right. He was retired for deafness in 1921.
Q:
For deafness. I remember that they said for disability.
A:
He was quite deaf and that was the proximate reason for his retirement.
Q:
And he went into what kind of work in New York, do you remember?
A:
He didn't do anything at first. He used to go down to the stock market and watch the
ticker all day. He concluded after about a year that he wasn't temperamentally suited
to making money on the stock market. He was a trader at the time.
Q:
Oh, he was?
A:
He was buying and selling stocks for short-term gain, but he concluded that he didn't
have the personality to cut his losses or take his profits at the right time, although he
was a very bright guy. Then he met my mother through his younger brother. His
younger brother, Louis, had been a colleague of my mother's first husband. They were
reporters on the New York Times. My mother's first husband died of tuberculosis.
Q:
What was her maiden name?
1
Dr. Frank N. Schubert conducted this tape-recorded interview with Lieutenant General (Ret.) Ernest
Graves in Arlington, Virginia. The interview took place in eight sessions during February, March, and April,
1985. Both General Graves and Dr. Schubert edited the transcript. The original tapes and unedited manuscript
are in the Research Collections, Office of History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia.
3