Henry Grimball (interviewed by Lisa Hayes on January 5, 2024)

Henry Grimball (interviewed by Lisa Hayes on January 5, 2024)

2024-01-05

Henry Grimball was born in Charleston in 1948. The Grimball family has long connections to South Carolina and to the Library Society, going back at least to the “brick” membership of Nathaniel Heyward in 1835. Mr. Grimball relates stories of his ancestors’ lives and discusses the legal careers (including his own) of three generations of Grimballs. He and his father both served as Trustees of the Library, and, as President, Henry Grimball led the charge to buy the Ripley Ravenel Building, current home to the Library’s staff offices, the vaults, Buxton Books, and the Igoe Shakespeare Library.

Hayes, Lisa

Cox, Danielle

MP3

Audio

English

HenryGrimball_OralHistory_20240104

1:55:42/105.9MB

Raw
0:00:00 Henry Grimball

--slammed with books.

0:01:00 Lisa Hayes

Is that right?

0:02:00 Henry Grimball

Yeah, and I don't need people to have given me lots of books and I've got more books that I can read in the rest of my lifetime. And there are books that interest me and so I haven't had the need to come here. I used to come here once a week and get books.

0:17:00 Lisa Hayes

Is that right?

0:18:00 Henry Grimball

That's right.

0:19:00 Lisa Hayes

And now you have your own collection at home.

0:21:00 Henry Grimball

I've got a collection and there are lots of things I'm interested in reading and another problem that libraries have now is Kindle. I had one of the very first ones and I use it and my wife started to use mine as fast fall so I gave one for Christmas so I can have mine back.

0:42:00 Lisa Hayes

I love my Kindle too. Do you know the Library Society has a subscription now that you can borrow books that way through us?

0:49:00 Henry Grimball

I didn't know that.

0:50:00 Lisa Hayes

You don't have to just do it through the county library.

0:51:00 Henry Grimball

I didn't know that. Yeah. I didn't know that. I'll have to find out how to get that done.

0:56:00 Lisa Hayes

If you need help navigating it just give me a call.

1:01:00 Henry Grimball

All right.

1:02:00 Lisa Hayes

Good. All right. So my name is Lisa Hayes. I'm the Special Collections Librarian. And I'm here today speaking with Henry Grimball. I'm here at the Library Society. It's January 5th, 2024. And just want to thank you for your time today.

1:19:00 Henry Grimball

Happy to be here.

1:20:00 Lisa Hayes

Thank you. So, Mr. Grimball, tell us, tell me, about your childhood. I know you were born here in Charleston.

1:22:00 Henry Grimball

I was born in Roper Hospital on August 23, 1948.

1:34:00 Lisa Hayes

Was that when the hospital was on Colonial Lake?

1:37:00 Henry Grimball

No, the hospital was at that point up at Calhoun Street. I asked my mother about that. I was her second son. I have a brother Billy who is two years older than I am. He was born there as well. We were all born there, all four of us, but I asked her what it was like and she said, "All she's ever said is, 'Son, it was hot.'" No AC. No AC. Can you imagine? Labor? And I was a big boy.

2:05:00 Lisa Hayes

And you were one of four?

2:06:00 Henry Grimball

Four boys.

2:07:00 Lisa Hayes

Yeah.

2:08:00 Henry Grimball

William, my older brother, he's the one that I mentioned, has the brick, which I think I think he's the only one that's still in existence. And he's two years older, once September 3, '46. And then my younger brother Arthur is four years younger than I am. And he was a rogue. Instead of going to Sewanee, he went to the University of Virginia for undergraduate and became a heart surgeon. My brother Frank is 10 years younger than I am and Billy, myself, and Frank, all lawyers. We got the rogue heart surgeon.

2:51:00 Lisa Hayes

Did you all go to Sewanee?

2:53:00 Henry Grimball

Except for-- - Except for-- For Arthur, all three of us went to Sewanee.

2:58:00 Lisa Hayes

Well, so where did you live downtown? And what did your parents do?

3:04:00 Henry Grimball

Well, we lived, to get you oriented, you come up Logan Street, Lakeside Sweatman's was on the right, right there on the southeast corner. It probably wasn't Lakeside Sweatman's back then, something else, same sort of thing, drug store. And diagonally across the street, there are now three or four townhouses on the northwest corner. Back then there were three or four big frame apartment houses. There were houses that had been divided into apartments and we were the second or third house from the corner of Broad and Logan on the north side of the street. Right behind us was Short Street and we had, my mother corrected me before she died, I said we were on the second floor, we were on the third floor. No elevator, so it was a walk up. And when I was born, we lived on Greenhill for a short time. We lived with my grandparents, Judge William Grimball and his wife, Panchita, on Colonial Street for a short time and got the apartment on Broad Street. And I was there when I was three, four, five years old. When I was six years old, my dad, he did something that was in the vogue at the time. He wanted to live in the suburbs. He had an opportunity to buy my great grandmother's house on lower Church Street, 26 Church, which he didn't do. He could have bought that house for $15,000 in the mid-50s. And instead, he built a house for somewhere around 20. Over in South Windermere, we were the third house. The roads were dirt and we could do anything we wanted within reason. We hunted, we had shotguns and we went crabbing down on, it was now Rebellion Road, old houses and then that was a mud flight back then and there was a little creek we crabbed at. And that's where we grew up and my mother and father lived there until his death in 1999. And a year or two later, two years later, she moved to Bishop Gadsden and she died December, a year ago, at age 100. And she was Frances Lucas Ellerbe. Her grandfather was Governor of South Carolina. Her father was a lawyer and a colonel in the Army. He was in coastal artillery in both wars and wound up in the Darwin Peninsula in World War II. She had one brother, William Hazelden Ellerbe, and he went to the Citadel. When he went to the Citadel, she came down there and became a secretary on Broad Street. She was a high school graduate. She loved Broad Street, and that's where she met my dad, who was a lawyer back in the late '30s, early '40s, right before the war. And Bill, her brother, was a Citadel grad and became a B-29 pilot eventually in World War II. He flew the hump for a while across Himalayas. That's very dangerous. A lot of planes were lost. And then he was stationed on Tinian, where they engaged in the spring of 1945 in five major bombing raids, incendiary bombing raids over Tokyo. And he was killed in the last one, May 26, 1945, there were upwards of 500 B-29s. There's a book that's been written about it called Black Snow and I've read it not long ago. It's written from the vantage point of the pilots and the people on Tinian and from the recipients of the bombs and it's terrifying.

7:19:00 Lisa Hayes

Is your uncle mentioned in that book?

7:24:00 Henry Grimball

No, he's not. He was a major in the Army Air Corp, when he got killed. And so mother married a father in 1943 in St. Michael's Church and was essentially a housewife the rest of her life. I used to think that wasn't any big deal, but it's one of the hardest jobs on the planet. I have a granddaughter now, Eliza, who's two on February 3, and when I take care of her, it's a full-time job. On the other side of the family, William Grimball, the judge, my grandfather, was the only circuit court judge in the 9th judicial circuit for about 35 years. And that was a big job back then. Now there are lots and lots of circuit court judges. It's not as impressive a position as it used to be. And he was married to Panchita Heyward. They were cousins. His middle name was William Heyward. It was Heyward and she was Panchita Heyward. She was born and raised on a Wappaoola plantation up in Berkeley County on the west branch of the Cooper River. One of the, I think that was the last plantation of Nathaniel Heyward. Nathaniel Heyward, who, he was, I think, my sixth great grandfather, maybe seventh. Nathaniel Heyward was a half-brother to Thomas Heyward, who signed the Declaration of Independence. He was buried down in Bluffton. Nathaniel Heyward had nineteen plantations from Beaufort to Georgetown, and he was the largest slaveholder in the history of the South, which is an unfortunate part of our family history, but that's the way it is. He owned over 2,000 slaves.

9:22:00 Lisa Hayes

And a member of the Library Society

9:23:00 Henry Grimball

Not only a member of the Library Society, he was a participant in the move of the Library Society to a brick building. I believe it was a building down on Broad Street where the legal department of the city is now.

9:37:00 Lisa Hayes

Yes, you're right, the corner of Church and Broad Street.

9:40:00 Henry Grimball

Church and Broad, that's the northwest corner. But anyway, the people who did that, the financiers were given the brick, which is a permanent free membership in the Library Society for as long as you held the brick. My brother Billy has that brick now. He lives up in Norfolk.

10:01:00 Lisa Hayes

I've never seen one of those bricks before.

10:06:00 Henry Grimball

It's just a little certificate, maybe eight inches by five inches, and it's in a frame.

10:13:00 Lisa Hayes

It's a piece of paper. It's not a brick.

10:18:00 Henry Grimball

It's just a little certificate, maybe eight inches by five inches, and it's in a frame. It’s a piece of the Library and I wish he’d give it to the Library because things like that have a way of getting lost. But so that's the Heyward side of the family and believe it or not my great-grandfather John Grimball, who was a Naval Academy graduate, at the start of the Civil War. He resigned his commission and became an officer in the Confederate Navy. He fought on the Arkansas, which was an ironclad on the Mississippi River. It had a bad engine. They went through the Federal Fleet on the way to Vicksburg and tore it up, one of the worst defeats of the United States Navy ever. But they got to Vicksburg and the engine didn't work there. Well, they eventually scuttled it and he came through Charleston to Bermuda to Liverpool where he got on what became the Shenandoah, which was a raider that went around the world, went around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia, up into the Arctic Sea. It was a hybrid. It had a steam engine. It had three masts. So you could sail and be powered by steam, which meant that when it got up into the whaling fleet, if it was a calm day, it could steam and the whalers couldn't move, which meant that they stopped and burned over 30 whalers, much to the chagrin of the United States government, which was on their trail. And they were nearly caught up in the Arctic Circle when the ice started to form. But they got out, got down off California, stopped an American ship, and were told that this was in July, that the war had ended in April. And so they disguised the ship as a merchant ship and went back around Cape Horn up to Liverpool and turned it in. He came through Charleston but didn't stop there because there was no reason to. This place was on its back that was just devastated. And so his mother was Meta Morris. And her papers are up at Chapel Hill. But she was like the fourth granddaughter, great grandchild of Lewis Morris who signed the Declaration of Independence and his son Colonel Lewis Morris was the aide de camp to General Green in the revolution in South Carolina in 1780-81 which was a terrible time. It was after Yorktown but horrible. Families against families and just a mess.

13:19:00 Lisa Hayes

Just going back right quick to the Shenandoah, did your family give us the logbook? You know, we have the logbook for the Shenandoah here.

13:30:00 Henry Grimball

We had it. So it had to come from my father.

13:32:00 Lisa Hayes

You did it, yes.

13:34:00 Henry Grimball

Yeah. It had to come from my dad. But anyway, he went on up to New York because Lewis Morris, whom we refer to as the signer, owned Morrisania. And Morrisania is now the Bronx. And they were a very wealthy, influential family up north. And so he practiced law in Manhattan for years and made a good living and then finally came back to town. He had a house down on, down close to what's down Murray Boulevard on the western side of the city. That house is gone now and all that was filled in and made streets and more land for the development of the city. But he had four boys and one of them was my grandfather, William Grimball, who was a circuit court judge. He had three children, Panchita and Judge Grimball had three children, John Grimball, my Uncle Jack, my dad, William Grimball, and then Frances, who was known as Fan Grimball, who married Henry Gaud, who's a lawyer. At one time in the mid-fifties they owned the entire Sword Gate property and ran the Sword Gate Inn. And they had three children, my first cousin. And John Grimball, whom I affectionately referred to as Uncle Jack, joined in World War II again. He enlisted as a private. Up in Columbia. And he went to Fort Jackson. people who knew him and knew the family said he shouldn't be, he's a lawyer. He had a law degree. He shouldn't be a private. And immediately the Commandant of Fort Jackson moved him into the office of court where he was trained and he became a tank commander and went to Europe to head a squadron of Sherman tanks and arrived, I believe it was October 1944, but it was just in time for the Battle of the Bulge and he and his squad were caught of a town called St. Vith, V-I-T-H. They were surrounded. Some rangers opened up a route out of there. They got out. He fought, he won either one or two silver stars in the Battle of the Bulge and then they moved on into Germany. Actually they moved toward Germany and by then they had Pershing tanks which were much better. Had a much bigger gun. It could tangle with any tank that the Germans had. They came to a little town called Remagen, near the Rhine River, on the Rhine River. And he and a superior lieutenant, he was a lieutenant there, a superior lieutenant, were told by a scout to come up on a hill and look. And they looked down and there was the Remagen Bridge, which was intact. And they captured the Remagen Bridge, the first bridge over the Rhine River. And he actually reconnoitred the bridge under .50 caliber machine gun fire. He won a Distinguished Service Medal for that, right under the Congressional Medal of Honor. And he became a circuit court judge in Columbia. He lived in Columbia the rest of his life.

17:17:00 Lisa Hayes

I thought you were going to say he was killed.

17:20:00 Henry Grimball

No, no, no, he survived. But he was, you know, I'd go visit with him in the house. We used to sail boats up on Lake Murray, which always stayed with them. He was a very heavy drinker. I resolved in my own mind when I read and matured and read more about it that he was probably self-medicating because of the horror he'd seen.

17:49:00 Lisa Hayes

Was he one that we talked about what had happened when he had seen or was he never talked about

17:56:00 Henry Grimball

No, not at all. He did tell me, and I can say this for the record now, the Battle of the Bulge, they would capture German troops and they had no place to put them, nobody to guard them, no way to do anything with them and they shot them. It was terrible. They hated it, but that was just part of that. That's the biggest battle the United States Army ever been in, Battle of the Bulge. He was there.

18:24:00 Lisa Hayes

Thank you for sharing that. Your right to be proud of your family's history.

18:32:00 Henry Grimball

One other line that I can't forget is Paul Grimball came here in 1682. He was the secretary to the province. He worked for the Lords Proprietors. They gave him a few thousand acres down on the North Edisto River and he took his wife. By then he had a son named Thomas, and I don't know that he had any slaves. He may have had some indentured servants, but they sailed down there and came up the North Edisto River to Point of Pines, which is directly across from the Bohicket Creek where Rockville is. And I've got a photograph of it, but there's a tabby pillar that's about 10 feet tall as the remains of this house, right on the shore, or very close to the shore of the North Edisto. And he handled a lot of the finances, sale of properties. I've actually got a deed that was given by a friend of my father's to him, and it was witnessed by Paul Grimball in 1692, deed to property in Berkeley County. It’s on vellum. I've got it in my office hallway at home on Orange Street.

19:48:00 Lisa Hayes

So he was secretary to the province?

19:52:00 Henry Grimball

Right. And he had all the Grimballs in the United States have descended from Paul. All of them. He was the original and only one. He came from England. I think he was involved as a businessman, merchantman in England and came over here, became secretary of the province and he farmed down there. His first house on the north of Edisto, while he was in Charleston, the Spaniards came up from St. Augustine and burned it down and took everything he had and he was very much upset by it. He communicated with the Lords Proprietors. He wanted to be reimbursed for his loss, and they said, "No." He had children and their children and children and finally Meta Morris married John Berkeley Grimball and they had that son John Grimball who was what we call the OC dog, he was a Confederate naval officer. He descended from Paul Grimball and then married into the Morris line and that was Meta Morris, direct descendant of Colonel Lewis Morris. And there's a tablet to Lewis Morris on the south wall of St. Michael's Church. Yeah, anyway. And he owned several houses in downtown Charleston. Their family was members of St. Ann's Episcopal Church, now the Bronx. And that's where the signer and Colonel Lewis Morris are buried.

21:28:00 Lisa Hayes

Well, I can see that you would make a very good attorney with your ability to recollect all of these facts. Do you have, is this written down somewhere?

21:38:00 Henry Grimball

Oh yeah.

21:39:00 Lisa Hayes

Is there a book about the Grimball family?

21:44:00 Henry Grimball

Grimball family, Morris family, Ellerbe family.

21:48:00 Lisa Hayes

Yeah. So it's all documented.

21:50:00 Henry Grimball

All documented. Oh yeah. It's, and I've got lots of papers in my house that document it. I'm a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. The only way you can get in is to have had an ancestor who fought, an officer who fought in the American Revolution for at least three years or was killed in service. And that's Colonel Lewis Morris. So my brother Billy got in and then his brothers all came in. Actually he got my father to join because the way we work in South Carolina, it has to be a direct line. So he got my dad to join. He was a University of Virginia law graduate, and he didn't like the Society since then. He was a Jeffersonian, my father. And Jefferson did despised the Society of the Cincinnati. And Jefferson thought it was a holdover of royalty from England and had the potential of an army coup to make Washington king or whatever. Washington was the first president general and Louis Morris was our, what they call it, propositus to where we've gotten into it. And I and my three brothers are all members, and I've been president of the Cincinnati in South Carolina. My brother Frank has, and Frank is now the treasurer general in the National Society, which has a magnificent house called Anderson House on Massachusetts Avenue.

23:36:00 Lisa Hayes

Does he get to live there because of his position? Is that what you mean?

23:41:00 Henry Grimball

Anderson House is principally a museum and a library. It's got an unbelievable collection of Revolutionary War books and documents. It's incredible. And it's ultra-modern. Ultra-modern.

23:56:00 Lisa Hayes

Is it the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati?

23:58:00 Henry Grimball

Of the National Society. Each state -- the Society of the Cincinnati is really a state rights organization each state runs its own show but we all together collectively support the national society which is really interested in projecting through education the values of the American Revolution which is considered really important by the Society and it spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing that.

24:35:00 Lisa Hayes

Well, and you must be gearing up, I would think, for the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War.

24:43:00 Henry Grimball

You know, I don't, I was real active in the general society at one time, but I'm not active in it anymore. I know that, you know, we have a big meeting every three years called the Triennial. That's when the new president general is elected, and that's next year. Twenty odd years ago it was in Paris and actually it was back in Paris because the French sent over lots of officers like Marquis de Lafayette who was a member and they have it about every twenty years in Paris. The one I attended twenty odd years ago was unbelievable. We had our meetings in the, I've always mispronounced it, Invalides or whatever, where Napoleon is buried in that huge building. We had the most modern buses, ultra-modern buses, and they didn't use Parisian police, they used national police on big motorcycles. It surrounded our column of buses and we'd go across Paris through all the red lights (laughing) and had the meetings there. And we had a luncheon in the Hotel de Ville, the city hall, which was 7 or 8 hundred people.

26:08:00 Lisa Hayes

Wow.

26:09:00 Henry Grimball

It's huge. And it was magnificent. And then last night, we had a ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles where the French presented to the national society reproductions of all the French battle flags from the revolution. and then we walked from there into the Hall of Battles where they served an unbelievable dinner. I was so intrigued. I got another glass full of the best champagne I've ever had, and I walked from one end to the other in that room. That room has huge paintings of great French victory scenes ending in World War I, and none after that. But anyway, it's over 100 yards long. Well, that's a football field. It's as wide as a football field.

27:03:00 Lisa Hayes

Paintings on both sides?

27:04:00 Henry Grimball

Paintings on, huge paintings on both sides. It's as wide as a football field. And the ceiling is so high, I'm not sure you could, you could kick a football in there, not hit the ceiling, but it's high. I was just, it was stunning.

27:22:00 Lisa Hayes

That's quite a celebration. Does your son, you have two children. Does your son have any interest in being part of that?

27:28:00 Henry Grimball

He's in the officer corp of the state society. My son Henry just turned 41. My daughter Emily is married to Stuart Longley and he's in it through I think the Connecticut Society.

27:43:00 Lisa Hayes

Will they be going to Paris next year?

27:47:00 Henry Grimball

If I finance it.

27:48:00 Lisa Hayes

Are our spouses included? Are they invited also?

27:50:00 Henry Grimball

Oh yeah.

27:51:00 Lisa Hayes

Is your wife included?

27:52:00 Henry Grimball

Oh yeah, oh it's a glorious social event. It's just unbelievable. But you know that's just that's one of the things I've done over the years. Not devoted a lot a lot of time to it but enough to have a lot of fun and help. And so that's kind of the family background I guess.

28:21:00 Lisa Hayes

Will you tell me about, so you lived in West Ashley for a lot of your childhood. 107 Chadwick Drive. What could you do in West Ashley when you were a boy? What was fun?

28:31:00 Henry Grimball

Yeah. Well one thing we Henry Fishburne who lived over in the Crescent in Gerard Sterling who lived in the country club right on the water we used to swim off of his dock. We could get bikes and pedal to all houses that were being built and collect all the empty soda bottles turn them in at the A&P that was being built in the South Windermere shopping center, I'm getting two cents a bottle. So we collected money. But I attended, as all my brothers did, Gaud School, which was in downtown. Berkeley Grimball came back from World War II. He was a doughboy in Italy and he saw terrible things. But anyway, he came back and he bought the Gaud School from my Uncle Henry Gaud, who Francis Grimball “Fan.” Henry Gaud's dad, Bill Gaud, had started the Gaud School for Boys. And Berkeley Grimball bought it for, I'll probably be off a dollar or two, but it was like $128. Well, it wasn't anything there, it was just a name. There wasn't any building that Bill Gaud owned. And so Berkeley's mother, Mrs. Elliott, had had three husbands. The middle husband was a Grimball, and that's where Berkeley came from. He died, as did the first husband, who I can't remember his name. And then she married Exum, E-X-U-M Elliott. And they lived down on Broad Street, I can recognize it but I don't know the number, but that's where she had the Watt, W-A-T-T, school. I suspect that was the name of her first husband, but I'm guessing. But anyway, the Watt school was grades one through three, girls and boys. And she funneled all the kids to Berkeley's, to the Gaud School, and he had the school from the fourth grade when I went there, through the seventh or eighth grade. And about every year or two he added a grade until he had a high school. But until then the boys who went to grad school went on off to prep schools like Episcopal and Chote, other schools. And so off to the high school of Charleston. My dear friend in law practice, Foster Gaillard, and his older brother, Paul, went to the High School of Charleston and they got great educations back then. That was a fine school. But we went to the Gaud School because of my father's connection with Berkeley. And when I was in the seventh grade, Berkeley had that school down at South Adger's Wharf. There's a plaque on it. That school was in a building there on the northeast corner of South Adger's Wharf in East Bay. The playground was East Bay Playground. That's where we went to play. It was a rap. And when he added grades he had to expand and just to the north of that building was Viohl's, V-I-O-H-L, hay and grain warehouse, because there's still a lot of horses in town then in the early 50s. He had big salt blocks, he had hay, all kind of. It was an anachronism for downtown Charleston on East Bay. But Berkeley leased the attic. To get to the attic he built a walkway across the rooftops. No cover to it. It had rails so we wouldn't fall off, but if it was raining we just had to run to get into the annex in the attic of Viohl's Hay and Grain.

32:31:00 Lisa Hayes

And you had classes up there?

32:33:00 Henry Grimball

Oh yeah, classes. And there was one big room where we had -- where they'd play the piano and we'd sing songs and gather once a week.

32:42:00 Lisa Hayes

Are those buildings still there? Is it homes? No?

32:48:00 Henry Grimball

The Gaud School Building is still there on the south, on the northeast corner of East Bay and South Adger's Wharf, but the warehouse, Viohl’s, was all torn down years later and made into townhouses. It's a stretch of townhouses. It's right across from Rainbow Row. Right, exactly. So and then in the seventh grade, Berkeley had the need to expand further so we bought what became which John Rutledge's house on Broad Street right at the mouth of Orange, you come across Orange. There it is. It's now an inn and it's got all the wrought iron work. It goes out three floors. He bought it. I'm a guest now and I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate number for something like sixty seven or eight thousand dollars. And that property scratched from Broad Street all the way to Queen. It's a tremendous backyard. And now at the north end of that lot of some houses that hold nuns. It was nunneries there. It also stretched over to King Street, if not to King Street, close to it, and that's the parking lot of the King and Queen building. So it was a huge piece of property. The problem with Berkeley always was timing and when we were there and when I was going into the 11th grade, he merged the Gaud School for Boys with the Porter Military Academy, which was Episcopal oriented. Bishop Toomer Porter had founded it after the Civil War. But anyway, that's a whole different story. But it was up on where the Medical College Now St. Timothy's Chapel is still there right on the corner and Colcock Hall is still there. I think they preserved that. The rest of it is all the field where the Porter boys marched and all its all buildings now. But they merged and in the eleventh grade we went to school on the Porter campus and he sold the Broad Street property for a loss, a few thousand dollars, loss, believe it or not, timing is everything. And he just missed. That property now would be worth fifty million dollars if he had to guess the whole property. Huge. And anyway, the Atlantic coastline gave the Porter Gaud school its property over at Albermarle Road. And while we were in the 11th grade at Porter Military Academy property, they built a new school over on Albermarle. And I was in the class, the first class, to graduate the next year. We were seniors and I was in the first class to graduate. We only had about fifteen boys in a class. Yeah, I mean it was reasonably small. It's grown like a weed since then.

36:21:00 Lisa Hayes

That's a lot of campus hopping for one person.

36:35:00 Henry Grimball

One of the things that I should mention because it struck me as a stroke of genius. Berkeley didn't have any money. And when we were down South Adger's Wharf he hired retired military people to teach. It was an amazing assortment of men. Bill Ross, we called him Captain Bill, Captain Ross, he had been a Marine in the Pacific in World War II, went ashore, landed at different islands to fight with the Japanese. And he taught us, what did he teach us in the fifth grade, I think maybe history? Another teacher you had was Ken Houk. Kenneth Houk was a great friend of Miss Rugheimer, who was the librarian back when I was a child, right here at the Charleston Library Society, a wonderful lady. I remember her. I remember what she looked like. And Kenneth Houk was a great English teacher. He was a graduate of the College of Charleston, and he connected everybody at Gaud school at this library, if he could. Yeah. He was really fond of this library. And he went on and stayed at Porter Gaud and retired, he was retired when my brother Frank graduated, it was a long time ago. Anyway, because Frank's, I'm seventy-five, Frank's sixty-five. So he graduated when he was eighteen, you could figure that out. Berkeley hired Admiral Bentham Simons, Benny, who lived in the Lining House at one time. Bentham Simons was captain of the Raleigh at Pearl Harbor, and he saved that ship. It's documented. I'd always heard about it, but it is documented that he got that ship under way. He was on the bridge in his Navy-issued blue pajamas, commanding the Raleigh. It got severely hit, but he saved it by running it aground. He ran it up on a bank and kept the ship from sinking. That was Bentham Simons. He taught history, I think. General Sullivan, I'll think of his first name in a moment. Sullivan taught geography. He was Mark Clark's Supply General in the invasion of Italy. He had been a hero in World War I. I didn't know this until I started researching it for biography and writing, autobiography and writing. Anyway, a memoir. And Sullivan was unbelievably handsome when he was young and he was severely wounded in World War I. He stayed in the army, became a general, and was Mark Clark's right hand in the invasion of Italy. And he got back to Charleston because Mark Clark became president of the Citadel and got in touch with General Sullivan, his nickname was Sully, and asked him to come help him in the administration of the Citadel. When he finished that, then he became a teacher at Gaud School.

40:08:00 Lisa Hayes

Having the Navy base here in Charleston, did that make some of these folks want to come here?

40:15:00 Henry Grimball

Oh, yeah. Charleston has always been very friendly to the military, very friendly. As my father used to say, the rest of the country doesn't quite understand what it's like to lose a war. The South knows all about it. We lost. And losing is not a good thing. So the South, and in particular a place like Charleston, has embraced the military because we know how important it is to have a strong military. You don't want to lose. You lost. A terrible event. So, yeah. Good for the country, but not so good for the losers. So anyway, that was Gaud School. After I graduated from Gaud School, I went on to Sewanee in 1966.

41:02:00 Lisa Hayes

And then you went to Oxford also. What were you doing there?

41:05:00 Henry Grimball

I was an economics major at Sewanee. One of the most interesting things I ever did, I got a job as an intern with AT&T in Manhattan in the summer of 1969. And they paid me an astronomical amount of money for that time. And I somehow, through an older lady at Sewanee, discovered that a relative of hers, I don't know whether it was a son or a son-in-law, was coming to Sewanee to teach in the summer music school. And he had an apartment on West 79th near Riverside Drive. And I sublet from him for $550 for three months. And then I got two roommates and we split the $550 three ways. The only deal was I got a little small bedroom and those two guys had to share the big bedroom. So I had my own room. It wasn't much of a room, but it was a nice apartment. It had a baby grand, had a violin.

42:17:00 Lisa Hayes

That sounds fun.

42:20:00 Henry Grimball

Just west of the Museum of Natural History.

42:23:00 Lisa Hayes

What a location. And that's when, July of 1969, we landed on the moon.

42:29:00 Henry Grimball

Right.

42:30:00 Lisa Hayes

Do you remember watching that on TV or what you were doing in that?

42:34:00 Henry Grimball

I had a mentor, Larry Cataldo, C-A-T-A-L-D-O, who was in his twenties. And his family had a house on Lake Winnipesaukee and he invited me to go up there for the weekend and we drove up in his beat up old car. Think it was a rambler. We drove up there and had a lot of fun and on the way back we were on the Hudson Parkway and we were listening to the radio and he said, "We got to pull over." So we saw a filling station, we pulled in, and it had a black and white TV in there, and we watched right there. But that was a very unusual summer, and I was in the office of economic analysis of AT&T at 123 William Street. The headquarters was on a lower Broadway, the international headquarters was on a lower Broadway. But we were on, what was way up in this building. I forget what floor we liked, the 17th floor of this skyscraper.

43:41:00 Lisa Hayes

Walkup?

43:42:00 Henry Grimball

Oh no, oh, a big bank of elevators and I commuted every day by subway, hot as hell. The subways weren't air conditioned. I'd get to work soon. But it was a great job and I was interested in economics. The problem that I faced with economics when I went to Oxford on a scholarship, I got to the finals in the Rhodes but I did not have a varsity letter. I raced sailboats. We raced. When I was 11 we bought a jet 14, my older brother and I for $700 from Johnny Jenkins who had it on a mud bank down at Brickhouse on Edisto. And we started racing it the next year after three days of training by Jimmy Hare, H-A-R-E. Jimmy was a nice guy, still around town. He retired as a colonel in the Army. But anyway, I probably didn't mention it in that bio on Thanksgiving morning, 1956. I was eight years old. And I was down Chadwick Drive playing with the Maloney Boys. Bad Boys, bad. And they had fireworks and they put up some firecrackers in the plastic doll baby that was on a trash pile. And when that, I was 10 or 15 feet away, but when it blew, it damaged my left eye. I'm blind in that eye. You can kind of see if you look at it. It's got a big, anyway, I I can't see it of it. And that, when I got drafted to go to Vietnam, that kept me out of the military. But it also meant I was forbidden to play contact sports, football, which I loved, basketball, because of the danger of an injury to my good eye. And we bought that sailboat when I was 11, three years after that accident, and that was like perfect. because I have no depth perception. Your brain adjusts in odd ways to make up for the handicap of no depth perception. But sailing is most of the time slow enough where I could cope with it. And I actually wound up doing a lot of competitive racing and was good at it. I won trophies and had fun with it. And when my older brother Billy took, when I was a freshman at Sewanee, we traded in the Jet 14 and bought a Thistle, which it was bright red, we named it the Red Baron. And it had a red, white, and blue spinnaker. And we raced that a lot. And it was also a good picnic boat when you were taking girls out of it. And Billy took it down to Pensacola when he moved down there as a lawyer for the Navy, in the civil work for the Navy, and I got into ocean racing, and I did a lot of ocean racing. I crewed, I never owned a big boat, always wanted to, but I crewed, and I steered, and I worked the spinnaker. Those were my two specialties, and they were perfect for that. But I got to Oxford, I got to the Rhodes finals in Atlanta, but I didn't have a varsity letter. And of the 12 of us who were interviewing for the finals, I was the 12th, the last. And that was not a good position to be in. I was not fresh. But I did get a scholarship through the Episcopal College and Universities to Oxford. I went and my economics tutor was the son-in-law, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who was the prime minister at the time. And his specialty was the mathematical model for economics. And it gets very obtuse, it's calculus and statistics. And I could do it, but I did not like it. And so I cut the two-year program short by a year, came back to law school, and I practiced a long time, for 51 years.

48:09:00 Lisa Hayes

Well, so you so I was thinking you had wanted to be a lawyer for your whole life. No, no, no

48:15:00 Henry Grimball

I know I kept my father was pretty you know my father was on the board here for about 20 years he was a trustee But he he was a lawyer and a really fine trial lawyer and but he he never pressured us to do any one thing. He wanted us to do the best we could and even though I persuaded him to become a Republican, he said he always admired the Kennedys because they were full bore into life, sports, sailing, all kind of things. Full bore, and he wanted us to be that way, but he didn't want to aim us in any direction, he was leaving it to us.

48:57:00 Lisa Hayes

So you went to USC Law School?

49:04:00 Henry Grimball

I came back, Billy was, my older brother was still in the Navy, Vietnam, Arthur was still at the University of Virginia undergrad, and Frank hadn't gone to Sewanee yet. But my father said we could go to any graduate school we wanted. I led my class at Sewanee. I was a valedictorian. Four years, straight A's. And I overloaded. And I overloaded after the first year I took seven three-hour courses every semester, which is a huge amount. But I loved it. I loved the educational part of college. So I could have gone all kinds of different places, but he said if you're out of state, you pay for it. If you're in state, I'll pay for it. And so the three lawyers all went to Carolina Law School and the heart surgeon went to the Medical University of South Carolina. That's the way it was. And Father was very generous about that because that's hard to educate four boys. Three at Sewanee and one at the University of Virginia and then pay for the graduate schools.

50:17:00 Lisa Hayes

A lot of money.

50:21:00 Henry Grimball

He was a good role model that way.

50:23:00 Lisa Hayes

And you said 51 years you've been practicing law.

50:25:00 Henry Grimball

I started clerking at Grimball and Cabaniss, my dad's firm in 1971 after my first year of law school and I clerked there '71, '72, '73, graduated in '74 and that's when I, in November of '74, started practicing law.

50:47:00 Lisa Hayes

Yeah. And you're 75 now, is that what you said? Do you have plans to retire or are you?

50:53:00 Henry Grimball

Well the problem I've got right now is I've got two cases left. One of them is the one I mentioned as I came in today. This had been going on for about three years before I was the construction of a house on Hilton Head. It was very poorly constructed. It took over $700,000 to repair when it was brand new. And that's in litigation, both in state and federal court. In federal court, the carrier denied coverage to the general contractor whom we sued. I represent the owner and sued the general contractor. And the carrier said we don't owe anything. No insurance has brought a suit in federal court called a declaratory judgment action to determine what coverage they owed or didn't owe. And Judge David Norton, who was my hall proctor at Sewanee when I was in McCrady Hall my freshman year, as a federal district judge. And we were about to have a hearing on a motion of mind for partial summary judgment and the judge said stop the music, this is a declaratory judgment action, I want to know whether I should retain jurisdiction. Because that's one of the few things, few kinds of cases where a federal district judge can refuse to take the case. He can refuse the jurisdiction. And he sent us an email and said, tell me about this case when you studied the Quarles Q U A R L E S case a 1937 case and the Nautilus case which was a 1992 case and we briefed it and yesterday afternoon at 2:38 p.m. in came an order from the judge bouncing the case out of court and I'm getting ready to sue that that carrier which sued my client in federal court I'm getting ready to sue them down in Beaufort County they're not gonna like it, and that's why I'm doing it. So that's that case, and then I have what we called a Bomasada case, which is a case that I got in 2011. It involved the construction 150 Bee Street condominiums right there on Lockwood.

53:05:00 Lisa Hayes

Oh I know those condos. All that work's been done on the outside there.

53:12:00 Henry Grimball

Well, it completely reworked because they leaked. That case went into suit January 26, 2012 when one member of 150 Bee Street LLC sued my clients who were also members of 150 Bee Street LLC. That LLC was put together to build the building. That was the purpose of it. One member sued us, my members, saying that they had misbehaved in the handling of the funds of the LLC. And that case finally came to an hearing before three. Three lawyer arbitration panel, October a year ago, eight-day trial, between three and four hundred exhibits offered in eight days. We traded over three hundred thousand documents. Enormous case. Thank goodness we have electronic files now because I could find anything in moments where had it been a paper file it would have been terrible. I actually had a paralegal, I did a medical malpractice, my first medical malpractice plaintiff's case, first medical malpractice case at all, which is about 20 years ago, between 15 and 20 years ago. We represented a lady who was operated on a T-3,4, T-7,8, to scactimate an inter-body fusion, which is in this part of the back. T-3,4 is right where women's breasts are right here and the doctor came in from the back which is almost never done and he didn't go out laterally enough. So he crossed her spinal cord permanently paralyzed from T-3,4 down Um, it resulted in two different suits and we got multi-million dollar settlements in each suit. I had a wonderful paralegal and when that case was over we counted the bankers boxes and multiplied by the length of each box and we had over 180 feet linear feet of paper in that one case and I had a lot other cases going on at the time but the Bomasada case was much bigger than that. Paperwise and that case resulted in a verdict against our clients but it was modest but they still wanted us to appeal and that appeal, that appeal from the arbitration panel goes to circuit court and whoever gets a bad decision there goes to the court of appeals in Columbia. And we argued that appeal before Judge Bentley Price who will no longer be a judge in June because he's been found to be not qualified.

56:21:00 Lisa Hayes

He's the person I've seen in the news.

56:23:00 Henry Grimball

The one you've seen in the news but we argued before him a couple of months ago. Hour and a half, two hour argument I had told him it was complicated that's why we needed extra time and we went in and I told him I said this is complicated and he said he'd give us a decision in a day or two and we hadn't heard anything in a a couple of months because it's a very complex case.

56:52:00 Lisa Hayes

You said it started in 2012.

56:55:00 Henry Grimball

The initial suit was filed. It's called a derivative action. The plaintiff member of the LLC brings a suit on behalf of the LLC, which makes it derivative, brings it on behalf of the LLC against the elements of the LLC for the benefit of the LLC. So it's a derivative suit.

57:22:00 Lisa Hayes

Like a brother and sister fighting in the family.

57:30:00 Henry Grimball

Whatever. Yeah. Anyway, that suit was first filed. January 26, 2012. But you know, we had COVID, which messed the whole legal system that screwed up. And we also had, and that was February 2020 for a couple of years, and we also had the construction litigation over the leaks in the building which erupted in the middle of the suit derivative action. And our case had to go, had to stop while the construction case was resolved, and that took two, three years. So that's why there's such a big time. Nobody's going to want to know that. It's fascinating and it's but the problem is that the appeal, if we get a bad decision out of Bentley Price we're going to the Court of Appeals and you're talking about another year, year and a half and I can't quit while that's going on. I can't.

58:37:00 Lisa Hayes

How many-- I don't know about how it is to practice law, but are you the only person in your firm that's working on this case?

58:52:00 Henry Grimball

Oh no, no, I had to enlist Morris Ellison, who's a brilliant commercial real estate lawyer, to help me. I got him involved in 2012 and he and I have had the best time working together on that case. I've become very close to him. He's an absolutely strict orthodox Jew. After sunset on Friday, he does not get in the car. Always leaves the office early on Friday. And his brother, as it turns out, I've had cancer. I got prostate cancer back in about 2010. I had surgery at Johns Hopkins and two years later the cancer came back. In 2012 I went there for radiation therapy. For two months I lived in a condo in the Inner Harbor. But we had merged in 2012, Buist, Moore, Smythe, and McGee that I went to when my dad retired in 1997. I moved to Buist, Moore, Smythe, and McGee, but I had good friends, and was my Henry Smythe, Foster Gaillard, great group of guys. Anyway, we merged, Buist Moore merged in 2012, as 15 years after I went there, with Womble, Sandridge, Carlyle, and Rice, out of North Carolina. And so when I went to Baltimore for the radiation therapy, we had just merged and there was a Womble office in Baltimore. So I practiced law seven days a week as usual. While I was being treated every day, every week day at 2 p.m. I had a driver drive me over to Johns Hopkins for that. I told people I had a torrid love affair. We got in bed every day at two o'clock naked with linear accelerator number five. And the door is about a foot thick and when they shut that dang door you're in this room. The room is bigger, somewhat bigger than the room we we’re in now. It's filled with electronics. And they played the damnedest music the first day. It was a rap, a lot of four letter words. And you know this thing is over you and it's got a cone. I thought it was coming down. I learned on the very last day that the gurney I was on was going up. Because on the last day I was about to jump off and they screamed at me as they came through the door, "Don't jump, you're six feet up in the air." I didn't realize that it was the gurney moving and not - but that cone shaped big old hunk of equipment did nine shots anywhere from ten or fifteen seconds to thirty or forty seconds around me and underneath. And so they played this terrible music and I got out and I told these nurses and I said, I want some music tomorrow and it's going to have one four letter word in it. And the full letter word is B-A-C-H. That's what I want to hear. And from then on out I had classical music.

1:02:30 Lisa Hayes

I was surprised they didn't ask you before they played that.

1:02:34 Henry Grimball

I was a little surprised by it.

1:02:36 Lisa Hayes

But anyway. So, anyway, will you tell me about how you met your wife? Tell me about her.

1:02:42 Henry Grimball

Anyway, Virginia Virginia's family is really the real good roots down in Montgomery, Alabama. She had a grandfather grandfather, great grandfather, who was governor at one time. The Gayle G.A.Y.L.E. Planetarium in Montgomery is her family. Her name is Virginia Gayle Grimball. She went to St. Mary's and then to Chapel Hill, two years at St. Mary's, two years at Chapel Hill, and worked for the Gignilliat firm. That's Gignilliat is Gignilliat, G-I-G-N-I-L-L-I-A-T. and there was a Gignilliat who was a quarterback of the Sewanee football team while I was there. Hugely well liked. His family had a law firm and that's who Virginia worked for and I think that firm was in Georgia. Pretty sure it was. She decided she wanted to see the ocean, live on the coast, have a dog, and she came and got a job working for Buist, Moore, Smythe and McGee on Exchange Street. She actually was going to interview at Sinkler, Gibbs, Simons and Guerard, which was further east on Exchange Street after you pass number five, which is Buist Moore on the right, you go further down and Sinkler was on the left, and who should be on the corner but Peter McGee, Joseph McGee, my law partner, and he intercepted Virginia. She was kind of asking questions about where she needed to go. And he said, "You don't want to go there. Buist Moore is a lot better firm. Let me show you our firm." And he takes it down the street into Buist Moore, where they promptly hired her as a paralegal. And my older brother Billy bumped into a first and said, and told me, 'cause we were practicing all together, he said, "There's a real nice girl down at Buist, Moore, you should call her." And one thing led to another. And so we got married on May 21, 1977, in Charlotte, because that's where both of our grandmothers still lived. And we have two children, son Henry and daughter Emily. Son Henry just turned 41 and Emily's 37, I think.

1:05:27 Lisa Hayes

And then Emily, does she work at Doyle?

1:05:31 Henry Grimball

She started that Doyle office. She worked for Christie's in Manhattan for thirteen years. She was up there and son Henry worked for a hedge fund there for six or seven years. Henry lived at seventy-first and first and Emily bounced all around. She wound up way downtown. Both of them were there in the crash of 2008. And Emily's position was not far from human resources and she saw lots of friends go in and come out in tears because they'd been sacked. Henry's hedge fund collapsed, went out of business, and he was tasked to marshal all the funds and send them back to the people who, to whom the funds belonged. So he stayed in an empty office on Fifth Avenue for some months. But they both saw what could happen in a heartbeat. But Emily loved it, but she got married to Stuart Longley, I guess about four years ago, and they were living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. And Stuart has a wonderful job, he can work anywhere, like a salesforce kind of a job, and works on a computer. And she got pregnant and COVID came and they said, "The heck with this." So they moved to Charleston and rented and then bought a house in Avondale and now they've just bought a house at 112 Tradd right around the corner. And they have a daughter, Eliza, who was born almost two years ago on February 3. I'm taking her to lunch every Friday.

1:07:26 Lisa Hayes

Oh, that's nice.

1:07:27 Henry Grimball

Very nice.

1:07:28 Lisa Hayes

Let's talk now a little while. What's the time? Doesn't matter? Okay. So your father was on our board, and you remember coming here as a child. What was the library like when you were a little boy coming here?

1:07:45 Henry Grimball

Nice.

1:07:46 Lisa Hayes

You remember Miss Rugheimer?

1:07:47 Henry Grimball

Miss Rugheimer. Miss Rugheimer was a very, like a grandmother. Yeah. And very interested in children. There was a big children's section. As you come into the main entrance, off to the right was a big children's section. All lots of children's, both puzzles, wooden puzzles, all kind of things. And my dad, by the way, in the Great Depression, he was born February 6th, 1917. He would come here as a young man because he didn't have any money much to do anything. He'd come here and get a book and sit in an easy chair and read all the time.

1:08:28 Lisa Hayes

So he loved the library?

1:08:30 Henry Grimball

Loved it from when he was a little boy. And I don't know that I can say that about either Fran or Jack, but my dad loved the library and felt a great affection for it his entire life. He persuaded the board to ask me to become a trustee. And I would just tell you, Lisa, I have real problems with names and dates. I was a trustee, I think for 19 years. You'd have to look at the record. And I don't know whether you're gonna want to publish this but I'm going to tell you exactly how things went. Warren Ripley was the president over 30 years. He worked for the Post and Courier. Very interesting person. An expert on Revolutionary War and Civil War munitions. The reason the pedestal on the north west corner of White Point Gardens as you come down King Street and reach South Battery right across to the left on that corner is a pedestal. It's gray, it's about three or four feet high. There's nothing on top of it. That was a Revolutionary War cannon that was on it. Hugely valuable. And people steal stuff off the Battery. You know, the monument, as you come down Meeting and get to South Battery directly across the street is the monument to the Hunley. And it's got, it's a fountain, big granite obelisk, and on either side, east and west side, is a dolphin. Those things are bronze, and they're maybe three or four feet high. Somebody stole one of those one time. Stole the damn thing. And it had to be replicated and put back on. Well, Warren was concerned that that gun was gonna get stolen, so it's in the museum now. He had it removed, and it's because it could have been stolen. Small enough, not like it was a great big Civil War cannon. This was a cannon maybe about four feet long. And so he was an expert in munitions, very interesting guy. We'd have these meetings and it didn't seem, Paul Trouche was a trustee too and Paul's about my age. We'd talk about it and say, "Nothing really going on." And my father's attitude was, and he said this to me so many times, "Warren is brilliant. Don't worry about it, he's got it under control." He did not.

1:11:31 Lisa Hayes

This is around, let's just give a frame of reference,

1:11:34 Henry Grimball

I forget the date when I became president.

1:11:41 Lisa Hayes

Well, I think in your form here it said 2006, maybe 2008 is when you were the president.

1:11:49 Henry Grimball

Well, this would have been in the nineteen years leading up to that because we were coming out of a meeting one night. We met down in the trustees room, which was down below us in the main. Yeah anyway I don't know what they call it and I hadn't been in there in years but we'd meet down in there at this nice elegant table and Warren would sit at one end and conduct a meeting and and Carol Rivers was the secretary and we were walking out one day and he looked at me and said you're gonna be the next president and I said say again because it hadn't been discussed at all It was just like a bolt out of the blue. So I thought, well, why not? So I became the president. And I was edgy. The thing that made me edgy first was the finances of the library, because that's what keeps something like this afloat. You have to have the right finances. I knew that there were funds, and I forget the names of them. There were different funds. Anyway, Frank Rogers was a general in the Air Force, handled half of the funds at his stock brokerage business, and I forget what brokerage business it was. And there was a woman who worked in another brokerage house who handled the other half. And I went to both of them and I said, "I want to know what's happening with this money and where we're going with these funds." And they each wrote separately. They didn't collaborate. Each wrote separately a report back to me. And the graphs in each were terrifying. We were going to go bankrupt in 15 or more years. That's when I learned about the Monte Carlo rule. You can only take 4% or 5% out of your holdings, financial holdings a year in order not to chew through it and eat it and exhaust it. If you take 10 or 15% a year, it's unsustainable. And that's what was happening.

1:16:07 Lisa Hayes

Well the, so now when we have a budget, it's my understanding that it has to be approved and goes through all these hoops and stuff. Did they not have a budget that had to be approved by the board?

1:16:20 Henry Grimball

We had budgets but it was just not paid any attention to in those trustees meetings. There was no real analytical approach to it. It was just trust Warren and he knows what he's doing and it wasn't working with all due deference to Warren. I was very friendly with him. He was a nice guy, but it was not working. The library wasn't growing. The one thing I did while I was on the board is I had a law office in the Frankie Building, and I'd walk from 11 Orange Street through this beautiful gateway walk through the library, through St. Phillips, and on up. And I passed by this building every day. And it was, most of the building was gone. It was a front facade, maybe 10 or 15 feet, and there were two posts that propped it up. And I looked at that thing. Pun Ravenel had something to do with it, I forget. But anyway, I'd look at it and I thought, that's the only place we're going to expand in my lifetime. And I went to the board and said, said we ought to buy it. And we did. And I was real active. I was a trustee at Historic Charleston. I was president of the Preservation Society and I got the preservationist and we came up and got on the other side of Broad Street, above King Street and looked at that facade and they said you've got to save this facade. It's real important. This tin facade is only one other like it. It's way up on upper King St. And so I persuaded trustees that we needed to save the facade. And the building was built. The facade was saved. It's named the Ripley-Ravenel Building. And because Warren was the president at the time. But that was one of what I considered my greatest contribution as a trustee because I ignited that project.

1:18:27 Lisa Hayes

You had the foresight to build the vaults, you knew that we needed some climate control areas for the rare books.

1:18:33 Henry Grimball

I don't remember that and I don't think I had anything to do with that climate control vault. I may have, I don't remember, but I did have everything to do with buying the building. Yeah, because it was a no-brainer. It's the only chance in my lifetime to expand the library, we needed the room. So anyway, what really was a straw that broke the camel's back was when I was told, and by the way Angie Leclercq became a trustee. She was a head librarian at Citadel. She later committed suicide, I'm sorry to say, but she was on the board and I consulted with her all the time and I called Angie out. She's a Whaley. She's Ben Scott Whaley's daughter. You know, Mrs. Whaley's garden. That's her mom. And those are strong people. Whaley women are strong. And I'd call her up on the phone and she'd say, "Henry, don't relent. Do not relent. You know what you've got to do. Don't relent." And she kept me bucked up. You can't, this is a very historic important part of our culture, this library. And I was just beside myself that it was going to be run into the ground. And we never had an executive director, I forget his name again.

1:20:02 Lisa Hayes

Eric Emerson.

1:20:03 Henry Grimball

Eric Emerson. Anyway, so we hired Eric Emerson. And he was with us a couple of years and I went off. By the way, I don't know what the status of it is now, but I was so upset about a person being the president of the library for 30 years, I persuaded the board to change the bylaws to have term limits. I don't know whether that's still in there or not because when I left, I wanted a clean break and I'm going to tell you something. I was tired. I had kept two or three big bankers' boxes to the side of my desk for three years because something was happening all the time. Oh, yeah. If I had kept hours, it was like the second job. I was so tired when I finished my three years as president, but I didn't put that term limit thing in place I hope it still is. It should be because it gives fresh life all the time. It's what's wrong in Washington. They don't have term limits. But anyway, you know then Van became the president and I'm sitting there at Buist, Moore working with him and he said we want to hire Anne and her husband was a law partner at the firm. And I had heard stories about Anne from her teaching over at Charleston Day School and I was concerned about it and I talked with him and he said, and we had a very cordial talk, I loved Anne, and anyway. We talked and he said, "I think it's worth a shot." And she was fantastic. She was fantastic. She helped. She wanted this library to live and grow and grow in a positive, effective way. And so she, and I take my hat off to her. She used to tell me when she first became the executive director that I was the person who saved the library. But that kind of faded into history as time goes by. Things fade.

1:22:28 Lisa Hayes

I think you definitely sound like you started the library on its healthy trajectory that we are on now.

1:22:34 Henry Grimball

Well, I didn't do it because I thought bells were gonna ring and trumpets were gonna blow. I did it because I didn't want it to fade away. It's too damn important.

1:22:46 Lisa Hayes

Your family loved the library and you loved the library.

1:22:50 Henry Grimball

Very much, but it's an institution, it's a cultural institution. It's been very important in the life of the city.

1:22:58 Lisa Hayes

275 years old.

1:23:01 Henry Grimball

Yeah.

1:23:02 Lisa Hayes

To have it, in your tenure, to have it disappear, that would have been heartbreaking I’m sure.

1:23:07 Henry Grimball

A black mark on all of us would have been terrible. And so I'm thrilled it has. And every now and then I come to one of the events there. like I say, I was jammed. I'm trying to get rid of books. I can't read them all. And I take books to the office and put them on a table and people take them. And I just can't read it all. But it's just a thrill to see the things that turned out as successfully as they have. And I don't know anything really much about where the library is today and who's actually on the board because I'm busy and I've moved on to other things. You know, you move on. I've been the, I was the head of the president of St. Andrews Society during COVID, which was a mess and different responsibilities require time and you move on.

1:24:07 Lisa Hayes

Well, thank you for what you did 25 years ago. And for coming today.

1:24:13 Henry Grimball

It just shocks me how time flies. When I was president of the Society of Cincinnati and the State of South Carolina, Frank Rogers called me and said, "I'd like to buy you a drink at the Yacht Club. I should have known something was up." We went to the Boathouse, we sat on the north wall up on the second floor, sat at a table against the north wall. He said, "I, we need to put up a statue to Moultrie, and we need to get it done." They've tried about eight times, and everyone's fizzled, all documented by the way over the many decades and he said “I think we're close I need you to really help me push this thing," and I took another sip of alcohol and said yeah of course why not and but things like that and this is the Frank Rogers who'd been handling the money half of our funds. He was a great guy and he'd been president of the [Society of the] Cincinnati. But something like that is a whole new diversion from my law practice. And by the way, until recently when I stopped taking cases a couple of years ago, I don't want to take on new cases because it could be like Bomasada and I'd be 90 years old if I got was able to retire so I quit taking cases but at one time I had I had so many cases that I was handling once I've tried over 300 cases in common place court nobody does that anymore I was bouncing around all over South Carolina from Greenville to Beaufort to Horry County Myrtle Beach all over trying lawsuits and I worked seven days a week. I was working seven days a week. I've been a member of St. Michael's Church all my life. I was a lawyer for St. Michael's, solicitor for 25 years and in the middle of the big fight with the national church. And time was tight. You know I can take a couple hours off today to meet with you, but I couldn't have done this ten years ago absolutely not I'd have met you at six o'clock at night for a couple hours but not during the day because I was working too hard and I put 15-20,000 miles on my car every year driving all over taking depositions and I didn't have time and when I finished with the Library Society I was so tired and I also think it's It's really smart, especially when you've been through such a hard time for the new people to get in and be fully in charge and not having some has-been yakking at them. I think it worked better, I'm pretty certain it did, but I didn't have time anyway. It's something like that statue. I wound up in charge of all the inscriptions on it, and I wound up writing the bio of Moultrie that's on the west wall of the pedestal, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.

1:27:55 Lisa Hayes

To get the research done, the writing just right?

1:27:57 Henry Grimball

There was no book. There was no biography of Moultrie at that point in 2008-2009, whenever it was right around the end. There was no single biography. Chip Bragg, who's a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, South Carolina, is a doctor, lives in Thomasville, and he wrote the first bio of Moultrie, one of our members. It's very well received, but I had to do the research, and I only had so many periods, commas, capitals, lower case. There was a tight restriction on space and what I could put. And that alone was an adventure you cannot believe, and I must be very brief, try to be very brief. There were six or seven organizations that contributed directly to that statue. They're on either the south or north side. Then there are other organizations, then six or seven or eight who were ancillary contributors and they're on the other side. And I wrote each organization and said, your name is gonna go on this pedestal, what is your name? I want it in writing and I want a reply. Or I'm not putting it on there. Because the names of societies are different than what most people think. And on the east side we just put Moultrie. But on the west side, Crites, who runs McCarthy's, do you know anything about that? McCarthy's, as you go up to Magnolia Cemetery when you turn in Crites' place of business is right there, right off whatever it is, the Meeting Street Extension. And they do tombstones. And they inscribe them. And when my dad died in 1999, I went up there after he was buried and Crites, the tombstone was there. Born February 6, 1917. Born September 9, 1999. I looked at mother and she looked at me and I said, well, he's a born again Christian, you know, he's born again. She said, no, no. And I talked to Mr. Crites and he said, we'll fill it and recut it. And I said, no, you won't. Cause that will not be permanent. Bye-bye tombstone in the Cooper River at Magnolia Cemetery. So, Crites was in charge of the pedestal of the statue to Moultrie. I was in charge of the inscriptions. Crites and I like each other, but he didn't want that pedestal to go into Cooper River.

1:31:15 Lisa Hayes

So you had to get it right.

1:31:17 Henry Grimball

I had to get it not just right, but really right. At the very end, do you know how they inscribe? It's fascinating. For example, on the west side of that pedestal where the bio is that I wrote, they make stencils that are rubberized cloth and it's thick, like a fourth of an inch thick. It's a stencil and it's got sticky on it like a sticky note and they stick it onto the granite and then they sandblast through the stencil. That's how it's done. It's done in, each stencil as it goes down, it's not all just one long piece, it's in sections, but Crites made me sign and date every one of the final stencils.

1:32:20 Lisa Hayes

Do you think that's because you have the discrepancy with your dad?

1:32:24 Henry Grimball

Absolutely. Not something else. Absolutely. He knew.

1:32:27 Lisa Hayes

You in particular.

1:32:28 Henry Grimball

Me in particular. And there was only one error I made in that bio. I said that General Moultrie, when he was governor, oversaw the ratification of the Articles of Confederation. Wrong. And you know, what I wrote went to the City Arts and History Committee, and they got some smart people on it. And that was the one thing that they corrected. The Articles of Confederation were ratified during the Revolution, not afterwards when he was governor. The Constitution was ratified afterwards, but not the Articles of Confederation. And I got it out of a source book. And it was just wrong. And I should have known it intellectually, I should have known that, but I just got it out of this source. And so that was corrected and later Chip Bragg read what I'd - he studied what I wrote and he said it was correct, which is like a pshh, you know, everything is right on it. And by the way, do you know what was there before the statue of Moultrie? The statue is on the east end of White Point Gardens and it's about 10 or 15 feet off the west of the sidewalk right in the center of the east end of White Point Gardens and the statue is enormous. I mean it's the statue on the pedestal is 15 feet high. The pedestal I didn't have anything to do with the design of the pedestal or the installation of the pedestal. What had been there before was the capstone of the Maine, the battleship Maine, sunk in in Havana Harbor, all of them. And when they lifted that up, and I don't even know where that is now, it's stored somewhere. But when they took it out, they found bones underneath because they had to get the foundation really right to hold tons of granite of the pedestal. So they dug down and they're pretty deep and they found bones. That stopped everything. They had to make sure they weren't human bones and they weren't. Anyway, somehow they got balled up in the city and when they brought this big flatbed truck in and had this huge crane to lift these pieces, the pedestals in like six pieces. A city policeman said, "Y'all don't have a permit to do this. You got to stop." And it was raining. It was raining. So that delay there, it was a big screw up. When they lifted that big piece up that has all the inscriptions on it, it weighs tons. They lift it up with two very heavy straps. There's already a piece below it on the ground. They lift it up and move it over and set it down. How did he get the straps out of it? How did he get the straps out of it? No.

1:35:56 Lisa Hayes

What did they do?

1:35:58 Henry Grimball

You know, the Egyptians used sand.

1:36:00 Lisa Hayes

Oh, yeah.

1:36:02 Henry Grimball

Ice.

1:36:03 Lisa Hayes

Oh.

1:36:04 Henry Grimball

They had blocks of ice, and when they set that pedestal down, it was on the ice, and they took the straps out because it was elevated by the ice, and then they had to hold it carefully in place as it settled down into places the ice melted. Brilliant. The only thing wrong with that pedestal, the last piece before the statue itself has got a Greek motif and there’s a name for it I never can remember, it's like Eric Emerson, I Anyway, it's three grooves, a little space, three grooves, a little space, three grooves. And that section is about ten inches deep, maybe a foot deep. And that section was put on upside down. And you can look at it, if you know, you can look at it and tell.

1:37:16 Lisa Hayes

Is it a little bit that way instead of that way?

1:37:19 Henry Grimball

No, no. It's just that the way those three grooves were put in, it would look better if it was reversed, if it was flipped over. It's just not right. But the architect, Constantine, went absolutely ape, went bananas, and it was all in the newspaper. And the committee that I had served on said, "Well, you're the lawyer. You take care of it." And I wrote and said, in effect, "The statute has been dedicated to the city. It's not ours anymore. You have to deal with the city." We also looked into trying to cut it, you know, glued as--and pegged and glued. It'd take a diamond saw, a band saw, and probably do more damage than good. 19, 20 thousand dollars worth. We just decided it was better just to leave it alone. You would never notice it if you went down there, except for the fact that I've told you.

1:38:40 Lisa Hayes

And now people might know.

1:38:41 Henry Grimball

But those things are such a huge distraction for somebody working seven days a week. Forgive me, but when I finished with the library, I had to quit and move on. Just so much time in a day.

1:38:53 Lisa Hayes

Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, we thank you for all those years of work and hours of work, it sounds like, and it should be your job and your family and all that time you put in for us.

1:39:05 Henry Grimball

Well, it was, no lawsuit, I told my wife, I said, "Wake up in the morning." I said, "You know, no lawsuit, would wake me up in the middle of the night like this damn library." I'd be lying in bed and I'd look up. By then my dad was dead. He died in 1999 and I'd say, "Father, please tell me I'm doing the right thing. Please tell me I'm headed in the right direction. Please give me some guidance somehow. Am I doing this right?" And it'd wake me up at night, worrying about it, for three years. It was something. It really was, and I didn't want to walk away from it. I wanted to run when I was through three years of being president. I was just tired. I was done.

1:39:58 Lisa Hayes

Well coming here today I hope that it makes you feel like, gosh, that was worth it, because you can see how well the library is doing.

1:39:59 Henry Grimball

I've never, never had any doubt that it was worth it.

1:40:11 Lisa Hayes

Yeah.

1:40:12 Henry Grimball

You know, it was really a—between Ms. Rugheimer and Eric Emerson, the library hadn't changed at all. It was in the backwaters of -- it was just ghosting along.

1:40:31 Lisa Hayes

We have now -- we have the most members that we've ever had, so that's really good. And you know, we do all the programming.

1:40:38 Henry Grimball

How many members?

1:40:39 Lisa Hayes

I think it's about 2700 members.

1:40:40 Henry Grimball

I think when I was president, it was like a thousand, maybe 800 or so.

1:40:41 Lisa Hayes

Yeah, and I think when Anne started there were maybe even a little less than that. So yeah, that's like memberships. And then if you count people in a household, it's a lot more than that. There's a lot of people.

1:41:04 Henry Grimball

I wonder what the future for libraries is, you know it worries me because I was a trustee of Historic Charleston for nine years. how I got to be a trustee is a joke. I was on City Council for two terms and I learned a lot about city zoning and planning and when I was no longer on City Council I developed a zoning practice. If somebody wanted to change a house or build something or do something I had a pretty good clientele. And, at one meeting, Peter McGee and Mrs. Edmunds, Frances Edmunds, representing Historic Charleston, were opposed to my proposition. And we had this debate. And to beat Frances Edmunds and Peter McGee is going somewhere and I beat them and I got what we wanted. The next day, McGee called me. I was not at Buist Moore yet, I was at Grimball and Cabaniss. He called me and said, "Would you be interested in serving as a trustee of Historic Charleston?" I was so flattered, I didn't even think of my zoning practice, which evaporated overnight.

1:42:29 Lisa Hayes

I bet.

1:42:32 Henry Grimball

It did. So I said yes. And back then the Nathaniel Russell House was the headquarters. And when there was a zoning issue I would walk from 11 Orange Street over to the Nathaniel Russell House, about three blocks, four blocks. And go up to Frances Edmunds office which was in one of the big bays on the south side of that building. She was a force. Wasn't afraid of anything. Nothing. If she had somebody who threatened the lawsuit she'd say, "Go ahead. I've got the best lawyers in town. If you want to fight, you looking at the right place." Nothing like that bothered her in the slightest. She was a Smythe. She's Henry, Big Henry's sister. And his son is my friend in law partner, Henry Smythe Jr. And Frances Edmunds had gone in and she said, "Mr. Grimball, Henry, would you care for a cup of coffee?" It was eight o'clock in the morning. I said, "I sure wouldn't Mrs. Edmunds." She'd ring a little bell and this Vietnamese, little Vietnamese man named Ming would come in.

1:43:50 Lisa Hayes

He's still around.

1:43:51 Henry Grimball

I know he is. He is. And she'd say, "Mr. Grimball would like a cup of coffee plain black, please." Two minutes later, Ming would come in. And I did zoning work for them for a while, and then the Nathaniel Russell House is a fabulous house. Its use has changed. And apparently museum properties are apparently institutions like Nathaniel, like Historic Charleston are selling their museum houses. That's the trend. But you wonder where that unintended consequence is to all that.

1:44:37 Lisa Hayes

You're speaking about the Historic Charleston Foundation's decision to sell the Nathaniel Russell House.

1:44:45 Henry Grimball

The number of people that come to see the Nathaniel Russell House has been in a decline. And that worries me about the library as well. Young people, what do young people do in my, you know, a lot of the lawyers in our office don't subscribe to the damn Post & Courier to the newspaper. Like what? Where are you getting your news? And then they have a big to-do in the newspaper this morning about how people didn't understand John Tecklenberg. I understand it. He let that riot take place up there.

1:47:28 Lisa Hayes

A lot of people were unhappy about that.

1:47:30 Henry Grimball

Real unhappy. I remember that night because we were going over to East of the Cooper for some social thing. And as we went up East Bay Street to go on the bridge, there were rioters up there. We went across and we were told later how dangerous it was to go downtown. So I think we took North Bridge and came in through West Ashley to Orange Street and avoided that whole section of the city. Stuart and Emily were driving in from New York and we told them not to come downtown but to go West Ashley, coming to the city from the west. And it kind of, you just, there's enough out there that worried people, and I knew his dad pretty well. Henry Tecklenberg was a nice guy, and I'm sure he's a nice guy, but I don't think that's where the city wants to be run.

1:48:53 Lisa Hayes

Well, I guess the voters decided that. We'll see when mayor Cogswell, the future mayor Cogwell, takes over.

1:51:29 Henry Grimball

I dated his mother before she married, before she married. Sally Eichel. I had to support him, and he's a nice guy.

1:51:40 Lisa Hayes

He is a nice person. And I like John Tecklenberg too.

1:51:42 Henry Grimball

I think John is a nice guy. I get along real well with him. One of his problems is that when we lived in that apartment house on Broad Street, Short Street was just to the north. We got in the backyard, which was mostly dirt. And it was a chicken-wire fence that separated the backyard of our property from a house on Short Street. And Short Street was totally integrated. There were Black children who were on the other side of that fence. And we saw, and we never associated too much, but Short Street was all black. And Price's Alley was Black, Rainbow Road was Black, lots of downtown was African American, and people got along great.

1:52:40 Lisa Hayes

That's what, so I talked to Jenks Gibbs, you know.

1:52:45 Henry Grimball

I know Jenks.

1:52:46 Lisa Hayes

And he kind of had the same take on it that South of Broad was pretty integrated when he was growing up. But same kind of thing, they didn't play with the African American kids, but they were...

1:53:00 Henry Grimball

They were all around. And maids would come walk to your house or whatever. But what's sad is that the economics of Charleston have been highly detrimental to the integration. It's becoming segregated and that's affected, that is, I'm sure affected the African American vote that Tecklenburg was counting on, but not nearly as many African Americans in the city now as it were when Riley was first elected. Not nearly. So that created a problem. And you know, there's only like 800 votes separated.

1:53:46 Lisa Hayes

Is that right?

1:53:47 Henry Grimball

Yeah.

1:53:48 Lisa Hayes

Not many.

1:53:49 Henry Grimball

Not many at all. This has been delightful.

1:53:53 Lisa Hayes

I really enjoyed it. I could talk to you for a lot longer, but I know you're busy, busy.

1:53:58 Henry Grimball

Well, I don't want to miss my lunch. My lunch with my granddaughter.

1:54:03 Lisa Hayes

Where are you all going? Or do you go to her house?

1:54:05 Henry Grimball

We go to the Carolina Yacht Club, South property. And that's a whole other story. I was on on the committee that set the footprint when they renovated the set of property. That was the most fun of all.

1:54:19 Lisa Hayes

(laughing)

1:54:20 Henry Grimball

It was fascinating. But we eat in the saloon, it's called a saloon cause that's where this big bar is, but we eat in the saloon, which has five or six dining tables because Eliza's so little and if she started to lose it, we wouldn't disturb everybody who's in the main dining room just out west, but she's never done that. And the staff absolutely loves, Eliza's a beautiful little girl and the staff loves her to the point where not only Zach, the manager of the whole entire club, but two other staff members we see most times we go there for a meal, gave her Christmas presents, which is out of the blue.

1:55:12 Lisa Hayes

What does she get to eat there? Do they have kid-friendly food?

1:55:16 Henry Grimball

No.

1:55:17 Lisa Hayes

No.

1:55:18 Henry Grimball

But we give her... she's gotten more picky as she's approached two years old, but she used to eat anything. She ate she-crab soup, salmon, chicken, anything. She's more picky now, but she always at the end had peppermint ice cream and chocolate sauce.

1:55:35 Lisa Hayes

Well, enjoy that. It's really been fun talking to you. Thank you so much.