A&E/Start

Getting started, 1939-1965:
Childhood, Youth, and Education

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Original Ignorance
As we are newly born, all of us know nothing about parents and their world of experience, about their and other's situations in time and place. Our natality inserts us into a full, actively developing world, uniquely situating each within it. As instances of self-maintaining life, we are thoroughly ignorant about what we can and should do. Knowing nothing, each newborn must recognize, understand, and judge its given circumstances, discovering how to act purposefully with and upon them and thereby experience the contingency of actuality, forever renewing that original ignorance. . . .

Hello,

I'm Robbie, officially Robert Oliver McClintock, but I've always preferred Robbie and strongly disliked Oliver. As Robbie, here's my story, which began in the French Hospital, Manhattan, on August 17th, 1939.

My birth nearly killed my mother. She suffered a catastrophic loss of blood in an emergency Cesarian operation. As an infant, she had contracted polio and spent a year-plus in a sanatorium in Bismarck, Nort Dakota, which left her with a gimp arm, a short leg, and a strong will, as well as the narrowed cervical canal that I couldn't get through. As usually happens when a child is born, my father had an easier time with my birth than mother did. He had the wrong blood type for the transfusions she needed and had to stand by while an orderly went out on the street to find a volunteer with the right type to give her lifesaving blood. Yeah—that sounded apocryphal when I heard it much later, but blood banks weren't common in hospitals then and the French Hospital was pretty small. In any case, she got the blood, but it took her a couple months to recuperate, much longer than her employer expected when they agreed she would keep her job after having her baby. They fired her. She sued them, and won her job back along with court expenses. Then she returned to work at a better salary with her former employer's competitor.

Parentage

Unbeknownst to me, during the fraught hours of my birth, I was beginning life with significant advantages, thanks to both my parents. By separate routes, each in their '20s had come east to New York from the west, taking root in Manhattan in the mid 1920s. It may seem unusual to note differences between oneself and ones parents, but I think it both interesting and significant that I was born in New York, an affluent Manhattanite by ascription, while each of my parents had become New Yorkers by aspiration and achievement. If you follow on, you'll have opportunities to judge whether this difference may be key to anything of much significance, but for now, to get a sense of my parents' lives, let's give them names and get them from their birthplaces to their adult lives in Manhattan.

I'll start with my father—his path from there to here was pretty straight. Franklin Trunkey McClintock, "Kewp," owing to his childhood resemblance to a kewpie doll, grew up in Spokane, Washington, where his family owned a flush business servicing logging camps through the Pacific Northwest. He was smart and sensitive, and I've decided from various clues that he was pampered at home and bullied in school and became strongly averse to both, plotting in his youth to put it behind with a minimum of sacrifice or conflict. His ploy was both simple and effective: Go east, young man! He firmly refused to attend Stanford, as pampering family and persecuting peers assumed he should and would do, choosing Princeton instead. There no one knew him. With Kewp left behind, he started over, a good egg called Joe. The name stuck, new friends lasted, and he never looked back.

In youth, Kewp had been pretty clear about what he didn't want, which got Joe to Princeton. But he was not an assertive person, more a quiet observer, at once gregarious yet reserved, not quick to declare what he thought he might want. He went through college making friends, developing a congenial, all-purpose intellect, becoming a somewhat low-keyed, self-aware sport. He left Princeton, class of '25, with a BA in history and a supportive circle—good connections, what an elite college was all about. Where to?

With no strong sense of purpose, he proceeded to Columbia where he studied history in a genteel way, perhaps for a doctorate and possibly thereby, a college teaching career. As the master said, the youth "learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise." It was the latter '20s, carefree in spirit, circumstances were becoming adverse: lumber became a troubled commodity, the family's finances worsened, and his father's health declined. A year before the panic, Franklin Trunkey McClintock sensed he needed an income, and to get one, Joe gave up his academic idylls, landing a good job in investment banking at Brown Brothers & Co., with thanks to his college connections. As the Crash of '29 and the ensuing Depression washed over everyone, corporate mergers and the 1933 Banking Act transferred Joe and his job , more or less unchanged, to a newly formed Harriman, Ripley, & Co., my father's employer throughout my childhood and youth.

My mother took a less predictable and more interesting path. Marguerite de Bruyn Kops, Margot for short, was born in 1903 in North Dakota, spending most of her infancy in the polio sanatorium, 200 miles away from her family, returning in 1905 to her home in Lawton, a tiny town in the north-east of the state. It was a new town, constructed by the railroad as a location for supplying locomotives with water for steam to power freight trains moving grain and other raw materials from Saskatchewan and Manitoba for production and distribution in the American mid-west. Her father, a 2nd generation immigrant from the Netherlands, and his wife, Annie, ran the Lawton general store, serving the 250 townspeople and the surrounding farming families there. Margot was the middle child of five, bright and active despite her disabilities from polio.

She went to the University of North Dakota wanting to study mathematics but had to major in home economics—officially only male students could successfully do mathematics. Margot adapted and completed her BA in 1925, along the way developing a flair for dress design and a long friendship with Marian Stepheson, a photography instructor. After Margot's graduation, she and Marion went to Paris to apprentice in Parisian couture, Marian in photography and Margot in design. Three years later, they disembarked in New York, eager to make it there. Margot began at the bottom, designing lady's underwear. And she got ahead because she understood stuff—fabrics, cutting, stitching from her time in Paris and how to do math standing on her feet from he BA in Home Ec at UND.

As department stores began to market upscale, ready-to-wear fashions for women, Margot's thwarted interest in mathematics paid off. Designing attractive suits and dresses that would fit the standard manikin, hand-sown, was important. But then the difficult part followed: one had to transform the basic measurements in the resultant patterns properly, scaling a design to enable mass producing a ready-to-wear inventory to fit off the rack the many different women wo shopped in stores across the nation. With these skills and an out-going personality she readily got well paid positions throughout the Depression.

It's embarrassing. At least I knew Margot and Joe had lives before my birth and found out how they got to New York. But for some reason, I never learned how they met and fell in love, if that's what they did before marrying in October, 1935. Without parents or family involved, they gave themselves a big church wedding, followed by a big party for friends and acquaintances at the Waldorf-Astoria. I suspect the guests would have mapped into several lightly intersecting circles, for finance and fashion were largely different scenes. They enjoyed creating a busy social space linking the two, and they made a point of including me in their social lives from infancy on. That's how I became an observant participator, at ease peppering adults about what they thought and did. It was an extroverted world, and reminiscing about the start of intimacy may better suit an introverted style, so I never got the story of how they met.

At any rate, I learned a lot participating in their adult world, but I did not become aware of a grand courtship between Margot and Joe. I think acquaintance turning to friendship and the economic advantages of pooling two incomes in a place like Manhattan during the Depression would have had much to do with bringing their wedding about. It was neither a love match nor an arranged marriage, but a marriage arrangement, one that worked well until death did them part. Whether or not they had fully anticipated my arrival in 4 years as part of that arrangement, I can't be sure, but I'm very glad I made it there, despite the hubbub of my arrival, and they have been most gracious, caring, and generous in including me in it thereafter. And with that said, I'll resume my story.

1939 to 1942: A Prince of the Park

As Margot recuperated, I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment on Gramercy Place. It was a great set up for a socially active couple with some money to burn. It had a large terrace, a coveted view, and suited their routines of engaging work and gregarious lifestyle, almost a set for a screwball comedy. Years later when they got together with old friends, they would reminisce about the start of the first big party they held. A lot of rain water had caused an ungainly sag in the awning over the terrace. Rushing about in last minute preparations, Margot had the maid give the sag a hefty shove with a broom from below, launching a wave of water over the edge of the terrace. A few minutes later, answering insistent ringing of the doorbell, they faced a dapper gentleman, irate and dripping wet. Dismayed, apologizing profusely—He had been standing in such an unfortunate location!—they invited him to come in as their first guest to arrive, and being a sociable person, he drank and conversed while his hat and jacket dried as if nothing had happened, and thereafter he would return for later parties, a part of their regular circle.

For my first 3 years, that apartment, and the flow of activity that took place there, situated my initial lifeworld—a bunch of givens where I began to sleep and to eat, to walk and to talk, acquiring my initial efforts to cope with circumstances of time and place. Starting ignorant, I naturally fit in as it was at first the only place I could come to know. The apartment was scaled and furnished, loosely Art Deco, for socializing among Depression era, upwardly-mobile professionals, circa 30 to 40 in age. It came with a rarity, a key to a private, block-sized space straddling Irving Place between 20th and 21st, Gramercy Park. That's where I spent my time outdoors, a prince of the park, wheeled about by nanny in my carriage, sporting absurd finery and cooing with gushy bystanders. I have no actual memories of my life there then, but I like to think I would be having some reservations about it. Big-smile pictures of me dressed to the nines suggest someone learning to excessively please. And when parties were held, with guests standing intent in their conversations, placing their drinks carelessly on low tables, perhaps my cultivating a knack for quietly sousing myself as I toddled by suggested a sophisticated despair in the making. From infancy on, we all adapt to our lifeworlds, working with their good and their bad, whatever those may be.

As an infant and toddler, I'd basically see my parents during their downtime, for both worked hard, fulltime, away from home 10 a day. This skews my picture of their life and my place within it. I didn't pick up on what they actually did at their time at work, that came a bit later. But I sensed that they felt their jobs to be fulfilling, worthwhile work, privileging them doubly, to have it securely in straitened times, and to have it for doing things they found interesting and worthwhile. My downtime, those 10 hours a day when my parents were away, were safe and secure thanks to Woz, but I don't think they were all that interesting and worthwhile.

I had a lot of time to myself. My parents worried that I would grow up to be overly shy. That didn't happen, but I grew up to be highly reserved, finding it hard to make direct contact with others absent some shared project to work on. That started very early and conditions favoring it persisted through several changes in outward situation. A party for my 3rd birthday with my urban friends that my parents arranged illustrates the problem. For Margot and Joe, and for me as well, I think, it was a bit of a stretch. Who were my urban friends? You might think that having a private key to a block-sized park, well laid out and well maintained, would be pretty cool to have. But if you are a 3-year-old, you experience the peculiar demographics of that private key: there aren't many other 3-year-olds running loose there, and if not literally, then figuratively, the few that are there are on a tight leash. It isn't a place to become adept at social play with your peers. My parents managed to populate the table with assorted 3-year-olds, and it was a smiley occasion for all, which made it into the picture book, but in retrospect I think it was a fraught occasion, portending for me a felt need for significant change.

Of course, I should make it explicit that living on Gramercy Place had not been the entirety of my world, for Woz and I would accompany Margo and Joe for various weekend visits and longer times in the summers of '40 and '41. I would experience those forays as transient departures from our urban routines, often pleasing but sometimes a little confusing, both more of the same and intimations of alternative lifeworlds. Sometimes there would be a beach—lots of sand, no clothes, all good. Other times it would be to a big house somewhere with a dozen or more adults—all eating, drinking, talking, and a lot of worry how to keep me out of trouble. One destination like that seemed somewhat recurrent and a little different. There, Margo and Joe often didn't relax convivially as elsewhere they would. Instead, they busied themselves with projects in and about this strangely vacant house, while Woz, who had barely ever in her life been out of the city, nervously kept me too much aside from the action. Nevertheless, I would eye what was around me, and with some excitement, I added "the farm" to my sparse vocabulary.

Margot and Joe had scraped to buy the farm for a song in a deeply depressed market 2 or 3 years before I was born. They had good incomes but were not wealthy, for Margot never had any assets and the comfortable expectations of Joe's youth had seriously contracted with the Depression and disappeared with his father's fatal stroke in 1931. What my parents bought was a farm that could no longer produce a livelihood for those who worked it. What they saw in it was a property that with steady improvements could in time become a wonderful "place in the country." Turning it into an attractive weekend and summer retreat had become their shared avocation, my father the planner and my mother the manager.

Work progressed slowly, and I came alongMy involvement came late, of course, and I could only begin as a passive participant in the endeavor, which a picture perfectly captures. It showed an adult crowd partying on the back terrace at the farm, celebrating my baptism in a local Episcopal chapel, since often passed but never entered. I was in the center, an infant asleep, held awkwardly in the arms of my godfather, CEO of the investment bank for which my father worked, a person whom I had not seen before and would not see again. That scene, and most everything else during my first 3 years, fits the conventional necessities—comme il faut, the way it's supposed to be. Those expectations structured the lives of my parents and the lifeworld they were creating. And on the surface, neither I nor they would have reason to expect things to become very different.

But conditions for change had ripened. By the time I turned 3, the country was in full wartime mobilization with important consequences for both Margot and Joe. One might think that people working in finance and fashion would have less to do during the war, but that wasn't the case. Like many in finance, Joe had strongly opposed the Banking Act of 1933, but his view of New Deal programs quickly improved and he had done considerable work financing the electrical distribution grids and supporting local changes needed to bring the fruits of TVA projects to actual customers. With mobilization, there followed the much larger problem of converting the American industrial based to all out wartime production. By 1942, that was the mission he understood investment banking to have. Similarly, Margot was caught up in a thorough transformation as the garment industry as it retooled and redesigned its business to produce the clothes that the many millions in the military needed for the all situations they faced. At the same time, they had to adapt civilian design and production to meet the needs of everyone within stringent rationing regulations and changing lifeworld uses. Social life changed as well. Gaiety had not come all that easily during the Depression. In a world at war it became all the harder, and rationing, designed to restrict consumption to strict necessity, prompted everyone to rethink their social styles.

As I later heard it, in 1942, the austerities of the war and the constraints of our out-grown apartment prompted my parents to change our living arrangements radically. This sounds like a pragmatically matter-of-fact intention. But it became complicated. Whether my parents fully thought the matter through now seems unlikely to me, but by mid 1942 or thereabouts, they had decided to move away from Gramercy Place, and to do it by living fulltime at their place in the country, the farm in Solebury, Pennsylvania. n actuality, moving to the farm entailed significant changes in my parents' lives and in mine, but for a considerable time, these did not have much effect on life goals and the norms that came with those. I want to examine these apparent continuities and the changes that set in slowly but steadily, for they were powerful formative experiences then and have retained their significance throughout my life.

Looking back, I don't fully understand why my parents didn't just move to a larger apartment at a less expensive address, a short taxi ride to work near Harold Square for Margot and a few stops on the subway downtown for Joe. But they did something feasible but unexpected, probably surprising to friends and acquaintances. And it worked out well, for me at least, once I slowly perceived and grasped the opportunities it opened up throughout my childhood and youth. I doubt that my parents explicitly consulted me in the matter, but I'm sure that in pondering the move together they have would said, among other things, "and it will be good for Robert." I don't know what role my actions and responses at the time played in their decision, but it is clear to me now that I wasn't actually making a life I could call my own in my situation in the city. They never said as much, but I believe they sensed it. Years later, off in boarding school, reading Catcher in the Rye, I didn't experience Holden Caulfield disinterestedly as Salinger's masterful literary creation. I recoiled from Holden as a repugnant persona of myself, the person whom I would have been had we staid pat on Gramercy Place.

Making the farm, not only our primary residence, but our only place of residence, significantly changed the meaning the farm had for them. Up to that time, they perceived and experienced "the farm" as an example of the ancient concept of "a place in the country," allusions to which abound in classical literature. A place in the country supplements the home in the city with a respite from urban pressures, a social resource in interacting with friends, and perhaps a way of converting consumption expenditures into a growing investment asset through steady improvements the property. Within their urban social and professional ethos, a place in the country came with important continuities, most importantly, the whole habitus of affluent, well-educated, privileged urbanity. If you had a house in the country, you might spend time in the country, but you were not of the country. For the adults, their urban ethos would remain central, defining the norms and expectations of life, reinforced by settled peer-groups and constraints of employment. By giving up their urban base, Margot and Joe slipped the anchor, and their place in the country started a cultural drift.

Margot and Joe might have thought they were making the farm function as the site for an alternative practice, living in the suburbs. Suburban life was catching on around New York prior to the war, and it became a dominant trend by the early 1950s. The suburb, a distinct locale, housed nuclear families, each in a separate house with the husband, the breadwinner commuting to work outside the suburb, and the wife, the homemaker caring primarily within the suburban locale for their daily needs and those of their children. Neither Margot or Joe grew up with experience of suburban life and coming to New York, neither formed close friendships with people who lived in the suburbs. Could they effectively redefine their house in the country as a suburban base? What's the commute? It's 5 days per week, 2 hours each way plus an 8-hour stint in the office, a wash between car or train, although rationing nixes the car. Who's the breadwinner? Tricky! Then, investment banks did not pay salaried executives particularly well until they made partner, which Joe only did in 1952. Until then, Margot made the bulk of their income (circa 60-40). Both had a sense of self that based significantly on commitment to their professional careers. The result will be 2 breadwinners, both at work 7:00 am to 7:00 pm. Who is the homemaker? Woz, a young Irish nanny, born and bred in mid-town Manhattan, sweet, shy, and insecure. That was the implicit plan. Would it work? Let's find out.

1942 to 1943: Changing Lifeworlds.

Self-Definition
We live life, each and all, in the face of necessities. Our capacity for self-definition arises, not from the fortuitous absence of those necessities, but from our ability to understand, to judge, and to exercise opportunities to influence how they impinge on us and our purposeful powers.

When we moved to the farm, Margot and Joe had owned it for 5 years or so and used it as their place in the country. As their place in the country, it fit well with their urban aspirations and norms, and we were clearly moving to the country, not the suburbs, in going there full time. They might think their 3-year-old would have analogous expectations, playing around a red barn with a cow and some chickens, and initially many anticipated continuities. But to a surprising extent, children are natural phenomenologists and they take in what they see, quite distinct from the fantasies their imaginations might conjure and the routines normal in their prior circumstances. [**** I'm quite sure, in a somewhat different way for my parents, we need to step back a bit Margo and Joe had bought the farm But I am sure that by the time it became home, I was ready to turn active, exploring the farm and making it my turf!

1943 to 1948: The Farm @ Solebury, Pa.

You can find the small village of Solebury at a confusion of stop-signs where 5 country roads converge, about 2 hours south-west of Manhattan, a couple miles beyond the Delaware River, 7 or 8 upstream from historic Washington's Crossing. At the western edge of the village, the Farm occupies 65 acres of bucolic Bucks County land, up the face of a rolling hill, about half of it fallow or wooded, the other half cultivated in wheat, corn, or soy beans. The main house had been built of field-stone in spurts from the mid 1700's to the mid 1800's, part of a prosperous farm, which in addition to raising crops and animals, served the locality as its creamery. There other farms in the locality brought raw milk for conversion into drinking milk, cream, butter, and cheese. It had a large attic floor beneath a sloping roof. The 2nd floor had 4 bedrooms, 2 small and 2 large with unused fireplaces, and 2 bathrooms. The main floor had a kitchen with an electric stove and large, inefficient refrigerator, a dining room with a big working fireplace, and a large living room with an even bigger fireplace. A coal burning furnace heated the house by circulating hot water to heavy iron radiators in the rooms. Water flowed to the house through a pipe from a natural spring where it came to the surface up the hill and collected in a small, rocky pool, covered by a little shed. In addition to supplying the house, the spring fed a small pond at the foot of the property, then flowing off under a small bridge for a local road. During the 19th century, that water was also essential for a small field-stone structure, about 12 to 15 feet square and one and a half stories high. The "spring house" stood, with slits high up giving a dim light inside, a pre-modern, walk-in refrigerator, powered by spring water flowing in, around a large circular stone in the center, and out to a nearby pond, keeping the butter, cheese and other creamery products safely cool whatever the season. Nearby there was a smaller stone structure, maybe 8 to 10 feet square, squat and disused—the "smoke house" .... But most important to me, a big, working barn stood catty-corner 75 feet or so from the main house. Like the house, the barn had grown from the mid 1700s on. Its base was about 50 foot square, constructed from field-stone, about 3 stories high, with the back wall dug into the hill rising behind it. The front and back walls were faced with wooden planks, the side wall were stone work going all the way up, supporting the roof and interior structure. The ground to the back wall was built up to make a wide ramp to the 2nd floor, with high sliding doors so that heavy, bulky loads could be easily taken in filled with various animals, diverse tools, and lots of space, materials, and stuff to let imagination soar. I describe the farm at some length because I made my new home a crucial site of my self development for the next 10 years and more. I certainly was not aware whether or not my parents purposively planned it, but our moving fulltime to the farm created for me extraordinary opportunities for self-development. . . . To be continued. . . .