Robbie/Timeline RMCC

A Self—Forever Forming

The story of my life and and self-formation

Getting started, 1939-1965

Origial 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 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, ND, 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. My father, as happens, 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 took a couple months to recuperate, longer than her employer expected. They fired her, despite having said would keep her job. She took it to court, standing up for women's rights, and won her job back along with court expenses, but returned to work at a better salary with her former employer's competitor.

Parentage

You can see, but 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 a key to much significance, but for now, to get a sense of my parents' lives, let's give them names and get them from their places birth to their adult lives in Manhattan.

I'll start with my father—his path 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 do, choosing Princeton instead. There no one knew him, he started over, a good egg called Joe. The name stuck, new friends lasted, and he never looked back. He left Princeton, class of '25, with a BA in history and a supportive circle—good connections, what an elite college was all about. He proceeded to study in a genteel style towards a doctorate from Columbia. That didn't last; it being the latter 1920s, circumstances were becoming adverse: lumber became a troubled commodity, the family's finances worsened, and his father's health declined—Franklin Trunkey McClintock realized he needed an income, and hence Joe gave up his academic aspirations, landing a good job in investment banking at Brown Brothers & Co with thanks to his acquired connections. With the crash of '29 and the ensuing Depression, corporate mergers and the 1933 Banking Act transferred that job 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 and Margot began establishing a career in the city's fashion industry. 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 scale them to enable mass producing a ready-to-wear inventory to fit off the rack the many different women shopping 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 found out how they met and fell in love, if that's what they did before marrying in October, 1935. Without parents or family ivolved, they gave themselves the wedding, followed by a big party for friends and acquaintances at the Waldorf-Astoria. I suspect the partiers might have mapped into several lightly interlocking circles with the members of each deriving from the work and college experience of either Joe or Margot. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, making inferences back from my experience as an only child whose parents were in their later 30s, each much involved in their careers and the social and cultural lives in the city. Worried that I might become overly shy, they made a point of including me in their social lives taking me to their parties and to the theater, and I became an observant participator. At any rate, in the course of that I did not become aware of a grand courtship between Margot and Joe, and I think 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 Park. It was a great place 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. In later years I would repeatedly hear how, before my time, they had made friends with a dapper gentleman who appeared at their front door just before a party dripping wets. The maid rushing about in last minute preparations had given the major sag in the awning over a hefty shove with a broom to get rid of the accumulated rain water. The gentleman enjoyed things while his hat and jacket dried and would return often for later occasions, but I wasn't able to figure out who among the crowd as I got to know it he might have been. 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 and to walk and to talk, acquiring my initial efforts to cope with circumstances of time and place. 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 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 perhaps my cultivating a knack for quietly sousing myself on drinks carelessly set on low tables by standing guests intent in their conversations 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. At the age of 3, I had the basics and was ready for a change with which I might turn active, a self-directing agent in a very different lifeworld. Thankfully, soon that came about.

1942 to 1943: A Different Lifeworld.

As I later heard it, in 1942, the austerities of the war and the constraints of out-grown living arrangements prompted my parents to change our living arrangements radically. I doubt that they explicitly consulted me in the matter, but I like to think that I had some subtle, tacit influence on the depth and extent of the changes they initiated. While we had lived there, the Gramercy Park apartment had not been the whole of my world, for Woz and I would accompany Margo and Joe to various places for short 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—intimations of alternative lifeworlds. One destination seemed somewhat recurrent. And there, Margo and Joe 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 going on around me and with some excitement added "the farm" to my sparse vocabulary. In August, I had a little party for my 3rd birthday with my urban friends, which for Margot and Joe, and for me as well I think, was a bit of a stretch. You might think that to have a private key to 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 in the Park, and those that are there, if not literally, then figuratively are on a tight leash. My parents pulled my 3rd birthday party off, but it was a smiley occasion for all that made it into the picture book, but sharpened anticipation for the change that was soon coming with that new word, "the farm."

How might an energetic 3-year-old intuit the possibilities of life at the farm relative to lonely prospects set by his urban agenda? That question come with a quick answer. For my parents, adults, the prospect of moving to the farm came with continuities set in their well formed character and established patterns of activity. They had bought the farm for a song in a deeply depressed market 2 or 3 years before I was born. Making it into an attractive weekend and summer retreat had become their shared avocation, my father the planner and my mother the manager. My involvement came late, of course, and I could only begin as a passive participant in the endeavor. A picture surely captures such expectations. 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 I had not seen before and would not see again.

For my first 3 years, conventional necessities—comme il faut, the way it's spoused to be—structured my life, as they had structured the lives of my parents and the lifeworld they created. And on the surface, neither I nor they would have reason to expect things to become very different with the decision to live at the farm. The idiom, comme il faut, literally says "as it is necessary" and comes to refer to what is conventionally required because in settled social circles, many conventions take on an appearance of necessity, requiring those who will conduct themselves effectively to follow the conventional expectations astutely. But the phrase can turn very ironic when necessities of life diverge from the social necessities. With the move to the farm, social necessity still controlled, I became alert, tacitly but consequentially, to these ironies as they arose and took advantage of them to center there, for better and for worse, my own independent lifeworld.

1943 to 1945: Starting to define myself

Self-Definition

We live life, each and all, in the face of necessities. Our capacity for self-definition arise, 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.

Soon after that 3rd birthday, my parents announced we were moving to the farm full-time. I don't have actual memories of my emotions that this announcement triggered, but I'm sure they were emotions of hearty approval and eager anticipation. Let's try now, as writer and reader, to grasp the inner experience I would probably have felt as the circumstances of living at the farm, absorbed and displaced those of living on Gramercy Place. To adults like my parents, aspirational expectations condition how they experience different places, shaping attend to and act on the actualities they encounter. To my parents, "the farm," a place in the country, would be an anticipatory idea, one that moves many urban folk who have some resources to spare. They might think their three-year-old would have similar expectations, playing around a red barn with a cow and some chickens. But children are natura phenomenologists and take in what the see, quite distinct the fantasies their imaginations might conjure. — 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 to important 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. . . .