Robbie/Timeline RMCC

Agency and Education

On forming my self and my circumstances

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

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, 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, but it took 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, and then 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. Of course, I knew nothing about them then, but they were essential facts of life for me. I'll fill in what I've come to learn about them as they were then and fill out lacuna with my considered judgment about what must have probably been the case. That way I can grasp a little about the lifeworld into which I arrived. It's a difficult matter, which I should face at the start. I write to better understand how a sense of agency emerges for living persons as we repeatedly find ourselves having to act, finding ourselves ignorant in the midst of actual circumstances about what to do, how to do it, why, with whom, when and where. I do this reflecting on my own case, seeking to understand how my own sense of agency, the ongoing emergence of what I can and should seek to do while immersed in the actual circumstances of my life, has come about. I do this cognizant that the lifeworld which became actual with me on August 17th, 1939, was unique to me and remains so as I in interaction with it have continued to develop. My reflections on this process give rise to no transmissible or reproduceable model. But the reflective effort may stimulate similar efforts by others, leading to more refined purposes, greater skills, and deeper insights. And as numerous reflections on how a sense of agency emerges in unique and different lives accumulates, insight into common resources and pitfalls may build, leading not to normative models, but to more helpful support and counsel to persons seeking to foster the ongoing effort by distinctive persons forming their abilities to act purposefully within their unique set of circumstances.

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, 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 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 recognized 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. 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 Place. 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, almost a set for a screwball comedy. Years later when they got together with old friends, they would reminisce about the dapper stranger who appeared, irate and dripping wet, just before the first big party they were holding there. Rain water had accumulated in a big sag in the awning over the terrace and the maid, rushing about in last minute preparations, had given a hefty shove with a broom from under the sag, launching a wave of water over the edge of the terrace. They calmed down the man, who had been standing in an unfortunate location, and invited him in as the first guest to arrive, and being a sociable person, he joined in, amiable while his hat and jacket dried, and would often return for later occasions, 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 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 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. 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. And the peoples of the world had fully plunged into the traumas of global war.

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. This sounds like a pragmatically fatter-of-fact move. In actuality it was more complicated for all of us, and I perceived the opportunities it opened up slowly throughout 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." Years later, off in boarding school, reading Catcher in the Rye, I didn't experience Holden Caulfield as a masterful literary creation, but recoiled from him as a repugnant persona that I might have been had we staid pat by Gramercy Park. While we had lived there, it 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 around me, and with some excitement, I added "the farm" to my sparse vocabulary. In August, my parents gave 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 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 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 in retrospect I think it was a fraught occasion, portending for me a felt need for significant change. and 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 does not come with a quick answer. For my parents, on the brink of 40, the prospect of moving to the farm came with continuities set in their well seasoned 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 "a place in the country," 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, 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 spoused 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 with a decision to live at the farm.

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.

In actuality, for my parents, moving to the farm entailed significant changes in their lives, but for a considerable time, these did not have much effect on their life goals and the norms that came with those. "The farm" as they perceived and experienced it exemplified the ancient concept of "a place in the country," allusions to which classical literature. It differs from a related, more modern idea of living in the suburbs. Neither Margot or Joe grew up with much experience of suburban life and coming to New York, neither became close friends with people who lived in the suburbs. Even in 1942, among upper-middle-class New York couples, their dual-earner marriage arrangement with a 3-year-old child would be unusual then. And the asymmetry of their dual-earner status furthered their distinctiveness, for 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. Their move was not one that fit the suburban because the self-expectations of both left neither adaptable to the homemaker role. Both Margot and Joe would commute 5 days per week, 2 hours each way plus an 8-hour stint in the office, leaving Robbie and Woz from 7 am to 7 pm in the place in the country. That's right: I saw this situation largely favorable; Woz did not. She had been incubating her nest egg near to her home in Hells Kitchen, a walk from Gramercy Place. But from rural Pennsylvania, she found catching the eye of a regular guy who would eagerly marry and make with her a home and family of their own an impossible dream.

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 three-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. . . .