Robbie/Timeline RMCC

A Timeline of my life and work

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Starting Up, 1939-1965

1939

Birth: August 17. Mother: Margot de Bruyn Kops McClintock, a designer of junior-miss dresses and suits sold nationally in mid-scale department stores. Father: Franklin T. McClintock, a midlevel executive in the investment banking firm, Harriman, Ripley, & Co. My birth nearly killed my mother, owing to 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, a strong will, and, I discovered, a constricted cervical canal. More. . . .

1939 to 1942

I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment, with its terrace overlooking Gramercy Park, scaled and furnished, loosely Art Deco, for socializing among Depression era, upwardly-mobile professionals, circa 30 to 40. I have no actual memories of life then, and it being all I knew, I seem to have accepted it. But smiley pictures of me dressed to the nines suggest someone learning to excessively please. And perhaps my knack for quietly sousing myself on drinks carelessly set on low tables by standing guests intent in conversation suggested a sophisticated despair in the making. At any rate, by late '42 or so, recognizing the austerities of war and the constraints of out-grown living arrangements, my parents radically changed my lifeworld, and theirs as well.

1943 to 1948

The Farm, Solebury, Pa. I don't know how my parents managed it, but suddenly sometime in my third year, our Gramercy Park apartment disappeared and I lived fulltime at "the farm," as we called it. Although I don't have a memory of my emotions about it, I'm sure I heartily approved of the move. 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 retreat weekends and summers became their shared avocation, my father the planner and my mother the manager. From my beginning, I had been a passive participant in that endeavor. But I am sure that I had had enough of being the prince of the park, wheeled about by nanny in my carriage, sporting absurd finery and cooing for gushy bystanders! I was ready to turn active, exploring the farm and making it my turf. 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.

but they each worked fulltime in their Manhattan offices with staffs to manage, projects to plan, and deadlines to meet.

Finishing up 2000-on

1959/60 Excerpt from my undergraduate journal pdf 1960/61 Educational Content and the American Reality: An Inquiry into Secondary Education for Americans Living in Europe (Senior thesis) pdf June: Graduated from Princeton University, with an A.B. degree and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Certificate, the Gale F. Johnston Prize in Public Affairs, and High Honors in the School of Public and International Affairs. Princeton Undergraduate Transcript, 1957-61. pdf 1961/62 Summer: Managed the summer program at the American School in Switzerland ("Swiss Holiday")
September: Began study at Columbia University towards an M.A. in History.
Fall: paper (now lost) on Henry Adams for a Colloquium in American Intellectual History with Henry Steele Commager, then visiting professor. pdf April: Draft M.A. Essays, "The Development of Concepts of Association in American Educational Thought" submitted and rejected by the faculty advisor. Arranged to switch to History and Education program with Lawrence A. Cremin as advisor.
September: Started work on Ph.D. on History and Education as a student in Columbia's International Fellows Program. pdf 1962/63 "Notes from a Mad Man," Review of Education and the New America by James McClellan & Solon T. Kimball. Unpublished, submitted 12/17/1962 for the General Seminar (TF6000). pdf December:The American Attack on UNESCO:1951-1957 (MA Essay, submitted 12_18_1963) pdf 1980 Citizens and Subjects: Educational Politics in
Historical Perspective pdf1 pdf2 1980 My case for promotion to full professor pdf html