Robbie/Timeline RMCC

The story of of my life and and self-formation, a title to be added

Getting started, 1939-1965

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, Margot, 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, and a strong will, as well as the narrowed cervical canal that I couldn't get through. As happens, my father had an easier time with my birth than mother did. He had the wrong blood type for the transfusions Margot needed and had to stand by while the hospital went out on the street to find a volunteer with the right type to give the blood she needed. Yeah, that sounded apocryphal to me when I heard it much later, but blood banks weren't common in hospitals then and the French Hospital was pretty small. But who knows? I'm here 86 years later telling my tale and after several weeks recuperating Margot recovered and filled her 95 with a full and active life.

Unbeknownst to me during the fraught hours of my birth, I was beginning life with significant advantages, thanks both to both my parents. By separate routes, both of the in their '20s came east from the west to New York, taking root there in the mid 1920s. It may seem dumb to look for differences between oneself and ones parents, but I think it both interesting and significant that I was born a New Yorker, an affluent Manhattanite by ascription for that matter, while each of my parents became New Yorkers by aspiration and achievement. I yo follow on, you'll have opportunities to judge whether this difference has significance, but for now, let's get my parents to the city.

I'll start with my father— his line was pretty straight. He 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 concluded from various clues that he was pampered at home and bullied in school and becoming strongly avers to it all he refused to attend Stanford and chose Princeton instead where no one knew him and he could start over calling himself Joe. At Princeton, Class of '25, he earned a BA in history and formed a circle of friends and acquaintances and continued to study in a genteel way towards a doctorate from Columbia. At the same time, lumber was becoming a troubled commodity, his family's finances worsened, and his father's health declined. Needing an income, Joe gave up his academic aspirations and landed a good job in investment banking at Brown Brothers & Co., and in the early '30s the Depression, corporate mergers and the 1933 Banking Act transferred that job to a newly formed Harriman, Ripley, & Co.

Margot's path to the city was less predictable. She was born in 1903 in Lawton, ND, a tiny town founded in 1902 to supply water for steam to freight trains moving grain and other goods from Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Chicago. Her father ran the general store there and she was in the middle child of five, bright and active despite her disabilities. She went to the University of North Dakota wanting to study mathematics

A newborn like myself, and like all of us as we are newly born, knows nothing about parents and their world of experience, about his and other's situations in time and place. Our natality inserts us into a full, actively developing world, uniquely situating us in it as instances of self-maintaining vitality that are thoroughly ignorant about what we can and should do. Knowing nothing the newborn must recognize and understand given circumstances and how to act purposefully with and upon them. , and both succeeded to get well-paid professional positions despite depression times, and to cultivate active social lives through which they met and married in October, 1935, celebrating with a memorable reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.

As we go along, I'll fill in how and why Margot got from North Dakota to New York, along with other things from them both. For now as I begin my story, I'll simply add that Margot had been born in Michigan Township in northeastern North Dakota on June 15th, 1903. In 1939, she was living in New York City, working near Herald Square in the Garment District, designing a line of junior-miss dresses and suits sold nationally in mid-scale department stores. and Joe, was known formally at the Wall Street investment bank, Harriman, Ripley, & Co. where he was a midlevel executive on financing large industrial projects through. Both Margot and Joe had gone to New York City to had been establishing themselves in their respective professions since 1925, meeting in the early '30s and marrying

I fill in more about his past as appropriate as well.

worked

Mother: informally, .

More. . . .

1939 to 1942: A Prince of the Park

I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment on Gramercy Park, replete with a large terrace, a coveted view, and their routines of engaging work and gregarious lifestyle. 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 was ready for a change with which I might turn active, a self-directing agent in a very different lifeworld. which, Thankfully, it 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, whom I didn't really know, and shortly after that I learned that we were moving away from Gramercy Park to live fulltime at the farm.

How might an energetic 3-year-old intuit the possibilities of life at the farm relative to nascent prospects set by his urban agenda? 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 retreat weekends and summers 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 structures 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 life necessities diverge from the social necessities. With the move to the farm, I became alert 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: Gaining Some Control

We live life, each and all, in the face of necessities. Our powers of self-definition arise, not from the fortuitous absence of necessities, but from our ability to understand and to exercise opportunities to influence how they impinge on us purposefully.