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. 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 the hospital 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. But who knows? I'm here now, 86 years later telling my tale, and after several weeks recuperating mother was herself again, filling out her 95, as sharp and active as before.

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 came 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 became 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 their birthplaces to the city.

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 it all, plotting in his youth to put those pains 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. Too good, of course; it being the latter 1920s, complications began to arise: 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 youth.

My mother's path to the city was less predictable and more interesting. Marguerite de Bruyn Kops, 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 home in Lawton, a tiny town in the north-east of the state. Recently, it had been 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, the two 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. Her thwarted interest in mathematics paid off as department stores began to market upscale, ready-to-wear fashions for women. Margot develop a reputation for designing attractive suits for the office and dresses for cocktails and dinner that would not only fit hand-sown the standard manikin but when mass produced with the many transformations of measurements needed in a ready-to-wear inventory would be properly scaled to fit the many different women shopping in stores across the nation. These skills and an out-going personality she readily got well paid throughout the Depression.

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.