Robbie/Timeline RMCC

A Timeline of my life and and self-formation

Starting Up, 1939-1965

Birth: August 17, 1939.

Mother: Margot de Bruyn Kops McClintock, worked near Herald Square in the Garment District, a designing a line of junior-miss dresses and suits sold nationally in mid-scale department stores.

Father: Franklin T. McClintock, "Joe" to friends and family, worked as a midlevel executive on financing large industrial projects through the Wall Street investment bank, 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: Gramercy Park, New York

I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment, with its terrace overlooking Gramercy Park. It was scaled and furnished, loosely Art Deco, for socializing among Depression era, upwardly-mobile professionals, circa 30 to 40 in age. I have no actual memories of life there then, but it was basically all I knew, I must have accepted it, I like to think with some reservation. Big-smile pictures of me dressed to the nines suggest someone learning to excessively please. And perhaps my 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. At any rate, by mid '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, Creamery Road, Solebury, Pa.

I don't know how my parents managed it, but in the months after my third birthday, the Gramercy Park apartment clearly disappeared from my lifeworld, persisting only in my second-hand memory. Before the move, we would have gone to the farm for a number of weekends, and perhaps longer times in the summers of 40 and 41, but I would have experienced that like other forays here and there as transient departures from our urban home live, pleasing but confusing. Instead, the move in 42 became a new actuality with possibilities which were for me, not clear but very different, for "the farm," as we called it, had now become home. Although I don't have an actual memory of my emotions triggered by the change, I'm sure I heartily approved.

Margot and Joe 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 began, of course, as a passive participant in the endeavor. But I am sure that by the time it became home, 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!

Let's set the new scene to sense how an energetic 3-year-old might intuit its possibilities relative to programmed and pampered prospects on Gramercy Park. 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. 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, a dining room with a large working fireplace, and a large living room with an even bigger fireplace, which also worked.Adjacent, 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., They
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.

Civic Humanism, 1960-1985

Digital Humanism, 1980-2005

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