Robbie/Timeline RMCC

A Timeline of my life and and self-formation

Starting Up, 1939-1965

Birth: August 17, 1939.

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.

Mother: Margot de Bruyn Kops McClintock, "Margo" informally, worked near Herald Square in the Garment District, 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: A Prince of the Park

I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment on Gramercy Park, replete a large terrace, a coveted view, and their routines of engaging work and gregarious lifestyle. For my first 3 years, that apartment and the bustle of activities that took place there situated my initial lifeworld—my experience of all the givens where I began to sleep and to eat and to walk and to talk, my initial efforts to cope with all my circumstances of time and place. Our 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 to 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 was ready for a big change through which I could turn active, a self-directing agent in a very different lifeworld, which, thankfully, my parents brought about.

1942 to 1943: Entering an Alternate 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 also a bit confusing as intimations of alternative lifeworlds. One destination for these visits seemed somewhat recurrent. And there, it seemed my parents did not relax convivially as they usually would. Instead, they busied themselves with projects in and about this strangely deserted 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 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 the Gramercy Park apartment to live fulltime at the farm.

Let's pause to sense how an energetic 3-year-old might intuit the possibilities of life at the farm relative to programmed prospects given with life on Gramercy Park. Conventional necessities—comme il faut, the way it's spoused to be—had structured my life in New York. The farm was, at least in part, an aspirational place in the country where my parents could pursue their values, comme il faut, finessing many urban inconveniences of city life. A picture taken at a crowded party on the back terrace of the farm celebrating my baptism surely suggests it. I am there, an infant asleep in the arms of Joseph P. Ripley, my godfather and owner of the bank for which my father worked, someone who I never again saw in the flesh.

For my parents, the farm had such aspirational meaning integral to their prior life in the city. They had bought it 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.

I don't have actual memories of my emotions that this announcement triggered, but I'm sure they were emotions of hearty approval and eager anticipation. Now, for us as writer and reader to grasp the inner experience of what to me was taking place with the prospect of living at the farm, in contrast to living at Gramercy Park, let's pay attention to the actualities of it. To my parents, "the farm" would be an aspirational term common with urban folk who have resources to invest 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 My involvement began, of course, as a passive participant in the endeavor. 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.

Let's set the new scene to sense how an energetic 3-year-old might, intuiting 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.

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