Robbie/Timeline RMCC

A Self—Forever Forming

The story of my life and and self-formation

Getting started, 1939-1965

All of us as we are newly born know nothing about parents and their world of experience, about their 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 life, we are thoroughly ignorant about what we can and should do. Knowing nothing, each newborn must recognize and understand its given circumstances, and how to act purposefully with and upon them, thereby experiencing the contingency of actuality.

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 from 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 both, plotting in his youth to put it 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 arose: 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 childhood and youth.

My mother took a less predictable and more interesting path. Marguerite de Bruyn Kops, Margot for short, 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 her home in Lawton, a tiny town in the north-east of the state. It was a new town, 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, she and Marion 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. Ss department stores began to market upscale, ready-to-wear fashions for women, Margot's thwarted interest in mathematics paid off. Designing attractive suits and dresses that would fit the standard manikin, hand-sown, was important. But it was ore difficult to then transform the basic measurements in the resultant patterns to enable mass producing a ready-to-wear inventory properly scaled to fit off the rack the many different women shopping in stores across the nation. With these skills and an out-going personality she readily got well paid positions throughout the Depression.

It's embarrassing. At least I knew Margot and Joe had lives before my birth and found out how they got to New York. But for some reason, I never found out how they met and fell in love, if that's what they did before marrying in October, 1935. They gave themselves the wedding, no parents and little family involved, and a big party for friends and acquaintances at the Waldorf-Astoria. I think those might have mapped into several lightly interlocking circles a bit with the members of each deriving from the work and college experience of either Joe or Margot. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, making inferences back from my experience as an only child whose parents were older than usual, each with involved in their career. Worried that I might become overly shy, they made a point of including me in the social lives, and I became an observant participator. At any rate, I am unaware of a grand courtship between Margot and Joe, and I think friendship and the economic advantages of pooling two incomes in a place like Manhattan during the Depression would have had much to do with bringing their wedding about. It was neither a love match nor an arranged marriage, but a marriage arrangement that worked well until death did them part. Whether I was anticipated n 3 years as part of the arrangement or