A&E/Start

Getting started, 1939-1965

1) A Toddler in the City

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Original Ignorance
As we are newly born, all of us 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 each within it. As instances of self-maintaining life, we are thoroughly ignorant about what we can and should do. Knowing nothing, each newborn must recognize, understand, and judge its given circumstances, discovering how to act purposefully with and upon them and thereby experience the contingency of actuality, forever renewing that original ignorance. . . .

Hello,

I'm Robbie, officially Robert Oliver McClintock, but I've always preferred Robbie and strongly disliked Oliver. As Robbie, 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, Northz Dakota, 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 usually happens when a child is born, my father 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 an orderly 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. In any case, she got the blood, but it took her a couple months to recuperate, much longer than her employer expected when they agreed she would keep her job after having her baby. They fired her. She sued them, and won her job back along with court expenses. Then she returned to work at a better salary with her former employer's competitor.

Parents

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 had come 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 had become New Yorkers by aspiration and achievement. If you follow on, you'll have opportunities to judge whether this difference may be key to anything of 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 their adult lives in Manhattan.

I'll start with my father—his path from there to here was pretty straight. Franklin Trunkey McClintock, informally "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 and would do, choosing Princeton instead. There no one knew him. With Kewp left behind, he started over, a good egg called Joe. The name stuck, new friends lasted, and he never looked back.

In youth, Kewp had been pretty clear about what he didn't want, which got Joe to Princeton. But he was not an assertive person, more a quiet observer, at once gregarious yet reserved, not quick to declare what he thought he might want. His family was affluent. As a boy of 11 they all went on a European grant tour and at Princeton he had an aura of modest wealth, often ignoring classes while concentrating on making friends, developing a congenial, all-purpose intellect, becoming a somewhat low-keyed, self-aware sport. He left Princeton, class of '25, with a BA in history and a supportive circle—good connections, what an elite college was all about. Where to?

With no strong sense of purpose, he proceeded to Columbia where he studied history in a genteel way, perhaps for a doctorate and possibly thereby, a college teaching career. As the master said, the youth "learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise." It was the latter '20s, carefree in spirit while circumstances were quietly becoming adverse: lumber became a troubled commodity, the family's finances worsened, and his father's health declined. A year before the panic, Joe saw that the prospects of Franklin Trunkey McClintock were decidedly declining. He sensed he needed an income, and to get one, Joe gave up his academic idylls, landing a good job in investment banking at Brown Brothers & Co., with thanks to his college connections. As the Crash of '29 and the ensuing Depression washed over everyone, corporate mergers and the 1933 Banking Act transferred Joe and his job, more or less unchanged, 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 were deemed capable of completing a mathematics major. Margot adapted and earned 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, eager to make it there. Margot began at the bottom, designing lady's underwear. And she got ahead because she understood stuff—fabrics, cutting, stitching from her time in Paris and how to do math standing on her feet from he BA in Home Ec at UND.

As department stores began to market upscale, ready-to-wear fashions for women, Margot's thwarted interest in mathematics paid off. A popular and profitable line of attractive suits and dresses began with a prototype cut, fitted, and hand-sown on the standard, studio manikin. But then the difficult part followed: one size didn't fit all. The proper scaling of pattern-sets fitting a garment of the range of buyers, tallest and slimmest to shortest and stoutest involved much more that a simple linear extrapolation. These required numerous simultaneous calculations and constraints involving fabric characteristics, the geometry of cut lines on the cloth, the effects of different kinds of stitching machines and the like in order to enable mass producing a ready-to-wear inventory to fit off the rack the many different women who shopped 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 learned how they met and fell in love, if that's what they did before marrying in October, 1935. Without parents or family involved, they gave themselves a big church wedding in the city, followed by a big party for friends and acquaintances at the Waldorf-Astoria. I suspect the guests would have mapped into several lightly intersecting circles, for finance and fashion were largely different scenes. They enjoyed creating a busy social space linking the two, and they made a point of including me in their social lives from infancy on. That's how I became an observant participator, at ease peppering adults about what they thought and did. It was an extroverted world, and reminiscing about the start of intimacy may better suit an introverted style, so I never got the story of how they met.

At any rate, I learned a lot participating in their adult world, but I did not become aware of a grand courtship between Margot and Joe. I think acquaintance turning to 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, one that worked well until death did them part almost 40 years later. Whether or not they had fully anticipated my arrival in 4 years as part of that arrangement, I can't be sure, but I'm very glad I made it there, despite the hubbub of my arrival, and they have been most gracious, caring, and generous in including me in it thereafter. And with that said, I'll resume my story.

A Prince of the Park

As Margot recuperated, I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment on Gramercy Place. It was a great set up for a socially active couple with some money to burn. It had a large terrace, a coveted view, and suited their routines of engaging work and gregarious lifestyle, almost a set for a screwball comedy. Years later when they got together with old friends, they would reminisce about the start of the first big party they held. A lot of rain water had caused an ungainly sag in the awning over the terrace. Rushing about in last minute preparations, Margot had the maid give the sag a hefty shove with a broom from below, launching a wave of water over the edge of the terrace. A few minutes later, answering insistent ringing of the doorbell, they faced a dapper gentleman, irate and dripping wet. Dismayed, apologizing profusely—He had been standing in such an unfortunate location!—they invited him to come in as their first guest to arrive, and being a sociable person, he drank and conversed while his hat and jacket dried as if nothing had happened, and thereafter he would return for later parties, a part of their regular circle.

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, to walk and to talk, acquiring my initial efforts to cope with circumstances of time and place. Starting ignorant, I naturally fit in as it was at first the only place I could come to know. 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 between 20th and 21st, Gramercy Park. That's 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 when parties were held, with guests standing intent in their conversations, placing their drinks carelessly on low tables, perhaps my knack, as I toddled around, for quietly sousing myself 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.

As an infant and toddler, I'd basically see my parents during their downtime, for both worked hard, fulltime, away from home 10 hours a day. This skews my picture of their life and my place within it. I didn't then pick up on what they actually did at their time at work, that came a bit later. But I sensed that they felt their jobs to be fulfilling, worthwhile work, privileging them doubly, to have work securely in straitened times, and to have work in which they did things they found interesting and worthwhile. My downtime, those 10 hours a day when my parents were away, were safe and secure thanks to Woz, but I don't think they were all that interesting and worthwhile.

I had a lot of time to myself. My parents worried that I would grow up to be overly shy. That didn't happen, but I grew up to be highly reserved, finding it hard to make direct contact with others absent some shared project to work on. That started very early and conditions favoring it persisted through several changes in outward situation. A party for my 3rd birthday with my urban friends that my parents arranged illustrates the problem. For Margot and Joe, and for me as well, I think, it was a bit of a stretch. Who were my urban friends? You might think that having a private key to a block-sized park, well laid out and well maintained, would be pretty cool to have. But if you are a 3-year-old, you experience the peculiar demographics of that private key: there aren't many other 3-year-olds running loose there, and if not literally, then figuratively, the few that are there are on a tight leash. It isn't a place to become adept at social play with your peers. At the party, my parents managed to populate the table with assorted 3-year-olds, and it was a smiley occasion for all, which made it into the family album, but in retrospect I think it was a fraught occasion, portending for me a felt need for significant change.

Of course, I should make it explicit that living on Gramercy Place had not been the entirety of my world, for Woz and I would accompany Margo and Joe for various 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, both more of the same and intimations of alternative lifeworlds. Sometimes there would be a beach—lots of sand, no clothes, potential playmates, all good. Other times it would be to a big house somewhere with a dozen or more adults—all eating, drinking, talking, and a lot of worry how to keep me out of trouble. One destination like that seemed somewhat recurrent and a little different. There, Margo and Joe often 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 around me, and with some excitement, I added "the farm" to my sparse vocabulary.

Margot and Joe had scraped to buy the farm for a song in a deeply depressed market 2 or 3 years before I was born. They had good incomes but were not wealthy, neither Margot nor her family ever had any assets and the comfortable expectations of Joe's youth had seriously contracted with the Depression and disappeared with his father's fatal stroke in 1931. What my parents bought was a farm that could no longer produce a livelihood for those who worked it. What they saw in it was a property that steady improvements could make into a wonderful "place in the country." Turning it into an attractive weekend and summer retreat had become their shared avocation, my father the planner and my mother the manager.

Work progressed slowly, and I came along. My involvement came late, of course, and probably slowed the work. I could only begin as a passive participant in the endeavor, which a picture perfectly captures. Let's take it as the image of the status quo ante, for it captured a dual introduction prior to the sobering effects of war: an adult crowd partying on the back terrace at the farm introducing their nascent place in the country in celebration of 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 whom I had not seen before and would not see again. That scene, and most everything else during my first 3 years, fits the conventional necessities—comme il faut, the way it's supposed to be. Those expectations structured the lives of my parents and the lifeworld they were creating, both in New York and at their place in the country. And on the surface, neither I nor they would have reason to expect things to become very different.

But conditions for change had ripened. By the time I turned 3, the nation was in full wartime mobilization with important consequences for both Margot and Joe. One might think that people working in finance and fashion would have less to do during the war, but that wasn't the case. Like many in finance, Joe had strongly opposed the Banking Act of 1933, but his view of New Deal programs quickly grew more positive and he had done considerable work on financing the electrical distribution grids and supporting local changes needed to bring the fruits of TVA projects to actual customers. With mobilization, there followed the much larger problem of converting the American industrial based to all out wartime production. By 1942, that was the mission he understood investment banking to have. Similarly, Margot was caught up in a thorough transformation taking place as the garment industry retooled and redesigned its business to produce the clothes that the many millions in the military needed: boots on the ground, parachutes in the air, and uniforms for every situation. At the same time, they had to adapt civilian design and production to meet the clothing needs of everyone else within stringent rationing regulations and changing lifeworld uses. Social life changed as well. Gaiety had not come all that easily during the Depression. In a world at war it became all the harder, and rationing, designed to restrict consumption to strict necessity, prompted everyone to rethink their social norms and aspirations.

As I later heard it, in 1942, the austerities of the war and the constraints of our out-grown apartment prompted my parents to change our living arrangements radically. This sounds like a pragmatically matter-of-fact intention. But it became complicated. Whether my parents fully thought the matter through now seems unlikely to me, but by mid 1942 or thereabouts, they had decided to move away from Gramercy Place, and to do it by living fulltime at their nascent place in the country, the farm in Solebury, Pennsylvania. In actuality, moving to the farm entailed significant changes in my parents' lives and in mine, but for a considerable time, these did not have much effect on life goals and the norms that came with those. I want to examine these apparent continuities and the changes that set in slowly but steadily, for they were powerful formative experiences then and have retained their significance throughout my life.

Looking back, I don't fully understand why my parents didn't just move to a larger apartment at a less expensive address, a short taxi ride to work near Harold Square for Margot and a few stops on the subway downtown for Joe. But they made a more radical move instead, feasible but unexpected, surely surprising to friends and acquaintances. And it worked out well, for me at least, once I slowly perceived and grasped the opportunities it opened up throughout my childhood and youth. I doubt that my parents explicitly consulted me in the matter, but I'm sure that in pondering the move together they have would said, among other things, "and it will be good for Robert." I don't know what part my actions and responses at the time played in their decision, but it is clear to me looking back that I wasn't actually making a life I could call my own in my situation in the city. They never said as much, but I believe they sensed it. Years later, off in boarding school, reading Catcher in the Rye, I didn't experience Holden Caulfield disinterestedly as Salinger's masterful literary creation. I recoiled from Holden as a repugnant persona of myself, the person whom I would have been had we stayed pat on Gramercy Place.

Making the farm, not only our primary residence, but our only place of residence, significantly changed the meaning the farm had for them. Up to that time, they perceived and experienced "the farm" aspirationally, their incarnation of the ancient concept of "a place in the country," allusions to which abound in classical literature. A place in the country supplements the home in the city with a respite from urban pressures, a social resource in interacting with friends, and perhaps a way of converting consumption expenditures into a growing investment asset through steady improvements to the property. Within their urban social and professional ethos, a place in the country came with important continuities, most importantly, the whole habitus of affluent, well-educated, privileged urbanity. If you had a house in the country, you might spend time in the country, but you were not of the country. For the adults, their urban ethos would remain central, defining the norms and expectations of life, reinforced by settled peer-groups and constraints of employment. By giving up their urban base, Margot and Joe slipped the anchor, and their place in the country started a cultural drift.

Margot and Joe might have thought they were making the farm function, not as their place in the country, but as a suburban home. Suburban life was catching on around New York prior to the war, and it became a dominant trend by the early 1950s. The suburb, a distinct locale, housed nuclear families, each in a separate house with the husband, the breadwinner commuting to work outside the suburb, and the wife, the homemaker caring primarily within the suburban locale for their daily needs and those of their children. Neither Margot or Joe grew up with experience of suburban life and coming to New York, neither formed close friendships with people who lived in the suburbs.

Could they effectively redefine their house in the country as a suburban base? What's the commute? It's 5 days per week, 2 hours each way plus an 8-hour stint in the office, a wash between car or train, although rationing nixes the car. Who's the breadwinner? Tricky! Then, investment banks did not pay salaried executives particularly well until they made partner, which Joe only did in 1952. Until then, Margot made the bulk of their income (circa 60-40). Both based their sense of self significantly on commitment to their professional careers. The answer had to be that each was a breadwinner, both them would go to work 7:00 am to 7:00 pm. Who's the homemaker? Woz, a young Irish nanny, born and bred in mid-town Manhattan, sweet, shy, and insecure. That was the implicit plan. Would it work? Let's find out.

2) A Boy in the Country

Self-Definition
We live life, each and all, in the face of necessities. Our capacity for self-definition arises, not from the fortuitous absence of those necessities, but from our ability to understand, to judge, and to exercise opportunities to influence how they impinge on us and our purposeful powers.

Some time in late August 1942, Margot and Joe in front, me and Woz in the back, drove away from Gramercy Place, not to return. Over the summer preparations had been made. We were taking only personal belonging from the apartment. Over the previous years, Margot and Joe had been doing lots of antiquing and checking out open-air markets for furniture and house wares, of which there were several every weekend, well-organized and well-stocked. So it was us alone, a decisive day.

Off we went through the Holland Tunnel to Route 9, across the Pulaski Skyway, joining Route 22 near the Newark Airport, then serving the military, crossing north-central New Jersey on Route 22 about 25 miles to Somerville and then on Route 202 to Flemington, about 15 miles, most all on 2-lane roads. At Flemington we navigated 3 traffic circles, going part way around the first two by taking the way to Frenchtown, and then going three-quarters around the 3rd, taking a windy local road 9 miles to Stockton, originally a place to load canal barges with stone from local quarries to ship down the Delaware. We go a bit down Main Street and seeing the Stockton Inn on the left, we turn right to cross the river to Pennsylvania. Off the bridge, we go straight ahead on Route 263, up a steep, long hill, laughing at the dumb 50 MPH speed limit sign where no one could get their car much over 30 by the top. But no matter, Solebury was just 2 miles further, a cross road, several houses, and a church. A quarter mile further, we turn off to the right onto Creamery Road, a rutted dirt road identified by a picturesque stone bridge at its start. We start up a long hill, but after 100 yards, we take the first right, a narrow drive into a parking area where we stop with the house directly ahead. Two hours, some 65 miles, and a different world: we are at our new home. Let's explore a little.

Two hours in the car, no stopping. I just want to run around a bit. Woz wants to take me inside to go to the bathroom, but I'm off, running around the front of the house. Hey, look at the big lawn sloping down from the house. It comes to a bottom and from there slopes up a little to some scraggly bushes bordering the lawn, and I see what must be a car going by, fast, not stopping, must be the road out of Solebury. Look! down towards the bottom corner there's a little pond (good for wading?) with a brook going out under a stone bridge—that must be where we turned off on the dirt road, and yeah, I can see up at my level where our drive turns in and our old car is parked. OK, what's at the far end of the house? The hill keeps going up pretty evenly quite a ways until it sort of drops off out of sight, a couple blocks uptown, get it?.

On my level, further out from the house, what's that weird-tiny-square-stone building with just a crooked old door, each side is only about as long as mom and dad's bed. Never seen anything like it. I'll ask about that and come back some time to check it out. Same for that other square building nearer the back of the house. It's bigger and taller, but from here I don't see any windows or doors—weird. Race you round the back of the house! We run down some stone stairs next to the big square thing, onto a flat area the length of the house and about half the width, covered with irregular flat stones and a big, old shady tree at each end. And there's a stone wall on the side away from the house about twice my height and on the other side, it's filled in and covered with a nice lawn, flat and even with the top of the wall. It would be good for playing catch so long as we keep away from the edge. We could have a picnic there, much better than Gramercy Park. Oh, over beyond the parking area, there's the big stone barn. Wow! Bet there's a lot of places and stuff inside, maybe even animals. But some other time. Gotta wee-wee.

Sorry, it's reflective Robbie here. I must break in to put this charming scene in perspective. First, the language may simulate a child's interior discourse a bit, but no 3-year-old could or would verbalize it this way. I've composed the words as an old man thinking back to an actual occasion in my childhood, trying to convey what I might have then experienced and what I presently wish in fact I did. To a surprising extent, children are natural phenomenologists and they take in what they see and process with clear intentional recognition, although their command of language doesn't yet, perhaps never will, be sufficient for them to express it well. I believe the scene as I've written it expresses what I might well have experienced if I jumped out of the car and ran all around the house registering what I saw, pausing here and there, to take it all it. But here's the rub, I looking back would be happy were the scene to have actually happened, but I must confess I'm convinced it did not. In August 1942, Robbie actually would have done as Woz suggested, get out of the car, go inside to the bathroom, sit down waiting for some lunch, or ask her to take him outside to look tentatively around while Margot and Joe unpacked the car. On that day when the family left New York to live in the country, Robbie was still a city boy, rather docile and over-tended. Five years later in August 1947, Margot, Joe, and Robbie reversed the trip, returning to make New York their primary residence, at least for 5 days per week, freeing Margot and Joe from their dread commute and enabling Robbie to enter the 3rd grade at the Buckley School for Boys. Let's try to understand Robbie's formative experience in those 5 years living full-time at the place in the country.

I think the first 8 months to a year were pretty difficult for everyone.