A&E/1939

1939-1961: Childhood and Youth

Primal Ignorance

Based on Robert McClintock's writings, particularly his later work on the StudyPlace project and Enough, he addresses the concept of "primal ignorance" as the fundamental existential condition of human life. Far from being a mere lack of data, he views this ignorance as the vital starting point for all authentic education and self-formation. NotebookLM

1) A Toddler in the City (1939-1942)

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, North 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. Then, 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 grand 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 ran a lumber business serving the 250 townspeople and the surrounding homesteading 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 Stephenson, 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 my 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.

Intimations of 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, Margot 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 Western 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 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 (1942-1947)

Self-Definition
Based on Robert McClintock's writings, self-definition is not a static act of labeling oneself, but a continuous, dynamic process of self-formation (often referred to using the German term Bildung). It is the central task of the autonomous person, involving the active shaping of one's character, capacities, and purposes within the constraints of their specific historical and cultural circumstances. NotebookLM

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 previous years, Margot and Joe had been furnishing the farm with local antiques, scouring well-organized and well-stocked open-ai r markets for furniture and house wares. Over the summer they prepared to leave the apartment and we now took only severalsuitcases. So it was us alone, a decisive day.

Off we go, through the Holland Tunnel to Route 9, across the Pulaski Skyway, joining Route 22 near the Newark Airport, now serving only 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, mostly 2-lane roads. At Flemington we navigate 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 —, 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 is just 2 miles further, a cross road, several houses, and a church. A quarter mile further, we turn sharp to the right onto Creamery Road, a rutted dirt lane identified by a picturesque stone bridge at its start. We head up a long hill, but after 100 yards, we take the first right, a narrow drive into a parking area where we stop with a house directly ahead. Two hours, some 65 miles, and a different world: we are at our new home. Let's explore a little.

I leap out, just wanting 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 away from the house. It comes to a bottom and from there slopes up a little to some scraggly bushes bordering it, 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 that anywhere. I'll ask about it and come back later 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 in.

But here's the rub, I would be happy looking back 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 on the farm. Did Robbie become a boy in the country?

Circumstances

In Robert McClintock’s work, the concept of "circumstances" (or circumstance, in the singular) is foundational to his understanding of human existence, education, and self-formation. He defines circumstances not merely as passive physical surroundings, but as the dynamic, interactive lifeworld in which a person is inextricably embedded. Circumstance

An infant comes into the world, into its unique circumstances, knowing nothing about its possibilities. Form the start, it has a weak power to refuse an enablement that circumstances hold out, as when an infant fails to suckle an awkwardly proffered teat, and it can vigorously affirm the nourishment that circumstance avails when mother's milk flows well. By this dynamic of weak rejection and strong affirmation, the infant conforms itself to the normal practices encouraged within its immediate circumstances. To an external observer, the process may appear to be one in which the external circumstances—parents and the prevailing social life—condition the child to recapitulate their hopes and expectations, when in actuality, the infant has been finessing much while appropriating what it finds fortuitous and manageable in the world around it.

We moved to the farm shortly before my capacity to form long-term memories had developed and after such a capacity develops, it is, in my experience, either episodic if highly situational or quite generalized if a sustained emotion or feeling. Consequently, the account of my life at the farm will not be a long, consecutive narrative of my inner development. Instead, it will comprise a collection of vignettes and episodes, each with bearing on the larger theme, how a self-directed, critical mind emerges. All together, they provide a mosaic of the inception of my sense of agency within my world of experience at the age of 3± to 8± (1942±-1948±).

In addition, I offer the, whole mosaic, and each of its components, with a big ±, signifying a degree of uncertainty, the magnitude of which you as reader must ultimately decide upon. I have current access to photographs, several paintings, some large and small objects, names, various documents, and brief and longer stories that vary in veracity. All these can prompt efforts at further reconstruction of my memories, helpful in recovering context and occasional facts of substance. I make use of all these sources, drawing on the interpretive skills of a professional historian, to understand and convey, as best I can, how my sense of agency relative to my actual circumstances developed over the course of my childhood. This is an ongoing, inward process, informed (i.e., formed inwardly) by a flow of actual behaviors and consequences, which we can describe imperfectly, but not now experience in actuality. With these caveats, what follows attempts to understand key steps in my development.

As a starting point, let's state the baseline. On moving to the farm full-time shortly after my third birthday, I was entering a new phase of childhood as an only child, having acquired the skills, disposition, and expectations conventional in an affluent home in Manhattan where both husband and wife were deeply involved in separate careers and a shared social life, with much child-care delegated to an incurious and unadventurous, but conscientious young nanny. I was, I think, relatively happy, physically active and compact. I was perhaps slow to speak, or so I infer from later hints, and I still hesitate to speak freely, without undue effort to choose my words. I was relatively at ease with adults, beginning to have the ability to ask them simple questions about their lives and to listen pensively to their answers, and perhaps feigning interest when their word seemed vacant. I was, however, simply unaccustomed to interacting eagerly and easily with other children.

In compensation, at an early age, I was adept at quietly finding things to do by myself—taking things apart (and of course far less adept at putting them back together), looking at pictures turning the pages of Life, Look, the National Geographic, and other magazines which were always around in New York and then at the farm. I did not yet read but enjoyed being read to and was aware, I think, that the marks on a page went with the words I was hearing, able to complain vehemently when the reader wasn't saying it right. Over all, I was a conventional child, one who had formed proclivities and aversions through the dynamic of weak rejection and strong affirmation of the affordances my circumstances offered up to me. None of this, at 3 and on, indicated strong choices or formed rejections, but reflected an opportunistic resonance with what I found around me. It was not the work of what I consider agency, forming an intent independent of the given affordances and trying to actualize that in interacting with them.

For Margot and Joe, myself and Woz, the first 8 months to a year were pretty difficult. I think my parents had thought that they were moving to the country, but things would go pretty much the same as they were going in the city. Their office commitments were 9 to 5 daily, both before and after. Going to and fro between home and office took the better part of an hour each way before the move, and if all went well two hours after, 12 hours each day versus 10 before. They managed that for the next 5 years. Their social world was already changing, becoming more serious with news from multiple fronts, often concerning preoccupying attention, and constricting, as well, owing to the constraints of rationing.

For Woz, it was a different matter. She had good marriage prospects, a comely and sensible young woman who had been incubating her nest egg near to her home in Hells Kitchen, 3 stops on the N train and short walks to and from the stations. But from rural Pennsylvania, she found catching the eye of a regular guy who would eagerly marry and make with her a home and family of their own an impossible dream. I don't remember exactly when she decided to leave but I think she had actually caught the eye of that guy, for I remember Margot telling on some occasion how jilted I felt when Woz announced she and her boyfriend had decided to get married, long before they had planned, because soon he'd likely be drafted.

Someone replaced Woz, whose name I fail to remember, nor do I remember exactly when she began. She too was from the city, not of a marrying age and not well versed in the conventional skills of a New York nanny, perhaps someone my parents knew as a part-time, fill-in maid, under skilled and under employed, who under the circumstances "would do," as they would say, with a little hope and much resignation. Of course Nanny-2 would do as far as the external conventionalities might require, but from my point of view she would not do at all, in ways that I quickly perceived and exploited. Woz acquired and exercised an adult authority embodied in comme it faut authority that I simply understood and responded to as the actuality of what we did, never having contemplated the possibility that alternatives might exist. Nanny-2, ignorant or uncertain about the established conventions, would unavoidably confront me with the contingency of the conventional necessities. For instance, Woz would say, "Robbie, it's time to go outside. Let's play baseball," a rudimentary game of catch in which one person throws the ball to the other, who either catches it or runs to pick it up and tag the other out. In a similar situation, Nanny-2 would say, something like "You've been inside for a long time. Do you want to go out? ... What do you want to do?" This came as a revelation, I think, not because I had never before thought up what I wanted to do, but because it was the first time I saw an adult in charge who did not at least nominally know what I should do. I started saying "let's play baseball" when I thought it might be fun.

Having discovered I could initiate activities, my opportunity for doing so significantly expanded on a late spring evening. Nanny-2 and I were playing baseball on the lawn above the patio behind the house, and Nanny-2 was having a specially good time, laughing, not catching the ball, running to tag me out with a stagger, not a stride. We paid little attention as Margot and Joe, back from their commute, came up to the lawn, taking in the scene, realizing it seemed a little off, and noticing the bottle standing on the stone by the stairs. Margot called out, firmly, "Robert, come with me," and Joe picked the bottle up, and asked Nanny-2, "What's this?" knowing full well it was a bottle of his scotch. Soon Nanny-2 was on the train back to New York, with "What are we going to do about Robert?" back in question.

Autonomy

In Robert McClintock's work, autonomy is a central, defining characteristic of human life and the fundamental premise of authentic education. He treats autonomy not merely as a political right or a goal to be achieved at graduation, but as an inherent, biological and existential capacity of the living person to direct their own formation. NotebookLM

At the farm, I went by rapid steps from being over-tended to becoming a highly self-sufficient child. My parents gave up on the idea of a nanny whose job would be caring for me, finding sufficient the near-by presence of a commonsensical adult who could respond appropriately in case of dire need. I could and would be trusted to take care of myself and that seemed pretty cool to me. Margot was good at organizing it. At a minimum, indoors a housekeeper would stay until my parents returned from work. And outdoors the handyman, that is Mr. Heppehammer, as I always addressed him, a taciturn, weathered giant dressed in overalls, would inconspicuously tend some chore or other, always slow and indefatigable, whether is was tiny or gigantic. Failsafe, I would occasionally commute with mother to her work, and for short periods persons like Aunt Alice, Opal, or Marlies would stay for a time.

Basically, from summer '43 to fall '47 I could do as I pleased, with some guiderails, not guardrails, to take care of myself in my room with ample toys and objects of interest, to explore a middling sized farmhouse, barn, and outbuildings, all built in increments from circa 1750 on, and to investigate 65 acres of mixed-growth farmland. To begin, a sturdy antique bell, designed well to be rung should fire break out in ones home, served as the key guiderail. Its sound was loud and clear, and vigorously ringing it at the backdoor established an earshot perimeter within which I was to stay, running back whenever I hear it. Also at first, I was not to venture alone inside the barn, except for two rooms on the first floor where tools were kept, a guiderail easily observed, for at 4, its formidable scale and poor lighting, and the thought that it might house frightening animals, made me reluctant to explore it even with the company of an adult. Soon, as my familiarity with its spaces grew, this guideline became a continuing matter of negotiation and in a year or two, the barn became a space of diverse play, inquiry, and chores. For my parents and for me, necessity proved an effective mother of invention. With good balance and strong bones, possibly a lucky star, I thrived with my parents' laissez faire childcare strategy.

Of course, it was not perfect. Most obviously, I continued to have restricted opportunities to form bonds with peers in age or interest. Margot and Joe had me attend Sunday School at the Solebury Church. My memory of it is very vague. I don't think there were many children and we mainly listened to Biblical stories and had little interaction with each other. At 5, I went to a local Kindergarten to get me ready for school and then 1st and 2nd grade at the Buckingham Friends School 3 or 4 miles away. The Kindergarten wasn't a great experience and I have no memories from it and made no friendships through it, which didn't bother me too much. In due course, I'll say something about the school, but it also didn't help much with my making friends with other children. I'm not going to say much about things that made little impression on me even though they may have occupied a good deal of my time. I think lots of experience is like the time your car spends in the garage—it counts towards the time you owned the car, but it's no where near as important as the time when you used the car to go someplace of significance or interest.

Projects

Based on Robert McClintock’s writings, the distinction between a life project and a pedagogical project is the difference between an existential condition (what a human being is) and a methodological tool (how a student studies). However, McClintock views them as deeply intertwined: the pedagogical project is the specific vehicle through which the student learns to manage the broader, overarching project of their own life. NotebookLM

My time was largely my own, I could freely use tools in the toolroom that I could handle, and somehow the idea of setting a task for myself got into my head. I found a book, The Five Chinese Brothers, funny, and I liked the illustrations by Kurt Wiese, a German émigré who spent much time in China before settling in an area across the Delaware not far from the farm. Occasionally, China featured in our family's conversation for when Margot went to Paris, her brother went to China and started a business there and were interred there by the Japanese during the war. I had heard somewhere that the earth was round like a balloon and China was on the opposite side of it. Yes, I had a small sandbox up the hill a bit behind the house, but I had bigger things in mind and one day in the summer of '43, I announced that I was going to dig a hole to China. I believe that if asked "Why?" I was going to explain that then my cousin's could escape the Japanese through it, but no one asked, not even "How?" and instead, with a smile, just let me do it. I selected a newish trowel from the barn toolroom, a gently curved blade to hold the dirt and a mildly pointed end to cut into the dirt and set to work on a small lawn next to the vegetable garden in fro of the barn. Slowly a hole grew, 2 or 3 feet in diameter, deep enough to make climbing in and out difficult for me. Finally, I came to a long-buried brick. I dislodged it, got it and myself out of the hole, and ran home with it, a trophy held high, "Look! I did it. Here's a brick from China."

With that, I was quite happy to stop digging. I had an authentic sense of accomplishment, and in a few days, I watched with only a little regret as the hole was filled back up with the dirt I had laboriously taken out. The hole was an exploit that no amount of fussing in the sandbox could reach. Before leaving his project, however inconsequential, we should note some important, paradigmatic characteristics in it. Taking my digging to China as a typical project, we should recognize that a project originates, that is it has its birth in a thought, an ideation, projected onto potential behavior, and my ideation controlled the course of the project, dramatically evident in my proclaiming its completion in the discovery of the old brick. All the digging was collateral to the ideational project. But all the digging was actual, in this case not particularly consequential. What actually results was the behavior constrained by all the circumstances, the conditions, at once limiting and facilitating. Whether these and other actualities are ultimately worthwhile—worth the effort expended—is a question in the face of which we must, at least for now, confess our ignorance.

Wile my project of digging to China took place, another project—let's simply call it EGGS—was developing, one with more discernable and desirable consequence, involving the whole family. We might hypothesize that it had a lot to do with my parents' somewhat mysterious decision in 1942 to abandon Gramercy Place and to move full-time to the farm. Both Margot and Joe help positions of responsibility in industries deemed essential in the war effort. But at the same time, they owned a semi-defunct farm, held essentially for leisured purposes at a time when everyone was pouring effort into Victory Gardens, which would by 1943 yield something like 40% of the fresh produce consumed in the nation. By itself, the farm would not produce a decent livelihood for a farming family, and its fields, about 30 acres, were share-cropped by a local farmer who made his living by tilling a much larger assemblage of arable land. However, the farm had far more productive capacity and putting it to use was a wartime patriotic duty. Even before we got there full-time, they planted vegetable gardens and the summer of '42, and thereafter as well, I loved the pea patch, rows of sweet peas. I'd sit between the rows, inching down, eating my way to the left and right, adept at plucking only pods at their peak freshness, the peas at plump maturity, but not yet over-ripe, beginning to dry.

Vegetables were easy; roof-top gardens could grow lots of those. If you've got a farm, animal products were the patriotic duty. Strangely, my parents started with a big boar, very large (by adult account, not merely by my childish perception) and highly virile (also by adult account, certain things not yet being fully explained to me). The boar was kept (using that verb aspirationally) at the far end of the barn where a natural spring fed a muddy area and an old, free-standing wall, L-shaped, provided much of the fencing needed for a pen, deluxe for the boar alone, but too small for a herd of pigs. It took a number of years before I finally understood, but they decided to sell the boar for a very low price after they had several calls from farmers at an astonishing distance away, complaining that the boar was trying to get into their pigsty. That would be aright, they would say, but they were worried that if he got in, he'd show all the pigs how to get out and it would take a lot of work to find them ad bring them all back.

I was glad to see the boar go. My sense of unease at venturing alone into the barn arose partly from the worry that he might unexpectedly appear in there. Chickens were a different matter. Even before the boar left, Mr. Heppehammer started to build a big hen house inside the upper part of the barn. In watching how the hen house was built, I became at ease in the barn and rules for it were loosened, although I had to stay way from an open shafts for dropping hay and other stuff stored high up down to the ground floor, literally the ground. But that wouldn't be used until we added bigger animals that chickens. Rest assured, the sheep would come, but for now t was the chickens. Building a hen house for 250 or more birds was a little more complicated than you or I might think. Mr. Heppehammer completed it slowly but steadily as was his way, making places for the chickens to lay their eggs, to roost asleep, and to get their food and to pick at mineral chips so their eggs will have strong shells. A hen house even needs electric lights on timers to use on short winter days because the hens need a long working-day to keep their egg laying systems going. In time, feed for the chicks came in coarse, heavy bags that Mr. Heppehammer could handle with a grunt. And once the hen house is ready, you have to get your hens, which come as little chicks in large, flat boxes, like giant pizza boxes, a whole bunch of them to a box, about 250 chicks in all. Then it takes almost half a year for the chicks to grow and start cackling and finally to start laying eggs. That's why it wasn't until the summer of '43 that my work with the chickens actually started.

At first, Mr. Heppehammer would daily collect the eggs, about 120 to 150, which would be delicate and weigh 20 to 25 lbs., more than I cold handle without breakage. I had a little work place in the living room in a nook made by a big "kitchen-hearth" fireplace protruding into the room, spanning the middle third of the end wall of the house. I sat at a small table with an egg scale on it, the buckets of eggs at my side, and four egg cartons arrayed at convenient reach to the sides of the scale. I also had a bowl of water and a soft towel in case an egg had icky-poo stuck to it, a hazard that all-too-often had to be removed from actual eggs from actual chickens. My job consisted of doing that when necessary and putting clean eggs on the scale, noting whether the indicator pointed to small, medium, large, or extra-large, and then placing them into the appropriate one-dozen egg cartons. When a carton filled, I carefully closed it and put it into a much larger cardboard crate, and when it filled, someone bigger and stronger would take it away, to where I'm not precisely sure. Thus I proudly did my part in the Victory Gardens efforts.

My egg sorting labors were OK and I looked for little challenges within what could be a boring, repetitive activity. Eventually that search for the distinctive within the repetitive became my experiential ground, many years in the future, when I started to develop a distinction between repetitive learning and recursive learning, but here it was just a way to remain interested in the job. I got pretty good at predicting to myself what category would get assigned to an egg once I actually weighed it, but I didn't use that ability to speed things up by skipping the actual weighing. I found most interesting the eggs that would top out on the scale, weighing more than the scale could measure. There were quite a number of these eggs. I could also spot them by their size, but some of these big fat eggs would have a slight constriction where the curve of the shell should be fattest, like a fat person who nevertheless has a hint of a waist. That would be a double-yolker, something I could check by looking at the egg with a bright light behind it. Double-yolkers were the holy grail of my morning quest, a special egg for breakfast, a value to me entirely independent of the weighing rituals.

An egg is an egg is an egg. Why don't we just put them as we gather them up into shipping crates and be done with it? As my egg sorting was going on, each Saturday I would accompany my mother for the weekly shopping in a large grocery store (supermarkets were not yet the term), and I solved the mystery of the reason why sorting the eggs was so important. There in the dairy section I saw egg cartons just like the ones I had filled with the eggs I weighed—small, medium, large, and extra-large—and although I wasn't actually reading yet, but I could pretty well understand the written numbers. The sign, "55¢ per dozen" above the stack of cartons marked "Large" would have in them eggs that pointed to "Large" on a scale like mine, and mother would have to give the grocer 55¢ for a carton of weighed eggs marked "Large". The cartons marked "Small," "Medium," and "Extra-Large" had different prices for eggs that weighed differently. I don't think I thought explicitly about it then, but my experience clearly encompassed an important distinction in the kinds of value we attach to things: "use-value," for the double-yolkers I kept out of the sorting, and "exchange-value," for the sorted (commodified) eggs in categories to which the grocery stores (the market) attaches distinctive prices.

I don't remember precisely how long my egg weighing went on, but it stopped before I got too bored by it. I may have stopped when I started kindergarten at 5, or it may have stopped when the farm shifted from keeping chickens that made food for the market in the form of eggs to keeping chickens that were food for the market in the form of dark meat and white meat—both the Kindergarten and the shift in how chickens served the market happened more or less at the same time. For me, the eggs were pretty much another solitary engagement, a condition built into my situation as an only child on a farm in a semi-rural area with access to limited transportation. I was basically ignorant of any alternatives and so I somewhat stoically made the best of what I had. One alternative consisted of a few adults with whom I had significant interactions of meaning to me. The other was the farm itself and some of the surrounding area. And the two, the farm and the adults, interacted constructively for me in important ways, as I would later conceive it, the farm as an experience of circumstances and various persons in my circumstances as exemplars.

Exemplars

Based on Robert McClintock's work, the concept of exemplars (or exemplarity) is a cornerstone of his theory on how culture is transmitted and how communities are formed. He moves beyond the simple idea of a "role model" to describe a dynamic, reciprocal force that drives human development and social cohesion. NotebookLM

We've already met one of the adults, Mr. Heppehammer. To a child, a farm is a very interesting place, complex and formidable in its way, a place one needs some mentoring in an effort to ground oneself. Mr. Heppehammer was inarticulate and sometimes inscrutable, but he understood what he knew. And he was someone, as Goethe observed, whose instruction opened the mind, for when words failed him, deeds spoke. He showed me how to do many things with illuminating deeds, for instance, how to drive a nail with a hammer, to let the momentum of the hammer do the work, a concept I could see in operation even though neither of us had the words with which to explain it properly. His gestures suggested choosing a spot to start the nail thoughtfully, finding the place it would penetrate the board well. He grasped the hammer gently in his big hand to swing it with control, not maximum force, to hit the head of the nail sharply at the optimal angle, transferring the full momentum of the hammer to the head of the nail and then on, in a straight line down the shaft of the nail, driving the point with minimum resistance into the wood. Mr. Heppehammer taught a great lesson in self-formation: observe, figure out why, and then try it yourself.

Marlies, especially, complemented well by her husband, Carl Ritz, helped me learn with my eyes and much more as well, thinking through what it is that I actually do not know and then concentrating attention and intelligence on figuring that out. Marlies and Carl were unlike others in the circle of people I encountered as a child on the farm, perhaps throughout my life. Carl was a painter, first present in our lives painting a portrait of my father, and then later one of me. He, like Mr. Heppehammer, was reticent and seemed to want nobody to notice him even though he seemed skilled, cultured, and interesting. He and Marlies lived in an isolated cottage that one walked to deep in a woods on a path having to cross a stream on stepping stones. Downstairs had a small bedroom and a large kitchen where much of ordinary life went on. The second floor was a Carl's large studio with sidewalls that went up shoulder height and a peaked roof then rising up, with big windows at the ends and a dormer window on one side.

Marlies was hard to pigeon-hole. She would be with us more often than Carl, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for a week or more, doing things around the house and outside, and keeping a friendly eye on me. But it wasn't like someone working for a wage like a nanny or housekeeper, but she was also not like the women I encountered among my mother's social friends and acquaintances. Marlies was perhaps 10 years older than Margot, but they almost looked alike, short, stout but not fat, vigorous but not hurried, both spoke with intention and intelligence. I think an elective affinity drew them together. Their relationship was one of two capable women leading completely different lives perceiving complementary needs and joining together in a kind of pas de deux in which one gifted time and attention and the other money and goods without either feeling the balance of respect and obligation disrupted.

I formed strong impressions from interacting with Marlies when I was 4 up to 10 or so, impressions that I think have had a lasting significance for my sensibility. The farm had two large cultivated fields and a couple smaller ones, all demarcated by hedgerows with patches where wild berries grew. I'd go on walks with Marlies along them, collecting blackberries, raspberries, wineberries, and more when ripe. Marlies wasn't an expert and didn't act or speak from authority, but she would make the flow of her intentions clear as we went along, stating how she eyed the berries, seeing how they looked and feeling how they clung to the branch, ignoring those that fell at the touch or clung tightly to it, gathering those that would drop into her palm after a gentle pluck or push. We'd return with more than enough and what we couldn't eat at meals, we'd make into jams and jellies, sealed into jars with wax. The specific skills I learned in this experience were incidental and now long ago forgotten, but I felt empowered by doing what we would do because I could overcome my ignorance about something by using attention and intelligence in pursuing a sustained intention accompanied by others.

As Marlies contributed to my sense of autonomy in action, she also helped to form my reading preferences. I think it was after the second nanny was let go, Marlies stayed over at the farm for the first time so my parents could attend some occasion in New York. I was beginning to read for and to myself, transitioning from having someone read a text to and for me. That evening Marlies let me read the last few pages of my favorite book, The Little Engine the Could, which I would read as an empathetic observer of what took place in the story. I would identify with all the boys and girls and circus people trying to get a suitable engine to take their train over the mountain, feeling bad over the many rejections from various possible locomotives, then hopeful as the little engine gamely agreed to try to take the circus train over the mountain, and finally feeling more and more elated—I think I can; I think I can; I think I can—as the little engine strained and after great effort got the circus train over the top, down to the eager children in the city below.

My reading of The Little Engine and other children's books typified reading as spectator. I identified fully with the sentiment of determination the little engine displayed in attempting a new and challenging goal. Most of the time, I think, most people read this way, spectators of the tableau the text lays out for us, liking or disliking what we see taking place. I encountered a second form of reading—let's call it reading as participant—with Marlies then. She said she would read with me a book from Germany that she had when she was my age, Struwwelpeter, known in English as Slovenly Peter. Marlies had her copy, a later edition of the original German pictures and text, so I couldn't read it to her, nor she to me, and she read aloud a bit of the German to give a feel for the rhyming text. Then we went through it together, both of us looking at the pictures while she explained what the text said through a loose translation, and we would discuss our reactions to it.

Slovenly Peter works like a prototypical comic book with 10 very brief "stories," 1 to 4 panels each, all disapproving undesirable behaviors, some depicted in very violent and grotesque pictures, a boy who sucks his thumb having his thumbs cut off by a weird scissors-man or a girl playing with matches burning herself into a pile of ashes. Other stories are somewhat less dire, depicting something like slap-stick, a hunter, chased by a hare, who's stolen the hunter's gun, and the comedy of error resulting when the hare finally fires at the hunter. If one reads Slovenly Peter as a spectator, it is very frightening and distasteful, making it very hard to understand how it could have become a highly popular children's book mid-nineteenth-century. The matter at issue in most of the stories touches on an actual issue in most children's lives—cleanliness, bullying, resisting temptation, watching where you're going, comporting oneself appropriately, etc. The consequences are extreme or ironic in such an outlandish way that most children would object and say that it was not right—the consequence depicted was too extreme and wouldn't actually fix the problem. Read as spectator, it's repelling. But read thoughtfully, concentrating on what's problematic in the behavior at issue and not on the frightening spectacle of its resolution, the book ceases to depict horrid scenes, but to stimulate thinking about ordinary problems about conduct, rules, habits, interactions with others, simple self-care. Slovenly Peter did not become my favorite book, but it made aware early in my reading experience that feeling likes and dislikes for what's on the page does not respond adequately to well crafted words and images. In a thumbs-up, thumbs-down world, the Scissors Man has much to do.

Exploring

Based on Robert McClintock's writings, exploration is the defining activity of the authentic student and the primary mechanism of "study." He uses the concept of exploration to distinguish genuine education from the passive reception of instruction, often employing the metaphor of the "philosophical explorer" versus the "superficial tourist." NotebookLM

When I was 4, 5, or 6, I liked best to set out and explore my domain on foot. When Woz and the other nanny were around, they were city women and liked to walk on sidewalks with their shoes on. No good! When they were out of the picture, finally, I was still 4 and liked to go barefoot and stayed mainly where grass was cut. But soon I went onto the fields with Marlies and discovered the value of shoes and even long pants. My radius of exploration grew. That's when some new guiderails came in, an explicit rule—Do Not Cross a Road (i.e. Route 263, which borders our front lawn, and Creamery Road, which goes up the hill, perpendicular to Route 263, from which our driveway turns off). This rule established a nearby corner and two sides of a rectangle defining the major part of the farm. Since the other two sides of the rectangle did not involve roads, they were left vague by the rule.

Compared to the limits on free roaming confining many kids, the rule defined a large, variegated area for me to explore as I wished, a freedom that I embraced to the point in my explorations where I found reasons to feel confined by the rule. Can a conscientious explorer pass up charting the mysteries of land close at hand, land one has visited in the company of Marlies, and that parents and others have clearly described as "part of the farm?" I'd spend time on the big front lawn, which sloped down and then up to 263. There were several big trees with lower branches just out of reach. In 3 or 4 years, I would hoist myself on them and climb way up, able to see all the way to the Delaware. But until then, I stayed on the ground. Thee summer I turned 5, I was investigating the ferns and frogs growing around the pond near the corner where the two roads in the rule joined.

I was idly thinking about where the water in the pond came from. Some water came from runoff that intermittently made a stream across the front lawn where the slope from the hill above met the much shorter slope up to Route 263, a discernable line across the lawn that seemed to go from the pond parallel to 263 to the far edge of the property where a hedgerow crossed it, blocking further view. When it was rainy water flowed into the pond, but most of the time that source was dry. Consistently, most of the water in the pond flowed out of a pipe from a spring up at the end of the barn the big boar had ruled. That was all I could see for the pond, but a brook also flowed down the hill along the edge of Creamery Road which steadily carried water from a spring higher up the hill and a lot of runoff when there was a heavy rain. It joined the water streaming from the pond and both as one flowed under the Creamery Road bridge.

At the same time I was sort of watching a frog on a little sand bar where the brook coming down the hill converged with the water flowing from the pond. The frog jumped into the stream and a few seconds later climbed out onto an old log half in the water and a dumb joke popped into mind that one of my parent's friends had asked me, trying clumsily to relate to a 5-year-old, "why did the chicken cross the road?" I wondered, if the chicken were the frog, would you say it crossed the road, even though it got to the other side, for I could see the old log was unmistakably on the other side of Creamery Road. For it, the road wasn't there. It just dove into a familiar stream and got out to sun itself on a log that had been there much longer than the frog was hopping around. People told me how a few years earlier the WPA had had the bridge rebuilt really well, good stone work, a arch with a big opening, at least as high as I was tall. Crossing a road meant walking on its surface from one side to the other. Like the frog, why don't I just walk under the bridge, magically going from one side to the other, in my case without even getting my feet wet for a nice sandy strip was next to the flowing water. I didn't cross the road, but just happened to go under it as I was pursuing my explorations.

On reaching the other side, I hac new options. I could turn left and come immediately to Route 263, on which I could not set foot, or turn right and go up the hill, but that would be "been there, done that" with Marlies. So the explorer's route was straight ahead. I knew that would very soon take me to a neighbor's property that I didn't really want to explore uninvited by myself, but I'd visited there and been in a pond/pool there, which was continuously fed by a stream not unlike the one I walked along under the bridge. I decided to look for it, and almost immediately, I saw it flowing towards me, on the other side of a marshy area, a flat hollow where the two streams fanned out with shallow pools, clumps of grass, and stinky skunk cabbage. Looking left, I saw Route 263, somewhat built up on drier ground, and right, the hill occupied by the farm and its fields. The water from the two streams had to go somewhat and with a little looking among bushes at the edge of 263, I saw the mouth of a very big pipe, the opening almost as high as my shoulders. This called for some close observation. I could see through it with no obstruction. The pipe was made of thick concrete and looked really strong with no irregularities. The water flowing into it wasn't very deep. Eyeing it a bit, I estimated I could duck-walk through it without getting my feet very wet. The current was gentle with a very small amount of sand accumulated at the bottom of the pipe. I concluded that this pipe would take a good explorer, short like me, following the water under 263 to the other side without my crossing the road, which, of course, it immediately did.

Coming out, I saw that the stream entered the upper edge of an old-growth forest at its middle, stretching 200 yards or so to the left and to the right. With the stream as a guide, I would soon learn that it and the forest descended for over half a mile. At the start, in place of the marsh, the stream fanned out on a bed of shale and then quickly tightened up as it went down a steeper incline, flowing on around large rocks covered with moss and fallen tree trunks bridging it here and there, then dropping out of sight beneath the forest foliage. What a wonderland to explore! I could always find my way home following the stream bed against the flow of the water. By 1970, the stream and forest would become central components of the Honey Hollow Watershed, A National Historic Landmark, but in the late '40s and early '50s, they were simply my turf, and the turf of two friends I made in a couple years. There we contemplated nature, its flora, fauna, and fungi, we discovered historic ruins, built defenses to save the free world, uncovered evidence of criminal doings, and just hung out in a wild world of our own, a great mixture of actualities and imagination.

Here are two maps of the area from 1970 of the Honey Hollow Watershed and the Marsh Trail in the middle of it. "The farm" is the areas towards the top marked McC. and McClintock. For the first year or two, I would explore mainly in the wooded are marked by a 3 in a black circle and the upper part of the marsh represented in the 2nd map, especially the remains of the waterwheel. It has been considerably restored, but for me in 1944/45 it was a fascinating ruin, clearly once-made of hand hewn timbers, but its purpose no longer immediately evident. It wasn't until later with my posse that I'd go further through the marsh to the lower wooded area and up the other branch of the creek.

Luckily, the magic entrance to this enchanted forest happened to be right next to our front lawn so I didn't have to trek far to enter it. Hence, I was not vulnerable to that "Where's Robert" mood that sets in when small children are out of sight for too long. For much of the summer I would take my expeditions with no one knowing exactly were I was. From time to time, I'd ask myself, did I break the rule? I would reassure myself that going under the bridge and through the culvert was different from crossing the road, but perhaps a little iffy. I decided that the question about the rule was undecided and would remain so until someone called me on it, "moot" as I much later learned to say. Until called on it, I'd follow my interpretation of the rule and be ready to argue for that, should it become necessary: first, I'd point out that I was following the intent of the rule, not putting myself in danger of being hit by a day-dreaming driver and second, that the rule did not define a perimeter within which I was supposed to stay but only a corner and 2 sides of an imaginary rectangle, permitting me, in the directions away from the roads, to go as far as I judged interesting and prudent, further up the hill next to Creamery Road or along the edge of Route 263 as far as Solebury. It made no sense to grant the discretion of self-governance in one direction and to withhold in the other. After a couple summers the rule just faded away, never rescinded but irrelevant to the actualities of a growing life.

Empathy and reticence

About the time I turned 5, I had a couple experiences that affected my interpersonal comportment. The public mood turned more optimistic as the Normandy landings succeeded and the allied armies quite rapidly advanced across France towards Germany over the summer and early fall. People relaxed a bit and movie theaters filled. I was attentive to war news and charged up about how it was going. Disney had rereleased its 1937 hit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and mother and Marlies took me to see it in Flemington. A movie program then consisted of a cartoon, newsreel, coming attractions, and then the main feature. The newsreels depicted war news, well-produced battle footage, air, sea, or land, whatever would project confidence that the allies were fighting effectively and elicit conviction that the effort was right and just. That day, the newsreel featured the massive bombing offensive against German industrial capacity and urban morale then underway virtually unopposed, the Luftwaffe starving for pilots and fuel. It pictured waves of B-24s and B-17s in bombing formation, P-51s in escort, cutting to footage taken through bomb-sights of bombs dropping and exploding on the urban settings below, all accompanied by martial music, narrated in a strong, patriotic voice. A ripple of enthused acclaim began in the theater and I jumped up on my seat cheering on the bombing.. "Kill the Krauts!" Suddenly, my mother yanked me down and commanded sharply, "Think of Marlies! She hates the Nazis, but the bombs are destroying places she lived and killing persons she lived with." People around us fidgeted, I felt abashed and thankful the newsreel ended and Snow White came on, but I felt badly for Marlies, and told her so, and she thanked me and said the war and the bombing were both necessary and sad, and I began to feel a little better while recognizing that human feelings were difficult and complex.

A couple weeks later, a sequel of sorts happened. As a family we would often go out for dinner because then rationing applied to the to the restaurant, not the person. Others did the same, and menus were often aspirational, portions diminutive, and service occasionally over-extended and inexperienced. As usual we went to the Towpath Inn, a fine, charming restaurant secluded on the bank of a defunct canal that cut through the center of New Hope, a town nestled by the Delaware River a couple miles from the farm. A good friend of my parents owned and ran the place and they would call ahead and expect a good table and special service. This evening, things did not start well. After an unexpected wait for a table, it was in an awkward place for my mother to reach. The menus came slowly, and when asked about what was special tonight, the waitress was incommunicative. My mother kept pressing questions, the waitress saying she didn't know. I was feeling more and more uncomfortable at my mother's rudeness, and when she asked in a loud voice, "How can you be so dumb?", I jumped up on my chair and shouted at her, "You shouldn't talk to other people like that! She's a person, too!" I had learned from what had happened in the movie theater no long before, but as they say, "a little learning is a dangerous thing."

A feature of the Inn were the tall shade trees growing next to the towpath, the biggest of which had a well-built tree house with a staircase up to it. At my outburst, my father very sternly instructed me to go to the tree house and not come down until they had finished their dinner. He almost never reprimanded or commanded me, usually preferring to calmly reason and suggest, and I was so astonished I immediately did as he said, feeling confused, believing what I said was right an just. My mother got ahold of herself, the owner came out and explained how they were short staffed. I believe my mother apologized to the waitress. I stewed in my confusion until after a while they finished eating ad called me down and we all went home. On the way, my mother said that she had been wrong in treating the waitress rudely and that I had been right in saying that she shouldn't have said what she said in the tone she had used. She then asked if I understood why my father had reprimanded me. I said I didn't really understand. If I was correct in objecting, why was he remaining quiet and then reprimanding me? She explained that he was quietly calming her and beginning to have effect. But I hadn't noticed and leaped up yelling at her. He rebuked me for saying the right thing in a very inappropriate way. I took that in, seeing the whole situation i somewhat different way, learning something about the complexity of interpersonal interaction in public settings from his unexpected rebuke. But wondered then, and still wonder now, whether my father's respect for the appropriate measure, and my respect for it too in later emulation of him, may not often lead to a problematic passivity in practice. But life goes on....

Community

In Robert McClintock’s work, community is not a static, abstract entity, but the vital, interpersonal matrix within which human beings conduct their lives, exercise judgment, and form themselves. He rejects the idea that a person can be understood in isolation; instead, human existence is deeply entwined with others, making the conduct of life a profoundly shared endeavor. NotebookLM

We moved to the farm at an opportune time as I was discovering myself in the world, not simply seeing the world in me. And the move to the farm coincided in an extended sense with a huge change in the nation, pervading each locality and region from 1942 through 1945. A kind of openness and equality presided as everyone learned to cope with rationing, to find their place in the war effort, and to support the men and women who were going off to fight for the future of us all. From 3 to 6, I acquired intimations of solidarity that I think have had an important role in the formation of my civic sensibilities. Although often alone, I wasn't lonely, and I had a sense of being part of a living community.

My birth, I think, changed my parents relations to their families. From childhood, my father knew twin boys, first cousins a few years younger than he was, who after college had also moved east, John to Boston and Rob to Washington, DC. From 1941 to 1948 or so, Joe and Margot started to coordinate their vacations with John and Petey, his wife, to rent a house together in one or another east coast town by the ocean for mid-June to mid-July. They had a growing brood of children, first Suzie, a few months young than me, followed by Jock, Lucia, and Debbie, at year plus intervals, and then Michael, after a several year gaps. For a month a year, they were the closest I had to brothers and sisters, but at the age of 10 other interests transformed shared vacations into occasional visits and then as distinctive lives filled out it all resolved into personal memories of past summers at the shore.

On my mothers side, I think my birth may have reawakened her sense of family connection. I was not yet 8 months old when Margot took me to Lawton, North Dakota, to visit her parents and the town where she grew up. We did it in style! As infants rarely flew in commercial aviation in 1940, one of the New York dailies ran a big picture of my mother about to go down the steep aisle of a DC-3, with me in a baby basket hanging on her arm. I don't remember that trip, but later in October 1944 we went again, by train on account of the war, to celebrate my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary. This trip seems to me lodged in my subliminal memory as an acquired intimation of solidarity among distinctive peers that I believe has had an important role in the formation of my civic sensibilities.

Lawton was a community like none other than I have had direct experience of and I believe a 5 year old can in a few days internalize an experience of a different place in such a way that it will be available to the understanding, not as an explicit concept, but as a tacit texture of character and meaning. The town officially began in 1902, one of many small towns that the Great Northern Railroad System promoted to feed its network of branches along the line from St. Paul to Seattle. Margot's parents moved to Lawton in 1903 from Michigan City, ND, 30 miles to the southeast, to start a lumber business, in demand as Lawton quickly grew to its mature size of 225 or so. Margot's father was in effect the town builder, overseeing the construction of it church and its school, and throughout his life a leading participant in the religious and educational activities in them. The population was remarkably stable and in 1944 a large percentage of the townspeople, 50% plus, were "old settlers" who came to Lawton by 1910 and lived there together, the lifeforce of the town, since then. My grandparents' Golden Jubilee displayed a community of equals where everyone knew everyone with mutual recognition based on decades of shared experience. My explicit memories of it are all a buzz, but my the occasion stays indelibly as an exemplar of what civic bonding should achieve.