Clarence and Ada lived in Brooklyn, at 368 Clinton Street, in a handsome corner brick-and-brownstone four-story house on a tree-lined street where such fine homes were built in rows. They had a long brownstone stoop and a wrought-iron rail with ornate masonry above a decorative carved wooden doorway with panels of frosted etched glass. A corner building was particularly desirable because it meant that the side of the building and not just the front had windows and light. In fact, the side on Sackett Street had ornate carved wooden bay windows. The rooms had high ceilings and tall arched doorways and chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. The neighborhood, Cobble Hill, was one of the oldest in Brooklyn, first settled by the seventeenth-century Dutch, who called it Punkiesberg, but it got a new life in the nineteenth century with a Brooklyn building boom for a growing upper-middle class—people like the Birdseyes. They started building houses by the hundreds, first in affluent Brooklyn Heights and then in the areas around it, such as Cobble Hill.
Clarence and Ada had their first child, Miriam, in 1878 and their second, Kellogg, in 1880. Their third, Henry, was born in Tolland, Connecticut, though there is no record of why they were there, and then the rest of their children were born in Brooklyn. They had nine children, and one of the twin girls born two years before Clarence, Marjorie, died at the age of not quite nine months. Clarence was their sixth child. By the time he was born, their Cobble Hill neighborhood was even more fashionable because the nearby newly completed Brooklyn Bridge brought them closer to Manhattan.
There is not a great deal known about Clarence’s relationships with his seven siblings. In his letters and journals they are only occasionally mentioned, but he did name his two sons after two of his brothers—Kellogg and Henry. Both older brothers became businessmen whom he often turned to for advice, and he seems to have been particularly fond of his brother Roger Williams Birdseye, born four years after him. The Birdseyes were a large family in which relatives were available for advice and connections. In the forty years that the restless Clarence rummaged through opportunities looking for his career, relatives constantly aided him.
Young Clarence showed few signs, or at least few have been preserved, of being the garrulous social person he became as an adult. As a child, he disliked organized sports and the other activities that were engaging most boys. It is not known if he had close boyhood friends. Most descriptions of the boy Clarence have him alone in nature. When he was about eight years old, the family bought a farm in Orient on the end of the North Fork of Long Island. The farm was named Wyndiecote, and Birdseye so loved it that he would use the name repeatedly for his homes as an adult. Wyndiecote was his ideal home. “I liked nothing better,” Birdseye recalled more than a half century later, “than to tramp alone through fields or along the seashore studying the birds and other wildlife which I encountered.” His mother, Ada, was the first to notice that the boy was at heart a naturalist. “I guess I was some kind of naturalist from the time I could walk,” Birdseye said and then added, “At least my mother thought so.”
When Clarence was ten years old, he became fixated in that way ten-year-olds do on getting his own shotgun. The idea was already entrenched in him that hunting was an essential part of enjoying nature. But it was also a way of turning a profit from nature. Making a profit was always a fundamental idea for Clarence. In his walks through the marshes around the sprawling Birdseye farm, Clarence had noticed a great number of muskrat. In a thought process that would be constantly repeated throughout his life, he wondered where there might be a market for live muskrat. He wrote to Dr. William T. Hornaday, the director of the Bronx Zoo, and asked him if he would be interested in acquiring some muskrat. Hornaday wrote back, explaining that he already had all the muskrat he could use, but he referred him to an English aristocrat who was stocking an estate. The ten-year-old went into the marshes and set traps until he had twelve live muskrat, and he shipped them to England. Nine of them survived the trip, and the Englishman paid him $1 for each. With the $9 he bought a single-gauge shotgun.
He then used the shotgun and learned how to preserve and stuff his victims by reading books and asking questions at taxidermy shops. The following year, in the winter of 1897, when he had just turned eleven years old, he placed an ad in a sports magazine for “the American School of Taxidermy.” In reality Clarence was all there was to the American School of Taxidermy. But he was offering courses at modest rates. It is easy to imagine the comic scene unfolding when someone wishing to learn the secrets of taxidermy answered the ad and discovered that the entire school consisted of an eleven-year-old boy. But unfortunately, there is no record of anyone responding.
Some of those who have told Birdseye’s story in magazines and newspapers have suggested that he was doing these kinds of things because the family finances had fallen on hard times. This was in fact to happen some years later, but at this point the Birdseyes seemed to still be living well. Like a good Puritan inventor, Birdseye simply liked to see a good idea translated into a commercial success.
There was also something else moving him. He longed for a different kind of life, a life of adventure. He was fascinated not only by Buffalo Bill but by all kinds of tales of the American West, of cowboys, and hunters, and trappers. His favorite writer was George Alfred “G. A.” Henty, a nineteenth-century English war correspondent turned popular novelist who wrote adventure stories, usually for boys. The lead characters were always highly intelligent, extremely resourceful, and courageous. He wrote 122 novels before he died in 1902. Birdseye’s favorite book by Henty was his 1891 novel Redskin and Cowboy. It is the tale of an English boy who is forced to leave the safety and quiet of his uncle’s home and journey to the American West, where he meets up with such characters as Straight Charley, Broncho Harry, and Lightning Hugh. Although most Henty novels are thought of as children’s books, Birdseye read them, as well as other westerns, his entire life and especially continued to reread Redskin and Cowboy. In a 1945 interview he told the New York Post that Redskin and Cowboy was the book that “first influenced him to live the outdoor life.”
When Clarence was entering high school, the family moved from their Cobble Hill brownstone to Montclair, New Jersey. Montclair was a destination for successful New Yorkers, not New Yorkers down on their luck. Montclair became independent of Newark because the citizens wanted better rail service than the city was providing. In the last third of the nineteenth century there was a sizable immigration of affluent New Yorkers to the new town. Businessmen and also artists came and built ample homes. Montclair had even had a recognized painting movement in the 1870s centered on George Inness, a Newark native who settled there in 1885 and was celebrated for the saturated color and brilliant light of his Montclair landscapes.
In high school, although his interests were primarily in science, Clarence also took the unusual step of enrolling in a cooking class. This was at a time when progressive women who wanted to teach workingwomen offered cooking classes, teaching them how to prepare food quickly while still maintaining jobs. The idea grew out of a mid-nineteenth-century movement to educate women on home management while men were being educated on matters outside the home. It included cooking and the science of nutrition and would eventually be called home economics. Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was one of the early proponents who fused modern science with home care. Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate from MIT, a chemist known for her research on the quality of drinking water, was another pioneer in applying science to domestic studies. Fannie Merritt Farmer, who graduated from the Boston Cooking School in 1889, greatly popularized the “scientific” approach to cooking, incorporating notions of simplicity, frugality, nutrition, and sanitation. Juliet Corson was a Bostonian who established a cooking school for poor women in New York, teaching frugality and proper nutrition from her home on St. Mark’s Place. Shortly before Birdseye’s birth she was teaching one thousand students a year, charging a nickel to poor students and extravagant fees to the wealthy.
By the time young Birdseye was in high school in Montclair, frugal, scientific, pragmatic, nutritious cooking was the established approach. His older sister Miriam, who graduated from Smith in 1901 and then earned a graduate degree in domestic science from Pratt in 1907, may also have influenced Clarence. She started as a home economics teacher in New York City and later became a prominent nutritionist.
It is unfortunate that little is known about life in Ada and Clarence senior’s household that would lead two of their children toward distinguished careers in food. Another sister, Katherine, the surviving twin two years older than Clarence, would later marry John Lang, divorce him, settle in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and become president and general manager of Mrs. Lang’s Candy Kitchen, which sold candy in stores along the boardwalk.
After graduating from high school, Clarence took a job as an inspector for the New York City Sanitation Department and then a job as a $3-a-week office boy in a Wall Street financial firm. According to legend, he was on a lunch break when he found on the ground part one of a ten-part mail-order shorthand course. He studied his part one and from that developed his own form of shorthand, which he used most of his life. Exactly what the system was, how to read it, and what he used it for remain murky. When his son Kellogg was first married, Birdseye tried to persuade his new daughter-in-law, Gypsy, to transcribe some manuscripts from his shorthand. But he gave her very little instruction and she quickly gave up the project in frustration.
• • •
Clarence worked through the summer, but in the fall his parents sent him off to elite Amherst College, in Massachusetts, at age nineteen, where they supported him in the style of a wealthy son. There was still no sign of family financial difficulties. Student rooms were available for as little as $55 a year, but the Birdseyes got Clarence the top-priced room at $120 a year, a steep price for a boy who had been working on Wall Street for $3 per week.
Amherst was the Birdseye family school, in the rolling green foothills of the Berkshires, the hometown of the poet Emily Dickinson, who died the year Birdseye was born and was just becoming famous while Birdseye was in college. This was the kind of thing Amherst was known for—its literature program. It was a liberal arts college with no emphasis on science. Science majors such as Birdseye were awarded bachelor of arts degrees just like literature majors. There was no bachelor of science degree. So it was not the ideal college for young Clarence, who cared, above all else, about science. But not only had Clarence’s father graduated from Amherst, so too had his older brother Kellogg, in the class of 1902, and another brother, Henry, attended but didn’t graduate, which would also be true of Clarence’s younger brother, Roger.
At Amherst, Birdseye studied under respected nineteenth-century men, many of them with the long and elaborate hair and beards of that earlier century. The college president, George Harris, had graduated from Amherst with the class of 1866. The professor in Birdseye’s favorite subject, biology, was John Mason Tyler, who had graduated from Amherst in 1873, back when the writings of Charles Darwin were fresh off the press and not yet part of the accepted teachings in the field. Benjamin Kendall Emerson, with whom Birdseye hoped to study geology, graduated from Amherst in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. Edward Hitchcock, a doctor who taught physiology and anatomy and was a pioneer in the physical education program with which Birdseye struggled, was born in the town of Amherst in 1828, the year the first passenger railroad in America started construction and Noah Webster’s dictionary of the American language was first published.
In Clarence’s first year he was an honors student in science but only average in everything else, including physical education. He did particularly badly in Spanish. Clarence’s fellow students called him Bugs because he was forever examining some bug or rodent in the nearby countryside. It is not known if Bugs grew out of Bob or the other way around, but after about 1906 almost no one called him Clarence.
Birdseye the naturalist never stopped working. Behind the town butcher shop was an infestation of rodents—what would have been horrible black rats to most people. But Birdseye recognized this particular rat as a nearly extinct species, Mus rattus, and was able to find a geneticist at Columbia University, T. H. Morgan, who wanted them to crossbreed with another wild species for experiments to better understand why in heredity some features are dominant and others recessive. Morgan was willing to pay $135 for a shipment of live Mus rattus, which was more than the $110 annual tuition at Amherst.
Birdseye wrote in later accounts that he used to spend free time at Amherst wandering the fields with his shotgun on his shoulder. “Suddenly I came upon an open spring-hole where thousands of small frogs were congregating—layers and layers of them came to hibernate for the winter.
“ ‘What are those frogs good for?’ I asked myself.”
It was seven years later, but he thought he would try the Bronx Zoo again since it had helped him sell the muskrat. He knew that the zoo had frog-eating reptiles that needed to be fed. It did want them, and he shipped them live—reptiles only eat them live—wrapped in wet burlap. For this he earned $115.
He seemed to feel isolated at Amherst and did not appreciate being called Bugs. He avoided talking about the frogs, the rats, and other activities because they led to ridicule. Writing about his college days years later, he said, “I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule.”
The summer between his freshman and his sophomore years he went to New Mexico for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1908, for reasons that are not clear, the Birdseyes fell into financial crisis. It seemed to happen just as Clarence was finding his rhythm in school. He was not athletic and played no sport and did not do well in gym. But he did join a fraternity, something in which his father was a great believer and about which he had even written a book. By the spring of 1908 young Bugs was scoring as high as 96 percent in biology and had almost a 90 percent overall course average, which was extremely rare. He applied to take special advanced biology and geology classes.
But there was no more money for schooling. On December 31, 1908, he wrote to the school registrar, “It will almost certainly be necessary for me to go through the rest of this year without any financial aid from home; and to this I must borrow about $300—$150 or $200 at once. Is there a student loan fund at Amherst and if there is can I secure the necessary money at not more than six percent interest and for one or two years?”
Apparently, he was not given a loan, because after the spring of 1908 he dropped out of college. This was the end of his formal education.
What was he to do with only two years of college? Without his college degree he could not become the fourth generation of distinguished attorneys. But he was not likely to have done that anyway. He had wanted to go to school to learn, not to launch a career. He could have returned to Wall Street and tried to make his mark in business, as New York was full of possibilities. But that was not what Birdseye was inclined to do. When he was in his sixties, he said, “Any youth who makes security his goal shackles himself at the very start of life’s race.” Birdseye was looking for adventure. And where did you find adventure in 1908? In the West.
The record is not clear on how Clarence Birdseye decided on Arizona and New Mexico or when exactly he went to work for the U.S. Biological Survey. In his letter to Amherst asking for a scholarship, he stated that he had spent the previous summer, 1907, in New Mexico. After dropping out of college in 1908, he returned. And years later he stated that he worked for the U.S. Biological Survey in the Southwest in the summers of 1908 and 1909. He needed to earn money, and he far preferred to earn it far away in the outdoors than on Wall Street in his native town.
Arizona and New Mexico were still frontier outposts in 1908 with a combined population of fewer than half a million people. They were both territories, ruled by a presidential appointee, and had not yet established the necessary infrastructure to apply for statehood,
though they would both soon do this and become states only four years later.
The territories had become increasingly present in the popular imagination, not only from western legends, stories, and novels, but from a landscape painting movement featuring such sights as the Grand Canyon by artists like William Henry Holmes (1846–1933). Holmes was not only a legendary painter and mountain climber in the West but an art curator in Washington, D.C., who did much to popularize pottery, textiles, and other Indian crafts from the Southwest.
Railroads were expanding their reach, though horses were still the primary transportation in the hinterlands. In 1901 the railroad reached the Grand Canyon, and the Arizona tourism industry was founded with a tourist village on the southern rim. The Fred Harvey Company, America’s first chain restaurant, which followed the railroad throughout the West, established a restaurant on the southern rim in 1905.
The U.S. Biological Survey, founded in 1885, was a branch of the Department of Agriculture largely engaged in the wholesale extermination of wild animals considered a nuisance by farmers and ranchers. Its leading victims were wolves and coyotes, and it hired hunters and trappers to kill them. In 1907 alone the program killed 544 coyotes in New Mexico and another 1,424 in Arizona. There was considerable controversy about the vicious steel traps that would hold an animal by the leg until it starved to death. In the 1920s the survey began poisoning them with carcasses injected with strychnine, producing a slow and agonizing but certain death. But in Birdseye’s time the big predators—wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions—were still hunted or trapped.
Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man Page 3