Shortly after building Number 10, my parents ran out of space for some of the large and important pieces they had acquired, so they bought the house next door. Connecting doors were cut through the walls from Number 10 on three floors. It was here that Father displayed some of his favorite works, including ten eighteenth-century Gobelin tapestries, The Months of Lucas, woven originally for Louis XIV, and the early-fifteenth-century set of French Gothic tapestries, the famous Hunt of the Unicorn.
I was fond of the Unicorn Tapestries and often took visitors through the room where they were hung, explaining to them, panel by panel, the story of the hunted unicorn. One of the visitors was Governor Al Smith of New York, who, as a guest at my sister’s wedding, listened patiently to my monologue and later sent me a photograph of himself signed “To my pal, Dave, from Al Smith,” as a thanks. In the late 1930s, Father gave both sets of tapestries to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Unicorn Tapestries continue to be the central feature in the Metropolitan’s Cloisters Museum in Fort Tryon Park near the northern tip of Manhattan Island.
Father’s pride and joy was his comprehensive collection of Chinese porcelains from the Ming and K’ang-hsi dynasties. He had acquired a significant portion of J. P. Morgan’s enormous collection in 1913 and maintained his intense interest in these beautiful objects for the rest of his life. Many of the K’ang-hsi pieces were huge beakers, taller than I was as a boy. They stood on specially made stands and were conspicuously displayed in several rooms on the second floor at Number 10. They looked very imposing—and overwhelming. He also bought many smaller pieces, including figures of mythical animals and human figures that were delicately painted and beautifully wrought. To this day I have a picture of him in my mind, examining the porcelains he was thinking of buying with a magnifying glass to ensure they had not been broken and restored.
Mother also loved Asian art, but she preferred the ceramics and sculpture of the earlier Chinese and Korean dynasties, as well as Buddhist art from other parts of Asia. She had what we called “the Buddha room” in Number 12, filled with many statues of the Buddha and the goddess Kuan-Yin, where the lights were kept dim and the air heavily scented with burning incense.
Mother had another partner in her collecting, her oldest sister, Lucy. Aunt Lucy had been almost completely deaf since childhood, and one had to stand very close to her and shout into her ear to be understood. Despite this handicap she was an intrepid traveler, and during the 1920s and 1930s she wandered the world visiting many out-of-the-way places at a time when travel was much more precarious, particularly for unmarried women. In 1923, while traveling on the Shanghai Express between Peking and Shanghai, Aunt Lucy’s train was attacked by bandits. Several people on the train were killed, and she was kidnapped. She was taken on the back of a donkey into the mountains, where the plan was to hold her for ransom. When the bandits learned that government troops were in hot pursuit, they abruptly abandoned her. Aunt Lucy made her way in the middle of the night to a walled village. She was refused entry and spent the night in a doghouse outside the gate before being admitted in the morning. She was rescued later that day.
Aunt Lucy bought art everywhere she went—often in remote spots and at modest prices. Not infrequently she bought things for Mother and would ship them back in large crates to our home in New York. Fortunately, Aunt Lucy had excellent taste. She developed a keen interest in Japanese bird and flower prints and Noh dance costumes, highly prized in Japan and quite rare, from the Edo Period (1600–1868), acquiring a rather large number of both over a period of forty years. In addition, she accumulated a superb collection of antique European and English porcelains, including a complete set of the eighteenth-century Meissen Monkey Band, modeled by Johann Kändler. Before her death in 1955 she left most of these collections to the Rhode Island School of Design, to which my mother also gave her important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints by the great artists Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamara.
SCHOOL DAYS
During the week our daily routine never varied. We were roused early for a quick breakfast, preceded by morning prayers in Father’s study. Father required us to learn selected verses from the Bible, which he called upon us to recite. Each of us then took turns reading a psalm or another passage from the Bible. We ended with a prayer. Father, strict but gentle, would explain to us the meaning of what we were reading. Making jokes or cutting up was sternly discouraged. Prayers lasted ten or fifteen minutes; neither Mother nor my sister, Babs, attended.
Except for John, we all attended the Lincoln School at 123rd Street and Morningside Drive near Harlem. Father considered it important for boys to get exercise, so every morning we strapped on our roller skates in the front hallway and headed uptown on Fifth Avenue along the border of Central Park. When we were younger, Winthrop and I got only as far as 72nd Street, whereas Nelson and Laurance often went to 96th Street. Following along behind us in a Nash sedan to pick us up when our energies flagged was one of the three Irish Concannon brothers, who had originally worked as coachmen and who all learned, with varying degrees of success, to drive a car. They had difficulty adjusting to sitting behind a wheel and were happiest driving one of our electric cars, which were popular before the advent of Henry Ford’s Model T, because, like a hansom cab, the driver perched on top like a coachman.
Lincoln was not a typical private school like Browning or St. Bernard’s for boys or Chapin or Brearley for girls, where the children of most wealthy families studied. Tuition was quite low to make it accessible on a competitive basis to children from all backgrounds. Lincoln was coeducational, and the student body was representative of the City’s diverse population. In my class there were a few children from the families of wealthy businessmen and bankers, but most of my classmates were from middle-class academic or artistic families. One of them, Tessim Zorach, was the son of the well-known sculptor William Zorach, whose wife, Marguerite, painted and wove tapestries. A few were the children of very recent émigrés to this country; one was even a White Russian émigré. My classmates were quite intelligent and, like me, were more interested in activities other than sports.
It was Lincoln’s experimental curriculum and method of instruction that distinguished it from all other New York schools of the time. Father was an ardent and generous supporter of John Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. Father and the other founders of Lincoln believed that modern schools had to be more than places where facts and formulas were memorized and recited verbatim; schools had to become the place where individuals learned how to think and solve problems on their own. Teacher’s College of Columbia University operated Lincoln, with considerable financial assistance in the early years from the General Education Board, as an experimental school designed to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice.
Lincoln stressed freedom for children to learn and to play an active role in their own education. In most subjects we did not have detailed reading assignments from a textbook but were instructed to go to the library and find information for ourselves. Essentially, we were taught how to learn rather than being forced to simply repeat facts that had been drilled into our heads. But there were some drawbacks. In my case, I had trouble with reading and spelling, which my teachers, drawing upon “progressive” educational theory, did not consider significant. They believed I was simply a slow reader and that I would develop at my own pace. In reality I have dyslexia, which was never diagnosed, and I never received remedial attention. As a result my reading ability, as well as my proficiency in spelling, improved only marginally as I grew older. All my siblings, except Babs and John, had dyslexia to a degree.
On the other hand I had some very good teachers at Lincoln. I attribute my lifelong interest in history to Elmina Lucke, my sixth grade teacher, who made the past come vividly alive. While Lincoln may have left me in some ways unprepared, I was able to enter Harvard at age seventeen and complete my academic requirements there with moderate success.
POCANT
ICO
During the winter the family spent the weekend at the estate in Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, just north of where the Tappan Zee Bridge now crosses the Hudson River. We drove up in a Crane Simplex sedan with a roof high enough for a person of average height to stand upright inside. It had folding side seats and could comfortably accommodate seven people including the chauffeur. For children it seemed like an endless journey—there were no modern highways, and the trip from Manhattan took about one and one-half hours—and I remember distinctly the smell of the plush fabric on the seats that always made me feel a little carsick.
Grandfather started buying property in Pocantico in the early 1890s close to his brother William’s estate on the Hudson River. Southwestern Westchester County was still very rural then and had large areas of woodlands, lakes, fields, and streams—all teeming with wildlife. Eventually the family accumulated about 3,400 acres that surrounded and included almost all of the little village of Pocantico Hills, where most of the residents worked for the family and lived in houses owned by Grandfather.
The wooden house my grandparents occupied burned down in 1901. Rather than rebuild, they simply moved down the hill to a smaller place, known as the Kent House, where they were perfectly content. After a great deal of prodding by Father they finally built a larger and more substantial house on the top of the hill near where the original structure had stood. Grandfather occupied Kykuit from 1912 until his death in 1937, and then Mother and Father moved into it.
My parents’ first home in “the Park,” Abeyton Lodge, was a large, rambling wooden structure down the hill from Kykuit. Abeyton’s cheerful interior was filled with oak paneling and floors, which gave it a warm and comfortable feeling. A wide golden oak staircase ascended from the entrance hall to the second floor, and a huge oak table almost filled the front hall. It was on that table that I recall seeing the front page of the New York Herald-Tribune the day the stock market crashed in 1929. There were fireplaces in many rooms, including several of the bedrooms. The one in the living room was always lit in cool weather and contributed to its friendly and inviting atmosphere. Bookcases with glass doors lined an entire wall and held sets of books by well-known authors, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson among them, as well as bound copies of Country Life and St. Nicholas magazines, both relics of Victorian America. The only painting in the house of any distinction was a large George Inness landscape.
There was a long hallway between the living room and dining room where the heads of big-game animals lined the walls. I have no idea where they came from, because Father certainly never went on an African safari, but this wasn’t too long after Teddy Roosevelt’s time, and mounted animal trophies were much in vogue. There was also a stuffed Emperor penguin standing in the front hallway. Admiral Richard Byrd had presented it to Father in gratitude for the financial support Father provided for his expeditions to the polar regions. Admiral Byrd visited us frequently in those days, and on his first expedition to Antarctica he telegraphed me from Little America saying he was naming a relay camp after me. That was an exciting thing for a thirteen-year-old boy. Byrd discovered mountain ranges near the Ross Sea, and he named one of them the Rockefeller Range, a name it still bears to this day. Another famous visitor was Charles Lindbergh, who spent a weekend with us soon after his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
A spur of the New York Central, the Putnam Division, ran right through Grandfather’s property, and there was a small station just outside the entrance gate. I recall hearing the whistle and the chugging of the steam engine as I lay in bed at night. Outside my bedroom window stood a big maple tree that turned bright red in the autumn. When the leaves fell, I could see up the sloping lawn past the sheep grazing on the golf course—a Scottish shepherd herded a flock of sheep around the property to keep the grass down—and all the way up the hill to Kykuit.
I had developed an avid interest in nature study, particularly collecting beetles, as a result of a class in natural history I attended, along with Henry Ford II, one summer in Maine. On warm spring nights I would hang up a linen sheet against the stucco wall on the porch off my bedroom and put a light in front of it. Beetles and other insects would swarm toward the light in large numbers, and in a short period of time the sheet would be covered with crawling life. On a single evening I could easily collect thirty or more species of beetles. It is a sad fact that the same result could not be produced today, clearly due to the extensive use of insecticides. As a child the strident sounds of the katydids, cicadas, and other members of the insect orchestra would keep me awake at night. Now, late in the summer, we sometimes hear a few katydids sawing away, but very few. Sadly, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring was all too accurate about the impact that pesticides would have throughout the world.
There were two electricians who lived on the estate, named, appropriately, Mr. Bell and Mr. Buzzwell. Mr. Buzzwell’s daughter, Louise, was exactly my age, and this fact convinced me when I was five that the two of us were destined to be married. When the snows fell, the endless sloping lawns around Kykuit were ideal for sledding, and Louise and I often raced down the hills together. Except for Louise and a few other children of estate employees, there wasn’t much companionship. I would sometimes bring friends out for the weekend, but more often I spent my days alone.
The estate was nevertheless a child’s paradise. When I was in my early teens, Father built a huge playhouse just up the hill from Abeyton Lodge with a gymnasium, indoor pool, bowling alley, squash court, and the kitchen where I had prepared Grandfather’s chicken dinner. A decade later Father added an indoor tennis court lit by a vast glass dome, with a sitting area for observers and fireplaces to keep them warm in the winter. There were an infinite number of places to play, but I remember usually having to play alone or with a tutor who came out for the weekend.
SUMMERS IN SEAL HARBOR
Summers were always spent in Maine at the Eyrie in Seal Harbor on the southeast shore of Mount Desert Island, not far from Bar Harbor. We would celebrate Grandfather’s birthday on July 8 in Pocantico and head north the next day. The movement of the household was a complicated logistical task and required weeks of preparation. Large trunks and suitcases were dragged out of storage and packed with everything we might need during the nearly three-month stay. On the day of our departure, workers loaded them on trucks along with ice chests containing pasteurized Walker-Gordon milk for the children on the train. Everything was delivered to Pennsylvania Station and loaded on the train. Abeyton Lodge was filled with a wonderful bustle and sense of anticipation as we hurried about collecting all of those things that we had to have with us: books, games, and athletic equipment.
In the mid-afternoon of what was invariably a hot and humid summer day, we would leave Pocantico for the drive to New York City. The family and household staff filled an entire Pullman sleeping car. In addition to Mother, Father, and the six children, there were nurses, tutors, personal secretaries, Father’s valet, waitresses, kitchen maids, parlor maids, and chambermaids—each a distinct vocation—to take care of some one hundred rooms in the Eyrie, which had been enlarged considerably by my parents after they bought it in 1908. In addition to the Pullman sleeping car, Father had a horse car hooked onto the train to accommodate the horses and carriages he always brought for the summer. A groom would sleep there so that no accidents occurred during the sixteen-hour train ride.
The Bar Harbor Express originated in Washington and stopped in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York to add sleeping cars. We boarded at about five in the afternoon for the overnight trip through New England. The following morning, as if by magic, we would be passing by the sparkling blue waters along the rugged coast of Maine.
We would climb down excitedly from the car when it arrived at the Mount Desert Ferry at the head of Frenchman’s Bay, breathing in the balsam-scented Maine air and pointing to Cadillac Mountain looming in the distance. Father supervised the unloading of trunks, luggage, horses, and people. Each of us b
oys helped carry parcels down the dock to the Norumbega, a side-wheeler, which would carry us to the island.
With everything safely stowed aboard, the Norumbega would pull slowly away from the pier for the four-hour voyage to Seal Harbor. The ferry stopped first in Bar Harbor, where many of our fellow passengers would disembark, along with their many steamer trunks and other possessions. Then the Norumbega would steam round the headland, toward Seal Harbor, and finally, in mid-afternoon, we would dock. After a journey of almost twenty-four hours we had finally arrived, with the whole summer stretching deliciously before us.
In contrast it now takes barely two hours to reach Ringing Point, my Seal Harbor home, by plane from Westchester. While it is a good deal faster, I am nostalgic for the sights and sounds of the train and ferry, and the sweet anticipation of an endless summer in Maine.
One of my earliest memories is from Seal Harbor. There was a report that a dead whale had washed ashore on a nearby island. Father arranged for a boat to take family members over to view the carcass. Barely three, I was considered too young to accompany them. I remember standing on the dock weeping bitterly as the others left and complaining to my governess that “in my whole life I had never seen a whale” and would probably never see one ever again.
By 1900, Bar Harbor had become one of New England’s most fashionable summer resorts, on a par with Newport, Rhode Island. The rugged coastline along Frenchman’s Bay flanking Bar Harbor was covered with immense gabled mansions of the rich, and the harbor was filled with large pretentious yachts. Seal Harbor, although only nine miles away, remained much quieter and more conservative. My parents thought Bar Harbor too flashy and ostentatious, and spent little time there. Families such as the Atwater Kents of radio fame, the Dorrances of Campbell Soup, and the Potter Palmers from Chicago gave elaborate parties, with bands playing on yachts anchored just off their property and dancing all through the night. Speedboats carried guests back and forth, and champagne flowed for all ages.
Memoirs Page 4