Antenucci was doing things that upset me, putting tubes into Dad and so on. Dad obviously was unhappy about it because he made noises to indicate he didn’t like it. So I said, “For God’s sake, the man is dying. Let him die in peace. There’s no chance of him surviving, is there?”
“No,” Antenucci said, “but we doctors still have to do what we can.”
“Well, you know, I’ve talked to my mother and the other children. We think you ought to try to keep him comfortable but not stick things in him anymore.” So they stopped.
A couple of days went by. From time to time each of us would go to the church up the street and say a prayer, but not with any idea that Dad would live. It was a joyous and very sad time. This old gentleman had, in a variety of ways, commanded tremendous love and respect from all five of us. I can’t characterize anybody’s grief but my own, but I felt as if a very big piece of my life was being pulled away. He was the foundation on which I had been standing for forty-two years. I had an awful hollow feeling about the future, how it would be without this man I had fought with so. Underneath it all, nobody ever had a greater influence on anyone else than T. J. Watson had on me.
I’ll never forget the moment of his death. All our lives we build up a tremendous desire to live. Jumping away from cars, running out of burning buildings. That instinct has been passed along in the human race for millions of years. I had never seen this will to live demonstrated the way I did now. Here he lay, head somewhat up, the room brightly lit, eyes closed, no oxygen mask, Mother and all of us present. He’d take a deep breath. Then there’d be nothing. Then he’d take another deep breath. Each breath during those last few minutes seemed to come harder than the last. The period between breaths became longer. Finally he took a long breath, sort of a shuddering breath, and it went out. As though to say, That’s it, all the cares of the world have departed. And he never breathed again.
We sat there a few moments. Mother started to cry. I guess we were all crying. The nurse came, and then the doctor, who felt his pulse and said he was dead.
I think I went back to my office with my brother to check on the funeral arrangements. Dick and I had agreed that the greatest tribute we could give him was to make the funeral as well run as any IBM meeting during his life. We had already made the plan and conferred with other IBMers. First, telegrams went out to every IBM location and all of Dad’s friends. We shut all the plants, all over the world, and had the flags lowered to half mast. Any employee who wanted to come to New York for the funeral was given time off to do so, although we didn’t offer to do it at company expense because they’d have taken it as a signal that they were all expected to come. We had crape-edged tributes to Dad put up in the lobby windows at headquarters, and Dad’s obituary in the Times ran four columns long and quoted a statement from President Eisenhower that said, “In the passing of Thomas J. Watson, the nation has lost a truly fine American—an industrialist who was first of all a great citizen and a great humanitarian. I have lost a good friend, whose counsel was always marked by a deep-seated concern for people.”
Dad wanted a funeral that was old-fashioned and formal—an open coffin with friends coming by, and then a great service at Brick Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue, where his old friend Paul Austin Wolfe was the minister. Dick and I arranged all that. We dressed in our dark clothes and went into that chapel, just Dick and I, to spend a few minutes at the open coffin. The first people to turn up were Spyros Skouras Sr. and Bernard Gimbel, both great businessmen and rough tough guys. Gimbel had built his department store and made it famous, and Skouras had started out by organizing a chain of movie theaters in St. Louis and rose to become head of Twentieth Century-Fox. He’d been very kind to Dad toward the end of his life, sending him a sound movie projector and then every month or two a movie Dad wanted to see. The two of them came in and said, “Don’t be upset about his death, boys. You feel a great vacuum now, but think of what he did with his life. Look at that face and remember where it came from. Think of the farm, think of the Cash Register Company.” Their words meant a lot to me because they were self-made men and they knew Dad’s history. There were hundreds of people more—the UN secretary general and diplomats and heads of businesses and plain people who worked at IBM.
When the time came, we closed up the coffin and went over to the church. His funeral was on the first day of summer, a hot New York day with a steady rain. Brick Church was filled to overflowing. There were people standing in the vestibule and more were seated in an auxiliary chapel and still more in the basement. We had special sound systems set up for them all to hear what Dr. Wolfe had to say. He gave a powerful eulogy about the determination and great simplicity that enabled Dad to succeed, and about his devotion to people. Then the service was over and only the family went out to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to bury Dad. He had bought a plot there during the war, when Olive and I lost our first baby, and now we buried my father next to our son. In his eulogy, Dr. Wolfe had quoted something from the Bible for Dick’s and my benefit: “Now the days of David drew nigh that he should die; and he charged Solomon his son, saying, I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore, and shew thyself a man.” But I didn’t feel like King Solomon at that graveyard, burying my father; I felt shattered.
I took Olive and two of our daughters down to Bermuda. We stayed at a beach club and rented motorcycles so that we could really get to know the island. After a couple of nights the shock of Dad’s death finally hit me, and I had a horrible allergic reaction, similar to what Dick had had for years. My throat swelled up and I couldn’t breathe. Olive had to get a doctor in a hurry. He gave me a shot of adrenaline, which kept me from choking to death. But I had terrible rashes that just wouldn’t go away. When I got back to New York I went to see Antenucci, who told me I was having a psychosomatic reaction to grief.
I was worried about how my mother would adjust to Dad’s death. Right away she’d told my brother and me, “I’m not going to be able to live without your father.” But after the funeral some of her strength began to show through. I asked her, “What do you want to do, Mom? What’s your plan?”
She said, “I want to sell that house.” She hated their Manhattan townhouse. It was palatial, and from her point of view it was a huge headache. She ran it for Dad and ran it well, but housekeeping and entertaining on a grand scale never really interested her. Dick and I put the place on the market and within four hours it sold at the asking price. I called Mother and said the house had been sold. That worried her. She said, “It must be a signal from your father. What do you think it means?”
“Mother, it’s affirmative, not negative. The buyer didn’t haggle about anything.”
That was a big load off my mind. She had plenty of time before she had to get out, and my sisters took her to Spain and Ireland as a diversion. I visited her for six days in Ireland and found her in remarkably good spirits. She was staying near Ashford Castle in a lovely part of the country, and she’d rented an old-fashioned high-back Bentley with a chauffeur, a very articulate Irishman whom she got along with well. As always Mother wanted to see everything and learn local history, so each day they’d sally forth into the countryside. She was particularly taken with the beautiful ten-foot stone walls that surround some of the buildings built by the British, and she pointed them out for me to admire. The chauffeur said, “You have to remember, Ma’am, that during the famine a man would work a full day for a bowl of soup and that is how these fences got built.” My own grandfather had fled from that famine, and Mother said less about the stonework after that.
When I came back to New York, I tried going to the office. But I found myself too upset to work. Everything about IBM reminded me of Dad. I’d spent four years rearranging the place so I could run it instead of him, but that made no difference. I decided the only medicine strong enough to make me forget all this would be to spend time with my own son. I decided to take him away for a week, and I picked Alaska because I thought it would be thrilling for Tom.
I wanted to give him something to remember—I wanted to take him to the edge of civilization and show him glaciers and mountains and the Bering Strait, where I’d come across from Russia in a Soviet cargo plane when his mother and I had only been married a year.
Before I left one of our directors came to see me. He was Gilbert Scribner, the senior partner in a Chicago real estate company, and a man of influence. Scribner was head of our compensation committee, and he said to me, “What do you want to be paid?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that we would have such a discussion. I expected to be paid what my old man was paid. I said, “Well, Gilbert, equal pay for equal work. I want precisely what my father got, with the same profit sharing.”
He said, “Your father started this business from nothing! He had to go out and call on banks! He had to really do things!”
This made me furious. I said, “Dad has been less active in recent years and we are sustaining growth here of sixteen percent. I take it that’s what you directors want to have continue?” He said he would have to go back to the committee.
It was a very tough position to be put in with Dad just dead. But I thought that to start in by being a patsy would make it impossible for me to manage the board. It never even occurred to me that my position was the slightest bit unreasonable. I was affronted that the question had even been raised, and I left for Alaska without waiting to see what the board would decide.
Tom was at summer camp up in Maine. I got a plane and a copilot from IBM, splitting the cost with the company because I was planning on visiting our Alaska offices. We picked up Tom and his friend John Gaston at the Bar Harbor airport and headed west. This was a grueling trip to make in a small plane—we had a twin-engine Beechcraft that cruised very slowly, at about 160 miles an hour. It took us two days and about twenty-one hours of flight time to reach Canada’s west coast. I was concentrating on Tom and his friend and the details of flying. Apart from that, my mind was a blank. I never thought about Dad for the entire week we spent in Alaska. But my sense of helplessness and grief seeped through in a hundred ways as I saw how people had to struggle to get along in that wild place. The argument I’d had with Gilbert Scribner also gnawed at me, and I kept calling Al Williams whenever I could find a phone.
The first place we stopped was Queen Charlotte Island, off the Canadian coast. I wanted to show Tom everything I could, and that island had a big lumber operation. We stayed in a little shack hotel run by the lumber company. For the first time in my life I saw how a living tree is trimmed and used as a derrick to lift and pile its neighbors as they are cut. Then we flew up the coast, got some fuel, and took the plane down low over the water in Glacier Bay. I didn’t know if I’d ever get an opportunity to sail up that way, but we simulated it in the airplane. It was a beautiful day, with the sun coming off the glaciers and mountains, and the water was full of jagged ice. We stayed in Juneau and the next morning we went out and saw bears scooping salmon out of a nearby river. I remember it was a hot summer day, and as I watched the bears sitting on their tails in that cool water, I thought it probably felt nice. But there was something melancholy about the fish. The guide told us that when salmon come up the rivers to spawn, they’re so old they’re actually falling apart. They’re decaying as they swim. They get up there somehow, lay their eggs, and die.
I couldn’t have picked a better companion for this trip than Tom, who had inherited Olive’s mildness and her gift for sympathy. Though he was only twelve years old and we didn’t directly discuss Dad’s death, he sensed the crisis I was going through, and having him there was a tremendous consolation. He was fascinated by wildlife, and took remarkable pictures of a moose during one of the side trips I arranged for him and his friend while I flew north to visit our sales office in Fairbanks.
The Fairbanks airport had a display of mammoth tusks, all thousands of years old, that had been dug out of the tundra. The local IBM manager came out to meet me, and he brought along a salesman who’d made quite a good record up there. The wall of the air terminal had a map showing part of Russia. I was so proud of the fact that I’d been there that I guess I started bragging about my war experiences and how we’d been stranded after nearly crashing our plane. I pointed to the map and said, “I stayed right over there! In Yakutsk!”
“My, my, isn’t that interesting,” the salesman answered in a very sarcastic way. Like some of the other IBM people I met in Alaska, this fellow had grit. I didn’t get mad at him because I was glad to have the hint. I thought, “I’d better slow down. I’m sounding like a loudmouth.”
We had a meeting that night at a restaurant on a lake. I remember being impressed because almost every house on the lake had a seaplane moored in front of it. It was the main means of transportation in this part of Alaska. At the meeting were maybe fifteen IBMers, mainly from railroad and defense installations, and some of them had brought their wives. The restaurant had only one room and a section had been curtained off for us. Everything went fine until it came time for my speech. I was just standing up when a floor show began on the other side of the curtain. It was a song-and-dance man, cracking jokes and making the audience laugh. I looked at the local manager and said, “I’d better wait till that guy sits down.”
“No,” he said. “All these people are busy. Some of them have children waiting at home. I think you should just go ahead.” He was as tough with me as the salesman had been.
I wanted to say, “God, I can’t do that.” But it was one of those things you have to live with. I made my speech damn short, but I shouted that entertainer down, or at least spoke loud enough so that on our side of the curtain I made myself heard. Somehow Alaska was so far out of the loop that the fact that I was chief executive of a major corporation didn’t seem so impressive—to anybody, including me. I found that was kind of a relief.
I went back and retrieved the boys, and then we flew across the Divide, a spine of mountains that cuts diagonally across the state. We needed fuel and stopped at a tiny airstrip, where I pulled the airplane up to a general store. They ran a hose out from the porch and filled the plane with gas. It struck me that this was the remotest place I’d been since Siberia. I wanted to go all the way up to Point Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States. But the Air Force was building the Distant Early Warning radar line, and the airport there was already full. We had to turn back at Kotzebue on the Bering Strait, just above the Arctic Circle. I was able to get the airplane high enough so that we could see the Soviet islands of Little Diomede and Big Diomede, not far from Anadyr, the last place I’d stopped in Siberia during the war. I told Tom all about it.
We flew back to Nome, two hundred miles to the south, and spent two nights at a hotel with a restaurant called the Bering Sea Café. I got to know the young man who ran it. He and his wife ate dinner with us the first night, and he asked the boys if they’d ever read Jack London stories about the Yukon. Tom said yes, and the hotelkeeper said, “How’d you like to go panning for gold?”
Tom’s eyes got big as saucers. “Oh gosh,” he said. “Great! But what’ll we do it with?” The hotelkeeper peeled five bucks off a wad of cash and said, “Go down the street and bang on the door of the hardware store. Tell him I sent you down for a gold pan.” Tom and the other boy made a beeline to the store and got a gold pan. The next day the hotelkeeper took us way out in the country. We saw ptarmigans, which are a beautiful species of grouse that lives in cold climates. They’re unusual because they have feathers on their legs, right down to their claws. Finally we got to a place where a man and his wife were working a claim using pressurized water and a sluice. As we drove up their little valley, we must have passed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of abandoned tractors, trailers, water pumps, cars, and trucks. We found the guy and his wife sitting on a couple of boxes with an open loaf of bread and some peanut butter between them. We talked a bit and I asked how their operation was going.
“We make a living out of it,” he told me.
I said, �
�You know, when people think of gold mining, they think of something pretty big.”
“Well,” he said, “we’ve gone through a lot of stuff. You probably passed some of it coming in. We’re doing well enough now, and we have one decent truck. We can go down to Seattle for the winter.”
He was still evading my real question. “No,” I said, “I mean, have you made any money?” They really hadn’t. They were still hoping to hit that big nugget. Meanwhile Tom and his friend found gold in the stream—tiny flecks of it. We took a piece of Scotch tape and taped them to a card so we could see them. When we drove away I was thinking of the futility of the life this man and his wife had, eating their way up this bank, taking a little gold out, buying a truck, bringing the truck back, wearing it out, letting it rot, finding a little more gold, buying another truck, and so on.
By the end of seven days we were all exhausted. We spent the last night in a hotel in Anchorage, and I found Tom’s friend John crying in his bed. The boy was homesick. I felt frustrated and helpless. I couldn’t bring the boy’s mother to him—he had no father, his mother was a widow—and I couldn’t get him to his mother, so the situation was just impossible. The next day we left for home. We flew straight—from Anchorage to New York in twenty-two hours. I don’t know how the copilot and I stood it. We flew home so rapidly that Tom and John had fresh trout to take to their mothers. We’d bought a mess of fish in Anchorage just before leaving.
The compensation committee finally met in September, after I was back in New York. They agreed I should be paid the same as Dad. Soon afterward, Gil Scribner came and said, “I suppose you are going to want my resignation.”
“Not at all,” I said.
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