Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  At the head of Main Street stood the teacher’s college, formally known as the Bloomsburg Literary Institute and State Normal School, a clutch of new brick buildings perched on a bluff along the Espy side of town that granted a view the school touted in its publications: “The river, like a ribbon, edges the plain on the south, and disappears through a bold gorge three miles to the southwest.” Normal schools like Bloomsburg’s represented the earnest efforts of high-minded nineteenth-century educators to raise standards in primary schools by making better teachers. A five-year burst of money and energy in the early 1890s had left the school with a new four-story dormitory, another dorm set aside for servants, an acoustically “perfect” thousand-seat auditorium, and that new boon, electricity. By Bessie’s time, it included a model school, where in their second year she and her classmates could put in the twenty-one weeks of student teaching required by state law. Also required of students were algebra and geometry, English literature, Latin, American history, rhetoric, music, and geography. It’s hard to be cynical about Bloomsburg’s normal school. It seems to have taken its mission seriously and conferred on the state and its schoolchildren a genuine public good.

  In 1897, at the age of eighteen, Bessie graduated with a BE degree—Bachelor of Elements, meaning the elements of teaching, which allowed her to teach in Pennsylvania. Three years later, in the 1900 census, she was recorded as living at home in Espy with her parents—occupation: teacher. This, of course, was just what she was supposed to be doing at this time of life, what most of her classmates did, and what her own mother, Jennie, had done before marrying Captain Boyd.

  But here Bessie’s story takes a turn. For in her early twenties, after six years of preparation and practice, she gave up teaching. What derailed her from it? Was she just bored with it, as one family member suggests she was? Was her move calm and well considered, or rash? Did family pressures of some kind intervene? Or did she simply feel a young adult’s healthy urge to get as far away as possible from small-town Pennsylvania? What we do know is that by early 1904, four years after the census worker had come round to the house in Espy, Bessie wasn’t a teacher anymore but a nurse. And she no longer lived in Espy at all, but in Philadelphia, population one and a half million.

  Her mother figures in Jane’s memories of her adolescence as a prim, provincial figure; what could you expect, Jane would as much as say, coming out of Bloomsburg and Espy? Bessie would become keeper of family scrapbooks, devoted gardener, serious churchgoer—not one you’d immediately figure for precipitously shifting gears, throwing over the past, leaving town, and hauling off for the big city. As we’ll see, it was Bessie’s elder sister, Martha, not she, who was the real dynamo among the Robison children and would go on to make a mark on the world. But just now, it was Bessie who was making changes.

  In April 1904, at age twenty-five, Bessie received her diploma from the Polyclinic Hospital of Philadelphia’s Training School for Nurses, located near Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia; Polyclinic would later merge with the University of Pennsylvania. Nursing education was growing more professional, with first one- and then two-year programs at Polyclinic giving way to a three-year course that required anatomy and physiology, bacteriology and pharmacology, in addition to work on the wards. One of Bess’s grandsons, a physician, would recall how, even as an old woman, she’d sometimes use medical terms left over from her nursing days—a fracture rather than a broken bone, a carbuncle, not a boil. In the years after 1904, Bess became supervising night nurse at Polyclinic, and met her future husband, Jane’s father.

  Jane’s mother, Bess Robison Butzner, in 1907, when she was a nurse. She lived to the age of 101. Credit 1

  Around the time Bess joined the ranks of Polyclinic nurses, John Decker Butzner was receiving his MD degree from the University of Virginia and coming north to Polyclinic for a year-and-a-half-long residency. After that, perhaps in late 1905, he may have served briefly as physician in a West Virginia mining town. By 1907 he had joined an existing practice in Scranton, sharing an office on Wyoming Avenue, the city’s Doctor’s Row. Just how, during their overlapping years in Philadelphia, he and Bess met, and how their relationship deepened, we don’t know. One family story tells how nurses often got stuck doing the personal laundry of the physicians, that Bess regularly got one pile of undergarments that stood out as particularly worn, shabby, and shredded, that she sewed them, mended them, fairly rescued them—and in this way came to the attention of young Dr. Butzner.

  Dr. Butzner had come off a farm in the rural South. Not cotton country, not the Deep South of the great plantations, but still distinctly the South—Spotsylvania County, in the tidewater region of northern Virginia, midway between Richmond and Washington, D.C. All his life he spoke with a soft southern drawl. His father’s side of the family, the Butzners of Virginia, had roots in Bavaria. His mother’s side, the Deckers, were Yankees who had moved south from New Jersey in 1839. By 1846, John Decker had warmed enough to southern ways to own a dozen slaves: “All the field hands,” a family history records, “were big women whom he had purchased at the Fredericksburg mart with the definite idea of raising his own negroes.” At war’s end, Mr. Decker owned seven parcels of Spotsylvania County real estate totaling 2,200 acres. In 1877, his daughter Lucy married. The groom was William Joseph Butzner. Their son, born the following year, was our Polyclinic physician, John Decker Butzner, known all his life as Decker.

  All through the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate troops marched, camped, and fought in the fields and woods of Spotsylvania County, as at bloody Chancellorsville or in Fredericksburg, the little trace of a town just over the county line from most of the Butzner holdings. After the war, nobody had much of anything; the well-off Decker family, it would be said, “never felt the pinching hand of want except in the cruel days toward the end and after the Civil War.” But while Jane would picture them as poor, or at least cash starved, the Butzner side, too, was never much less than middlingly prosperous. During the years young Decker was growing up, his father owned, free and clear, four hundred acres rising up from the Rappahannock River that produced crops of hay, corn, wheat, and, notably, by family lore, Black Galloway cattle.

  Meanwhile, Decker’s prosperous uncle Marshall may already have been helping him and his brothers through school. Decker and his two brothers, Billy and Calvin, had attended a one-room farm school that brought them together with cousins from miles around. The teacher was ordinarily the family’s eldest unmarried female; when she went off to have children, the next young woman in line got the job. Later, Decker put in a year at the Fredericksburg Academy, a recently founded Presbyterian-supported school. He and his younger brothers all did well there, Decker extraordinarily so. In 1894 he was one of only a handful of students to earn a gold medal for his grades, distinguishing himself in English literature, German, Latin, geometry, and physics. From there, with brother Billy, he attended the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, the two whip-smart Butzner boys for a while living next door to one another on campus. In 1901, Decker was awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and in 1904 received his medical degree. Then it was off to Philadelphia, his Polyclinic residency—and Bess.

  However their relationship evolved, it seems plain that for several years Dr. Butzner was establishing himself in his Scranton practice while Bessie was back in Philadelphia; as late as December 1908, Bessie was still getting mail there. During these years, with Philadelphia about three hours on the through train from Scranton, their relationship may have been something like what today we’d call a long-distance affair. When they finally married, on March 24, 1909, he was thirty, she twenty-nine—about seven years older than the average bride of those days. The ceremony took place at the home of her mother, across the road from the old canal in Espy. Just a few weeks before, her father, Captain Boyd, had died suddenly at age seventy-four. So the wedding, as the local paper noted, was “a quiet one, only members of the family and a few invited fami
ly being present.” After a trip south, they returned to Scranton, where they would make their home.

  Soon after they married, with Dr. Butzner still new to his practice, he bought an automobile—to more easily visit his patients, he said. Only trouble is, he never said a word about the big expense to Bess, just did it. The slight rankled. Then, another time early in their marriage, Decker’s mother bestowed on Bess the recipe for his favorite pie. Well, young Mrs. Butzner so much as said, that might be well and good on the farm, with all the rich ingredients in hand, but money was tight—and for now, at least, she just wasn’t going to make it, and didn’t. To Bess, the Spotsylvania County embodied in her husband’s Virginia drawl could seem like a mire of low, ribald humor and crude language. Why, it’s hot as seven bitches, you’d hear a Spotsylvania man grouse; you didn’t talk that way in Bloomsburg. There were small frictions, inevitable in any marriage, but hinting that any harmony of taste and sensibility Bess and Decker shared was not a perfect one.

  Jane’s father, Dr. John Decker Butzner. He died when she was twenty-one. Credit 2

  And yet, out of their two dissimilar natures emerged, as if alchemically transmuted, a home of healthy, sometimes madcap exuberance, lively talk, free questioning, enjoyment, and encouragement that profoundly inspired the confidence and independence of their children.

  —

  The third child of Decker and Bess, Jane Isabel Butzner, was born on May 4, 1916, at 10:25 p.m., Dr. Butzner himself attending. The location was 815 Electric Street, the name honoring Scranton’s claim as home of the first electric-powered streetcars. Dr. Butzner had bought the house in 1910, and would place it in Bess’s name in August 1918 for one dollar “and love and affection.” In this unprepossessing detached house in north Scranton, set on a slight slope down from the Dunmore hills to the east, Jane lived her first four years. She’d remember that they had two tricycles, or “velocipedes,” as her mother mistakenly called them. “I learned to get out early to stake my claim,” Jane would say.

  Older by six years, her sister, Betty, was born in 1910; the age gap was enough, Jane’s son Jim suggests, that Betty seemed “more part of the world of the adults, not a playmate of Jane’s.” Between the two of them came William, born in 1913; as late as spring 1915, on a visit to his grandparents in Virginia, he’d seemed fine, so it must have come as all the more a shock when on August 3 he died. Jane’s birth nine months later, virtually to the day, hints at some deep compact between Decker and Bess to answer the loss of their son with new life.

  In 1917 John was born. Jane, seventeen months older, remained especially close to him through most of her life; when, years later, a telephone call brought news of his death, she said, “He was my oldest friend.” By 1920, the family was complete, Jane’s youngest brother, Jim, having been born on November 10. Dr. Butzner’s mother, Lucy, was living with them at the time, so the Electric Street house may by now have felt cramped. A few months later, in February 1921, Dr. Butzner bought a house at 1712 Monroe Avenue, a few streets east over the Scranton city line in a leafy suburb called Dunmore. There Jane lived for the next fourteen years and grew to young womanhood.

  It was a house bigger than any Jane would live in later, a successful physician’s house, biggest on the block. Their neighbors in 1930, when Jane was fourteen, included a plumbing supply company manager, a civil engineer, and the superintendent of a coal mine. There were grander houses a couple of blocks over on Washington Street, great sprawling affairs. But the Butzners’ house was big enough—wide and deep, with porch columns supporting a second-floor terrace, with gables, cornices, shallow bay windows, a garden out back maybe thirty yards deep. Jane’s son Jim, hearing about the house from his mother, came away imagining it “a wonderful, generous place to live.”

  You came in off the street, up past the front lawn, to the broad, columned porch, and stepped into the parlor. Jane’s room was a few steps to a little landing, then up two more short flights to the second floor, then first door on your left—probably the smallest of the several bedrooms ranged around a little hall. Jane’s window looked out past the balustraded terrace onto Monroe Avenue’s quiet, residential harmony. Back on the first floor, kitchen, dining room, and Dr. Butzner’s study branched off the broad expanse of parlor which, with its fireplace and passage to upstairs, lay at the center of things; it would have been hard to plant yourself there and not give yourself over to the life of the family. “It was a cheerful place,” Jane would say of the house. “We did a lot of talking.”

  It must have been quite a scene when they all got together, the four Butzner kids, in, say, the early 1930s. They looked pretty much alike, actually—the same-shaped heads, the distinctive Butzner features juggled just a bit differently in each. All tall, strikingly so in youngest son Jim’s case. All brainy, and encouraged from early on to use their brains. “Four amazing children,” says Jane’s niece, also named Jane, of the Butzner kids. When they’d get together later, by then older and married, it wasn’t much different, except that then it was the eight of them—each spouse, it could seem, suited not just to one Butzner, but to all of them. All friends, discussing books, ideas, politics, the day’s pressing problems, the crazy, funny, outrageous doings of the world. Years later, a family friend would speak of an almost preternatural Butzner-Jacobs optimism, a community of support that bound them together—not a simpy sweetness but a sense that life was too good, too interesting, to waste on wayward fits of ignorance and pettiness. They were “delightfully and acceptingly nonconformist,” says another family friend of more than thirty years. “They had no mean streak.” All of them, says Carol, sister Betty’s daughter, “reveled in life. Everything was celebratory. It was joyous. Every meal was joyous. Every walk was an adventure.” It was a family of “no guilt, no regret, no shoulds, no should-nots.”

  Jane, at left, in about 1927, age eleven, with brothers Jim and John Credit 3

  Too good to be true, of course. And maybe there wasn’t among them much latitude, or encouragement, to explore personal feelings or doubts, or to let boredom, annoyance, or futility have their day; this was part of the family culture, too. But allowing for memories sweetened by time and a streak of family boosterism, surely something healthy and productive was alive among them. Betty would become vice president of a major New York interior design firm and was later active in the Esperanto League. John would become a judge, for years a justice of the 4th District U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, from which he’d issue important and controversial antisegregation decisions. Jim, most of his adult life spent in southern New Jersey, would have a successful career as a chemical engineer for a major oil company and, on the civic front, help transform a tiny local college into a major community asset. Jane would write books and change the world. Each remained married to the same spouse their whole lives—mostly, it seems, happily. The four of them found plenty to disagree about. Their voices could rise. But the way their children tell it, they had fun, and were determined to extract every last fresh nugget of pleasure and interest from the world.

  —

  One day when Jane was seven, sister Betty, by then a Girl Scout, took her on a hike. Jane remembered the toasted marshmallows that evening, but more vividly the moment when Betty bumped her foot on a rock. “That’s puddingstone!” Betty cried out. What a great word! Jane thought, and what an interesting geological anomaly: a mass of rounded stones and pebbles embedded in a sandy, cement-like matrix. Here, at age seven, was something of the peculiar doubleness of Jane’s intellect: her lifelong fascination with the world right in front of her nose—an explorer’s fascination, a journalist’s, a scientist’s; and, right beside it, a delight in language and all its nuances of sound and meaning.

  At six or seven, Jane was reading pretty much everything, sometimes trailing her mother around the house, book in hand, asking about words she didn’t know. She liked nursery rhymes and traditional songs, thought about what they meant. “When Good King Arthur Ruled This Land” tells of pudding stuffed wi
th “great lumps of fat as big as my two thumbs”; Jane saw in it a distaste for profligacy. She loved The Three Musketeers. She buried herself in The Book of Knowledge, a children’s encyclopedia, popular and fun—if, in son Jim’s words, “chock full of egregious misinformation, and racist.” She discovered Dickens’s compulsively readable A Child’s History of England:

  So, Julius Caesar came sailing over to this Island of ours, with eighty vessels and twelve thousand men. And he came from the French coast between Calais and Boulogne, “because thence was the shortest passage into Britain”; just for the same reason as our steamboats now take the same track every day. He expected to conquer Britain easily; but it was not such easy work as he expected.

  As a young girl Jane may not have talked of it so freely, but much later she’d often refer to the chats she’d have in her imagination with historical figures. “Since I was a little girl I’ve been carrying on dialogues with them in my head just to keep from being bored.” First was Thomas Jefferson—until, that is, “I exhausted my meagre knowledge of what would interest Jefferson. He always wanted to get into abstractions.” She turned to Benjamin Franklin, who, she advised an interviewer once, was interested in “nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details, such as why the alley we were walking through wasn’t paved, and who would pave it if it were paved. He was interested in everything.” She’d tell him how traffic lights worked, observe his surprise at how modern women dressed.

  She set no limits to her imagination and apparently no one tried to do it for her. “Where I grew up in Pennsylvania,” she’d write, “the children believed that on a night in August the lakes turned over.” Later, she learned better, but just then “I imagined this marvel as a dark, whispered heaving and slipping of the waters with bright fish tumbling through. We knew when it had happened because we would find floating fragments of bottom weeds and in the top few feet of water, usually so clear, bits of fine muck and a rank smell.”